[Avodah] effects of religous worship no health

[Daniel Israel]

On Wed, 03 Dec 2008 11:41:33 -0700 Steven J Scher <sjscher at eiu.edu> 
wrote:
>R'YG:
>> We are not saying that He would do so "simply to convince people 
of His
>> existence"; on the contrary, I am saying that as long as He can 
be
>> expected to act according to the normal ways in which we are 
told He
>> acts, i.e. as a Shomai'a Tefillah, we ought to be able to 
measure and
>> quantify this effect. ...
>
>Yes, He's a Shmoai'a Tefillah, but He is also an Ohavei Mishpat 
v'Tzedek. 
>HaShem hears all prayers, but doesn't necessarily act on all of 
them ...
>So, what would be His reasoning for 
>treating those patients who are not deserving, but just happened 
to be 
>prayed for as part of our study, better than those who are more 
deserving, 
>but were randomly assigned into the non-prayer group?
>
>The only thing that I could think of is that He would do it 
>because He wants to provide us evidence of His existence -- but it 
seems like 
>(a) that's not really a good enough reason to otherwise circumvent 
His 
>middah of justice, and (b) He has other, much more convincing ways 
at His 
>disposal to provide this evidence if He really wanted.

Another possibility is that He would arrange so that the supposedly 
random groups are not random.  The scientists can pick any random 
number generator they like, HKB"H can always "game" the system so 
that the prayed-for group contains the people he wishes to give a 
better outcome to.

OTOH, it is important to note that while a strong positive 
correlation would be plausible piece of evidence for existence 
(although it could also be a statistical anomaly or the result of a 
methodological error, the latter being very common in this type of 
study), a negative result (no difference between the samples) would 
not be evidence for anything, really.  HKB"H could simple choose 
not to reveal Himself in this way.

In fact, when I hear studies of this sort showing positive results, 
I tend to be skeptical, not because I don't believe HKB"H exists, 
chv"sh, but because I don't believe He runs the world in a way such 
that this kind of test can work.

--
Daniel M. Israel
dmi1 at cornell.edu