There are several others if you go to google scholar and look for double blind studies and prayer.

Johnathan- Frankly, I am far to skeptical about the power of prayer to even want to study it out side of the realm of how prayer interacts with mental health. That is entirely other conversation.

Science still struggles with measuring emotional responses. Their methods remain crude, but are getting better.

I’m not after emotional responses and experiences, though. Unless we’re talking about measuring the faith of the pray-er, then I am most interested in prayer’s effects on measurable things like health and wealth. I’m basically gunning for the theistic god who answers prayers with worldly effects (e.g. the proverbial surprise check after paying tithing despite not having enough money to pay the bills, or the miraculous healing of someone after being prayed over).

There are studies that show both positive and negative effects. There are more studies that show no effect at all.

Psychologists have yet to come up with a reliable test to measure emotion, even fmri tests and eeg tests which map brain centers are not effective at explaining reactions our emotional reactions to our environment. So, I doubt that doing scientific analysis on prayer would be very effective.

I don’t need proof of the power of prayer to a god because in my experience I have not found such beliefs as effective. My experience is not enough for me to take a position on someone else’s faith.

Also, was the control group pulled from the same population but their shamans instructed to refrain from praying for them?

I cannot vouch for limbs growing back as a result of prayer; however in the mental health realm there has recently been some evidence that faith healing, prayer etc. In areas where traditional healing practices (shaman, medicine men) are available along with secular western medicine and mental health practices are available. Tests have shown that individuals with mental illness have a faster and more effective healing rate when treated by their shaman than when treated with Western
practices.
This includes what may appear to western doctors as purely physical illness.

The healing rates of Schizophrenia in cultures where “mentally ill” individuals are treated by shaman are also better than cultures, such as the U.S., where these illnesses are treated with medication. Other non-religious practices.

But (of course there’s a but) the turn that our conversation took is an excellent example of what Andrew has been trying to say about the supernatural. Toss the supernatural into a conversation and it leads it down a dead end street where no useful conclusion can be made.

You say we have to factor in God’s will if we want to test prayer. No one is competent to speak for God’s will, so this puts prayer beyond discussion and therefore beyond usefulness.

Someone prays for their sick aunt and they get better? Must not have been God’s will that she die. Someone else prayed that their father would beat the cancer but he died anyway? God must have wanted him to come to Heaven. There is thus no way to disconfirm the efficacy of prayer.

There is no result that would lead the believer to say that prayer doesn’t work. Under these conditions, saying that prayer works doesn’t provide information; the statement has no real content, only the appearance of saying something. Someone who believes that prayer works has no way of knowing what effect their prayers will have. Maybe they’ll get what they want, maybe they won’t. So why even ask in the first place?

No one who uses this kind of logic can say truthfully that their experiences led them to believe in prayer. Something other than their experiences and logic led them to that conclusion. Childhood teaching when we’re the most vulnerable to indoctrination may be one factor. The will to believe may be another. In any case, it is only a pretense to themselves and others that they are being reasonable in believing in prayer.

I find the sign-seeking defense frustratingly hypocritical. First, God didn’t seem to mind splitting the Red Sea for the skeptical Israelites, or raising the dead Lazarus, or letting Thomas feel the nail and spear wounds. Why should he refuse to offer me a reason to believe? Why am I different than those other skeptics?

Second, almost every believer that I’ve met is a skeptic at heart, except for the case of their own religion. If I came to them and claimed that making oblations to Cthulhu had made me wealthy, they would doubt me and demand some form of proof. That’s why I say the sign-seeking defense is hypocritical.

This is where superstition (the refusal to submit our faith to the test) leads us.

Someone somewhere said pretty much the same thing as you have. I wish I could remember the quote exactly, but basically, what wasn’t reasoned into can’t be reasoned out of. I agree mostly, except it’s not always true. Reason (and testing a hypothesis about prayer) convinced me.