The Healing Power of Prayer

One of the things I have often wondered about was the Healing Power of Prayer.

I've "done some research" on the web and I've read articles where actual scientific studies ere performed and no evidence was found that prayer helped much at all. However, there is no denying that sometimes, when people KNOW other people are praying for them, sometimes miracles happen, and this does have actual statistical proof.

So what does this tell us? That there is no God? Or that God is just very fickle, and if you're lucky he'll roll a 6 when he comes up to your prayer?

My notions on the issue are that the Healing Power of Prayer may just be: when you feel like enough people actually, for real, CARE.... that you SHOULD get better, because there are people out there that NEED you still. This would be a very useful evolutionary adaptation, speeding up the departure of the wicked and preserving the good.

Given the miraculous medical recoveries I have seen, and been. Given the actual numerical facts about how prayer affects recovery no better than no prayer. I know there are no host of angels waiting our commands. It's our natural behavior pattern to forget the failures and be awed by the massive "miracle" of the success when the odds are high enough. Even if we have to believe in Magic to make it seem "plausible". This is a basic survival mechanism built into all creatures with a brain. It's a foundational principle of Natural Selection.

Even the lowest of the lowly low animals, the flatworm knows to GO TO THE LIGHT!!! because when something is swimming over you, it might eat you, best to avoid moving shadows! Because, rather "miraculously" those flatworms that swam to the darkness found a mouth waiting to eat them, and they didn't have many offspring.

In all likely-hood, sometimes people's own healing systems are able to be activated if you secrete just the right balance of hormones and other bio-chemical stuff. Science is already discovering that there are ways to cause this to happen though stem cell research and the Human Genome Project.

There is a way to cause the genetic mechanisms that changed us from children to adults in our prime, run again! That means that when they unlock this Pandora's Box, death will become something very different than how we see it now. The science for this is happening now, in labs around the world. We need more money to more scientists. Not more church buildings or warships.

Or we could keep invoking spirits and appealing to Higher Powers, I suppose.