I'm not really sure what your point is (despite your saying that your main point was). Do the comments with regard to the books have a point? It seems your main point is to ridicule (ala Dawkins style?). "Poisoning the well" with regard to Flew's book and the prayer article (not the 'believer turned atheist' book of course) isn't a great example of reasoning. Anyway, given the Christian proposals about God, experiments with regard to the efficacy of prayer cannot be conducted. Perhaps it's a good thing "religious discussions" are fewer (unless of course it is about teaching the psychology of religion). --Mike
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Now that we no longer have Jim Guinee with us, posts about religion are much diminished. Not to fill his shoes, but I thought it might be worth mentioning that the New York Times has two recent long essays on the topic. The first is titled "Suffering, evil and the existence of God", and it's about, well, suffering, evil and the existence of God, by the eminent scholar Stanley Fish. It's actually an extended review of two books, the first written by a believer turned atheist, and the second by an atheist turned believer. See http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/suffering-evil-and-the- existence-of-god/?incamp=article_popular or http://tinyurl.com/26ck98 In the second case, it's no mere atheist who had a change of heart, but the famous ("notorious" is the word he uses himself) philosopher Antony Flew. We did have a discussion a while back about the significance of Flew's apparent conversion, about which there was some doubt. Now it seems Flew's really done it. Yet in the second essay, Mark Oppenheimer makes a persuasive case that it occurred after Flew had begun cognitive decline, and that he was duped into his new-found religious belief by those who had befriended him. It seems that little of Flew's book, titled "There Is a God: How the World¨s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind" was actually written by him. See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/magazine/04Flew- t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=login or http://tinyurl.com/2z9chv (free registration may be needed) This leads to my main point. We had expressed considerable interest at one time in experiments purporting to demonstrate scientifically the efficacy of prayer. One of the strangest of these was a report published in the mainstream _Journal of Reproductive Medicine_ in 2001 by Cha, Lobo, and Wirth with the title "Does prayer influence the success of in vitro fertilization-embryo transfer? Report of a masked, randomized trial." The answer was yes, at p = .0005, God exists and hearkens to prayer. The study has now achieved a further remarkable distinction according to Bruce Flamm, writing in the Ob/Gyn News (I read 'em all) ("Prayer study author charged with plagiarism", March 2007, v. 42, p. 8). Dr. Flamm makes the bold claim: "This may be the first time in history that all three authors of a randomized, controlled study have been found guilty of fraud, deception and/or plagiarism". Dr. Cha was not pleased with this opinion, and is now suing Dr. Flamm (see _The Chronicle of Higher Education_, October 24, 2007). Isn't prayer research fun? Stephen ----------------------------------------------------------------- Stephen L. Black, Ph.D. Professor of Psychology, Emeritus Bishop's University e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 2600 College St. Sherbrooke QC J1M 1Z7 Canada ----------------------------------------------------------------------- --- __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ---
