06.30.07
Prayer and neurology
Prayer
A Neurological Inquiry
Still, many credulously believe that some people (especially so-called “psychics”) can read minds and that thoughts can be transmitted from one person to another by mental telepathy or “extrasensory perception” (ESP). Perhaps this belief has been fostered by the seemingly substantive and energetic presence of our thoughts. But numerous experiments during some 150 years of research have not validated ESP and have left a wake of spurious statistical analyses (Lilienfeld 1999; Paulos 1990).
It is not simply credulity to have beliefs about telepathy, and the methodology on ESP is so beside the point as to have established nothing.
The types of experiments created simply don’t create the context where telepathy is supposed to occur.
The question of prayer is complex (I am not a believer here), and takes in a host of circumstances. The hopeless confusion and decadence of prayer ought to be of concern to any student of religion, but the fact remains that the issue takes in so many different situations as to make generalization impossible.
Meanwhile, why is neurological examination (I have no objection to a ‘try and see’ experimental approach here, however) considered the answer? More of the God gene nonsense