Intercessory Prayer: A Waste of Time?

No Reliable Evidence that Such Prayers Are Beneficial

As a writer, I spend about 1 hour per day wading through e-mails, press releases, online journals and other such creations of the electronic media in order to learn if something within these communications is actually worth passing on to the reader. And while the following essay may not be considered as news to the casual reader, I found its topic quite interesting.

Gil Gaudia, Professor Emeritus, State University of New York at Fredonia recently published an essay entitled About IntercessoryPrayer: theScientificStudyofMiracles, 1which deals with the efforts to scientifically evaluate the ability of prayer to favorably influence the clinical course of a properly diagnosed and well-documented physical illness.

Dr. Gaudia begins with a quote from David Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding:

"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be even more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish. . . 2