Give an example of a test of something intangible

Whether living by the precepts of your religion helps you feel happier, or at least helps you perceive yourself as happier (see pew research study on this). So you could have faith that living by the precepts of your religion will help you feel happier. But it’s hard to tell if the results are genuine (i.e. does living a religion cause happiness? Or does feeling like you’re living a religion cause happiness? Or are religious people more likely to lie to claim their religion is the cause?).

As a practical example, look at Buddhism, where many (most? all?) schools encourage meditation as a spiritual exercise with the intended result of achieving inner peace and unification with the universe. Practitioners have faith that meditation will bring them closer to that goal, and that faith is strengthened the more they experience results.

There are secular reasons to explain these of course (e.g. networking effect of attending religious services, value of rest, etc). The difference is the reason they’re practiced can build faith in the divine instead of just trust in a practice.

And some external tests:

• Would attending a Rotary club meetings have a similar effect as attending religious services?
• Would non-religious meditation result in the same level of satisfaction and calm as religiously-motivated meditation?
• Are secular people as likely to engage as religious people?

I imagine these tests would not be definitive though, since it’s hard, if not impossible, to establish causation for subjective things like “happiness” and “satisfaction.”

No, that is how we believe in anything

I disagree. If we don’t have much evidence and need to come up with an explanation, we guess. And if our guesses are proven consistent as new evidence becomes available, our confidence in that guess grows.

I’ll use one of my favorite allegories here, Plato’s allegory of the cave. It’s not a perfect fit here, but I think it’s applicable. There are two perspectives I’d like to look at:

• religious person - the shadows and the prisoners’ reasoning about them is science, and the prisoner being brought out is like a prophet, who comes back and tries to explain to the “scientists” how the shadows relate to “real” things the prisoners can observe
• secular person - the roles are flipped; the shadows are religion, and the person brought outside is a scientist, who explains the real causes behind the shadows they see

Both find it difficult to believe things they haven’t seen, and give a lot of value to things they can see. Both need to make guesses as to what’s going on given the limited facts they have. The difference imo is in the type of evidence they’re willing to accept to change their beliefs.

It was not a test of god and it is shameful that you would try to make it out to be so.

The study was to determine whether prayer helps in recovery. There’s two ways (maybe more) this could be interpreted:

1. Test whether God (or some divine third party) will intervene in helping recovery if someone prays
2. Test whether the knowledge that someone else is praying helps in recovery, regardless of whether someone is actually praying

The second is probably the intent here, but it’s easy to see the first get misconstrued (esp. since they had a group that got the placebo), and it seemed from context that’s what you were doing. I apologize if I was putting words in your mouth, but that was my interpretation.

So, if we assume the second was the intent, all the study proves is that knowing someone is praying for you doesn’t really change recovery outcomes, since the difference was within margin of error (the article’s words, I didn’t look into the methodology). It doesn’t prove prayer to be ineffective in total (again, can’t control for God), just that knowing someone is praying for you doesn’t do anything. And the study also fell short in that it doesn’t examine impact to the people doing the praying, since much of the point of praying for someone is to help the person doing the prayer (it’s a small act of care for someone else).