Thread: How can Spirituality be studied Scientifically?

Originally Posted by Alric

Of course there are coincidences. I can make totally random guesses at things, and because its random I will some times be right. In the cases I am right there is no purpose or higher meaning to any of it, because they were all random guesses. Everything happens for a reason but not for a purpose.

If you have a kind of prayer that works, what you need to do is keep narrowing down the variables until you can get repeatable results. So that if you do A, and the situation is B, you always get the same result. If you do that, I am sure you can get money to do research studies on it.

I don't need to because it's already happening, I just can't find the research where it was done right. And I'm not going to argue the synchronicity because there's currently no scientific data to back it up and I'm still making a subjective claim which is not the purpose of this thread. The purpose of this thread is also not to argue about whether or not prayer may be real but about how things like prayer can be studied scientifically. You just described exactly what needs to happen, not just with prayer but all aspects of spirituality. But one must also be patient and realized that so many variables come into play it'll take time and perseverance to get to that A causes B point. I think statistics are still a valuable tool, though, so even if A didn't cause B 100% of the time that doesn't mean A doesn't commonly cause B, which is a good way to make decisions.

Ideally you want to get it to 100%, but what you can also do is try to identify to the unknown factors that are involved in it. If you are not getting 100% that means something else is effecting your result. The biggest problem is that most people have always treated this sort of stuff like a black box. You pray, something happened, then you either get the result you want or don't. You need to find out what happens in the second step, and if you understand that and you can explain what is going on, you can study it in much more detail.

Once again I must bring up Game Theory, which is the science of judging people's reactions and building rapport. The factors involved in someone's reaction to you are astronomical and completely beyond our capacity to control or even predict. No matter how far you get into social dynamics, you cannot account for every single variable. That does not mean game theory has no value, and utilizing it in order to judge what is most likely going to happen is still a worthy endeavor and a good staple for decision making.