Prayer does work, and very powerfully too at times... There's a lot of nonsense spoken about praying in tongues (babbling about babbling!), but it's actually one of the most powerful methods of prayer... distracting the conscious mind, which is usually the biggest barrier to the healing power of prayer... praying in tongues is a very effective answer.
So it DOES have a real effect that CAN be measured, even to the point that different kinds of prayer or praying under different circumstances can be determined to have different levels of "power". Surely you can share with us how these facts were determined.
People who attempt to test the efficacy of prayer are making the mistaken assumption that it is a physical phenomenon that can be controlled by us
If it isn't & can't, then everything you just said in the previous quote box was false.
So when Christians pray for a man who is dying and he dies anyway, skeptics are unimpressed. But it simply may have... Maybe... prayer may...
So it has no effect often enough for its effectiveness to be completely hidden and look exactly the same as not praying at all, and all you can come up with to try to disguise that is making up a series of hypothetical ways it might maybe have done something else instead of what it was supposed to do that's good enough anyway. The claim you started with wasn't a maybe-might. It was a DOES. Show us what it DOES... not just because it's what
your claim really was, but also because people people can sit around fumbling for made-up excuses for the failures of their false claims as easily as you can for the failures of the ones you claim are true.
"Psychics" & "mediums" talk about being interfered with by negative vibes coming from someone nearby... astrologers complain about being set up with misinformation or claim there was some lost obscure detail about someone's "chart" that was somehow hidden or otherwise not accounted for on the first try... magicians claiming real telekinesis claim they're feeling a bit weak when a demonstration they didn't set up themselves is sprung on them... people claiming to be able to identify individuals or do medical diagnosis by aura repeatedly reduce & weaken their claims for testing purposes and then, when they fail anyway even on the reduced version, retroactively claim that their wrong answers were really right because they hadn't felt very sure about them... people claiming to be able to live without eating food insist that they really could have done it if they'd just been allowed to keep going when their attempted demonstrations are aborted because they showed clear signs of malnourishment... snake handlers who get bitten and are saved by medical intervention swear they know someone else for whom it had worked when no medical people were around... chi masters who can't push down their opponents in real matches claim their opponents were using chi too or there was some other kind of chi-interference at the exact time & place of the match or they're suddenly feeling ill but they're sure they could do it some other time...
Backing off from claims of what would happen to excuses about what might happen some other time when nobody's looking is precisely the routine behavior of people with false claims. That's who you're making yourself look like. To differentiate yourself from them, all you need to do is show your claims about the real world actually being accurate in the real world, not more and more and more and more excuses for why it isn't.
I was in a hurry, and conflated flat denial and experience.
Well, the former isn't much on its own anyway. Of course people will deny stuff they don't see any reason to think it's real. That's because... they don't see any reason to think it's real.
Fourth - Flat denial that Intelligent design MIGHT be valid.
Of course, because it has overwhelmingly been proven over and over and over and over and over to be nothing but a pile of flat-out lies.
At this point, there's really not even any need to move on and deal with the rest individually because... come on, seriously... Creationism. That's not just false, but a towering beacon of flamboyant dishonesty shininig on the hill for all to see, declaring the wonders of illogic to be found inside where the world's greatest collection of lies has been brought together and put on display for your amazement. Gaze in shock as you pass from one chamber to another to another to another to another in its mighty Hall Of Fallacies! Get lost among the self-contradictions in its dizzying Maze Of Mirrors! Get a tiny bottle of Even Holier Water in the gift shop on your way out for just $14.99!
Anything else you associate with that is even more discredited just because you've now exposed yourself as a Creationist making a list of things associated with Creationism. Any film of credibility you might have been able to put up over some of these other claims is now dissolved away by the Creationism. It's like defending yourself against charges of petty theft & vandalism by giving an alibi that you were elsewhere killing someone at the time.
Creationism to back up "the existence of God and the efficacy of prayer". Holy wow. We need a smiley that's looking down, slowly shaking its head.
