Why Aren Fraud And/Or Incompetantcy Looked Upon As Real Possibilities In Scientific Procedures?
In the January/February 2000 issue of The Humanist, the journal of the American Humanist association, author David Shafer, Ph.D., discusses scientific investigations of the claim that intercessory prayer can affect cardiac patients who are not even aware that they are being prayed for, bringing about alleviation of pain and faster recovery times. If it were true, it would certainly be a paranormal event. In these tests, the patients were divided into two groups: the control group was not prayed for — at least not so. Now, it’s a fact that scientists are often, to most of the public, pretty strange folks. We’ve pretty well gotten over the notion that they all wear white coats, carry smoking test-tubes, and are male, but even they sometimes admit that they may not see things quite the same way that the rest of us do. One thing has always made me wonder about their world-view — they almost never consider the possibility that a fellow- scientist might be directly cheating, or might be me
