protron or Neutron orbiting the nucleus (Two Bears)

Please, Two Bears, take your analogies from birds and bees or any other field in which you have some knowledge, but not from physics. Your lack of basic knowledge is embarassing.

As for that one study claiming to have found an effect of prayer upon well being, that's just one among many with negative results, and not a very good one, methodologically speaking. But this one study is cited all over again in the one-sided literature and all critical commentaries are of course omitted. Another study that was not only double-blind but triple-blind has found no effect. So what? If you want to learn a bit more about such studies and the methodological pitfalls this old post from me is a good start and gives some hints where to find the original sources. The small print in the sections about methods is what you have to read when you want to give an informed opinion about these studies. Secondary sources as the ones you recommend are a bad start.



In the old ages, people all over the world have been puzzled by things moving and not moving in their environments. That's how most of them explained it to themselves: The things moving had to have some 'life energy' (psyche, anima, or whatever) in them, to make them different from things not moving by themselves. Therefore the old Greek, for instance had a god moving the sun, a god moving the ocean waters when he was in a bad mood, a god for the winds. The Germans had all kinds of gods for each well, each waterfall. That was one way of coming to grips with the observations that some things move by themselves and others don't.

Nothing of any real value (in the sense of prediction and manipulation) has come out of these assumptions. They appeal to the intuitive mind, but as an explanation with predictive power they fall completely flat. The well stops giving water because a god (spirit) is angry? Cul de sac.

Since long, the postulate of spirits as movers of wells, waterfalls, trees has been given up in science (not in fables, tales, but that is a different story). The increaes in knowledge about what moves the water, what makes the clouds move, what makes the trees grow has been tremendous.

No wonder then that recent attempts to explain what makes the animals move (and later, perhaps, what make man move) look not at a failed program of explanation of which never anything worthwhile has come out, but at a successful set of ideas.

The group who has studied all 1000 neurons of a normal fly has done more to our understanding of autoception of the fly and of how a fly moves (in a way that to an observer may even look full of purpose) has done more than centuries of philosophers.

Humans tend to see intentions where nothing but a complicated neural circuitry is in action. Look for instance at how chess games between a human and a machine are commented. I have yet to see a comment avoiding concepts like 'intention' for moves of the machine. 'Fritz 8 is trying to block the line for the rook and at the same time bring his bishop into the game to put more pressure upon the knight defending the king'.

Complex machine action looks to us like founded upon intentions. That's how we perceive it and how we describe it. I've no problem with that language at all. It is my own language when I speak about these things in daily life. But as a start for a research programm it is worthless. And that is the reason why the people doing actual research do not follow any other programm and not that they only want proof that it isn't true..

Wolfgang