LH, that's very nice poetry, but would you care to give any solid examples? I would "loftily" say that those sentences sound beautiful, but don't actually say anything. ;-)

AFAIK, medical science is quite happy to accept that a person's "will to live" makes a difference to the outcome. Whether othe ppl can make a difference (eg. Susan's prayer circles) has some anecdotal examples but no real evidence. Is the number of "miracle" cures from prayees greater than the number of "miracle" cures from non-prayees? Do you have more chance of making it if you're not religious but have a supportive group of friends, compared to those who go to church every day but are naturally anti-social?

A good example of how things can get screwed up with this kind of thing (I'm afraid this is an anecdote I've been told, but I'm sure Wolfgang will know of this). A psi experiment comes up with a few ppl who score incredibly highly to start with and are asked to come back, but over time their score dropped down, suggesting that they'd "worn out" their "talent". What actually happened was that their score was the average of all results, so that they just got a lucky streak of random correct results and then reverted to the normal level, so the average returned to normal. :-) Had any of the previous rejects been tested over the same number of multiple rounds, they could have equally come up with the same lucky streaks.

An example of a different error would be saying that vegetarians are healthier on average than meat-eaters, therefore vegetarianism is automatically healthier. The problem with this is that all vegetarians have made the decision to eat healthily, whereas a fair proportion of meat-eaters have made no such decision and are quite happy to eat megacalories at McDonalds with no vitamins at all! So the only fair comparison in that case is to compare vegetarians against meat-eaters who have a balanced diet.

So the issue is that studies are needed to test out hypotheses under conditions which have been correctly set up to avoid bias in either direction. If "spirit" does exist and people can raise their level of consciousness to a greater understanding of the world around them, then finding out how they do this so that they can teach others must surely be the way forward. Certain religious groups do try this, but the claims of each that they are the "one true way" tends to suggest that they aren't...

Graham.