Be on guard. The “courtier's reply” round is being loaded into the breech. It will be followed up by the “word salad” grenade. :) (Sorry, too much time reading PZ Myers' blog. The place where logic, reason, and sanity go to die.)

Questions of origin only apply to beings that are not everlasting or eternal. To ask where an eternal thing comes from is like asking a 7 foot basket ball player why he is 4 foot tall and then getting annoyed he does not give your question a direct answer.

Some analogues might help here, a person has the property of not being number essentially. There is no possible world in which a number is a person. Similarly, water has the property of being H20 essentially; any thing that is not H20 is not water and so on. I have the property of being identical with myself essentially, and so on.

When I say that something is made good by God desiring it, I mean something X is good for P if God, understood to have the aforementioned attributes essentially, desires that X have P.

Do you have any intentions to address the questions I have raised?

No, you do not need this. All you need are its claims. Then you can determine whether those claims correspond to reality.

All right, working on this assumption, what claims does Christianity make which are refuted by this study on prayer?

This is very confused. First of all, why do you despise astrology – especially as you don't have a low opinon of astrologers' intelligence? And if they are intelligent, and you are intelligent, and both of your views have reasons for being untestable, surely their views are as valid as yours.
But, of course, you despise astrology, and I'm willing to bet that you have reasons for this. Reasons which you will claim can be readily observed; reasons which you will claim stand up under testing. And the astrologer denies these reasons. You do not respect astrologers' intelligence.

1. I disbelieve astrology because I believe Christianity, and astrology countervenes the Christian worldview. I have no considered opinion on whether astrology may have some basis in fact. I suspect it is nothing but charlatanry; but I am aware that demonic power can play a hand in many things that people like yourself consider pure superstition. In either case, I am not so stupid or so cynical to think that people believe in astrology for no reasons whatsoever. I may not have a high view of their reasons, and I may consider them foolish, irrational, and even wicked—but if I were to set about engaging them in rational dialogue to persuade them of their error, I would not begin by doing everything I could to alienate them, such as presupposing the worst about their beliefs and their motivations, imputing my own opinions and prejudices to them, and refusing to interact thoughtfully with their actual view.

I think if they have no persuasive power over someone else we're in trouble. Ever the empiricist, I believe that common internal experiences are valid reasons for believing things.

Why is it necessary that an experience have persuasive power? Are you saying that experiences with no persuasive power, or experiences which are not common to other people, are in some way invalidated for the subject as well?

Then congratulations, the validity of your prayer is indistinguishable from hindu prayer.

By empirical testing, perhaps so. I don't discount the possibility. But so what?

Or there could be no god, and that is why answers to prayer are indistinguishable from null.

Given no other prior presuppositions, it would appear that either is equally likely, yes. Which is why your entrance into this thread triumphantly announcing that studies “prove” prayer doesn't work was really quite ridiculous. All you were doing was begging the question to start with.

I am not trying to disprove christianity. I am trying to illustrate how the efficacy of prayer is indistinguishable from not-prayer.

Perhaps from an empirical point of view it is. I'm not arguing one way or the other, though problems with the study you cite have been brought to your attention. But since the original post was directed towards Christians, who presuppose the efficacy of prayer, and do not use empirical tests to distinguish that efficacy, your comments here seem entirely inappropriate.

There is no alternative to Divine Command Theory without inviting questions such as “then the concept 'goodness' must somehow precede god”

There is confusion here, you note correctly that our knowledge of the concept of good, in some instances preceeds our knowledge of the concept of God. But that does not show right and wrong or goodness does not depend on God for its goodness. Our knowledge of the concept of water proceeded our knowledge of hydrogen and oxygen it does not follow water is not dependend on water and hydrogen for its existence.

and “why is it necessary that god is good?

God is usually defined as a being worthy of worship and the greatest supreme being , this is based on religious experience people experience a being worthy of devotion, worship, adoration, etc. However a being that was evil would not be worthy of worship, hence if God could be evil in some situation, God could cease to be God in such a situation. Moreover, a God who could be evil in a possible situation would be less worthy of worship and great than a God who would refrain from evil in the same situation and so on, a lot of this is simply the working out of the concepts of deity implict in religious devotion. One can question wether these concepts have application and refer to something real, but thats a different question to wether this is the concept believers work with.

The answer that god is “necessarily good” seems to be saying that “it couldn't have been otherwise”. But how can you detect the veracity of this? How can you know that it couldn't have been otherwise without knowledge of good that is beyond god's?

See above your confusing wether our knowledge of what is good is independent of our knowledge of God, but thats a different question to wether right and wrong can exist independent of Gods existence.

BTW necessary truths are not generally ascertained empirically, observation tells us what is, it does not tell us wether something necessarily is, or how thinks would have been in different possible worlds which we do not observe. This is usually determined conceptually, and by rational intiutions, and metaphysical argument. It seems to me you are operating with an excessively empiricist epistemology and one that is implausible.

On the contrary—if I were planning to refute astrology, then its mechanics would be of great importance to me. How can I even begin to argue that astrology is false if I have no conception of how it is supposed to work?

No, you do not need this. All you need are its claims. Then you can determine whether those claims correspond to reality.

The problem is, that's just your assumption. It's not a Christian assumption. So you're attacking a strawman:

And I agree with you that the christian claims about prayer may be different. But I suspect that they will be indistinguishable from null. And I think it is an empirically verified fact that where there is null there is nothing.

I'm sorry, but much as I despise astrology, I don't have such a low view of people's basic intelligence as you do. Even assuming that astrology avoids testability, I'm not going to beg the question by calling that “convenient”. There may be very good reasons, from an astrological point of view, that astrology's mechanics cannot be tested in a scientific way.

This is very confused. First of all, why do you despise astrology – especially as you don't have a low opinon of astrologers' intelligence? And if they are intelligent, and you are intelligent, and both of your views have reasons for being untestable, surely their views are as valid as yours.
But, of course, you despise astrology, and I'm willing to bet that you have reasons for this. Reasons which you will claim can be readily observed; reasons which you will claim stand up under testing. And the astrologer denies these reasons. You do not respect astrologers' intelligence.

When prayer is answered, it can virtually always be ascribed by the skeptic to coincidence.

Haha, you have it completely backwards Bnonn. Respectable experiments show that it IS coincidence. Rather, despite these experiments – such as the prayer experiment we're discussing – any believer can attribute answered or unanswered prayer as 'answered'.

Yet, often when looking back over the years, a Christian can see a clear path defined by answered and unanswered prayers.

I am not old, but I, too, can look at my life's path and see a meaningful progression. I can often see how and why things have happened – things which, at the time, seemed random. I don't attribute these things to prayer, of course. I can see the reasons for those things in hindsight, where a christian, I guess, just attributes them to god.

Presumably you agree that internal experiences are valid reasons for believing something, even if they have no persuasive power over anyone else?

I think if they have no persuasive power over someone else we're in trouble. Ever the empiricist, I believe that common internal experiences are valid reasons for believing things.

You seem to be presupposing that all phenomena operate by natural laws. So, if I pray, then there will be some kind of probabilistic law which inexorably causes some result. But prayer isn't mechanical. God isn't some kind of power reserve that can be invoked to change the world in a certain way. He's a person, and prayer is a mechanism of communication with him.

Then congratulations, the validity of your prayer is indistinguishable from hindu prayer.

In his eternal plan, God may have determined to have us pray for B, so that he could cause B to occur in answer to that prayer.

Or there could be no god, and that is why answers to prayer are indistinguishable from null.

A belief which must be shared by Christianity if you are going to use it to disprove Christianity. So by your own admission, your argument is completely misdirected.

I am not trying to disprove christianity. I am trying to illustrate how the efficacy of prayer is indistinguishable from not-prayer. The study I forwarded earlier is a great example. And the arguments people have presented here as to why prayer is not testable are also great examples. And if prayer is indistinguishable from not-prayer…