The conviction of the effectiveness of prayer therapy in healing patients depends on the degree of religiousness, but religious and non-religious people do not differ in their opinions about medical treatment and its criteria.
In his report published in the journal "Psychology Today", the writer David Laden said that the conviction of religious faithful to the effectiveness of the treatment of prayer and prayers in the past has only required the success of a few attempts to apply this treatment, unlike non-religious people.
At first glance, this finding suggests that religious people follow less stringent evidence standards than those who do not believe in any religion. However, if a team of doctors and nurses try a new medical treatment that would cure a person with a disease, both religious and non-religious demand the same level of evidence.
The study reported that despite claims to the contrary, religious people do not necessarily show a bias against science or scientific thinking that they seem to understand as non-religious people. However, religious people tend to show prejudice in favor of miraculous interpretations of events. This makes sense because supernatural phenomena are an important part of their worldview.
Scientific evidence
Science is not simply advanced by gathering evidence to support hypotheses, but also looking for evidence that might prove a hypothesis to be false. For example, when we evaluate the effectiveness of a new treatment, we want not only to know how many patients have been treated, but also how many people have not been successful.
So far, research has not determined whether religious and non-religious adopt different criteria for using failed experiments as evidence against a given hypothesis.This was the research question studied by psychologist Emilio Lobato and his colleagues in a recent article in the Journal of Social Psychology and Personality.
During the study, the responses of religious and non-religious responses were compared under four conditions. The first two conditions revolve around the number of successful treatment experiences they wanted to see before they were convinced that prayer or medical treatment was successful, as in previous studies. The other two conditions were about the number of failed experiments that the two groups needed to see before they were convinced that prayer or medical treatment were unsuccessful.
In line with previous research, the results show that religious and non-religious people adopt similar standards regarding medical treatment. In other words, religious people showed no prejudice against scientific thinking.
In contrast, religious people have set a minimum threshold for accepting supernatural experiences in exchange for medical treatment, and the same applies to non-religious participants as well. In other words, both groups needed to see fewer prayer therapy experiences than medical treatment to convince it to be effective.
The two groups did not act sympathetically when evaluating failed experiments, as they sympathized with the supernatural allegations. In evaluating medical and prayer treatments, religious people adopted the same standard, requesting a similar number of failed trials before both were rejected. In contrast, non-religious people requested fewer failed trials of prayer therapy versus medical treatment to judge it as ineffective.
prejudice
The bias against miraculous claims from non-religious people is known as the Sagan standard, named after famous cosmologist Carl Sagan, who argues that extraordinary claims and claims require extraordinary evidence, in other words extraordinary evidence as well.
From a global scientific point of view, supernatural allegations are unusual and are therefore assessed with a higher level of medical claims.
In short, the religious and non-religious assess the scientific claims in a similar way, while assessing the supernatural claims differently. While natural claims are assessed from a neutral perspective, we tend to evaluate supernatural claims according to our worldviews.