Larry Dossey MD has written some interesting books about the study of the effectiveness of prayer and mental intentions. He's very open-minded, though a traditional, Harvard-trained physician.
I think it's totally worthwhile to study prayer and mental intentions scientifically, though like many things in life they are complicated phenomena and difficult to isolate for the purposes of an experiment.
The Princeton engineering lab's studies of random-number-generating machines being affected by human mental intentions towards them and the studies of petri dishes of bacteria being affected by distant prayers by strangers are quite interesting because they were done on non-human, easily-measurable entities. |