A Dispute

I have been reading the dispute which has arisen on a couple of blogs: My sister's blog and The blog of someone my sister knew in college. The issue about prayer having no "instrumental value" is that to which I refer. The argumentation on the latter's blog is misleading--asking for statistical evidence. This sort of request, of course, misses the whole point. And perhaps the proper response is unsayable, I don't know. But asking for statistical evidence isn't the way to go at all. I mean, you won't have any productive dialogue arguing that way. The whole thing about prayer is that it doesn't fit into all those nice analytical boxes one would like to use to analyze everything. I mean...that's the nature of prayer...if you could analyze it then it wouldn't be what it is. There is much more to say about this issue. This is only my first intuition: more thoughts later when I'm not writing papers and finals are over.