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This study was reported under headlines like, “Intercessory Prayer Has No Major Effect on Recovery” (BeliefNet) ², “Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer” (New York Times)³, “Study Fails to Show Healing Power of Prayer” (Yahoo! News)⁴, and “Prayer Does Not Heal the Sick, Study Finds (Times Online)⁵.

These headlines may be catchy, but they do extreme violence to the actual science. This brings me to my first main point: Be skeptical. Often journalists (and sometimes scientists) exaggerate or omit certain facts in order to tell a better story.

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Oh, Pat Robertson. There you go, shooting off your fool mouth again. The man is supposedly a lawyer and he can’t recognize a logical fallacy when he utters one.

That would be the fallacy of the False Dilemma, also known as the False Dichotomy. Unless those eight Dover school board members were officers that were personally selected, installed, and maintained by God, voting them out of office does not necessarily constitute a rejection of God. More likely, it counts as an act of common sense.

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