Blog - Can you quantum test prayer

Page / - last modified by Victor Zhang on 02:47, 26/03/2025

Can you quantum test prayer

last modified by Victor Zhang

on 02:47, 26/03/2025

Table of Contents

Overview
The push back people use when people try to setup experiment(Like The Harvard Prayer Experiment) to test the validity of various claims regarding prayer is usually "You can not test god". However this pushback leads to several paradoxes.

Paradoxes

Every testimony is a test
I'm quite interested in what religious activities people do and why people do them, so I have attended a lot of church sessions where there are people give testimony to justify conversion to (usually Christianity). The testimony usually go something like after start believe god and praying, they either get good jobs, or go through hardships of life, etc. It's basically equivalent of saying "I tested praying, it worked". So unless people keep the information private between them and god, every testimony is a test.

Condition that invalidate all prayer
If testing make prayer not work and therefore couldn't be tested, people can just setup an experiment that will track at least a subset of population's prayer result. If the "you can not test god" is true, the setup of the experiment will invalidate all the prayer that person does which seems to be like a "bug" of a system.

Similar to quantum state reveal
Post modernist likes to attribute the "mysteriousness" of how prayer work to the spookiness of quantum physics. Although most of it is just normies like you and me misunderstanding the spookiness of quantum physics, there is actually some merit in this comparison. When a photon/electron is observed, it "solidifies" the state of the "decision" the photon/electron made, which made it analyzable using statistic method. Similarly if we setup experiment track people's prayer which already have result, as a result, even if those participant agreed to be in the experiment, their prayer was sincere and not a test at the moment of the prayer therefore were all valid prayers for statistical analysis purpose.

Digress

To establish why quantum test would be the only test that's worth running on prayer

People usually pray for cancer for remission but not amputees to regrow because there's claim: prayer only work on mysterious properties rather than seemingly deterministic properties.

Similarly prayer experiment could be run on Random number generators, however most random number generators on computers are Pseudo Random which means it's deterministic, that is probably not mysterious enough.

So here is the experiment

Problems to address

The prayers have to be sincere and not knowing it's an experiment

(Only some claims) Cause have to be noble, and can't be "I want a car" or something like that, although it's not a universal concern, still worth to be addressed

Process also have to be blind for researcher to reduce the cognitive bias.

To have comparison point, we need to pick something that at neutral state has a statistical 50/50 chance. QRNG(Quantum Random Number Generator)'s neutral state is known, which is if do it enough time, it should be 50/50. (Note: unlike pseudo-random number generator which is deterministic and seems can't be altered by prayer, quantum random number generator is a true randomness, therefore if the religious hypothesis is true can alter the statistical result)

Experiment design: The QRNG donation challenge

Setup a youtube/twitch/etc. live stream of QRNG(quantum random number generator) generating bits, setup a period for each session to make the donation.

The stream also covers a conditions that for every excess "1s / 0s"(decided but not revealed, but fully recorded and verified by a 3rd party that agrees to NDA to ensure no cheating) donate 1$ to foodbank. The viewer do not know the condition but god surely should know, with prayers to donate more, god would know which number to increase.

When time runs out, reveal the condition and the result in front of the livestream and make the donation.

Run several rounds to ensure is not just random errors leading to prayer "works" or "not work".

Hypothesis

Because most people will be praying for more donation to foodbank (unless you believe more religious people are evil than benign), at each experiment session, there should be (at least) positive amount of donation.

The amount also should be quite large, as "solve world hunger" is a common prayer so people does not need to be watching the stream to be praying for that. Therefore should sway the QRNG in the direction of pre-defined goal saved on a hidden medium verified by a 3rd party with no conflict of interest.

Even if you argue that the people watching the stream will know that you are testing prayer, all those who are praying to end world hunger who's not watching the stream does not know it's a test and are hence sincere.

The goal is not selfish, the goal is noble so according to a majority of religious explanations, the prayer should be answered.

Posted by Victor Zhang · Permalink