The basic premise: all of reality is under the absolute ownership of the Holy One, blessed be He. The human investigator is not “looking from the outside” at a closed system, but acting within the system of the Master of the house. When one tries to examine empirically whether “prayer helps,” an internal contradiction arises very quickly:

1. A methodological-theological problem
A statistical test requires a representative sample, meaning a complete list of all those praying, every request, every context, every merit and liability of every person, and every stage in the cosmic process. Since this information is kept only by the Master of the world, every human “sample” is always partial and arbitrary. If the Holy One, blessed be He, chooses to conceal His traces, He will simply ensure that the sample collected includes דווקא cases in which the prayer does not manifest in practice, or manifests in ways that cannot be identified. The researchers will declare “there is no effect,” even though in the heavenly accounting the prayer operated with full force.

2. Hester Panim — the hiding of the Divine face
Already in the prophecy of “I will surely hide My face” it is stated explicitly: there is a period in which the Creator chooses to hide His overt appearance. Hiding of the Divine face is not accidental, but a policy. Any attempt to illuminate that hiddenness through scientific means is essentially circumventing the divine policy. If the measurement succeeds, the hiddenness has been canceled; and if the hiddenness is in force, the measurement will fail. Both possibilities undercut the value of the research from the outset.

3. The prohibition of “Do not test”
The Torah forbids: “Do not test the Lord your God.” The Sages expand this: it is forbidden to put the Creator to the test, even with pure intentions. One who seeks to “prove” God by empirical means crosses a line of Jewish law. Someone who violates this prohibition may be punished by having his test come out distorted, and afterward he will also have to give an account in the World to Come.

4. Prayer as an operative tool that is not probabilistic
Prayer is not a matter of “raising percentages” in a mathematical sense, but of opening a channel. If a person lacks merits, or if the request conflicts with the highest good, the channel remains closed. When the only barrier is the absence of prayer, the appeal releases the flow. This happens behind spiritual scenes to which a human being has no access. No statistics will document such channels, because their activation depends on the particular decision of the Master of the world at every given moment.

5. The logic of “the free lottery ticket”
Prayer is free and belongs to the daily commandments. Giving it up is like a person refusing to fill out a lottery ticket at no cost, even though he does not know whether his numbers will come up. In any case, even if the odds are entirely determined behind the curtain, only one who asked can receive.

6. Moving the discussion to the proper plane
The demand for empirical proofs brings faith into a foreign arena that is not authorized to deal with it. One who seeks decisive evidence misses the whole point of the hiddenness, violates “Do not test,” and ignores the line separating scientific knowledge from traditional fidelity. The question of whether to pray is not a statistical question but a question of obedience to a commandment and of the desire to open a spiritual possibility.

Therefore, the argument that “prayer is ineffective because there is no empirical evidence” completely misses the entire theological structure. One who believes in the Creator’s ownership, in the policy of hester panim, and in the prohibition of testing, understands that such research is doomed to built-in failure. Consequently, the logical path is to continue praying, since there is no cost, there is a commandment, and there is the potential for immeasurable abundance.

I’ve elaborated on all this more than once. You are only arguing that this is a thesis that cannot be refuted. Fine. That is also what I claim. We both also agree that it does not appear in the world that this is happening. The difference is that you still choose to accept it even though there is no indication whatsoever that it is true, and in fact the opposite seems to be the case, whereas I choose not to. So all this length is pointless.