The Power of Prayer Test:

Have you ever performed a QUANTIFICATION TEST on prayer to see HOW WELL prayer works? Try this.

Flip a coin 20 times noting the results on a sheet of paper. You should see that you got around half the flips heads and half tails, give or take one or two. This is your control group.

Next, do the same exercise but each time you flip the coin pray for heads (or tails). Note on the paper the results of the 20 flips. Your result should show around 10/10, give or take a few.

You might say that the power of prayer worked in around 10 of the flips! But compare the results of your prayer group with your control group. The prayer group did NO BETTER than random chance as shown in the control group.

There is your power of prayer.

Christianity teaches both prayer as mediation (not my will, but thine be done) and as petition (god will supply all your needs through his riches in Christ Jesus). Some sects emphasize one over / to the exclusion of the other.

There is some value to meditation of any sort, including meditative prayer, as any form of letting go of particular expectations is calming / centering / helpful. The central benefit is from the letting go, not so much the particular rationalization / motivation for doing so. Even this article merely claims "beneficial psychological effects" and admits they are the same for the meditative traditions of other religions.

There's also a facile claim that "science proves prayer works" as if that "proof" is for prayer of any sort, when it's not.

Petitioning prayer manifestly does not work (except in an "even a stopped clock is right twice a day" fashion). Requesting protection, favor / grace, healing and the like has never been demonstrated to have an effect that can be clearly distinguished from random happenstance.

As soon as what you might call a meditative aspect enters into prayer (a prayer for insight / understanding might have a focused, waiting aspect to it for example) then there is a potential for a person to be influenced to be more patient or calm or more positively focused or more aware or open or contemplative than they would normally be by default, and thus the potential for better outcomes and/or more positive framing for one's perception of outcomes. But that class of better outcomes doesn't require an interventionist god to explain why it kinda-sorta "works".

It's a crock. He's a theist, he can't say much else. And besides science has proved that it doesn't, praying runs at something less than 50/50, so it's random.

And like you say, manipulating meditation into a form of pray just fills up his crock a bot more.