Implications of Prayer in Slaughterhouse-Five

I decided to look more deeply into the Kilgore Trout novels within Slaughterhouse-Five. The one which particularly piqued my interest was The Big Board. It is about two earthlings who are abducted by aliens and taken to a zoo on the platen Zircon-212. There, they are told that the aliens have invested a million dollars in stocks, and it is up to them to manage this so that they can be rich when they are returned to earth. The have a big board in their enclosure with which to view the stock market changes. Of course, all of it is fake, contrived by the aliens to make the humans show intense emotions for viewers of the zoo. To me, there is an insane amount of important and interesting ways to look at this novel and its implications. I am writing my response paper on some of them. 

However, religion also comes into play in The Big Board, and in an intriguing way, although I'm not sure how to work it into my paper. So I will discuss it here. At one point, the aliens tell their human captives that the President of the US has declared it National Prayer Week, and asked everyone to pray. The week before, the humans had lost a small fortune in olive oil stocks. "So they gave praying a whirl. It worked. Olive oil went up." Now at first, as I was reading this, I took the claim that the prayer worked to be Vonnegut's dry, sarcastic, irony. But the fact that the aliens control the stocks does not mean that a hypothetical God did not make them raise olive oil in response to the human prayers. The fact that the aliens are in total control does not disprove God, and the power of prayer. In a less religious sense, the prayer most definitely made the stock prices go up. This is due to the fact that the aliens told the humans about "Prayer Week" so that they would pray, and thereby entertain the audience. When the humans do pray, the aliens reward them by raising the stocks. This is done merely to manipulate the captives emotions, but despite that the prayer did without a doubt work. I think that the fact that prayer can work in such a tangible sense, even in the absence of a God, quite interesting and thought-provoking. Another question brought up is that of whether or not the aliens are gods to the humans. They certainly seem godlike. Controlling everything in the environment, knowing everything about the humans, and even answering prayers. Now I am unaware of all of the implications if the aliens are gods, but it does seem to reveal a lot and lead to a lot of questions about the possible nature of deity a religion. If the humans began worshiping the aliens, would their stocks go up? I think so. How similar is the situation on Zircon-212 like our own? Is what entertains and affects us as superficial as that which decides all of the emotions of the humans on Zircon-212? If anyone has any thoughts about these question I would much appreciate hearing them.