Prayer Studies Said to be a Waste of Money
By: Dr. Bruce L. Flamm
The six-hospital STEP project, the largest study ever conducted on distant intercessory prayer, has just confirmed that distant prayer has no beneficial effect on cardiac patients. The large multiple-hospital MANTRA II study published last year also showed that distant prayer had no beneficial effects.
What are the implications? Is there no God? Is there a God who does not answer prayers?
In my opinion, our conclusion should be a bit more mundane. Rather than wasting more time and money on similar studies, scientists should stick to science and theologians should focus on theology.
For thousands of years, supposedly-answered prayers and healing “miracles” have been used as evidence for the existence of God or gods. Today, some individuals would like to demonstrate scientifically that distant prayer works in order to prove that their particular concept of God is correct. But there is a down side to playing such games: What if scientific studies continue to demonstrate that distant prayer does not work?
From a scientific perspective, the concept of scientifically investigating alleged supernatural phenomena is paradoxical. Science is firmly based on the assumption of a natural, albeit highly complex universe. Science cannot comment on claimed supernatural realms precisely because, by definition, they are claimed to exist outside of the natural universe. If prayers could cause supernatural events to occur in the natural world, then no scientific study could ever be trusted. How could we ever know if a study’s results had been altered by distant prayers?
Thinking about prayer
Interestingly, the concept of investigating alleged supernatural phenomena is also absurd when viewed from a theological perspective. If you doubt this, ponder the following questions:
Is intercessory prayer a contest in which the one with the most prayers wins?
Is God so busy that he can only help people when enough prayers come in on their behalf?
Do prayers from five people constitute a higher and more efficacious dose of prayer than those from two people? What if the two people have stronger faith than the five?
Can God be tricked into participating in a prayer research study?
Why can God heal functional defects but not structural defects? For example, prayer has seemingly helped countless people with allegedly “paralyzed legs” discard their wheelchairs but, strangely, prayer has never caused a single amputated leg to re-grow.
Are prayers for healing directed to Allah or Yahweh as effective as prayers to Jesus or God the Father? Should such questions be investigated by randomized controlled trials?
Discussions of faith healing and distant prayer belong in religious journals, not scientific journals. It is one thing to tell an audience at a religious revival that prayers yield miracle cures but quite another to make the same claim in a scientific journal.
For some people, miracles, or perhaps symbolic miracles, are metaphors for God’s love. Science does not deal in metaphors. Science deals with events that can be tested, verified and replicated. In the entire history of modern science, no claim of any type of supernatural phenomena has ever been replicated under strictly controlled conditions.
If intercessory prayers actually worked, one would expect the faithful to have vastly less disease and far greater life spans than nonbelievers. This is obviously not the case. In spite of persistent prayers by faithful friends and relatives, religious people die just as frequently and just as horribly as people who receive no intercessory prayers.
What’s the harm of prayer?
It is often claimed that intercessory prayers may not work but at least do no harm. However, reliance on faith healing can cause serious harm and even death. The consequences of avoiding medical care because of reliance on religious rituals and faith healing have been well documented. Another report in the journal Pediatrics in 1998 identified 158 children who died because of reliance on faith healing and religion-motivated medical neglect.
The STEP publication concludes by stating that the research could not address a large number of religious questions, such as whether God exists, or whether God answers intercessory prayers. The former question is obviously beyond the scope of the research, but the latter seems to be the very point of doing this huge study. The intercessory prayers in this study were clearly directed to God. Why conduct a huge randomized multi-center study if you are not going to take the results seriously? As a very wise man once said, “if you might not like the answer, don’t ask the question.”
Dr. Bruce L. Flamm is clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California, Irvine. This article was written for Science & Theology News.