The efficacy of prayer
Published: April 2, 2006
That study finding no evidence to support the effectiveness of intercessory prayer says more about the limitations of science than it does about the efficacy of prayer.
The comprehensive and well-designed study was funded mainly by the John Templeton Foundation. It divided 1,802 heart-bypass patients into three groups. Patients in one group were told that others would be praying for their health and recovery. Patients in the other two groups were not certain that anyone would be praying for them. Those who knew they were in people’s prayers had slightly more medical complications than the others. Those who had no way of knowing whether people were praying for them had comparable medical results, regardless of whether anyone was praying for them.
The Templeton Foundation could have obtained similar results by studying people who buy lottery tickets. The study would find that people who pray for a jackpot are no more likely to pick winning numbers than those who don’t.
Such studies, however scientifically sound they may be, misapprehend the nature of prayer. Saying a prayer is not like asking the boss for a raise, or sending a Christmas list to Santa Claus. When people pray, they attempt to widen the conduit of communication between themselves and God. What is communicated may sometimes resemble a set of demands, but when those demands are not met it doesn’t mean that no communication has occurred.
Many prayers, surely including many of those made on behalf of the heart patients in the Templeton study, do not challenge God to perform certain actions, with the implication that if those actions do not occur the time spent in prayer has been wasted. Rather, many people in prayer seek to reveal to God what is in their hearts, or to place their trust in God, or to quiet their minds so that so that God’s will in their lives and the lives of others can be better understood.
Scientific proof that specific prayers aren’t always answered won’t shake the faith of people who make room for prayer. Indeed, the faithful should be relieved by the results of Templeton study. People of faith are warned against putting God to the test, and proof of a measurable benefit of intercessory prayer would have led in that direction. A positive finding would undoubtedly have led to more refined studies showing that some prayers get better results than others. Reader boards outside churches would soon proclaim their members’ prayers to be 33 percent more effective than the competition’s.
Science - a human undertaking, bound by human limitations - can’t comprehend the divine. It won’t be able to calibrate the benefits of prayer. It can never prove, or disprove, that prayers are being answered every instant.
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