Playing with God: Prayer is Not a Prescription
by Glenn McGee
2007. The American Journal of Bioethics 7(12):1

Despite some very vocal advocates, the idea that prayer is a cure for disease just doesn't have a prayer. Harvard researchers and the Templeton foundation poured nine years and $2.4 million into the sixth and most comprehensive study to date of the effect of prayer by strangers ("intercessory prayer") on patients' health. And this month they announce, as have those who led the other five studies, pretty definitive results: prayer by strangers across thousands of miles had no effect on side effects for 1,802 heart bypass patients. There's just no getting around the evidence that there is no meaningful correlation between prayer by strangers and patients' health.

Introduction

Despite some very vocal advocates, the idea that prayer is a cure for disease just doesn't have a prayer. Harvard researchers and the Templeton foundation poured nine years and $2.4 million into the sixth and most comprehensive study to date of the effect of prayer by strangers ("intercessory prayer") on patients' health. And this month they announce, as have those who led the other five studies, pretty definitive results: prayer by strangers across thousands of miles had no effect on side effects for 1,802 heart bypass patients. There's just no getting around the evidence that there is no meaningful correlation between prayer by strangers and patients' health.

Those who continue to preach for remote control prayer are undeterred in the struggle to turn religion into biomedical research. The studies just haven't been done correctly, they argue. Perhaps people didn't get the prayer right, or did not know how much to pray. Or maybe patients were scared (which may very well explain why heart patients who were told they were the subject of prayer did more poorly than those who were unaware).

But the problem with patients putting their faith in intercessory prayer is that it tries to turn religion into biomedical science, at great cost to both.

The problem isn't prayer. Prayer can be the most generous, open, solemn and thoughtful form of human expression and people often pray when things seem to hit rock bottom. Faith that a prayer may enlist God's help to heal someone is about as universal a religious experience as they come. When medicine fails and science reaches its end, a physician would have to be pretty callous to scorn patients' and their families' faith, even in miracles.

But that is the point. Miracles are for religion. Faith is for religion. Prayer is for religion. Biomedical science is, well, science. Just as high school science classes have no business teaching intelligent design alongside evolution, there is no place in medical school for utterly unfounded attempts to turn religion into a drug. Unless you believe that God can be tricked into participating in a study of intercessory prayer, the entire scientific effort is folly.

What would intercessory prayer do for medicine if it actually worked? Would those who can line up the most prayer support live the longest? Should God be able to not only reduce side effects but also, as Bruce Flamm notes, re-grow amputated legs? Which God should be the subject of prayer, in what language and using which denomination?

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of prescribing "prayer treatments" is the eerie clarity that its advocates have about the point of intercessory prayer. What is the prayer supposed to do for a heart condition? The massive studies to date suggest that prayer does not affect the medical condition of patients in a significant way, but what if the outcome were that more patients who had been the subject of intercessory prayer were to die? Would that be a bad thing? How odd that these advocates, claiming a Judeo-Christian tradition that speaks of ashes to ashes, feel comfortable in the argument that prayer is "working" when it forces people to stay in this mortal coil one moment longer. And what would it say?

Miracles happen. If the result of these studies is that millions of Americans are interested enough in the health of strangers to pray for a health system that provides real healthcare for all, it would give everyone a good bit more faith.

Notes