New Study Casts Doubt on Faith
March 31st, 2006 by gordo
Some people’s prayers may be counterproductive
A multiyear study of more than 1,800 patients has led researchers to the conclusion that intercessory prayer offered by strangers had no effect on patients undergoing heart surgery. Patients who knew that they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications. The study appears in the upcoming issue of the American Heart Journal, and is now available online.
In a New York Times article, various researchers and professionals gave their reactions:
“One conclusion from this is that the role of awareness of prayer should be studied further,” said Dr. Charles Bethea, a cardiologist at Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City and a co-author of the study…”It may have made them uncertain, wondering am I so sick they had to call in their prayer team?”
Well, that’s one possible conclusion. Here’s another: researchers should quit wasting time and resources studying the power of prayer. A quick look at the upcoming issue of the American Heart Journal shows that there are a lot of areas of research with much greater potential to benefit patients.
If a you want to pray for a person, it’s hard to see the harm in that. Telling the person that they’re so sick that you’re calling in a prayer team is probably a bad idea, but you can ask your congregation to pray for your sick relative without telling the patient about your efforts.
“The problem with studying religion scientifically is that you do violence to the phenomenon by reducing it to basic elements that can be quantified, and that makes for bad science and bad religion,” said Dr. Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia and author of a forthcoming book, “Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine.”
I can certainly see how studying only the quantifiable elements of a phenomenon would make for bad religion, but it’s hard to see how it would make for bad science.
Dean Marek, a chaplain at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and a co-author of the report, said the study said nothing about the power of personal prayer or about prayers for family members and friends.
Working in a large medical center like Mayo, Mr. Marek said, “You hear tons of stories about the power of prayer, and I don’t doubt them.”
Yes, Mr. Marek, you do hear stories. But you also see research, and the research indicates that the stories have given you a false impression. And as for personal prayer and the prayer of family members, I think that theologians like yourself have to account for God’s selective hearing before you ask the rest of us to conclude that prayer by strangers has a fundamentally different effect than prayer by relatives and friends.
Bob Barth, the spiritual director of Silent Unity, the Missouri prayer ministry, said the findings would not affect the ministry’s mission.
“A person of faith would say that this study is interesting,” Mr. Barth said, “but we’ve been praying a long time and we’ve seen prayer work, we know it works, and the research on prayer and spirituality is just getting started.”
And that’s exactly why studies like this are a waste of time. Nothing is going to convince people who pray for one another that their prayers have no effect. The only effect that a study like this can have is to take valuable resources from research into more promising treatments.
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I can’t help but wonder about the theology that leads people to pray for relief of illness. First of all, if one believes in an immortal soul, then our time on earth is rather short. Wouldn’t praying for a loved one’s soul be a more productive use of your time? Isn’t an eternity in hell a lot worse than dying of an illness?
Also, if one believes that God could intercede to relieve suffering, then one must also accept that God allows suffering for a reason. Maybe it’s best for the human race that a certain number of people die of heart disease, until we can develop the technology to find cures on our own. That would give us some time to figure out how to feed all the people we save.
If that’s the case, then it seems incredibly unfair to relieve one person’s suffering and not another’s, based on the quality or the amount of prayer given on that person’s behalf. My relative’s survival is dependent on my prayer? How unjust is that? Can my relative help it if I’m an atheist?
I can’t speak for the believers on this one, so if anyone wants to help me understand how praying for someone’s well-being could be effective in a universe governed by a just and loving God, please feel free to comment.
(cross posted at appletree)
March 31st, 2006 at 11:53 am
I have had that same question for some time now…
If the God has a preset master plan then how can “prayers” be effective in any way?
Furthermore…
Isn’t it always said of events that it was “god’s will” or “the path God has chosen for me” .. don’t these two things seemingly cancel each other out. The former must be grounded in a kind of supreme free will and the latter is clearly a deterministic point of view. Prayers would only fit into the former and as such God becomes selective in the prayers he listens to or is swayed only by a shear volume of similar prayers…
And as you pointed out, why would a just and loving God need to be asked, proded or reminded to do the just and good thing.
enough rambling….more coffee…
~
March 31st, 2006 at 11:54 am
I was actually a little surprised that the people who knew they were being prayed for had more complications. Not that I think the prayer itself makes any difference one way or another, but my first impression would be that knowing you’re being prayed for means knowing you have the support of friends and family, which should help with the recovery. Did the researchers check to see if the people who were being prayed for also had satanic covens praying against them?
There was also that study that came out a couple of years ago that initially seemed to show that infertile women who were being prayed for were more likely to get pregnant. Only problem was that the whole thing turned out to be a fraud. Here’s one article about it.
March 31st, 2006 at 12:04 pm
Well of course Christians assume that whatever being created the universe must of necessity be omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent, but it really doesn’t follow logically. You’d have to be either pretty fucking mighty or pretty fucking smart to create a universe, but it doesn’t follow in any way that you’d have to be good. The Gnostics (or at least some of them) had the idea that the demiurge was actually a malevolent being who had created the material world as a prison for our souls. That makes just as much sense.
March 31st, 2006 at 12:24 pm
sgo, it sorta makes God out to be an elected official who doesn’t take time to get involved in a particular issue until his office is barraged with e-mails, faxes and letters asking him to vote for or against bill.
“Alright, alright, I’ll cure the fucker of leprosy if you just promise to leave me alone after that!”
March 31st, 2006 at 12:29 pm
Stephen, did you ever see the movie “Dark City”? It’s similar to “The Matrix” in that humanity is trapped in a prison that they are not even aware of. “Dark City” takes a different tack, in the the creatures imprisoning the humans are studying them, and they switch and change the memories of each person on a regular basis, seeing how they respond in new situations.
March 31st, 2006 at 2:17 pm
The Catholic Encyclopedia explains their take on prayer, adding a high level of complexity and subtlety. Before you wander off into the thickets of what Christians believe, or what prayer is, or what Christians believe prayer is, maybe you ought to read the article.
Under Effects of Prayer:
This, of course, is a Catholic take and does not, obviously, speak to what Lutherans, Baptists, or Pentecostals believe or argue.
March 31st, 2006 at 2:46 pm
As they said on BoingBoing, perhaps they were praying to the wrong god?
BLOOD - FOR - BAAL!!!
March 31st, 2006 at 2:49 pm
I haven’t seen Dark City. Sounds interesting. (Besides, IMDB informs me that it has Jennifer Connelly in it, so it doesn’t even have to be any good to be worth watching.)
Another thing this reminds me of is one of the pieces in The Mind’s I. This was a scenario where a computer scientist had figured out how to create artificial intelligences, and he’d created a whole virtual world populated by these beings.
Obviously we’ll need to make a few advances in computer technology before we can get there, but of course the point is that this guy now finds himself in the position of God in relation to this virtual world, and he’s struggling with the moral and ethical dimensions of the situation. I don’t remember all the details, but it revolved around questions like what obligations this guy owed to the virtual AI beings he’d created, whether the fact that he’d created them meant he could do whatever he wanted to them, and so on. It’s basically a thought experiment that provides a different angle from which to view these questions.
March 31st, 2006 at 5:37 pm
Buddhism is a minority religion, and meditation is the preferred method. From years of meditation, it somehow paved the way for other sympathetic healing art using energy healing. I place my hands on or one inch away from the affected part of the person, depending on my connection to the person, and energy flows between the person and I and the universe and we both benefit.
March 31st, 2006 at 5:41 pm
Actually, the editorial linked to in this post makes for interesting reading. The researchers of the STEP study are taken to task because statistically, patients who knew they were being prayed for did worse yet the researchers state that this could have happened by chance. Of course, no one has a good idea of why “prayer” had this outcome. The editorial has some hypotheses but they are a little obtuse. Could the knowlege that people were “praying” for you alter your endocrine output which, in turn, alters your immune response? We weren’t given the medical details of the bad outcomes so hard to tell.
March 31st, 2006 at 5:44 pm
Buddhism is a minority religion?
March 31st, 2006 at 5:58 pm
Yes, Buddhism is a minority religion http://www.adherents.com/rel_USA.html
March 31st, 2006 at 7:14 pm
You mean in the US.
April 1st, 2006 at 12:40 am
Dr. C.–
I doubt that a good answer would be readily apparent, even if the full data were available. The researchers involved took a long look at the data, and none was willing to come to even a tentative conclusion.
April 2nd, 2006 at 1:46 am
This is all very interesting. To me, as someone who believes in God, it points to how complex the physical world is and how complex the spiritual world is as well. While I have faith in science and progress, I still know that there are some things that science cannot and probably will not be able to quantify. To me, it is obvious that things of the spiritual realm (if you believe in such a thing) probably do not follow the same laws of science that the physical world follows. I would argue that even when it comes to the physical world, our science is still in its most primitive stages. We haven’t even begun to really understand how the universe works. Centuries of scientific study, in the grand scope of things, are mere seconds in the history of our world.
I agree, these types of studies are probably a misuse of money that could better be allocated elsewhere… and I readily admit that had the outcome been different, me (and probably many less rational people) might be saying “see, even science agrees.” I see the irony in the fact that my belief in God is not 100% swayed. We are forced with a choice, either believe that the spiritual world that we believe in deep down is not in the realm of statistical possibility or scientific measurement, or allow that human science was not meant to measure things in the physical world.
One last thought: As a dedicated liberal and progressive, who also happens to believe in God (but rarely go to church), I sometimes find myself slightly alienated whenever the topic of religion comes up on the liberal forums. While I am not exactly the most religious person in general, I find that some (definitely not all) of my fellow liberals go to extremes to trumpet their atheism as the true hallmark of being a liberal. I am as annoyed and perturbed by religious zealots as the next guy, but I find the God-bashing in general unusual in that I think it creates more of a divide among a group of people with mostly shared values. People’s personal, religous beliefs, sexual preferences, culture etc, are sacrosanct (to the extent they don’t impinge on other peoples’ rights). Why ridicule people’s belief in God or make it an issue when what we need is more allies, not less. El Gordo was actually quite restrained and I appreciated his mostly non-judgemental commentary, so this is definitely not a comment on his post. It just reminded me of this and I have meant to comment about it for a while. As liberals we need to try to be as open-minded and inviting to as many groups as possible if we are ever going to slow the momentum of the conservative movement.
Peace to all of you.
April 2nd, 2006 at 10:46 pm
JP
The parameters of science are not the same as parameters of religion. A simple example would be evolution, where the Roman Catholic Church has kept apace to a certain degree with the science of evolution, and their recent encyclicals on it, sheds some light. RC has the advantage of her Pontifical Academy of Science comprising scientists of repute of various religions, or no religion, to advise the Pontiff. On this even the renowned philosopher of science, Karl Popper, deceased, recognized there are two dimensions of evolution : one as a science and the other as a metaphysical research program. As long as one thinks it is entirely the domain of science, with her limited, self limited parameters, one misses its other dimension. Another good example is the science experiment on origin of life, where chemicals are mixed to produce some protein like life that seems to move. While science does not speak to whether it is anything else than the physical components, unfortunately, some have concluded erroneously from there, that, itself necessarily draws an ancillary concept, that life did not require God. It is not an issue science can pronounce on nor does science set out to do so, and yet, I have seen such ancillary concepts actually stated as part of the lesson plan, online lessons , sample.
I would agree with you on your kind comments of Gordo.
April 3rd, 2006 at 12:21 pm
sgo,
The Da Vinci Code had prompted my husband and I looking into the issue of the gnostic gospels. Apparently your question is addressed there, if I have read it correctly. The books we read are
Elaine Pagels “The Gnostic Gospel” written before Da Vinci Code , Marvin Meyer “The Gnostic Discoveries” written after Da Vinci Code and referencing it. There seems to be two major watersheds, the first when in the period of about 100-200 AD [ not quite sure of this date] the gospels, gnostic or non gnostic gospels were selected and the selected ones were canonised , that we have the 4 canonised gospels with the other gospels excluded. The second period would be the after Christianity became a state religion, and this seems to be covered by “The Closing of the Western Mind : The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason” by Charles Freeman. We have not read the last mentioned yet, but it was recommended by a friend and thus appears in this comment, as we do see that there are two periods. Commonly known is the Council of Nicea convened by the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine, 325AD.
I am a Buddhist and this is my intellectual understanding of Christianity.