Don’t Pray for Me

by Jon Mandle on March 30, 2006

AP:

NEW YORK – In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that having people pray for heart bypass surgery patients had no effect on their recovery. In fact, patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications.

The study looked at complication rates within 30 days of heart bypass surgery and compared three groups of about 600 each: “those who knew they were being prayed for, those who were prayed for but only knew it was a possibility, and those who weren’t prayed for but were told it was a possibility.”

Results showed no effect of prayer on complication-free recovery. But 59 percent of the patients who knew they were being prayed for developed a complication, versus 52 percent of those who were told it was just a possibility.

A kind of reverse placebo, I guess.

Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center, who didn’t take part in the study, said the results didn’t surprise him….

Science, he said, “is not designed to study the supernatural.”

No, it’s designed to study the natural. Like, for example, whether prayer can help recovery from bypass surgery.

UPDATE: Here’s a link to the abstract in the American Heart Journal. The full text is behind a pay wall.

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X-Tra Rant » Prayer Doesn’t Help
03.30.06 at 11:10 pm

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1

greensmile 03.30.06 at 8:44 pm

I am relieved. One of my dearest friends put a lot of stock in earlier reports that praying for the recovery of people you never met was some how efficacious. It drove me batty. But some disagreements are best left to the ministrations of time.

2

Ginger Yellow 03.30.06 at 8:55 pm

I think what he means is “the supernatural isn’t designed to be studied by science”. As Jon says, if prayer had an effect on recovery rates, science would show it. Unless of course God didn’t want it to show up and ignored the prayers in question.

3

theogon 03.30.06 at 9:06 pm

So is the director of the “Center for Spirituality, Theology, and Health” arguing for his unemployment?

4

Tracy W 03.30.06 at 9:09 pm

On a practical level, in these prayer studies I don’t see how you can control for unofficial praying.

Even in my family of atheists, there is the odd christian floating around who can be relied on to offer up some prayers in any emergency. And if Grandma was still alive no scientist could stop her from doing so.

Though exactly why any God worth the name would intervene if a sick person had people praying for them, and not otherwise, is an extremely puzzling question. Isn’t the christian god meant to be omniscient?

5

Lawrence Sober 03.30.06 at 9:12 pm

I was praying for the study to yield the data exactly as described in the article.

Praying to Satan, that is.

Moo-hoo-hoo-ha-ha-haaawwwww!!!!!

6

derrida derider 03.30.06 at 9:16 pm

“PRAY, v. To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.”
– the Devils Dictionary

But then it really is hard for people to live without hopeful illusions – human beings cannot bear very much reality.

7

pdf23ds 03.30.06 at 9:16 pm

“On a practical level, in these prayer studies I don’t see how you can control for unofficial praying.”

Is it a bad assumption that, on average, the people in the control group will not be prayed for more by non-study prayers than the people in the prayed-for group? If not, I don’t think there’s any control issue.

8

Kieran Healy 03.30.06 at 9:20 pm

Is it a bad assumption that, on average, the people in the control group will not be prayed for more by non-study prayers than the people in the prayed-for group? If not, I don’t think there’s any control issue.

Well it depends how the surplus of non-directional prayers (e.g., prayers for the health or wellbeing of everyone) is allocated by the Deity. If He (or whomever is delegated with this while He is busy appearing in a plank of wood in Illinois, etc) directs those extra prayers to those in need — e.g., to those who are not presently being prayed for personally because they are in a control group in a study — then it seems there would be a confounding effect.

9

BigMacAttack 03.30.06 at 9:25 pm

Either religiously or scientifically the correct question is what effect did/will praying have on the person saying the prayer.

Scientifically, it is very clear(ok maybe not very), the answer is that prayer has a benficial effect.

Religiously? Who knows? Not me. But standard doctrine is that, holding everything else equal, it will have a beneficial impact on the person making the prayer.

Religion and science all in agreement.

10

sara 03.30.06 at 9:39 pm

It is obvious that these people praying for perfect strangers are bothering God.

Too much God-bothering (aka prayers) amounts to a DDOS attack on God. He can’t get through.

(acknowledgements to Ken MacLeod, Newton’s Wake)

11

pdf23ds 03.30.06 at 9:48 pm

“If He […] directs those extra prayers to those in need”

The preferential allocation of Prayer Healing Potential (PHT) to otherwise unprayed-for souls could have major policy implications for devout Christians. If that is indeed the case, as seems to be implied by this study, global PHT could be maximized most by a non-preferential style of personal prayer. This is obvious once we remember that the more particular the request for PHT on the part of the supplicant, the more likely the request is inapplicable. In these situations the PHT would simply go to waste. Thus, it’s in the best interests of all Christians to refrain from spending prayer time on focused supplication in favor of a more general, all-encompassing style of appeal.

12

BigMacAttack 03.30.06 at 9:50 pm

Sara,

Only god either doesn’t exist or is one omnipotent dude.

Either way, the people praying seem to win.

13

pdf23ds 03.30.06 at 9:54 pm

In all seriousness, for individual prayers to not have an additional, discernable effect, as this study shows, goes against the beliefs of most devout Christians. While the study may not show that prayer is completely ineffectual, it at least shows that the marginal effect of an individual prayer, no matter how directed, approaches zero. So, no control issue.

14

BigMacAttack 03.30.06 at 10:10 pm

Pdf23ds,

Perhaps, perhaps not.

But regarding very basic current religious doctrine, you don’t know s!!t.

Having sat through years of catholic mass, mostly spent forlornly dreaming of the catholic girls all around me, I am an atheist. Given the circumstances it was the only logical choice.

The bead counting is idiocy. But that isn’t the core. The core is a beautiful and deep message about humanity. In my experience most priests, under the right pressure, would confess that praying is good for the person saying the prayers and THAT is what is important.

And science seems to agree.

15

pdf23ds 03.30.06 at 10:15 pm

In my experience with various Baptist or non-denominational protestant churches, what your priests say would be considered heresy. It all depends on how fundamentalist the particular church is. But I really doubt that “prayer is for the prayer” is a majority view among Christians, or even Christian pastors/priests.

16

BigMacAttack 03.30.06 at 10:36 pm

Pdf23ds,

You don’t seem the church type. But ok. I have heard it before. A group southern ladies discussing praying to have a foe smote, and half caught between was that wrong?, and why didn’t it happen?, and leaning towards why didn’t the smote happen?, and what is up with god for not doing it?

But my gut says you are mostly missing the point. And for most Christians, though they might not be able to articulate it, or be self aware of it(which is good, if you are self aware that defeats the purpose), they understand.

The conceit that it helps is crucial to the benefit.

17

pdf23ds 03.30.06 at 10:43 pm

Any incidental benefit of pray-er to the prayer is dwarfed by the harm to the pray-er of the necessary irrational beliefs and dogmatic mindset.

And, you’re right, I’m no longer the church type.

18

BigMacAttack 03.30.06 at 10:52 pm

Pdf23ds,

But that is exactly my point. I think? The benefits of irrationality are huge. It is irrational to be rationale. And Christian dogma is a great source of rationale irrationality.

19

Zeno 03.30.06 at 11:51 pm

I strongly encourage believers to pray. Pray, pray, pray. I’m pleased every time I hear a religious broadcaster say, “The most important thing you can do is pray!” Yes! The more we can get those people on their knees in supplication to their lord, the less time they have to screw up other things. And since they believe that prayer has great power, they can agree with me that they should just keep on praying.

20

Paul 03.31.06 at 12:00 am

There’s an elite religious private school here in Sydney that organises regular third party prayer rosters to improve the results of students at the school sitting their final exams.

The observations about the morality of a god who responds to third party prayer mentioned at #4 go double for prayers requesting that members of a privileged group do better at a zero sum game like exam results.

21

jdw 03.31.06 at 12:54 am

This does demand some sort of follow-up study where people going into surgery are told “You’ll be under about four hours. No one is praying for you.” Doesn’t it?

22

Xero 03.31.06 at 1:56 am

As much as I would love to be able to take this as proof of something, anything, I can’t because the study is flawed. First there is no control group. We have no idea what would have happened if a person was neither prayed for or told it was a possibility. And in each of these circumstances we don’t know what the situation would have been with out the pray or possibility. It is possible that with out pray, the group that had a 59% complication rate had a higher chance of complications to begin with. It’s far to easy fudge a study like this. Pick the subjects with the highest likelyhood of complication and make the the group you want to have the highest complications. Seriously, there are days that science makes me laugh, and in general I support it.

23

theogon 03.31.06 at 1:58 am

bigmacattack: I learned in theology classes that the Catholic Church believes precisely that (that prayer is only for the benefit of the supplicant.) The reasoning was, more or less, that God, being a priori right, can’t be convinced of or pursuaded to do anything which He wouldn’t have known or done already.

24

abb1 03.31.06 at 2:32 am

On a practical level, in these prayer studies I don’t see how you can control for unofficial praying.

This is not the point of the study, though. The study is not about the effect of the prayer; it’s about patients being told that they are being prayed for. This is different.

25

Iorwerth Thomas 03.31.06 at 4:01 am

Yeah, but if patients were part of an organised religious group beforehand, they might well know that they’re being prayed for anyway, which’ll skew things. If I were more cynical, I’d suggest that knowing you’re being prayed for by a bunch of random strangers as part of a scientific study is what caused the results.

More seriously (since I can’t get past the paywall):

i) Is the result statistically significant, and what criteria are being used to judge significance?
I suspect that if the difference is small, there may be some regression towards the mean in follow ups, and we’ll see no difference between the groups.

ii) Did they control for the religiousness of participants when they were assigned to the various groups? I remember hearing (and correct me if I’m wrong) that a study performed on terminal cancer patients showed that religious ones were less likely to go into remission (in the words of one researcher: ‘As far as they’re concerned, death isn’t the worst thing that can happen to them.’). A similar effect here (if, say more religious patients wound up in the group knowing they were prayed for, just by chance) could also skew things.

More research needed, I think, if you want to establish a definate negative link. Mind you, this isn’t anything that Galton hadn’t already demonstrated in the 19th century with reference to the most prayed for people in Europe at the time – the members of the various Royal Families.

As to the concept of prayer: Roman Catholics have a worked out theology of prayer which makes at least some sense; fundamentalist Protestants don’t. Film at eleven.

26

a different chris 03.31.06 at 4:09 am

Maybe the reason the “prayed-over” did a little worse is that they were freaked out by the whole thing?

“Ok, I’ve had a heart-bypass, but this is the 21st century and this isn’t a radical or even unusual surgical procedure anymore. I’ll be fine…uh, what the h*ll are these people doing?? PRAYING over me? Holy sh*t, I must be in worst shape than I thought…”

27

newsflash 03.31.06 at 4:15 am

Dr. Mauve M. Meilleure, the expert on get well cards, fruit baskets, flowers and visiting hours at the Health and Economy institute, considered this research a big boost for her plan to convert the chapel into a gift shop. “It is now undeniable that our methods support a better recovery, and this research shows again that there is no longer any need for prayer at the hospital.”

Atheist Daily 4/1/2006.

28

bad Jim 03.31.06 at 4:17 am

Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott, aber boshaft ist er nicht. Einstein’s English redition is reportedly “God’s sneaky, but he ain’t mean.”

The question shouldn’t be that difficult to test. If prayer is even minimally effective, one ought to be more confident of its efficacy upon the threshold potential of a semiconductor than its utility with respect to a considerably more longstanding and wide reaching condition like cancer or heart disease.

Nevertheless, it appears that the manufacturers of computers and those purveying the programs which animate them apparently rely less upon prayer than relatives of the terminally ill, despite the theoretical advantage of the first group.

29

soru 03.31.06 at 4:54 am

Nevertheless, it appears that the manufacturers of computers and those purveying the programs which animate them apparently rely less upon prayer than relatives of the terminally ill, despite the theoretical advantage of the first group.

Actually, not so much. For example:
http://www.cummings.com/testimonials.htm
Lease quiet, Feng Shui-designed facilities for short or longer term critical trials in Massachusetts, and also for genetic biology, stem cell research and NIH work. Abundant free parking in all locations.

One wonders if the Feng Shui design is there to prevent random background prayers from interfering with the clinical trials.

Effective healing prayer, of course, only makes internal sense from an magical or animist background, not a strictly monotheist one. You are lending a piece of your soul to the ill person to help them fight off the evil spirit, not telling an omnipotent being something they already know.

30

Iorwerth Thomas 03.31.06 at 4:54 am

Actually, modify the question as to significance; what do the confidence intervals and relative risk statistics given in the abstract actually _mean_?

31

Iorwerth Thomas 03.31.06 at 5:01 am

‘Effective healing prayer, of course, only makes internal sense from an magical or animist background, not a strictly monotheist one. You are lending a piece of your soul to the ill person to help them fight off the evil spirit, not telling an omnipotent being something they already know.’

Yeah. As a strict monotheist (evil and irrational to boot), I’d always tend to regard any positive evidence of effect in such a study as evidence of the existence of psychic powers (because it’d suggest a law like causal process), not of God. So I’m not suprised by the results, apart from the apparent reverse placebo. Which might well be chance, anyway.

32

Bill Gardner 03.31.06 at 5:35 am

“Effective healing prayer, of course, only makes internal sense from an magical or animist background, not a strictly monotheist one. You are lending a piece of your soul to the ill person to help them fight off the evil spirit, not telling an omnipotent being something they already know.” (soru @#25)

Exactly right. Many Buddhists pray for healing for magical / animist reasons, despite being (more or less) atheists.

33

abb1 03.31.06 at 5:46 am

Maybe the reason the “prayed-over” did a little worse is that they were freaked out by the whole thing?

I think it’s quite possible, actually. If I was told by hospital’s staff before the surgery that people are praying for me (as opposed to: don’t worry, this is a routine procedure), I’d have to assume that my odds aren’t that great.

34

John Biles 03.31.06 at 7:22 am

Actually, the one category they should have included in this but did not was ‘People told they were being prayed for, but actually, no such prayer occured’. That would have tested whether it was prayer affecting them or their own psychological reaction to being told of prayer.

35

Michael Kremer 03.31.06 at 8:16 am

These studies always strike me as completely misguided. Suppose there is a God who responds to prayer. Does this God respond to words uttered or to the cry of the heart? The study can only be testing the latter hypothesis.

In short, “prayers” uttered as part of a study (where you pray for people you don’t know, knowing full well that there are others who are equally deserving who aren’t being prayed for) *isn’t* “intercessory prayer.” The study isn’t studying what it says it’s studying.

36

Michael Kremer 03.31.06 at 8:17 am

Sorry, I meant “the study can only be studying the *former* hypothesis, whereas it should be studying the latter.”

37

Michael Kremer 03.31.06 at 8:19 am

Let me add that what I have always been told, as a Catholic, is that to each prayer we have to add “thy will be done” on the model of Christ’s prayer in Gethsemane, and that God answers all prayers, but not always by giving us what we ask for.

38

The Modesto Kid 03.31.06 at 8:42 am

Did they control for the sect and piety of the people doing the praying? Seems to me they should have had different groups being prayed for by Baptists, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Catholics. And expand the study! Have groups prayed for by Methodists, Moravians, Unitarians, Quakers,… Buddhists, Jews,… You could also rank within each group by degree of piety exhibited by the supplicant.

39

Bill Gardner 03.31.06 at 8:53 am

john biles @#35:

“Actually, the one category they should have included in this but did not was ‘People told they were being prayed for, but actually, no such prayer occured’. That would have tested whether it was prayer affecting them or their own psychological reaction to being told of prayer.”

That would have been an interesting condition to run. However, Institutional Review Boards (IRBs = the panels that oversee experiments on humans) rarely approve studies that deceive participants. I can’t see an IRB approving such a deception of a patient facing a CABG.

40

Steve LaBonne 03.31.06 at 8:54 am

Some nimrod praying over me would defintely make me feel sicker, so I’m not surprised by that increase in complications.

41

chris y 03.31.06 at 9:03 am

Francis Galton, in his 1872 paper which adopted a quantitative approach to this problem, found no correlation between the amount of prayer for a stranger and that stranger’s long term survival, but noted that it remained possible that prayer was useful, in a psychological sense, to the person praying.

42

y81 03.31.06 at 9:23 am

Since even a simple photon can’t be caught going through a diffraction grating, doesn’t it seem that the designer of the photon is probably a little too subtle to be caught by a study like this?

43

jet 03.31.06 at 9:54 am

I can see the reverse placebo effect here. Tell a person they are part of a study where strangers will be praying for them and that would certainly add some anxiety and stress to their already stressful situation, if only because they are doing something they don’t normally do. Purposefully adding stress to a heart patient sounds almost criminal.

And according do Douglas Adams, God relies on faith, which is belief in the absence of proof. So if this study proved that prayers improve outcomes, [according to Adams] God would disappear in a puff of logic.

44

Bro. Bartleby 03.31.06 at 10:11 am

Oh dear, do you suppose the study factored in our morning prayer (along with chants) at the monastery? We pray for all those folks who no one else are praying for. Just covering all the pray bases, so to speak.

Shalom,
Bro. Bartleby

45

Timothy Burke 03.31.06 at 10:32 am

There are a lot of ways to interpret this result so that it’s not entirely a fair test of the question at hand which have already been pointed out here. You’d need a group which were not prayed over and a group who were told that no one was praying for them, etc.

But I’m sure that really hard-core believers might equally respond that God knew what these prayers were for, and the sincerity or lack thereof of the people praying, and declined to subject an exercise of faith to the reason of unbelievers. There’s always an escape hatch for those determined to find one, even if the implications (God is willing to perversely visit harm on innocents in order to foil unbelievers) are ignored. This is of course a conceptual problem with prayer in the first place: a belief that the sincerity or volume of prayer is a superior incentive to encourage God’s beneficient intervention into Earthly affairs from the outset has a fairly offensive conception of the divine potentially embedded within it, e.g., that bad events are allowed as punishment for a lack of faith or even a lack of sufficient prayer, and that God delivers benefits differentially based on the fervor of praying.

46

Steve LaBonne 03.31.06 at 10:55 am

Since even a simple photon can’t be caught going through a diffraction grating, doesn’t it seem that the designer of the photon is probably a little too subtle to be caught by a study like this?

Has it escaped your attention that there are very many quite straightforward physical ways to detect photons, without one of which you wouldn’t be reading this?

47

theogon 03.31.06 at 11:15 am

If the sincerity of the supplicants in question is an issue, they can be out of the loop as well. There are many avenues to procure prayer time by third parties who will be operating under the assumption that the prayer is for reasons other than scientific curiousity.

48

Bro. Bartleby 03.31.06 at 1:03 pm

re: 47

… blink blink … ouch!*

(*photon detector being poked by errant paper airplane)

49

cduncan 03.31.06 at 1:07 pm

A few thoughts:

*** I’m pretty cynical regarding the statements of religious folks along the lines of “Well, this just shows that science isn’t designed to test the supernatural.” Don’t you just KNOW that had the results come out otherwise, the very same folks would be crowing, “See! Science has verified religion!”

*** As many have remarked, the poorer performance of those who were told they were being prayed for might be caused by worries such as “Am I really so bad off as to need strangers praying for me?” (Alternatively, there may have been something akin to the phenomenon observed by Claude Steele–“stereotype vulnerability”–regarding poorer-than-average test scores among African Americans, namely, that African-American test-takers sometimes worry that they HAVE to do well so as not to confirm negative stereotypes, and that this added pressure is counterproductive. Perhaps many patients who were told they were being prayed for were devout, and were worried that a failure to get better on their part would help the cause of atheism.) OK, suppose there is a straightforward psychological explanation of some sort to explain why those prayed for did worse. Still, this fact does not weaken the study’s status as counter-evidence to the effectiveness of intercessory prayer. I suppose a believer in intercessory prayer could say: Well, prayer still could have had a health bonus of factor 10, say, but the psych-yourself-out factor was 15, thereby masking the benefits of intercessory prayer. But even if this is right, since the pscyh-out influence can’t plausibly be thought to be very strong, at BEST the benefits of intercessory prayer are very minimal. So I don’t see any way out for the believer in intercessory prayer except ad hoc responses to the effect of God refusing to come to the aid of those prayed for, in order to give those impudent scientists a smack-down, or whatever.

*** I suppose the best test would be to secretly arrange for intercessory prayer for a group of patients, without those patients knowing they were part of a study, and then comparing the recovery rates of this group to a control (who was also unaware of being party of a study). But research ethics boards would rightly refuse to approve the conscripting of subjects without their knowledge. So the best test is morally off-limits. Still, this test is enough for me!

50

eweininger 03.31.06 at 1:49 pm

The study cost $2.4 million, and most of the money came from the John Templeton Foundation, which supports research into spirituality. The government has spent more than $2.3 million on prayer research since 2000.

CT, it seems, is a fairly cosmopolitan place, with contributors and more or less regular commentators from throughout the Anglophone world, and to a lesser extent, beyond. So, could someone please tell me–someone from a country other than the U.S.–whether this sort of research is conceivable–even vaguely conceivable–wherever it is you live?

My thanks, in advance.

51

contrary 03.31.06 at 1:52 pm

“And according do Douglas Adams, God relies on faith, which is belief in the absence of proof. So if this study proved that prayers improve outcomes, [according to Adams] God would disappear in a puff of logic.”

So Jet, tell me, since the study shows that prayer does not improve outcomes, what happens to the Athiest’s god, since faith in it is no less dependent on similar inference?

52

Bro. Bartleby 03.31.06 at 2:05 pm

Folks, this experiment is akin to placing an uncovered petri dish on my dining table, then pretending that it is in a sterile environment.

53

BigMacAttack 03.31.06 at 3:29 pm

‘This is of course a conceptual problem with prayer in the first place: a belief that the sincerity or volume of prayer is a superior incentive to encourage God’s beneficient intervention into Earthly affairs from the outset has a fairly offensive conception of the divine potentially embedded within it, e.g., that bad events are allowed as punishment for a lack of faith or even a lack of sufficient prayer, and that God delivers benefits differentially based on the fervor of praying.’

Only as Theogen, myself, and others on this thread have pointed out, that the concept of prayer isn’t neccesarily one of God intervening in earthly affairs of men based on their prayers.

54

Orkon, GCD S.114.2 03.31.06 at 4:52 pm

Oh dear, do you suppose the study factored in our morning prayer (along with chants) at the monastery? We pray for all those folks who no one else are praying for. Just covering all the pray bases, so to speak.

Shalom,
Bro. Bartleby

Bro, sorry to break the news, but we cast a Prayer Bubble spell over your monastery in 1954. I can assure you that your prayers haven’t been heard by any deity since that time.

Have a great day!

Orkon, Grand Chancellor of Demons, Sector 114.2

55

John Quiggin 03.31.06 at 4:53 pm

Boring to point it out, I know, but the reported difference is statistically insignificant (at least when you consider that there are quite a few pairwise comparisons possible here, so one random result is more likely to appear significant by chance than is implied when you consider the result in isolation).

The crucial finding is that prayer makes no difference one way or the other; it seems unlikely that being told about it makes a difference either.

56

John Quiggin 03.31.06 at 4:55 pm

Having checked the abstract, the result shows up as marginally significant, but my point about multiple statistical tests is still relevant here.

57

roger 03.31.06 at 4:56 pm

Wow, these scientists really know nothing. You could set ali baba outside the cave and have him utter tons of formulas, but ONLY ONE WORKED: Open Sesame.

Similarly, you have to have the right prayer. Like pills, it depends on the composition of the prayer. Obviously.

Luckily, after doing years of research, me and my associates stumbled on the right and infallible prayer, the only one that attracts the Demiurge’s attention. Yes, it involves the Lord’s Prayer backwards… you have all heard the rumors. But the difference is ONE LITTLE WORD.

Yes, friends, one little word and you can be cured of anything from Beri Beri to the worst cancer. And that power can be yours… for just a minimum emolument. Science tested! New and improved! An infinitely blessed relief, for a mere pittance, I’m telling you, half of what you would pay for a four year stay in a elite hospital!

I accept credit cards, too.

58

Maynard Handley 03.31.06 at 5:38 pm


Sara,
Only god either doesn’t exist or is one omnipotent dude.
Either way, the people praying seem to win.

I guess the phrase “opportunity cost” means nothing to you?

59

BigMacAttack 03.31.06 at 10:14 pm

Maynard Handley,

Why do you hate me so?

My fault. One last time. The benefits to the prayee are bs and the benefits to the prayer are real, god or no god.

A few extra minutes of prayer vs watching the commercials during CSI Memphis isn’t even a contest. The prayer wins.

60

Maynard Handley 03.31.06 at 11:13 pm

Interesting.

(1) So your claim is that you don’t actually have to live the Christian lifestyle, tithe, or, heck, even go to church? It’s enough to pray a few minutes a day. This is certainly a novel approach to religion, but one that I imagine could be popular in this day and age.

(2) An aspect of opportunity cost is that by backing god A you are implicitly (and heck, sometime implicitly) insulting god B. Your model is based on the assumption that the choices are “no god” or “god”, but the choices are in fact, “no god”, xtianity (of a hundred different flavors, mormonism, judaism, islam, zoroastrianism, hinduism, etc etc.

61

Bro. Bartleby 04.01.06 at 12:54 am

Yes, even atheist pray, only they call it muttering.

62

rollo 04.01.06 at 12:56 am

The “process of wavefunction collapse as a result of observation” is taken pretty seriously by physicists. Isn’t it? That’s the “Collapse Postulate” right?
As I understand it the essential idea is measurement alone alters the measured state – at certain abstruse levels of quantum physical “reality”.
Measurement of course is nothing like prayer.
That both the measuring scientist and the praying religionist may be employing forces they’re completely mistaken about but do exist, in a context they’re both blind to and in, seems not unlikely.
This is one more example of the use of dogma as an excuse to disenfranchise non-believers – in this case Cartesian dogma, and non-believers in the supremacy of rational positivism – and rearticulate the world-view of a particular sect.
Virtually everyone in the discussion of this experiment approaches it with bias and a prejudicial view of the outcome. And again we see the debate filtered down to a binary choice between two fundamentalisms. The same teams in the same uniforms out on the same field.
Even as the news comes in from the frontier that time and space are surely only local phenomena, that at the edges of the known and observable strange things happen that are entirely counter to assumptions derived from tangible consensus reality – yet these “scientific” rationalists deride the assertions of believers in prayer and divinity, or in telepathy and precognition, lumping them all together along with anything that might challenge their superiority. One bit of superstition condemns the entire credo. Whereas the scientific belief in “miasma” as the cause of disease was an aberration, or an inevitable mistake on the path toward understanding, or something.
Holding up naive caricatures as representative and pretending to an impartiality that is entirely fake isn’t unbiased science in action. What it is is the pompous arrogance of a priesthood interested in maintaining its power and centrality, calmly demonstrating the superiority of a moral stance that is valenced completely on themselves.
Because nothing submits to the demands of their measurements and obediently reveals itself.
You can’t have it both ways.

63

bad Jim 04.01.06 at 1:04 am

I like Kevin Drum’s take on this:

As I recall from Sunday School, testing God is supposed to be a no-no. In the second of the three temptations of Christ, Satan takes Jesus to the top of a temple and tells him to jump off in order to prove that God will save him from death. Jesus refuses, saying, “It is written, ‘You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.'”

It’s the same deal for prayer: it works, but not if it’s being done for the purpose of testing that it works. It’s sort of the Heisenberg Principle of Christianity.

I seem to recall something about experimentation as temptation in Mann’s Doctor Faustus as well.

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nik 04.01.06 at 5:42 am

I don’t think anyone’s picked up on the role of the ethics committee in all of this. What this study needed was a group of people who knew they were being prayed for, but were in fact being lied to. Instead we get people who were told it was a possibility they were being prayed for, some of whom were some of whom weren’t.

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abb1 04.01.06 at 6:48 am

That was one weird experiment. At first I thought that they simply studied the effect of letting patients know that someone’s praying for them; that would make sense.

But then I realized they were also trying to study the effect of prayers. This is confusing. Either you study psychological effects, or (if you want to be eccentric) you could, I suppose, study supernatural effect of praying, fine. But why would you want to combine two unrelated phenomena into one experiment?

This is silly. While on it, why wouldn’t they also subject some of these people to loud heavy metal music?

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soru 04.01.06 at 7:48 am

While on it, why wouldn’t they also subject some of these people to loud heavy metal music?

ethics committee.

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Tracy W 04.02.06 at 5:34 pm

So, could someone please tell me—someone from a country other than the U.S.—whether this sort of research is conceivable—even vaguely conceivable—wherever it is you live?

Yes. NZ has devout Christians too. The difference is that there’s less of them and they’re aware that they’re in a minority. The limiting factor for such a study would be that money for research is much more limited in NZ, so it would be unusual to get such a study done here for funding reasons.

Yeah, but if patients were part of an organised religious group beforehand, they might well know that they’re being prayed for anyway, which’ll skew things.
Even if patients are not members. I’m not a member of any religious group, no matter how disorganised. But I know that if I was in hospital for a major operation there’d be people praying for me whether I like it or not. Christians are a bit unstoppable that way.

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Clone_a 04.03.06 at 3:27 am

Prayer IS beneficial to the person praying. When you fear for others, and you pray to God, you remind yourself of His love for you and for those that you pray for. As a result, you receive comfort. God knows what people need. He also knows when it’s your time to go. So praying “to sway the hand of God” is in essence an attempt to manipulate God. Manipulation is witchcraft.

Besides this, you have to be responsible for your choices. If you lived your life in excess (eating wrong, not exercising…blah, blah, blah) you are likely to experience heart trouble later in life.

Sin will kill you (not God – sin). Sin is living in a way contrary to what is good for you. And who better to determine what is good/bad for you than your Creator?

But, if you’re sick – what YOU believe will have a significant effect on the outcome of your surgery – if you have a positive outlook on life – and you can, especially if you believe that God loves you, you’re in a better position to come out alive after surgery.

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TP 04.03.06 at 5:00 pm

I posted most of the following in the comments at Professor Myers’ blog (Pharyngula):

While I am exceedingly dubious of the notion of distant intercessory prayer as therapeutic, as some have alluded to here, there are thousands of studies, many of which are methodologically sound, which demonstrate therapeutic effects for the individual patient arising from praying or engaging in other kinds of spiritual activities.

Most of the best of these studies are compiled in the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Health, and the Journal of Religion and Health also has spent some time on the notion, which is termed (sorry if this makes anyone cringe), the ‘epidemiology of religion.’

Full disclosure: I am an atheist interdisciplinary Ph.D student who studies the medical humanities and has done some study of the interplay between religion and health (though my primary focus is clinical medical ethics and health policy, not religious studies).

Though I am well aware that not all or even most of the studies on the therapeutic effects of religious practice on health are legitimate, it seems difficult to dispute the notion that there are more than a bare few which are methodologically sound. I respectfully disagree with those here who are arguing that religious praxis is not correlated with therapeutic health effects. NOTE: I am certainly not suggesting that providers ought to ‘prescribe’ religion or any such notion, at all, nor am I asserting ANY kind of causal relationship, nor am I offering any conclusions as to the significance of the findings. I am merely suggesting that there are sufficient valid studies on the issue to justify the opinion that there is some statistically significant correlation between the two.

The notion of distant intercessory prayer, which was at issue in the AHA study, is a related but different inquiry, one in which, as noted here, the studies are not really compelling.

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Bro. Bartleby 04.03.06 at 6:22 pm

Just in:

Churchgoers Live Longer
By Robert Roy Britt
LiveScience Managing Editor
posted: 03 April 2006
11:29 am ET

There are many things you can do to increase your life expectancy: exercise, eat well, take your medication and … go to church.

A new study finds people who attend religious services weekly live longer. Specifically, the research looked at how many years are added to life expectancy based on:

* Regular physical exercise: 3.0-to-5.1 years
* Proven therapeutic regimens: 2.1-to-3.7 years
* Regular religious attendance: 1.8-to-3.1 years
——-
Okay, your choice, jog and sweat like a pig OR sit on your butt and listen to the choir.

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