Prayer and Healing

Well a recent article by Benson, et al., that is scheduled to appear in The American Heart Journal, was just announced in the New York Times and will certainly prove controversial within the Christian community. The article found that prayer actually does not lead to better outcome for heart surgery patients, and actually found that complications actually increased for patients who knew they were being prayed for (though it does not report if this was significant or not). Regardless, I will give the article the benefit of the doubt regarding to methodological issues and discuss the implications of this research.

From a Christian perspective, why would prayer be found ineffective (and possibly harmful) with patients undergoing heart surgery? Well the first possibility is that God did not want to make prayer an activity of effectiveness. If research came out and supported prayer's effectiveness, then only a fool would not pray. And if you are familiar with Christianity, you know that it is centered on faith, if prayer was empirically validated, then faith would not be an issue.

I have some problems with this argument, however. Why would God deceive mankind? Well perhaps deception is a strong word, but in a sense, if that was true then God would be keeping us from truth simply because it was scientific truth. As a scientist, I have strong convictions not to believe that is how God works. Besides, even with positive results, it seems likely that prayer would still be doubted and that most people would still not pray. And even if more did pray, couldn't God discern which were genuine?

Another explanation is that the research article asked participants to include a certain phrase within their prayer, "for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications," which was not the type of prayer that Jesus modeled as he prepared himself for crucifixion. Instead, Jesus prayed that he did not have to go to the cross, but he said "but thy will be done." We do not know whether or not a formulaic prayer that demands God to act in a certain way actually works.

Once again I feel this argument does not hold much merit, though it certainly brings up some issues. If we were to pray for God's will all the time, we would often be inauthentic. We ought to pray the words "your will be done" only in those moments when we feel we can accept whatever God has in store for us. And I don't think God is threatened by our upfront requests from him. In fact, the lamentations of the Bible are often just that - requests that God act.

Then was it just that the people weren't faithful enough followers of Christ? I have no clue but my guess is no. Perhaps their desires were tainted by a sinful desire to prove God works to the world. Again we will perhaps never know. But I don't think it helps our case as Christians to suddenly strike back at the scientific community or the research participants. These people were doing research to discover truth, whereever that may lead them. Sometimes we discover things that frighten us because we feel that it threatens our faith. But that doesn't need to be so.

One thing I know is that science is NOT about finding the truth. It's about finding things that are true. If you don't ask the right questions, you don't find the truth. And the worst part of it all is that no matter what there is always some degree of the unknown in science. It's based on statistics and computations.

So how do I make sense of the finding that prayer does not help people get better? Well for the negative aspect of it I wonder if the people who were being prayed for were people of faith. If they were not then perhaps saying they were being prayed for could result in deep resentments about religion coming up. And, like the study suggested, the patients who knew they were being prayed for could possibly have been feeling greater pressure to get better, not just for the sake of those praying but also for the sake of science's knowledge about the power of prayer. All of this remains speculation. Perhaps over the course of my studies I might have the opportunity to do a research study on the effectiveness of prayer, perhaps in a different light. Unfortunately, the problem remains that naturalistic studies don't remove all the confounding factors while experimental studies create an unrealistic environment.

From my own experience I know that prayer changes the way I act. If I pray for someone, I am more likely to remember their struggles and ask about them later. It helps me to gain sympathy and compassion for their struggles and the time necessary to think about what I can do for them. In that sense prayer has benefits that have nothing to do with a "spiritual force." I don't deny the possibility of God's Spirit healing people. In fact I believe God does heal some. But I know that God has also allowed suffering in the world. I believe that God often ignores our prayers because his will is perfect. The amazing thing is that God's will can be changed by us, he listens to us. But important to remember when we feel our prayers are powerless is that prayer changes us. And perhaps that's the best reason to continue praying.