I must admit that studies trying to find correlations between intercessory prayer and health outcomes seem a bit strange to me. The Intercessory Prayer Efficacy Study, or STEP, is just the most recent study on intercessory prayer, and while others have already tried to show some kind of correlation between intercessory prayer and distant healing, so far. we have only had mixed results.

STEP claimed to be the largest prayer study ever conducted, and used a sample of 1,802 heart bypass patients from six hospitals to measure the effects of intercessory or third-party prayer. It seems to be more rigorous and seems to address issues that the other studies do not address, but I want to question the dissonance between the philosophy of science that underpins those studies and the theological / spiritual construct underpinning the practice of prayer.

Doctors are engaged in scientific research to improve diagnosis and treatment. So I would like to develop the scenarios in which this research is useful. The point of scientific research is that we just don’t know what we will find. With all of these studies there are three potential outcomes: positive correlation, no correlation, or inverse correlation. In other words, STEP could have shown that prayer helps health outcomes, prayer has no effect on outcomes, or prayer worsens outcomes.

What is the motivation behind these studies?

Suppose STEP has shown that intercessory prayer has a positive correlation: those for whom prayer is offered have fewer complications, statistically speaking. Would we then be in a position to offer prayer to a patient who is about to undergo a coronary artery bypass graft? What if the patient’s belief system is atheism and they believe that distant healing through the power of the mind is an illusion and incompatible with current evidence? Those of us who practice medicine, would we still recommend that this person submit to intercessory prayer? Would we call a patient who refuses to have a non-adherent or non-obedient intercessory prayer?

Clearly, there would be ethical issues to be solved if the sentence has a positive correlation. Some patients will not want to enter pre-modern practices like prayer, even if scientific evidence, which would still be weak, has shown some benefit.

Or suppose, as with all interventions, that prayer has really serious side effects, or even that intercessory prayer is shown to have a correlation with worsening complications: people pray for you and you make it worse. So, would it be up to doctors to advise patients not to pray? Would those whose faith is more important than life itself be considered unwise to pray? Would we try to prevent parents from praying for their children because this could be potentially harmful to them, at least some percentage of them? I can imagine Child Protective Services getting involved to keep children away from parents who persisted in such pre-modern practices that science now shows are harmful.

Or suppose there is no correlation between intercessory prayer and complications, which is in fact what STEP found. Now what? Do we give our praying patients that knowing smile that says, “Well, at least it won’t hurt you if you pray?” Of course, doctors would never do such a thing. But armed with scientific knowledge, doctors have done much more serious and serious things than look askance at a patient’s magical and strange thinking.

I cannot imagine that those of us who practice medicine will change our practices based on any of the possible results of these types of studies. So what is the purpose of making them?

Perhaps these studies are done because some think that medicine needs to be a little more humane. Certainly, openness to the patient’s belief system, which often includes something like prayer, could help maintain humanity in medicine. But then, if that is true, showing that prayer works, scientifically speaking, would go against the very impulse to humanize, because saying that prayer is important only if it “works” loses the sense of the importance and coherence of systems. beliefs of patients. to maintain their dignity.

Or perhaps these studies help affirm the faith of those of us with religious faith – or to put it more nicely for those secularists who prefer to be spiritual rather than religious – those of us with spiritual longings or deep respect for the mystery of the world. Perhaps by demonstrating that there is scientific evidence of what we have always believed, we feel vindicated in the court of reason or science. People of faith have often lived with a bit of shame, as faith is often claimed to be irrational, as if faith might need science to prove to us once and for all that we are not irrational, as if science be the arbiter of all truth and wisdom. .

Or is it simply that doctors need one more tool in their toolboxes? Maybe these studies are really trying to find all the potential things that could help or harm patients. But it’s not that doctors need another tool: prayer. Using prayer as an instrument reduces prayer to something it is not: a means of controlling the world. Certainly there are more effective tools than prayer, because if there had been a clear correlation between prayer and health outcomes, it would already be included in the toolbox.

Philosophy of science and theological question

Motivation to study intercessory prayer aside, there are still much deeper problems with attempts to study intercessory prayer. To understand this point, I will have to engage in a little philosophical reflection on science, although doing so inevitably is an injustice to the complexity of the philosophy of science.

The purpose of science is to tell what is true in many cases. Science tries to say, this elephant is like that elephant, to say what is true of all elephants, or at least a percentage of all elephants. In the therapeutics research, the scientist tries to keep a myriad of variables constant to control some intervention, be it a pill, a surgical intervention or, in this case, a prayer.

But what interests me most is the theological point that follows this philosophical point. What people of faith believe is that if prayer works and someone is healed, we are dealing with a unique event unlike all other events, and therefore by definition it cannot be reproduced. People of faith have never used prayer to control the world efficiently. Sure, people of faith have certainly prayed for help in times of trouble, illness, and death. But people of faith have always understood that if God acts, it is by divine motivation. It is the grace of God’s action.

Furthermore, to say that these studies on intercessory prayer have nothing to do with God, as STEP claims, means that they are not studying prayer at all, but rather a secularized and “scientific” remnant, pale and pathetic of it. To remove prayer from its theological, religious and spiritual context is to remove something that is not prayer. So what are these scientists studying? Whatever it is, it is not prayer as I understand it.