The Search for Evidences, part two

One of the most famous recent pieces of scientific research was an article that appeared in American Heart Journal in 2006. The lead author, Herbert Benson, is a physician at the Mind/Body Institute in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. His co-authors included other doctors, Ph.D.s in medical sciences, nurses, public health experts, and theologians. This extensive team conducted what is perhaps the best study to date of whether or not prayer works.

In this study, Benson and co-workers identified about 1,800 people with heart problems, and who were scheduled to have a heart bypass operation, in hospitals across the United States. The investigators wanted to know if intercessory prayer would help the patients recover from surgery. The experimental design would seem to be very simple: some of the patients would receive supplementary intercessory prayer, and some would not. (You cannot prevent people from praying, but the investigators arranged for Catholic and Protestant religious groups to pray for the list of patients, in addition to whatever prayer from friends and family they were already receiving.)

But there is a confounding factor in this approach. If the patients who received supplementary prayer knew they were receiving it, this might have a psychosomatic effect upon them. They might feel better, and even recover better, simply in the knowledge that they were being prayed for. The prayer itself might have no spiritual or miraculous effect. Benson and colleagues were aware of this, and they designed their experiment to avoid this problem. They divided the patients into three groups, not two. Patients in two of the groups were told that they might or might not receive extra prayer. The patients in these two groups therefore could not know whether they were receiving supplementary prayer. Of these two groups, one received supplementary prayer, and one did not. The patients in the third group were told that they would receive supplementary prayer, and they did.

The two groups that were uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer had virtually identical rates of complication following surgery. This demonstrated that prayer, itself, did not cause healing in these patients. The group that received prayer and knew it had, as predicted, a psychosomatic effect, only it was the opposite effect from what was expected. These patients actually had more complications after surgery. This surprising result could not be explained, except that perhaps it was performance anxiety: the patients knew that they should recover from surgery, because if they did not, they were letting God down.

These results have left religious people, who believe that God answers prayer, scrambling. Their most common response was that God simply refused to go along with the experiment. God refused to heal the heart patients because He did not want anybody investigating Him. (This seems a strange reason for a God of Love to let somebody die.) Of course, nobody can say. The experiment tells us nothing about what God, if any, might have been thinking. All it shows is that prayer does not reliably work.

So, just as with the near-death experiences, we are left with a jarring lack of evidence that there is a God or an afterlife.