From time to time an article will appear on scientific attempts to prove, or disprove, the power of prayer.
It might seem an obvious example for apologists to use. If we can provide evidence that prayer works, then unbelievers must sit up and take notice! I am not writing here about anecdotes of personal healing or answered prayer in the lives of friends. Those can be powerful testimonies. Rather, I mean evidence that has been produced by controlled experiments.
Given the reality of answered prayer, what can we make of such scientific studies?
First attempt
Possibly the first known attempt to conduct a scientific study was made by a cousin of Charles Darwin, Sir Francis Galton. He noted that kings are prayed for more than anyone else. Therefore, kings should live longer and healthier lives than ordinary people.
But Galton observed that the evidence shows otherwise, kings actually live shorter and unhealthier lives than the average. As evidence that prayer does not work such a study is laughable. There are too many other factors involved in the lifestyle of a king – perhaps kings would, on average, live even shorter lives if it weren’t for prayer, given their diets of rich meat and fine wine.
Heart prayers
Scientific studies of prayer continued through the 20th century. Between 1969 and 1993 the Christian Science sect carried out a study on plants, which claimed that prayer aided their growth. The results have not been generally accepted, the evidence being rather weedy!
However, a 1988 study on a coronary care unit, along with a 1999 variation on the same test, showed positive results. The testing involved having two groups of patients. One group received prayer from a team of Christians. The other group did not. There was a statistically significant improvement among those who received prayer.
The largest study of this kind was the 2006 STEP (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer). Carried out over ten years, with 1800 patients and a 2 million-dollar grant from the Templeton Foundation, the results were inconclusive. The study was carried out on heart bypass patients who were divided into three groups. A first group knew they were being prayed for, a second group did not know for sure, but were being prayed for, and a third group did not know for sure, but were not being prayed for. Yes, you may need to read that sentence again. Sceptics and atheists had a field day with the results. They revealed that the first group had the worst results. ‘Prayer is bad for your health’ was the cynical headline!
Of course, if we want to argue about these results we could turn them around. Perhaps God foreordained that those in the first group were those who most needed prayer because their condition would be more serious. Despite the complications they did better than they would have done otherwise, just like the indulgent kings of history. How could we possibly know what might have been?
Dubious premise
Evangelicals have good reason to be cautious about any studies like this. The attempt to provide a scientific test of prayer is alien to the very nature of prayer. CS Lewis wrote prophetically on this theme in a paper called The Efficacy of Prayer. ‘You cannot pray for the recovery of the sick unless the end you have in view is their recovery. But you can have no motive for desiring the recovery of all the patients in one hospital and none of those in another.’
The very idea of taking part in an experiment where we pray for some who are suffering and deliberately do not pray for another group runs deeply counter to the compassion that motivates prayer. To pray in order to test the effectiveness of prayer is dubious. While it is permissible for us to step out in faith in our personal life and see if prayer works (Lord I believe, help me in my unbelief!), it is another thing to join a prayer experiment in order to provide public proof of the power of prayer. In such prayer experiments, Lewis pointed out that: ‘you are not doing it in order that suffering should be relieved; you are doing it to find out what happens’. Whatever else such experiments are testing, they are not testing biblical prayer.
Over simplified
Such tests crudely simplify prayer. Science deals in repeatable experiments that provide testable predictions. Prayer cannot be treated this way. In The Providence of God (IVP), Paul Helm writes: ‘Prayer is set among divine and human actions and their significance in the one, unrepeatable history of the universe’. We cannot isolate prayer from the other factors that are involved in miracles, healing and other blessings. God is able to weave together prayers, words, actions and natural weather patterns into a seamless whole. The idea that we can extract the prayer element and dissect it in a lab is nonsense.
So can we use prayer in our apologetics? I think so. Not through a set of scientific experiments, as if we were measuring weather patterns. We trust the power of prayer to bring conviction. We pray for our non-believing friends. We pray for hostile critics. And we certainly share examples of where we have seen answered prayer in our own lives.
