Audio only:
In this episode Trent shows why studies of intercessory prayer can never prove the atheist claim that “nothing fails like prayer.”
Transcription:
You often hear atheists say “nothing fails like prayer” and some even claim that scientific studies have proven that prayer doesn’t work. But in today’s episode I’m going to show why science not only hasn’t disproven the efficacy of prayer, but that it is impossible for science to do that. Here’s Hemant Mehta describing the typical kind of study on prayer that atheists often cite
CLIP:
That’s kind of like the ultimate prayer test, isn’t it? If all these people are praying for you to get better, and let’s say they’re not praying for the person next to you who has the exact same problem and you got better, wouldn’t that suggest that prayer had something to do with it? It’s kind of like this ultimate science experiment. Well, guess what? They’ve done that experiment. They’ve done controlled experiments at least as much as they could be controlled anyway, where some group of patients in a hospital are prayed for by strangers and they don’t know about it, and those same strangers do not pray for the control group and they see which group does better. Guess what? There’s no difference. Who would’ve thought? So? Look, prayer doesn’t help.
But there are three problems with these studies that make them useless when it comes to studying the efficacy of prayer.
First, there’s the problem of an impossible control group.
In an experiment, the control group are the subjects that don’t receive the variable under testing. When it comes to testing prayer, the control group would be a set of people who are not receiving intercessory healing prayers. But it’s impossible to isolate any group of people from prayer.
Of course, scientists create divide a group of sick people into two groups and tell a specific set of volunteers to only pray for one of the groups of sick people. The scientists would then observe the patients the volunteers are praying for and see if they do better, the same, or worse than the so called “control” group.
But this wouldn’t be a true control group, because there is no way to isolate them from receiving any form of intercessory prayer. What if the friends and family of the people in this group are praying for them anyways? What if a holy woman in a very rural area on the other side of the world prays for the healing of those “who have no one to pray for them”?
I can easily see God dignifying the prayers of such a holy, unknown woman by making her the mighty cause that brought healing for people who were being used in an experiment. Participants in prayer studies often complain about the scripted prayers the researchers given them, so it makes sense God would give preference to the genuine prayers of a holy person. James 5:16 even says the prayers of a righteous person are very powerful and on the Sermon on the Mount Jesus condemned vain repetitions in prayer as if mechanical recitations forced God to act.
In fact, God’s attitude towards human beings trying to test his willingness to answer prayer brings us to the second problem with prayer studies, the problem of an omniscient test subject
Testing the effects of intercessory prayer isn’t the same as testing an inanimate force like gravity, because God isn’t a force that is automatically activated when enough prayers are uttered. God has a will and so he might choose to honor or not honor certain requests made through prayer. In fact, it’s been said that God always answers our prayers—it’s just that sometimes the answer is “no.” The idea of testing God’s willingness to answer prayer is even condemned in scripture when the Devil says Jesus should jump off the temple since the Bible says God will send angels to prevent his holy one from being harmed. Jesus shuts down the Devil’s temptation by declaring, “It is said, ‘You shall not tempt the Lord your God.’” (Luke 4:12).
Now, science does test the reactions of people and not just forces. Psychologists and sociologists do this all the time, but their experiments must be blind or even double blind. This means the participants, and sometimes even the researchers, can’t know who is receiving the test variable otherwise their knowledge will affect the outcome of the experiment.
So when it comes to an experiment on prayer, the person being observed can’t know people are praying for him. That’s because studies have shown that people who know they are receiving prayers tend to have worse health outcomes because they are anxious about their condition being so bad that prayer volunteers have been brought in to help them.
However, a prayer study is, whether it admits it or not, testing God to see if God will answer prayers. But just as when humans know they are in an experiment this can alter their behavior and the experiment’s results, the same is true for God. The only prayer study that would count would be one where God doesn’t know he’s part of an experiment on his willingness to answer prayer. But that’s impossible given God’s omniscience, or his being all-knowing. Here’s an example to explain how omniscience messes up any kind of prayer study.
Imagine we did an experiment on a celebrity to see which kinds of fan mail he responds to. If he knows he’s part of an experiment, he may alter his response to satisfy the experimenters. Or he may not participate at all because he’s indignant about his response being part of some experiment and not a genuine response to his fans.
Now, a person testing prayer might try to get around this by saying prayer experiments have nothing to do with God. The experiments only test if the physical act of prayer we observe has any effect on healing people. I mean, you could do a study like that and Christians would agree that merely saying words into the void doesn’t do anything. Such a study would also disprove New Age fads like The Secret that make it seem like you can manifest or will reality to be a certain way.
Prayers are not magical incantations that manipulate reality. They are just requests for help. The word “prayer” comes from the Latin precarae which means to make a request. In Old English this could be a request made to anyone but over time it came to mean making a request of God even though it traditionally had a much wider usage, which is why Catholics speak of praying to Mary and the saints.
Whether scientists admit it or not, everybody interested in prayer studies is assuming that what is being tested is whether it is more likely God will heal someone based on other people asking God to heal that person. But since God is both all-knowing and not an empirically observable part of the natural order, science cannot study what God will or won’t do. All scientists can do is make a non-scientific inference about God’s will based on extremely selective results in a prayer study. And this brings us to the third and final problem with prayer studies: The Problem of Interpretation
Any study on intercessory prayer will yield one of three results: prayer has a negative effect on a patient’s health, prayer has no effect on their health, or prayer has a positive effect. Regardless of what outcome we observe, this can’t tell us anything about God’s existence, nature, or will.
For example, suppose a truly blind prayer study showed that intercessory prayer results in worse health outcomes for the recipients of prayer. This has been observed in some outlying prayer studies but suppose it were consistently observed. What would we conclude?
Is God making the patients worse to bring about a greater good? Is the devil using his powerful yet non-miraculous powers to make people sicker in order to ruin our faith in God? Is the creator of the universe evil rather than good? Does karma punish organized scientific prayers and reward genuine ones?
Science can’t determine which of these explanations is the correct one because science is restricted to observing the natural world. Even if a prayer study found a positive correlation between intercessory prayer and healing, it wouldn’t show that God exists. I’ll admit, such an outcome would bolster my faith at first, but this outcome would be plagued by problems similar to those that accompanied a study that showed prayer caused negative effects.
Is God the cause of this statistically anomalous healing? Is it a psychic mutant? Aliens? Is it an “evil-creator” who heals patients in order to bring about a “greater evil?” Is it an impersonal “karma field?”
In these cases, science could only show us that intercessory prayer caused a certain kind of physical effect, but any speculations about the relationship between the cause (i.e., prayer) and the effect (i.e., healing) would belong to the realm of philosophy or religion, not science. That’s why in narrow circumstances with more data the Church can reach conclusions about miraculous healings. In these cases, the Church can use sound reasoning to determine that there is enough of a religious context like a saintly life of the intercessor, to attribute a miracle to the person’s intercession. This isn’t scientific proof, but there is no scientific proof that all our knowledge comes from scientific proof so that’s not a good objection.
So what if scientific studies show that intercessory prayer made no difference in a patient’s health? This seems to be the result of a large study of prayer called the STEP project. Atheists might say that this proves that “nothing fails like prayer,” because if God did not exist we would expect intercessory prayer to not have any measurable effects. But this is the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. It goes like this:
1. If A, then B.
2. B. Therefore, A
Why is this a fallacy? See this example:
1. If I’m in San Francisco, then I am in California.
2. I am in California. Therefore, I am in San Francisco.
Of course, I could be in Los Angeles or Yosemite and still be in California without being in San Francisco. In this argument, the consequent proposition cannot be used to support the truth of the antecedent proposition.
However, It could be used to deny the truth of the antecedent proposition (which is also called modus tollens) by saying, “I am not in California, therefore I am not in San Francisco,” but it can’t be used to prove the truth of the antecedent. When we plug in the atheist argument from prayer, we get the same problem:
1. If God does not exist, then prayers made in scientific studies will not be answered.
2. Prayers made in scientific studies are not answered, therefore God does not exist.
God can still exist even if certain requests made in prayer are not answered. After all, God may have good reasons for not granting those requests, and he may be answering other prayers that are not being catalogued by scientists. Since God not an automatic force that acts in statistically predictable ways, extremely limited studies using some intercessory prayers cannot be generalized to give us conclusions about the efficacy of prayer for the billions of people who pray to God outside of the hundreds involved in a few studies.
But that doesn’t mean we can’t know anything about how prayer affects us in our own lives. God could reveal himself to you in a subjective way that you can’t prove to others but that doesn’t disprove it for you. If you were falsely convicted of a crime based on good objective evidence, that wouldn’t justify you rejecting the subjective evidence of your own knowledge that you are innocent just because you can’t objectively share it with other people.
And sometimes we do pray for help and God does not respond. And that sucks. But that doesn’t mean there is no God or that God doesn’t care. Sometimes when we ask for something we are asking for something that is bad for us or at least not good for us but we can’t see that. James 4:3 says, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.”
But in other cases we aren’t asking for something selfish and God still does not grant our prayer. This is where Faith sustains us and we have to trust God who sees life from an eternal perspective we can’t comprehend. Romans 8:28 says, “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.”
St. Paul asked the Lord three times to remove a thorn in his side, which could have been a physical ailment, or even a person causing Paul a lot of trouble and the Lord did not answer Paul’s request. Here’s how St. Paul puts in 2 Corinthians 12:
Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me; but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor. 12:8-10).
Thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.