Harvard, the American Heart Journal and possibly a bunch of other people spent $1.7 million on a controlled study to find out whether prayer-at-a-distance improves the outcome for heart patients. The findings were that patients didn't do any better if prayers were made on their behalf, provided they didn't know about the prayers. Patients who were told they were being prayed for actually did worse, and by an unhealthy margin.
It's as if I can hear the atheists snickering, even though the report go to great pains to point out that this study doesn't prove or disprove the existence of God. William Saletan, smart as always, makes a list of explanations for the result.
Saletan is right to do this. If you include God in our existence, you need to at least entertain various possibilities for why things turned out the way they did.
The way I visualize this, though, is that God is laughing and shaking his head at the vanity of humans; the vanity being that we actually have the intellectual and spiritual means to conduct such a test. If there is heresy at work here, it's among the "religious" people who presume to prove the existence of God by such crude means. At the risk of invoking a cliche, if God wanted to remove all doubt among the faithful (and faithless), it would have already been evident. Does anyone really think that a $1.7 million study would lead to the next big Revelation?
The movie Dogma is also about tempting the Divine, in this case a Catholic bishop who plays games with the doctrine of infallibility. The movie puts existence itself at stake by creating an unbearable paradox. This prayer study, well-meant as it may have been, plays a similar game.
The healing power of prayer could only be proven if either a) prayer is itself a compelling force that, under certain circumstances, God can not resist; or b) God, as a sentient being, responded to the execution of the study itself (rather than the prayer) by effecting better outcomes for those who received prayer. I don't know if anyone believes that prayer is a force stronger than God's; and I doubt the faithful would believe that the study would be more persuasive than all prior appeals.
In other words, it would be a much more reasonable theological construct to believe that distant prayer works only as long as no attempt is made to determine God's existence by doing it. One could say that praying for the sick will only work if healing them is the only purpose of the prayer; or to put it more cutely:
No double-blind, cross-over, placebo-controlled study can neutralize omniscience.
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