One reason was scientific-the noise factor. Yet, based on the research design, Hope College psychologist David Myers offered reasons why “intercessory prayer will not exhibit significant healing power for the cardiac care patients of this experiment.” It sought to standardize the prayers and avoid some of the previously mentioned pitfalls.
#Polymath trial trial#
It attempted a randomized clinical trial to see if prayer reduced complications following coronary artery bypass surgery in 1,802 patients who were treated in six different hospitals. One of the largest prayer studies was conducted in 2006. Check out his more detailed synopsis of prayer research for the John Templeton Foundation. Christian psychologist and son of a United Methodist pastor Kevin Ladd outlines some of the challenges when we try to weigh prayer.David Myer’s response to the 2006 Harvard prayer study outlined below is one of many gems to be found in David Wilkinson’s fantastic book, When I Pray What Does God Do?.Even if we believe God can act, why pray at all when God’s responses appear to be so haphazard? This is complicated by the fact that each of us has had the experience of seemingly unanswered petitions.
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Many outside of our churches and even some inside believe that God cannot act in response to our prayers. As a prayer expert Kevin Ladd, notes, “The metaphysical core of prayer-what God does-is not accessible to science.” This means prayer is a place where the natural and the supernatural meet. When Christians pray, in whatever form and context it occurs, we believe that God is involved. In part, this is because not all prayer researchers are practitioners who understand the plethora of prayer among God’s people.įinally, and most importantly, there is the matter of God’s participation. These variables could matter but are not accounted for in most studies. Even in reciting the Lord’s Prayer in worship every Sunday, a person’s mood, stature, or focus may differ from week to week. It is safe to say that no two people pray the same way. Some ask God to intercede and others listen for God’s prompting. Some are vocalized and others are silent.
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Some prayers are individual and others are corporate. Even if hundreds are praying for a monarch to live long, a single prayer from outside the study could confound the results. Furthermore, dosage in prayer is irrelevant (the main flaw in Galton’s study). The gold standard of research design is a randomized controlled clinical trial, but it would be problematic to have one group praying for ill outcomes (nor does it make sense to think God would grant them). Be it experimental design, mistaking correlation for causation, or other forms of researcher bias (both for and against). Why is it complicated? There are many reasons:įirst, the research suffers from a variety of scientific flaws. I replied, “That’s complicated.” At the time, I did not fully understand how true this is. Several years ago, a pastor asked me if the scientific study of prayer is legit. And like some current research on prayer, his somewhat satirical study is not exemplary science. He may have been the first to find prayer inefficacious via scientific study, but he was far from the last. Galton started a trend that continues today by applying scientific methods and statistics to the study of prayer. Yet, compared to other well-to-do groups-clergy, gentry, military officers, “the sovereigns are literally the shortest lived of all who have the advantage of affluence.” He concluded: “The prayer has therefore no efficacy, unless the very questionable hypothesis be raised, that the conditions of royal life may naturally be yet more fatal, and that their influence is partly, though incompletely, neutralized by the effects of public prayers.”
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Every Sunday, Church of England congregants prayed for health and long life for the sovereign. The Victorian British polymath-infamously known as a founding figure of eugenics-realized that the most prayed for individual in England was the monarch. Francis Galton was among the first scientists to design a prayer study, in 1872.