Why I Stopped Praying (2)

Like I said before, I couldn't possibly address all the different views on prayer in one blog post. I don't think it's possible to address them in even two, three, or four posts. However, on the matter of prayer as a means of petitioning for intervention, I think there are some very important points to add.

Some of you may have read my last post on prayer and thought, "So what about your supposed intellectual dilemma! Prayer works!" That's an important point, to be sure. Regardless of the skeptics difficulty in making sense of prayer, if it works, isn't that reason enough to continue doing it?


The Efficacy of Prayer
To put it bluntly, the evidence for the power of prayer is almost purely anecdotal. That is to say, it typically comes to us in the form of people selectively passing around stories of its success. It isn't backed by consistent, verifiable, and objective results. It's typically selective and subjective.

This also happens to be the status of every other supposed spiritual power proposed by world religions and mystics. Believe it or not, theists are not the only ones making miracles claims in this world. In fact, it's widespread. We don't hear about them because, surprise surprise, we don't live in those communities, we don't live in those countries, we don't live in those cultures, and we deliberately do not involve ourselves with other religious ideologies. We live in a closed, dominantly-Christian system.

But all that aside, attempts have been made to research the efficacy of prayer from a statistical standpoint and the results, for skeptics, have not been surprising. Sure, you'll find studies giving some weight to your ideas, as expected, but overall (i.e. in terms of meta analysis) a significant and concrete correlation between prayer and any verifiable results has not been found.


Example
One example here would be the highly-acclaimed STEP study conducted in 2006. In this 10 year study, 1,802 patients –all having been admitted for coronary artery bypass graft surgery– were sampled (Fung & Fung, 2009). Divided three ways, one group received prayer and knew about it, one group received prayer and didn't know about it, and the final group received no prayer at all.

The results of the study, not surprisingly, indicated that no significant correlation between prayer and the reduction of complications occurred (American Heart Journal, 2006). What was surprising, however, was that the group who had known they were being prayed for actually did worse.


But I Know People Who...
I know, I know. You know people who have experienced miraculous healing as a result of prayer. So do I. With my Pentecostal background and family, I've been loaded up with these stories. Sunday after Sunday. Why am I not convinced?

These stories are, once again, anecdotal –just as they are for any other religious miracle claim. People selectively share them when prayer seems to work for them and they don't share all the other times (99% of the time) prayer seems to fail.

Statistically, people are bound to have fortunate events occur following a prayer, especially when they prayer about everything troubling them. And when people only share these apparent success stories, hearers are led to believe there is something significant or causal about prayer.

In reality, if they had, instead, clashed two sticks together every time they wanted something good to happen, they might have had the same results. There's no way of knowing. Statistically, this seems to be the case.


Sidenote
As the son of a pastor, I've actually been privy to a few untold accounts of miraculous "un-healings". That is to say, I've heard the miracle story in person and found out later that the cancer had sadly and mysteriously returned. And this time, the cancer didn't go away.


Strange Things Happen
Sure, there are some accounts which seem credible to us and we can't easily explain them away. However, is this true only for prayer? I think there are a number of extremely strange events which occur on earth which none of us can easily explain. And what about all the other miracle claims made by other religious or mystic groups?


Conclusion
As always, there are a number of ways to justify this scenario. We can all come up with reasons as to why your God or spiritual power wouldn't want its power to be recognizable through statistics, associated solely with his true faith, or why miracles simply can't be measured in the first place. (See the rather humorous justification offered by Fung & Fung.)

But all this ex post facto justification only reminds us of a much bigger problem for spirituality. It is poorly defined. That is why we can so easily adapt it to every failure or new empirical discovery we happen upon.

If statistics had consistently shown that prayer did, in fact, produce significant results, believers would say, "But of course! That's our God at work!" But when statistics show otherwise, believers are permitted to say, "But of course! God isn't mechanical. You can't test God!" (Fung & Fung).

Religious theories can't be easily destroyed because religious theories can be molded to fit virtually anything. They are inherently and, perhaps, brilliantly ambiguous. But that's an entirely different topic for another post in the future.

Works Cited

American Heart Journal. (2006, April). Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: a multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer. Retrieved October 29, 2014, from ncbi.nlm.nih.gov: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16569567

Fung, G., & Fung, C. (2009, May 15). What Do Prayer Studies Prove? Retrieved October 29, 2014, from christianitytoday.com: http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2009/may/27.43.html?start=1