Government Funding Studies on Healing Power of Prayer
According to The New York Times:
Critics express outrage that the federal government, which has contributed $2.3 million in financing over the last four years for prayer research, would spend taxpayer money to study something they say has nothing to do with science. "Intercessory prayer presupposes some supernatural intervention that is by definition beyond the reach of science," said Dr. Richard J. McNally, a psychologist at Harvard. "It is just a nonstarter, in my opinion, a total waste of time and money."
In one continuing study, financed by the National Institutes of Health and called "Placebo Effect in Distant Healing of Wounds," doctors at California Pacific Medical Center, a major hospital in San Francisco, inflict a tiny stab wound on the abdomens of women receiving breast reconstruction surgery, with their consent, and then determine whether the "focused intention" of a variety of healers speeds the wound's healing.
Even those who defend prayer research concede that such studies are difficult. For one thing, no one knows what constitutes a "dose": some studies have tested a few prayers a day by individual healers, while others have had entire congregations pray together. Some have involved evangelical Christians; others have engaged rabbis, Buddhist and New Age healers, or some combination.
A further issue is that there is no way to control for non-prayed-for people. If someone in a study is put in a non-prayer group, how can you be sure that no one is really praying for them? You can't. Indeed, it would be silly not to assume that various friends, family members, and even strangers are probably praying for everyone in the study.
Another problem concerns the mechanism by which prayer might be supposed to work. Some researchers contend that prayer's effects - if they exist - have little to do with religion or the existence of God. Instead of divine intervention, they propose things like "subtle energies," "mind-to-mind communication" or "extra dimensions of space-time" - concepts that many scientists dismiss as nonsense. Others suggest that prayer may have a soothing effect that works like a placebo for believers who know they are being prayed for.
All of this reads exactly like post hoc rationalizations that we always see when people are trying to offer supernatural and paranormal explanations for events. In every case, the events share the similarity that no immediate or obvious natural explanation exists — at least to the observers in question — and so instead of looking for one people jump immediately to something non-natural.
Either way, even many churchgoers are skeptical that prayer can be subjected to scientific scrutiny. For one thing, prayers vary in their purpose and content: some give praise, others petition for strength, many ask only that God's will be done. For another, not everyone sees God as one who does favors on request. "There's no way to put God to the test, and that's exactly what you're doing when you design a study to see if God answers your prayers," said the Rev. Raymond J. Lawrence Jr., director of pastoral care at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. "This whole exercise cheapens religion, and promotes an infantile theology that God is out there ready to miraculously defy the laws of nature in answer to a prayer."
The fact that many traditional religionists aren't happy about this is important to remember. It's not all believers who are looking for scientific validation for their beliefs. Some will even deny that a person gets better because of prayer or that it is possible to pray to God to heal someone — such believers simply pray for the strength to deal with whatever is going to happen rather than beg and assume that God might change the course of the universe merely to please them.
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