In the New York Times, the headline reads, Long-Awaited
Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer, and of course, as with so many study results regarding the
measurement of the immeasurable, all it reveals is more ambiguity. According to the researchers, this study was going
to be the study that ended the contentious debate between those who believe you can measure, in scientific terms, the
power of prayer to heal, and those skeptics who believe you simply cannot measure spirituality by the laws of the
physical world. The results of this study suggest prayer has no power to heal. But, I can quote an equal number of
respected studies that show prayer does have the power to heal. In addition, I can illuminate a central flaw in the
study, just from reading the press on it. The flaw begins in defining healing and the true power of prayer. The participants in the study who were asked to pray, were told they could pray in any way that suited them, but they were to include in the prayer, for a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications. Basically, prayer is not an exercise where Santa shows up and leaves all the presents you asked for under the tree. This predisposes the belief there is some central magical figure granting requests. Or, equally as misdirected, that we are all little Harry Potters, with the power to alter the course of an event by chanting a certain phrase. There are all kinds of healing. There is physical healing. There is emotional healing. There is healing of the mind. There is spiritual healing. Which means, at the start of this study, the researchers were on a course doomed to failure, if the results were based on specific wish granting of a single wish.
I think Dr. Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia and author of a forthcoming book, Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine, sums it up best when he states, "The problem with studying religion scientifically is that you do violence to the phenomenon by reducing it to basic elements that can be quantified, and that makes for bad science and bad religion." Research into the power of prayer will be a waste of time and money until there is a paradigm shift in physical world thinking to the spiritual world. Both are real, and both are intertwined, but both are separate, with a power all their own.
1. Yep, I agree. Why pray at all, if God's will is going to be done anyway. One would be better off learning self-hypnosis or deep meditation in times of stress or pain--then One couldn't end up like Job. People who practice daily prayer or those who participate in prayerlines often cite examples where prayer changed things. The problem is that they are like gamblers who forget all their losses.
Posted at 12:53PM on Mar 31st 2006 by Rich Maas