This post was written by Chris Gadsden on June 12, 2006
Recent research concerning the effects of prayer on health (specifically, recovery from bypass surgery) concluded that prayer had no significant effect. Was this project a brave attempt to show the connection between faith and science, or a misguided endeavor that exposed the delusional nature of religious belief? Neither.
While I salute the S.T.E.P. researchers for their courage and intentions, I am disappointed by their fundamental misunderstandings of God and prayer. (I assume that their goal was not to prove that God answers prayer, but rather to find out if doctors ought to be incorporating the variable of prayer into their prescriptions.) Integration can go wrong when we have a faulty grasp of our own worldview. This is why it is critical for Christian academicians, no matter what their field of research, to possess a thorough knowledge of their faith.
So where, exactly, did they go wrong? They failed to understand this simple truth: prayer has no causal power. No experiment was needed to show this, because theologians have taught this for two millennia. Prayer, or any act of asking, does not operate according to the laws of physics or any other empirical principle. This is why my two-year-old son feels quite free to disregard my repeated entreaties to “please share your cookie.� My asking is nothing more than that – asking. The power to comply lies solely with the agent being asked.
Richard Swinburne, Emeritus Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford, has written an excellent piece (from an angle different than mine) explaining why this study was misguided from the outset. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, skip to the last section (4 paragraphs) for a lucid analogy that drives the point home.
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