This is the third study I know of in which intercessory prayer (prayer by strangers for the afflicted) has failed to show results. The first two papers, whose titles are below (click to read) showed that such prayer failed to help patients with heart disease. I’ve discussed these before, and you can see for yourself that if God exists, listens to prayer, and sometimes responds, He clearly was not listening in these two experiments.
I give the conclusions of each of the first two studies below. Notice that the second study was funded in part by the John Templeton Foundation, which clearly hoped for a positive result!
First, a study from 22 years ago:
Conclusion: The study found no evidence of an effect of intercessory prayer on the primary outcome of mortality or on the secondary outcomes of hospitalization time, ICU time, and mechanical ventilation time.
Second, a study from 17 years ago:
Sadly, no gods with any power to respond to prayer did anything. Note as well that, in fact, intercessory prayer increased (nonsignificantly) the percentage of bad outcomes (bolding is mine). Perhaps god doesn’t like intercessory prayer!
Results: In the 2 groups uncertain about receiving intercessory prayer, complications occurred in 52% (315/604) of patients who received intercessory prayer versus 51% (304/597) of those who did not (relative risk 1.02, 95% CI 0.92-1.15). Complications occurred in 59% (352/601) of patients certain of receiving intercessory prayer compared with the 52% (315/604) of those uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer (relative risk 1.14, 95% CI 1.02-1.28). Major events and 30-day mortality were similar across the 3 groups.
Conclusions: Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.
And look at the acknowledgements:
This study was supported by the John Templeton Foundation. The Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation supported the Baptist Memorial Health Care Corporation site only.
And here’s the latest study, published in a weird journal, but one that is peer-reviewed: Heliyon. Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:
Heliyon is a monthly peer-reviewed mega journal covering research in all areas of science, the social sciences and humanities, and the arts. It was established in 2015 and is published by Cell Press. The journal is divided into numerous sections, each with its own editorial team.
Click the title to read, or you might find it more convenient to download the entire pdf here. The reference is at the bottom of the page.
The experiment was done in Brazil, and I don’t think I need to reprise the methods and results since the summary below gives all the essential information. I’ve highlighted the lack of positive results by bolding part of this summary:
Between September 2020 and December 2020, a total of 199 participants (out of 244 that were screened) were randomly assigned to either the Intervention group (n = 100) or the control group (n = 99, Fig. 1). Baseline characteristics, presented in Table 1, were well balanced between the two groups. The study population consisted of 34 % women, with a mean age of 61 years. Additionally, 44 % of participants had hypertension, and 6 % had obesity. At the end of the study, no significant difference in the primary outcome of mortality was observed between the intervention and control groups. Among the 99 subjects in the control group, there were 8 deaths, and the same number of deaths [8] occurred in the intervention group (HR 0.86, 95 % CI 0.32 to 2.31; p = 0.76). Similarly, there were no statistically significant differences in the secondary outcomes between the two groups. The need for ICU admission (p = 0.471), length of stay in the ICU (mean difference 0.77, 95 % CI -4.13 to 3.20; p = 0.70), need for mechanical ventilation (p = 0.457), duration of mechanical ventilation (mean difference 3.89 days, 95 % CI -7.09 to 14.71; p = 0.54), and length of hospital stay (mean difference 1.96, 95 % CI -2.78 to 7.85; p = 0.45) were all similar between the two groups, as shown in Table 2. Due to the necessary change in participant identification during the study, we also evaluated the outcomes among participants who were identified by initials and received direct prayers (Table 3) and among participants who were identified by the number of the hospital beds (Table 4). Similarly, we did not observe any changes in the primary or secondary outcome.
Other aspects of the study worth knowing about include the fact that subjects were admitted to intensive care or clinical inpatient facilities with a PCR-confirmed diagnosis of COVID-19. All patients were older than 18, and were used regardless of their religion or lack thereof. The study was double blind with a control group of patients; patients didn’t know whether they were being prayed for (half were; half were not) and the pray-ers didn’t know the names of the patients, who were identified and prayed for only by their initials and, later, by the number of their hospital bed (God presumably knows all this stuff).
The pray-ers were “Protestant religious leaders” who were able to pray daily for one of the patients. And the prayer devoted to each patient was INTENSIVE, as detailed below:
Each intercessor prayed from their own homes or workplaces, dedicating a total of 240 min per day, divided into three shifts of 80 min each (morning, afternoon, and night). The content of each prayer was not specifically assigned, but it was required to include the following topics: 1) preservation of the patient’s life, 2) avoidance of orotracheal intubation or mechanical ventilation for those not yet intubated, 3) shorter duration of intubation and mechanical ventilation for those already in that state, 4) reduced length of stay in the ICU, and 5) reduced total length of hospital stay.
Now that is what I call prayer. Nevertheless, there was no difference in the outcomes of the experimental (prayed-for) and the control (not-prayed-for) group). The authors do give some caveats, including the small sample size and the fact that the method of identifying patients changed mid-study from initials to hospital bed number (Brazilian law was invoked), but if there is an omniscient God, He should know these things.
This is three out of three studies that haven’t worked. The possible explanations include these:
1.) There is no God to hear the prayers.
2.) There.is a God, but he can’t hear the prayers.
3.) There is a God who hears the prayers, but he pays no attention to them.
4.) God doesn’t want to be tested, and so ignored the whole experiment. But note that God was effectively tested in a Bible passage (1 Kings 18) in which sacrifices were offered to a false god versus the real God simultaneously, and only the sacrifices to Yahweh worked. This was a controlled experiment!
5.) Protestant prayers are less effective than prayers of other denominations.
Inventive readers can think of other explanations.
Of course as an atheist I think that #1 is the right answer. As the late Victor Stenger said, “The absence of evidence [for God] is indeed evidence of absence if the evidence should be there.”
Naturally this study won’t make a dent in the belief of the godly, for they will simply discount it on one ground or another—probably #4 above. All we can say is that three sincere attempts to see if prayers work showed that they don’t.
And did I mention that although Lourdes is full of discarded crutches and wheelchairs, there are no false eyeballs or prosthetic limbs on display? Apparently God can cure lots of stuff, but is impotent before blindness and amputation.
________________
Soubihe Junior NV, Bersch-Ferreira ÂC, Tokunaga SM, Lopes LA, Cavalcanti AB, Bernadez-Pereira S. 2023. The remote intercessory prayer, during the clinical evolution of patients with COVID -19, randomized double-blind clinical trial. Heliyon. 2023 Nov 17;9(11):e22411.
doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2023.e22411. PMID: 38045114; PMCID: PMC10689938.
Inventive readers can think of other explanations
I’ve prayed for the day when religion would be thoroughly debunked… ;o)
God’s clearly doing her best to make your prayer come true! 🙂
I’ve been around pious Christians all my life, and I’ve seen countless prayers and ceremonies asking for healing. But I’ve never seen any such incantations done after death, asking god to bring the person back to life–even though these people fully believe that god has such power, as shown by the Biblical story of Lazarus. So why don’t believing Christians ever pray for death to be reversed? Is it because they know deep down that it’s futile?
There are some extremist versions of Christianity (as well as other religions) which do pray for the resurrection of the dead — and claim to have the evidence.
As you might guess, it’s pretty weak. Back in my debate room days we atheists once encountered a fervent Pentecostal from the US who insisted it was possible for highly devout Christian ministers to pray over corpses — successfully. As proof he directed us to a grainy video from either Africa or South America (I no longer remember) which involved a weeping crowd, a shouting preacher, and a still body on the floor which first started shaking, then staggered up to screams of joy and thankfulness. Would we deny then the evidence of our own eyes??
We did.
Cults have been known to pray over one of their surprisingly mortal Immortal Messiahs for days. Doesn’t work. But if the religious can imagine a more powerful faith than that encompassed by ordinary believers, it will be done.
A corollary to your question about why (most) believing Christians don’t pray for the reanimation of the dead would be to ask why they pray AT ALL when someone is suffering from a potentially fatal illness or injury, since “paradise” is supposedly so much more wonderful than their earthly existence? In fact, why would the object of their prayers even want to go to the hospital to try to be cured?
As Dan Barker says – “Nothing fails like prayer”.
I think the answer will be 6) They were praying wrong.
There are 1200 different Christian denominations in the US alone. Unless the right denomination was selected to do the praying, it won’t work.
Surely prayer and prayee need to be religiously aligned to some significant extent – to some degree comparable to whatever the distinction between the various sects is. I mean, from outside (atheists, or Shintō animists) it would make no difference which sect of Protestantism is selected, but I would guess that to the Protestant (who has chosen one of these sects – and rejected the other 1199) there must be some significant difference, and that matters to their god too – otherwise, “why?”
Your point about 1200 denominations in the US alone may be significant. I started by assuming that they’d all be English-speaking, but on consideration, you’d expect a substantial number of them to be primarily or predominantly Spanish-speaking. and a few Hopi, Navajo sects too. Surely, the language in which the prayer is made would have an effect on the attention that any god pays to the prayer?
Of course, the potential downside would be that such an experiment might lead to the deduction that one language is preferred by one god over another. So … shouldn’t some of the prayers be done in Hebrew, Aramaic, Classical Greek, Arabic, or whatever language the Mormon tablets are inscribed in – in order to probe which language is truly (or untruely) the preferred (or anti-preferred) language of god.
All of which might possibly set the monotheists at each others throats. Not that one would notice any difference from today.
If I were one of the praying people, and I sincerely believed prayers could help save someone’s life, I would surely spare some time to pray for all of the patients in the study, including the poor souls in the control group who were not otherwise getting prayed over. It should work; God shouldn’t care whether I know their names. Thus, the control group would not be valid.
You aren’t able to do that because you’re given only one set of initials or one bed number. If you could just say “God, help all the sick people in this hospital,” you might as well say, “God, help all the sick peoople in the world!”
That’s an outstanding comment!
Invalidating the control groups in one fell swoop means the studies fail to disprove the value of prayer. Seriously it would be interesting to interrogate the pray-ers after the study wound up to find out how many “cheated” and prayed for everyone. After all, if prayer is not harmful, how would it sit on the conscience of a lay person who believed strongly in it to deny it according to a research protocol?
What makes this trial of prayer in Covid double-blind is not that the pray-ers didn’t know who they were praying for. Rather, the researchers scoring the outcomes didn’t know the allocation of each patient to prayer or no prayer. The reason for not telling the pray-ers the names of the patients was to preserve mandatory confidentiality, not to blind the study.
There’s more though. The doctors and nurses giving the everyday care to the patients must also not know the allocation of their patient. The study doesn’t specify this. The primary outcome is death in hospital, which sounds cut and dried and not bias-able by allocation knowledge. But what if someone was clearly dying? A doctor’s decision to transfer him out of hospital to a hospice could be biased by the desire not to have the patient die in hospital (and score against the hypothesis.) The secondary outcomes are soft and subject to clinical judgement. A treating doctor unblinded to prayer allocation who had strong beliefs one way or the other about prayer could be tempted to make hundreds of clinical “toss-up” decisions on the basis of his beliefs in order to “help” the study confirm them.
Addendum to Jerry’s reply. It seems that the pray-ers were assigned collectively to a list of patients, rather than one-to-one. It depended on how many patients were in hospital and how many pray-ers were available. So I think there is nothing to stop a pray-er from signing off with, “Oh, and by the way, a prayer for all the sick people in the hospital, and the entire world.” Which makes the whole idea of intercessory prayer patently absurd.
You reminded me that as a child, for some time I observed a self-imposed nightly ritual of praying for the health and well-being of everyone I loved. I named them all one by one (including my guinea pig), but finally added: and all the people in the whole world! Clearly, if you believe in that kind of magic, it is unfair to leave anyone out.
So, you prayed for the well-being of the enemies of your family/ home country/ football team/ political parties you’re not aligned to, and every other n’er do well in the history of the universe.
Boy, that’s going to have the picket lines forming outside your home. As well as, potentially, justifying charges of treason.
Astonishing result! Whoever would have thought?
They should try Jehovah’s Witness prayers next time, sure to work.
I think God was probably busy helping some team win a football game so one of the players could thank him on TV for the win. So he had no time to answer prayers for people’s health.
Plus, God is offended when people test him, and he clearly knows that Protestantism is not the one true religion.
If I was God I would spend all my time watching the output from the Webb telescope and just marvel at how awesome that creation is!!
Your mention of g*d spending eternity admiring his creation with a telescope reminded me of Simon Edge’s’ comedy novella The Hurtle of Hell.
Four hours of prayer every day?! I can understand this obviously not helping the sick. (The small problem being that there is no God; explanation #1.) But what about the prey-ers, the folks who’s spent four hours praying each day? Did they die?
No but they were ten times more likely to vote republican than non prayers.
Down the pub I heard of a paraplegic who went to Lourdes. She obtained no relief from her condition but on getting home her wheelchair was found to have a brand new pair of Pirelli tyres.
:-D. Surely they should be Michelin?
Indeed!
Duh😬
I forget who said it, but there is also a constant background of prayers and also other people praying for the control group. Thus, the room might be so noisy with prayers that the intercessory pray-ers are thoroughly drowned out. If God pays attention, the duration of their prayers ought to be irrelevant.
Regarding Templeton, you often hear a quip like, “Tell me the sponsor of the research, and I will tell you the outcome.” To the contrary, the Benson study (no. 2 above) was highly regarded and gave a negative result, which would not have been Templeton’s preferred outcome. Nor that of Herbert Benson, the lead author, who (IIRC) was an Orthodox Jew.
Templeton’s grubby fingers have been stuck into a lot of pies over the years. But (unless I’ve missed something), none of the ventures they’ve put money into have ever produced any real evidence for the relevance of religious beliefs or doctrines to science (or anything else, come to that).
According to their own figures, their total endowment is $3.9bn, and they give grants worth $150m a year. Some of the science they have funded is of real value; and I understand in recent years they have moved somewhat away from the overt link with faith. They could do so much more good if they could bring themselves to ditch it completely.
“randomized double-blind” (RDB)
Well of COURSE there was no effect! That’s not how prayer WORKS – God gets tipped off when RDB is in effect – the epistemology is completely different!
Pfff…. scientism.
/sarcasm
… here’s a sign a local church put up the other day that is related (always entertaining):
THE ANSWER TO FEAR IS HOPE
… I just get a kick out of that. Does everyone see? Hint : two meanings are perceptible.
Ha. I get it.
Now punctuate this telegram so that it makes sense.
TIME FLIES YOU CANT THEY GO TOO FAST
Time flies. You can’t. They go too – fast!
… seems incorrect…
Time flies? You can’t. They go too fast.
Clever – the question mark… I’ll have to think this one over though….
There is another possible reason the prayers didn’t work-God just doesn’t like the people being prayed over.
Some years back I saw online a statement that “God doesn’t like amputees” because he has never,ever grown back the missing appendage. So there’s that.
This spoof article from the BMJ is my favourite in the genre:
https://www.bmj.com/content/323/7327/1450.full
“Remote intercessory prayer said for a group of patients is associated with a shorter hospital stay and shorter duration of fever in patients with a bloodstream infection, even when the intervention is performed 4–10 years after the infection”
The subjects of these experiments are suffering because that is what god wants for these people, asking via prayer to alleviate suffering is misunderstanding the mysterious ways in which a god works. So effectively the god just hears it as moaning, groveling, humans and clocks off. God likes it to be sure and the proof is,
there is lots of suffering about but just has to put up and shut up. Small price when you live forever and you need entertainment.
I was always anmoyed when someone claimed they survived a tornado or other such event because they prayed. It is a very sad view of their god”s lack of compassion. It does seem that regular religious practice leads to a longer life, though
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/rshm/tyler-vanderweele-do-religious-people-live-longer-0#:~:text=Another%20study%2C%20published%20last%20year,frequent%20the%20temple%2C%20church%20or
Admit I have only read headlines. I can’t make myself believe in god so I will have to stick to diet, exercise, and relaxation techniques.
This reminds me of the expression “There but for the grace of God go I,” which pious people might say when they see someone else in a terrible situation. It clearly says God is capricious and mean, but that’s not what the person intends it to mean.
Not exactly omni- benevolent.
Such claims are seriously damaged by the problem of unreported failed claims. The number of people at imminent risk of their life who prayed for divine intercession, and who then were killed by the impending event must be substantial. but being dead, they can’t bear witness to the inefficacy of divine intercession.
It’s a difficult sort of experiment to design. Even harder if you include (non-religious) ethical considerations.
I had a reasonably good friendship for several years with someone who I knew harbored some strange ideas about supernatural phenomena. As I once did myself, he attended Burning Man events. We sometimes went together. That was our main bond, though in general we also shared similar ideas about art, science, and technology. We also liked cats.
My friend was a musician and an accomplished drummer, including on conga drums. Before going to Burning Man, he would buy a new, expensive conga drum that he would play at the event. Lots of revelers would happily dance to his playing. But after most of “the Man” had burned, he would throw his new drum into the still-hot embers.
It was a sacrifice to atone for his sins. Or to release bad vibes. Or something. I didn’t interrogate his motives much. We were just guys enjoying the art and playfulness of a contemporary bacchanal. (Similar, maybe, to the “Nova” event in Israel that recently ended in butchery by Hamas.)
One day he copied me on an email that he sent to his many friends. He knew that I was an atheist. He knew my general thoughts about supernatural phenomena. He knew that I didn’t pray. But in that email he asked his friends to pray for his sick cat.
I emailed a reply (paraphrasing from memory): “Hey, Bobby. I don’t know why you copied me on that email. I’m sorry, but I won’t be praying for your cat. I can’t pray for your cat. I simply don’t believe in prayer. And if I did pray, it would be insincere.”
Our friendship ended with him writing, in a short emailed response, that I was the most evil person he had ever known. He really did write “evil” — which is a word I don’t generally use, as I think most people attach supernatural attributes to it.
I’ve told this story to a number of people. Some have asked me why I didn’t just humor him, or simply not respond. But I don’t feel any guilt. I’ve long tired of playing make-believe with believers, especially with those who otherwise seem to be reasonably intelligent.
Show me good scientific evidence for a belief, and I will modify my position. But not just because, not even for a friend. Or a cat.
You should have informed him that prayer for a sick cat is superfluous, in view of the
principle that God IS a cat (https://historycooperative.org/cat-gods-feline-deities/ ).
Ha! There is that, too. 🐱
Well, each cat is a god into and of themselves, supreme lord of all they survey. And very intolerant of unbelievers.
I got hold of a film of Euripedes’ Medea a few days ago, and was watching it last night. I’ll continue keeping my eyes peeled for a copy of “Bacchae”. Which puts a very different meaning on “bacchanal”.
Hmm…
If you were to pray for the cat, but it died, I’d bet he’d certainly blame you, as his other friends were true believers.
In retrospect, I have little doubt that he thought I was putting his cat at risk with my comments, at least to some degree. (How many people praying does it take to convince their god to spare a cat’s life or guarantee that it recovers from illness?) But that was the last email communication I had with him, and I don’t know how the cat fared.
Of course I also think that he thought I was being insensitive. But I was replying to his insensitivity to my position about prayer. Again, I tired long ago of pandering to believers of supernatural phenomena.
You told him what he already knew, that you aren’t into the religion thing, and he blasted you for it.
It always strikes me the way people steeped in religion are the biggest jerks around. God has done nothing for them.
Meant to be a response to Jon A above
Atheists can be jerks, too. But I was shocked by his response. It certainly put a period to our friendship.
But wouldn’t you think that by being devoutly religious a person would be blessed with kindness? And studying the word of god all the time, that should produce a good person too.
It’s more evidence that the god connection doesn’t help.
He wasn’t a devoutly religious person in the way you might be suggesting. He was certainly not a run-of-mill Christian. He was just caught up in some new-age-y supernatural crap. That’s sometimes even harder to deal with, because it’s so nebulous.
He wasn’t devoutly religious in the way you might be suggesting. He certainly wasn’t a run-of-the-mill Christian or god believer. He was just taken in by new-gay-y crap, which is sometimes more difficult to deal with, because it’s so nebulous.
The site was a bit glitchy, and I replied twice, the second time too quickly, with a typo that I missed. It’s “new-age-y” not “new-gay-y.”
Lay psychologist Ruth says that the over-the top reaction was not to Jon saying he couldn’t and wouldn’t pray, but to his lecturing tone when he should have been commiserating.
Thanks for the lecture?
I’m sure that the Officer’s Mess at Auschwitz (or any other KZ/ extermination camp/ work camp) had a number of very well-thumbed Bibles, so that the minds of the soldiers could be eased by the sure and certain knowledge that they were doing their god’s work.
Yes, I think that what the evidence indicates (if anything) isn’t a benevolent god, but something like a devil, who’s running a giant scam— making everyone think he’s god with his “mysterious ways” ruse.
In 2009 Cochrane published a meta-analysis of 10 studies and came to the same conclusion: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19370557/
The reason prayer didn’t work is because God knew we were conducting a study and if he answered the Christians’ prayers, it would be evident in the data and prove that he’s out there. God doesn’t want to be revealed except on his terms.
But the joke is on you God because we scientists can manipulate you not to help suffering people for fear of being discovered and outed and no longer mysterious and inscrutable. Scientists can make you do otherwise so…checkmate. And if you’re all good, you should’ve prevented those Christians from dying from COVID.
With a death rate of 8% in the control group, this study is far too small to make any inferences about the non-effectiveness of prayer. Even if the true effectiveness of prayer had been to reduce deaths to 1% (instead of 8%), we would have failed to reject the null hypothesis about a third of the time with a sample of 100 in each arm. Ruling out smaller effects (which would still have been important to patients if true) would have required many hundreds or thousands of patients in each arm.
https://clincalc.com/stats/samplesize.aspx
Of course even if there had been only one death in the prayed-for group, we wouldn’t have accepted the effectiveness of prayer because the prior likelihood is so small, essentially zero. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The null hypothesis is rejected in this example at p = 0.035 (Fisher’s exact test). But we would say by common sense that it was just a chance event that occurred 1 time in 29 (sampling error) or that the study was rigged somehow, rather than accepting the study as proof that prayer worked.
Nietzsche, with typical caustic wit, observes on the same theme: “It is a curious thing that God learned Greek when he wished to turn author — and that he did not learn it better.”
A part of the 2006 study that most people leave out is the interesting finding that postsurgical heart arrhythmias, the dependent variable, INCREASED when patients knew they were being prayed for. Presumably, it was increased cortisol from the stress of feeling one must not let down the prayer that WORSENED that medical condition, and we know stress can worsen ANY medical condition. Also, chaplains are often praying in the room of patients, so science has basically found they could be worsening a medical condition if they ask God to help them (medically at least). I have also been interested in psychological findings that non-theistic practices such as Buddhism can INCREASE narcissism and REDUCE compassion. Buddhists believe their practice REDUCES suffering, just like a Christian who believes accepting Jesus does. Therefore, Buddhists are more likely than non-practitioners to believe they have personally “escaped” suffering, or by spreading the practice they are reducing it in the population (this belief must derive from the Brahmanism that the Buddha also practiced). Therefore, even non-theistic religions can cause effects contrary to their intentions. Buddhism can have the same proselytizing fervor as theism (exceptions: Jews and Quakers typically don’t proselytize). And not even the crassest cognitive psychologist will maintain, as the Buddhists do, that ONLY thoughts (which you try not to focus on when your practice) cause suffering, that our mortality, illnesses, economic condition, or culture are not also significant underpinnings of suffering. Buddhism like intercessory prayer also requires an idealist’s belief in magical protection.
How can a study like this even work? Christians all over the world are praying all the time. In my denomination we pray for the sick every service and throughout the week. In some Christians denominations there are monks dedicated to praying for people. The only way to study Christian prayer is to come up with a new way of studying it. There’s no such thing as an “uncontrolled group” when it comes to Christian prayer. I’m excited though to see more studies of the supernatural but you can’t study it as you do medicine. Where things are actually controlled.