Prayer Experiments Do Not Show That Prayer Is Not Efficacious

This article was originally featured on ResistanceTV.

The efficacy of prayer is an issue in Christianity that skeptics like to argue about and Christians themselves struggle with.  Does prayer actually have an affect on the outcomes or is it just a waste of time?  I am not going to answer every question here, but I am going to address a particular argument skeptics use to show that prayer is not efficacious.  Prayer experiments, according to many skeptics, show that prayer is not efficacious because prayer does not seem to positively affect the outcomes.  I will briefly explain what these prayer experiments are and why I think they do not cast doubt on the efficacy of prayer.

In these experiments, researchers choose different groups of people who have medical needs.  They have certain groups of people receive prayer and other groups of people receive no prayer.  According to a New York Times article on the prayer experiment funded by the Templeton Foundation in the early 2000’s

The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half the patients who received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive prayers.

In these types of experiments, the group of people that does not receive the “treatment” in question is called the control group.  This group of people does not receive the treatment that is being studied, which is prayer in this case, and their results are compared to the results of the group or groups that do receive the treatment.  The expectation is that, if prayer “works,” then we should see the health of the people being prayed for do noticeably better than the health of the people who are not being prayed for.  However, prayer studies give mixed results.  In fact, in the experiment funded by Templeton, the group who knew that they were being prayed for did a little worse than the other groups.  This seems to show that prayer has no effect on the outcomes, so prayer is not efficacious.  The studies do not go as far as showing that God does not exist, but the results could still be troubling for Christians.

While these experiments are interesting, I do not think that they cast doubt on whether prayer “works” or not.  There are many reasons that people have given to doubt the experiments, but I will focus on two.  First, these experiments presuppose an incorrect view of prayer.  Second, there is an inherent flaw in its methodology.

Skeptics who use these studies to argue against prayer seem to think of prayer as a mechanical process where, if you put in the correct inputs, then you will get certain outputs.  If the Christian God exists, then we would expect Him to answer our prayers roughly as we expect them to be answered.  Since we often do not get the outputs that we expect there to be if there were a God answering the prayers, this means that prayer must not “work” for some reason.  This, however, is a flawed view of prayer because prayer is not a mechanistic process like I described above.  God, if He exists, is a free agent who can freely choose to say “yes,” “no,” “later,” or “yes, but not as you expect,” based on His wisdom and knowledge of the facts.  It is a standard Christian belief that God is not obliged to answer our prayers or constrained by our prayers.  This makes it doubtful that a controlled experiment can accurately tell us whether or not God is intervening.  

The next problem has to do with control groups.  In these types of experiments, one needs a control group to compare to the group that is receiving the treatment in question.  However, this article, talking about the Templeton study, points out a significant problem with prayer studies

The new study was rigorously designed to avoid problems like the ones that came up in the earlier studies. But experts said the study could not overcome perhaps the largest obstacle to prayer study: the unknown amount of prayer each person received from friends, families, and congregations around the world who pray daily for the sick and dying.

The problem that this quote shows is that it is basically impossible for there to be a control group for these experiments.  Researchers can choose a group of people who are not being prayed for by the groups of praying people that they have recruited, but the individuals in the “control group” are likely receiving prayer from an unknown number of family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers throughout the world.  This means that people who are being treated are being compared to people who are getting the same treatment.  If this is the case, then we should not be surprised if the “treated” group does not do noticeably better than the “control” group.

Both of these issues should make us doubt that these studies give good evidence against the efficacy of prayer.  Anyone who believes in the power of prayer should not feel threatened by research like this.