 |
| Hospital bed. Image source. |
I read this article from Rebecca Watson, Study: Prayer Doesn’t Cure COVID. Jury Still Out on “Thoughts”. Those of you who have read my blog for a long time may know that I am SO FASCINATED by questions like: How would it even work, if God really did act in response to prayer? What kind of data would we expect to see, if that were true? What would be the most effective way to harness this phenomenon in order to benefit society? (Some of the posts I have written on this: Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk, I Would Love to Know If God Intervened to Stop Covid From Spreading in Churches, On believing that "prayer works")
I very much do NOT believe that God acts in response to prayer- because if you actually spend any time thinking about the implications of it (or worse, if you're evangelical and you twist yourself in knots trying to make sure you're doing everything right so God will answer your prayers), it leads to a lot of very bad implications about God's nature.
I am a Christian though, so I'm coming at this from a different angle than Watson is; she is an atheist and is writing for an atheist audience, so she takes it as obvious that prayer doesn't cause "God" to do anything. For me, it wasn't obvious. I had to think through a lot of things. Most Christians do pray, and do believe "prayer works", but I don't.
Watson is discussing a study on "remote intercessory prayer" - researchers had participants pray for strangers in the hospital who had COVID.
The study was conducted in Brazil, with only 199 patients instead of 300, a few weeks’ duration instead of six months, the exact prayers weren’t specifically scripted out, and the protocols changed halfway through the study when data protection laws changed and the people who were praying could no longer know the initials of the people they were praying for, so they switched to bed numbers.
The result was still the same as every other halfway sane study on intercessory prayer: no difference between the control group and the people who were prayed for, in terms of death, ventilation, hospital time, or anything else. So what did we learn? Nothing. Nothing at all.
!!!! Oh man, that mention of patients' initials vs bed numbers is FASCINATING to me! Does God handle it differently depending on which way you anonymize the study? What if there are multiple patients with the same initials- would it be like, the researchers assign Prayer Volunteer 1 to pray for patient C. D., and there is another patient C. D. in the control group not getting prayed for (different person but same initials) and God uses Their omniscient knowledge of the researchers' methods to figure out which is which and make sure the prayers get allocated correctly? Or would the researchers need to add an additional indicator to pass along to the prayer volunteer, to pass along to God, to make sure God knew who they were talking about?
Or would God hear the prayer from Prayer Volunteer 1 and apply it to both patients with initials C. D.? Would the prayer then only be half as effective for each individual patient? What if there's another patient in the hospital also with initials C. D. but they aren't part of the study, does God allocate some of the prayer power (???) to them too?
Since the prayer volunteer doesn't know the patient personally anyway, how much does it matter who the specific patient is? Maybe God just averages their prayer out over all patients in a similar situation- which would be all patients in the study, including the control group- which would explain why the results found no difference between the control group and test group.
What if the researchers made a mistake, and got a patient's initials wrong? What if the researchers told a prayer volunteer to pray for patient C. B. but actually that's wrong and the patient's actual initials are C. D.? Would God be like "I have no idea who you're talking about" and just do nothing with that prayer? Would God check the researchers' notes and find out who the correct patient is? (What if the researchers told the prayer volunteer the correct initials, but the prayer volunteer is the one who made a mistake and prayed for the wrong initials- would God handle that differently than if it was the researchers' mistake? What if the prayer volunteer prays for the wrong initials on purpose???)
Do the researchers even need to tell the prayer volunteers any identifiers about the patients they are praying for? Surely the researchers can just write up a document on who is praying for whom, and then not show it to anybody, and the prayer volunteers can just pray "God please help whoever it is I'm assigned to pray for, I don't know who, but you know", that should work just the same as if they used initials or bed numbers, right? But what if there's a miscommunication between the researchers and actually 2 completely different versions of this document exist- which one does God use to look up whom your prayers are for?
Maybe they should do a study where they intentionally make 2 different versions of the who-is-praying-for-whom assignments, and the results from the study can be used to figure out which version God was working from!
All of this is, uh, ridiculous, and like I said, I don't believe prayer actually causes God to do anything. So I'm not asking these questions because I think there are actual answers- it's because I'm just so fascinated by imagining how this magical prayer system would even work. (Call it worldbuilding.)
But the biggest reason I don't believe "prayer works" is expressed very well in this bit of Watson's article:
Who will be convinced by this? No one. Every rational person on the planet who thinks about this issue for more than a few minutes already understands that if an omniscient, benevolent god exists, she’s not just watching a child die of leukemia because she’s waiting for you to ask her directly for her intervention.
YES! This! Exactly!
This should be obvious, right? It makes no sense that God, who is apparently all-loving and wants to heal people, refuses to intervene unless someone prays in a very specific, correct way. I say it should be obvious, but when I was evangelical, that's literally what I believed. I believed God was so powerful, God was so near, God could do anything, God could immediately heal any sickness or solve any problem, God could do it and it wouldn't be difficult at all- but *I* was the problem because I wasn't praying in the right way. Yes, when prayer doesn't "work", Christians have all sorts of reasons to explain why it's because you didn't pray correctly. Maybe you didn't have enough faith. Maybe you prayed for the wrong reasons. Maybe you have some sin in your life that you need to repent of, before God will listen to your prayers. Maybe you prayed for something that wasn't "in God's will."
It's ridiculous, the belief that God has all this incredible power, and They love people SO MUCH and They want to help SO MUCH, but They're being held back by these little technicalities. They're being held back because even though I tried as hard as I could to pray in the exact right way, with the right motives, trusting God, and so on, somehow I still got it slightly wrong, and therefore God just does nothing.
(Maybe Christians shouldn't say "prayer works" if what they actually mean is "prayer works if you do it in the exact correct way, which the vast majority of people aren't able to do, the vast majority of the time, so basically how it shakes out is that prayer overwhelmingly doesn't do anything at all.")
And, related to that, Watson lists these possible explanations that religious people might give, to explain why a study found no evidence that prayer made a difference:
- My deity doesn’t like to be tested and so he purposely did nothing, because proving He exists makes faith pointless
- My deity will only listen if the plea is made by someone who knows and loves the patient, not from a stranger hoping to prove something to scientists
- Protestant?? PROTESTANT???? You’re lucky my Catholic god didn’t smite everyone in the treatment group. He’s like that, you know.
- It’s part of god’s plan for the people in that treatment group to die.
- What exact words were in the prayers? My deity needs certain magic words, like “in the name of the father,” “amen,” and also “please.”
Her wording here is kinda snarky, but these are actually very real... like, people will really legitimately give reasons just like these to explain why prayer didn't "work."
And this has me thinking about back when I believed that "prayer works," and I read articles about studies which found no difference in outcomes for people who were prayed for or not prayed for. How did I explain that to myself, back then?
Well, basically, I believed there were a whole lot of conditions that you needed to satisfy, in order for your prayers to "work." You had to be a Christian- and not just that, but a real Christian- because evangelicals totally believe that most people who "claim" to be Christian aren't "real" Christians. You had to pray with the right faith and the right motives. And, honestly, these criteria were impossible to fully define- honestly, I would have given anything to know what the exact criteria were, because I prayed desperately for SO MANY things, and I wanted so bad to know what I needed to do to get my prayers to "work." *I* don't even know how to get my prayers to work- the idea that researchers can simply set up an experimental group of people who are praying "correctly" was unbelievable to me.
So when I heard about studies that found that prayer made no difference, I imagined it went something like this: In the test group (the group of patients who are being prayed for by the prayer volunteers) most of the prayers are worthless because the prayer volunteers aren't the correct kind of Christian, or don't have the right motivations or trust in God when they are praying. And, on top of that, let's talk about the control group- the patients who are not being prayed for. How do we know they're not being prayed for? We just know that the participants in the study are not praying for them- but it's likely that other people are praying for them. Maybe their relatives, maybe some random overeager college student who's like "God, please help everyone who's in the hospital" and God takes that to mean all patients in all hospitals in the entire world. The amount of *noise* that's constantly occurring on communication channels between humans and God... It's likely that the amount of *effective* (however that's defined) prayer received by the control group is not meaningfully different from the amount of effective prayer received by the treatment group. And that's why the results of the study don't show a difference.
(Okay now I'm fascinated by that too- if that is the reason that studies on prayer don't find any difference, then how would one go about designing a study which would avoid those problems? Maybe the control group could only consist of patients who did not tell any of their family/friends they were sick? And maybe they have such an obscure problem that no random stranger in the world is going to accidentally say a prayer that includes them? [I guess it shouldn't be about praying for them to be healed from sickness, then- it should be something much more unusual than that.] Any more suggestions? Leave them in the comments section!)
For what it's worth, the explanation that says a study didn't find any difference because "you're not supposed to test God" never made any sense to me, even when I was evangelical. It assumes there's a very clear distinction between situations where we can collect data that we can analyze with statistics, and situations where we can't- and that God behaves differently in these 2 different types of situations- and I just could not believe that it was possible to really make such a distinction. Christians would say we "know" prayer works because we've experienced it (and I also believed that, back then) but apparently we can only "know" it in a vibes-based way, not from actual data. This makes no sense; if the phenomenon is real and we're really experiencing it all the time, then surely there must be plenty of cases where someone can easily come in after the fact and do some investigating and write down some concrete numbers which can then be analyzed. Even if it wasn't a formal study being done in real time, the data exists and there must be cases where somebody can do some investigative work and get that data.
Anyway. I just want to know how it would even work, if it's true that "God answers prayer." If you're praying for someone you don't even know personally, how does God handle that? (This happens when participating in research studies on prayer, but there are plenty of other situations where it happens too. Christians who have a relative who is sick, and they share this prayer request with as many other Christians as possible- so you end up with a lot of people praying for something even though they know very few actual details about the situation.) How does God determine the specific person that your prayers should be applied to? Or do They kind of average the prayers out over every person who generally fits the description you gave in your prayer? What if your prayer request is based on misinformation- does God make corrections to it Themself so They can interpret your prayer in a way that would make sense? What if you pray for something that's not even wrong? How does it work? I mean, I don't believe any of this, but these are the things I think about.
---
The questions in this post are mainly about the little logistical details about prayer- it's hypothetically possible that there are answers to all of these questions, and God *does* have a system that's fair and logical for prayer. (Romans 8:26 comes to mind- we may not know how to pray for things that actually make sense, but God interprets our prayers in a way that makes sense.) My other posts on prayer, though, are more serious and ask much more uncomfortable questions about prayer, which don't go anywhere good no matter how you answer them...
Related:
Prayer Rates Don't Correlate With Actual Risk
I Would Love to Know If God Intervened to Stop Covid From Spreading in Churches
On believing that "prayer works"
I'm SO HAPPY I Won't Be Praying During Childbirth
An Invisible Virus and an Omniscient God
Also I've linked to this study before, but here it is again, because the questions it asks in the "Discussion" section are THE BEST questions, like, these are the things we really need to know, if it's true that "prayer works": Prayer and healing: A medical and scientific perspective on randomized controlled trials
No comments:
Post a Comment