This Just In: Prayer Not A Talisman

I am quite sure this is foolish. Suppose subtle and genteel commentators like Raving Atheist and my local blogging buddy World Wide Rant Andy pick up on this? I’ll be drawn into an apologetic flame war, only to have to resolve it in some fashion to avoid the quiet awkwardness of the next Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash, should I have the opportunity to show up and share a cold one or two with my fellow Denverite.

It was WWR Andy who directed me a week or so ago to a post at Pagan Prattle about a scientific study of prayer. I observed that the prattling Pagan (whose domain is “antipope.org”–he’s NOT a Catholic, okay?) likes to refer to God as my “Imaginary Friend.” I do not sense from this a desire for sober discussion of serious issues. Accordingly, I’ll just concentrate on the Telegraph article itself rather than P.P.’s brief analysis of it. (I note that his comment system includes a warning to users not to post any advocacy of theism. I won’t say if this compares favorably or unfavorably to my comment system.)

A quick note of caution: filtering scholarly studies through wire services and mainstream journalism–sometimes even lay science journalism–can be a tricky business. Journalists didn’t major in journalism because they were really good at science and math, so sometimes the facts get a bit confused. If I am overly critical of the actual researchers here due to the Telegraph’s simplification, I apologize.

Now, the study: Cardiologists from Duke University Medical Center conducted a three-year studying involving 750 angioplasty patients. These patients were randomly assigned to one of twelve groups from various religions around the world, which groups then prayed for the recovery of their assigned subjects. Off the cuff, there are three problems with this study, two of which are so obvious that one marvels at why the study was conducted. The third may be less obvious, but it is the most devastating.

First is the assumption of religious pluralism. Fashionable though this may be, it remains formally impossible for many religions simultaneously to obtain in real life. Some would argue that it is impossible that any obtains, but this is of course part of the question at hand. If the twelve prayer groups of the study represent twelve mutually exclusive religions, then at least 92% of the prayers were almost certainly ineffective. A serious study of this kind (granting its other assumptions, which are about to be revoked anyway) would control for the religion of those doing the praying. This would probably require an increase in the sample size of 750 patients, or a reduction in the number of religions included, which would itself imply more testing to ferret out the religion whose prayers actually work.

Of course, the act of praying to Some Deity may in itself be effective, and I suppose this study could at least establish that baseline. The results would not be ultimately useful, though, without a god-specific follow-up study.

Second is the problem Judaism and Christianity have with experiments of this kind. As the Telegraph article points out:

�the experiment�was criticised [sic] as crude by Church leaders. The Bishop of Durham, the Rt. Rev Tom Wright, said: “Prayer is not a penny-in-the-slot machine. You can’t just put in a coin and get out a chocolate.

“This is like setting an exam for God to see if God will pass it or not.”

He said both the Old and New Testaments said “very clearly” that you must not put God to the test.

These are prayers offered in such a way as to violate explicitly the revealed will of the God of the Bible. It’s a fair bet that if he is God, he will not generally answer prayers that are prima facie sinful. He might conceivably do this at certain times for certain reasons, but we wouldn’t expect to see a big statistical bump in a controlled study in which all of the prayers were of this kind.

This crazy-talk segues well into the third–and you might say actual–objection.

Now, amateur internet apologists for atheism probably count the paradox of prayer as one of their better proofs of the non-existence of God. How, they might ask, can prayer mean anything if God is omniscient and already knows the outcome of the request? If prayer changes God’s mind, then God is either not omniscient or not immutable and theism is false. If prayer doesn’t change God’s mind, then God is cruel for giving his people false hope by commanding them to engage in a futile practice, and theism is false.

Various streams of Christian theology of varying degrees of orthodoxy deal with this question differently, but I find the answer implied by the Reformed tradition to be the most compelling. In this tradition, God is not waiting in his heaven to hear what his people ask him so he can decide what to do. When an angioplasty patient is sewn up, God does not hold his ear expectantly to the prayer line, listening to hear how many times he hears the patient’s name so he can decide the relative level of morbidity or mortality to assign to the case. This would indeed be a concept of prayer that is logically incompatible with theism.

A sustainable theology of prayer must reconcile the clear command to pray and the biblical view of prayer as a worthwhile practice on the one hand with the doctrines of God’s sovereignty and exhaustive foreknowledge on the other hand. This is not difficult as some would make it, if we consider both God’s ordaining of events and the prayers of the faithful to be two parts of the same whole. Rather than waiting passively to collect autonomously offered requests and vote on them to determine the course he will choose, God works out his will through the prayers of his people. The sovereign causing of effects and the intimate leading of believers to pray for those outcomes are done contemporaneously.

God apparently desires–for no other reason I can think of than that it pleases him–to have us involved with the outworking of his will. The New Testament teaches that the Holy Spirit sometimes directs believers how to pray, tellingly even to the point of “praying for them,” as it were, non-linguistically. Jesus himself acknowledged the conflict of the human and divine wills in prayer, asking the Father to spare him from his terrible death the night before his crucifixion. Subordinating his will to his Father’s–as was his meat and drink–he eventually prayed explicitly for the fulfillment not of his will, but his Father’s. Clearly, prayer is not so neatly separated from God’s eternal decree. Truly conversational dynamics are present.

So is God merely talking to himself here? Hardly. When the faithful pray, they are freely choosing to offer prayers to God according to their desire to do so, thus participating as human persons communing with the personal God in the process of accomplishing what God has determined to accomplish. Prayer is fundamentally a relational activity, with the primary relationship being between believers and God. God doesn’t need us to pray, but graciously chooses to involve us in the process of doing will in the world.

We can draw a corollary from this that will bring us back around to the final objection to the angioplasty study. Having in hand the Divine-human relationship inherent in prayer, we could note that the New Testament exposes a pattern of laying on of hands during prayer, which is inherently more relational than receiving a computer-generated prayer email from software configured by a group of researchers. This is not to say that prayer offered impersonally or at a distance is guaranteed to be ineffective, but it is rather to note the horizontally relational context in which the New Testament considers prayer. You generally know the people for whom you are praying. If you are not actually physically near them–which you are all but assumed to be–you are emotionally near them and have a personal stake in the outcome of their crisis. The act of praying not only involves you in relationship with God in the outworking of his will for them, but it involves you in relationship directly with the subject of your prayer by bringing your passions and emotional commitments in line with their possibly deep, possibly life-changing need of the person for whom you are praying. Through prayer as conceived by the New Testament, you are drawn into closer relationship not just with God, but with other members of Christ’s Body. This isn’t the sine qua non of prayer, but it does seem to be a necessary effect of prayer when it is offered in its expected context.

I don’t expect to have defeated all possible objections to theism that might piggyback on a study like this, but I have proposed an outline of a conceivable, internally consistent theology of prayer that might predict the results that the Duke study has shown. I also wouldn’t expect anyone who rejects theism to be very impressed with this proposal, but I would like it to show that no one should reject any form of theism merely because it commends effective prayer.

Comments? Email me. I’ll post anything thoughtful and non-flamey, unless you ask me not to.

UPDATE: Raving Atheist parries; I riposte.

MORE: Professor Paul Myers has the effrontery to call me long-winded. I respond in ironically too many words.