Do intercessory prayers work? Medical science has taken an interest in the power of prayer. One approach is to assign patients randomly to a control group that is to remain in an “unprayed” state; another randomly assigned group of patients then receives intercessory prayers over a set period of time by persons who sign on to pray for them. Unsurprisingly, most studies using this randomized controlled trial (RCT) method show no healing effects of prayer—I say “unsurprisingly” because this result cannot come as news to those with a modicum of knowledge of Christian thought and theology.
First, we cannot ever be sure that the supposed control group remains, as it were, unprayed for. Who knows whether someone isn’t praying for them in secret? Friends and family members may continue to pray for them, regardless of scientific protocols. The prayer group may not be able to control their prayers in the surgically precise manner laid down by the experimenters. In addition, there may also be an element of unknowing or unwitting prayer: Behind such studies lies the rather naïve, sterile assumption that prayer is a kind of “Dear God” epistle that we set down to write in our innermost mind, when in fact prayer can be near-automatic and more integrated with our lives: When I am saddened by the news that my friend has fallen ill, this emotional response is itself a kind of prayer; my emotional state is a call for help. The heartbreak we feel upon sensing the plight of our neighbor is in a certain sense a kind of prayer, a plea that things might be set right. These studies fail to acknowledge the corporeal and quotidian nature of prayer: Life lived right is one long prayer.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, there is a strange hubris at the core of scientific prayer studies. “The arrogance that would make God an object and impose our laboratory conditions upon him is incapable of finding him,” Pope Benedict argues in Jesus of Nazareth. For who are we to play empiricist tricks with God? Einstein once quipped that “God doesn’t play dice,” to which Niels Bohr provided the perfect reply: “Who are you to tell God what to do with his dice?” There is room for a similar response to these studies. If God is omniscient, capable of knowing all things, he would certainly be able to see through schemes and stratagems like randomly-controlled trials, whose aim, it would seem, is to pin down his real existence and test his efficacy. But how could we mere mortals issue commands to God? When the Devil tempts Jesus to prove God’s saving powers, his reply is simply, “It is also written: ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’” The Christian view is that we must put our trust in the Lord, but we cannot therefore throw ourselves off the top of a building and expect his saving grace to swoop in and keep us from hitting the ground, because that would be akin to issuing an order to God—exploiting his omnibenevolence, and therefore disrupting the rightly-ordered relationship between creator and creature.
What these studies also neglect is that what we hold to be good does not always coincide with the good that God wills. We may fervently desire good health and long life. But the Christian life means resigning oneself to the idea that one does not always get what one wants. The Cross, that “terrible cross,” as Robert Barron puts it, teaches that through suffering, the good may also be brought about, hard as that may be to stomach.
Furthermore, there is an axiomatic assumption at the core of such studies that is deeply inimical to the Christian worldview, namely the idea that God is somehow absent from the “scientific” treatment of medical ills. Medical science is the work of human beings, these studies suggest, while prayer is a kind of afterthought, a distinct appeal to God. But whatever this is, it is not the Biblical view of the world. Hegel’s notion of Spirit marching through history, racking up all manner of scientific and technological breakthroughs along the way—from the discovery of hygiene to penicillin and modern cancer treatments—could be read in an overtly Christian-theological manner, showing that God is already working to help us by way of (supposedly secular) scientific interventions. A competent surgeon who removes a cancerous tumor or a lab researcher on the cusp of discovering a new drug are both examples of a divine power working through them to bring about the good on Earth. “Now we have this treasure in clay jars, so that this extraordinary power may be from God and not from us,” Paul tells us (2 Cor. 4:7). Secular scientists can be instruments of God, whether they like it or not, like “clay jars” freighting the divine life into the world.
Christianity is not anti-empirical or anti-science. The Gospel of John emphasizes that Christ has a deep respect for the innate human desire for empirical knowledge and sensate proof: Our reason makes us creatures enamored with ratiocination. This is why the resurrected Christ allows Thomas to view and touch his wounds: “Put your finger here; see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it into my side” (John 20: 27). If God made us in his own image, this means that he equipped us with a certain basic empiricist orientation to the world around us—and he respects this human predilection. But it is more pleasing to him that we trust in him: “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed” (John 20:29).
Finally, prayers do not stack up like quantitatively additive interventions. More prayer does not necessarily make for better prayer. (And more medical treatment is not always better than less treatment: Combining prescription drugs can do more harm than good.) To think that two prayers are twice as powerful as one prayer, or that two hundred praying persons are two hundred times more powerful than one person’s prayers, runs counter to the notion that prayers are only ever supplications to the One who wields authority (ἐξουσία). To think in these former terms is to move away from religion and into the realm of magic: If two of my prayers are automatically better than one of them, then I have become a sorcerer, capable of controlling God himself. As noted above, this approach is antithetical to Christian thought.
We have, however, been given good reason to believe that the divine standing of the one who prays plays some role in the efficacy of prayer: “The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (James 5:16). But scientific trials cannot as a matter of principle take such differences into account—how could they? We mere creatures cannot guess the true will of the creator. It is only for him to decide whether a person is righteous or not—or whether a prayer will be heard.
The proper course of action in the Christian life is to believe without seeing. This is what is called faith—real faith. As the Incredulity of Thomas in the Gospel of John shows, only authentic faith is truly pleasing to God, even though he sometimes meets us midway, given our all-too-human longing for empirical evidence. But randomized controlled trials will never give rise to real belief. God is unlikely to allow us to pin him down quite so easily. The one who prays without second-guessing the Almighty, prays best.