Frasch Ideas—Examine, Inquire, Explore

More on Prayer and the STEP Study

Posted by Theresa on July 10th, 2006 filed in Believe It or Not

This is from Rhosgobel: Radagast’s home about the STEP (The Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer) Study:

I am impressed by these authors - they appear to have done a first-class study on a very controversial topic. However, what’s distressing is that the study will probably not change anyone’s opinion.

Those who already believe that prayer is useless didn’t need a $2.4 million study to show as much, and those who believe in prayer will probably just rationalize this study away. Examples of this rationalization can be already found in many of the newspaper articles covering this study:

“Working in a large medical center like Mayo, Mr. Marek [a hospital chaplain] said, ‘You hear tons of stories about the power of prayer, and I don’t doubt them.’” (NY Times)

“A person of faith would say that this study is interesting,” Mr. Barth [spiritual director of Silent Unity] said, “but we’ve been praying a long time and we’ve seen prayer work, we know it works, and the research on prayer and spirituality is just getting started.” (NY Times)

“Dr. David Stevens, executive director of the Christian Medical and Dental Associations, said he believes intercessory prayer can influence medical outcomes, but that science is not equipped to explore it. ‘Do we control God through prayer? Theologians would say absolutely not. God decides sometimes to intervene, and sometimes not,’ he said.” (Houston Chronicle)

“‘Maybe the people weren’t praying very hard,’ Higgins said of the study. ‘I have no doubts that intercessory prayer works, (just) not all the time.’ Even Christ’s prayers in the garden of Gethsemane weren’t answered, Higgins said. ‘At the end, it’s God’s will be done. … I don’t know how you can measure those things.’” (St. Petersburg Times)

It’d be nice if they had some data to back up their claims.

If there were a good rational basis for why prayer should work (and/or multiple other well-controlled studies showing that prayer did actually help), I could see listening to these critics and attempting to argue that maybe this study wasn’t quite perfect and thus we should do more study. However, there is no good evidence that prayer does anything, and not even an evidence-supported mechanism for why prayer should work, so let’s just call it a day and focus on remedies that might actually help people.