Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [139]
21 E. Harkness, N. Abbot, and E. Ernst, “A Randomized Trial of Distant Healing for Skin Warts,” American Journal of Medicine 10 (2000): 448-52.
22 H. Benson et al., “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in Cardiac Bypass Patients: A Multicenter Randomized Trial of Uncertainty and Certainty of Receiving Intercessory Prayer,” American Heart Journal 151 (2006): 934-42.
23 Richard P. Sloan, Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008).
24 One of the more remarkable involved my own infant ears. When I was a few months old, I developed an excruciating ear infection. I shrieked for several days straight to announce the problem. After days of intense prayer by my mother and our Christian Science practitioner, Mrs. Wooden, I grew quiet. Gratified by the silence, my mother tiptoed into my room. Lying on either side of my head, next to my ears, were two pieces of a hard yellow substance in the shape of honeycombs—double mastoids that had somehow emerged from my ears on their own. Of course, a skeptic would say that my mother did not document this “healing” by getting a doctor to confirm it, or that if such a “healing” did occur, you could say it was the natural course of events. Everything depends on how you read the “evidence.”
25 See Astin et al., “The Efficacy of Distant Healing.”
CHAPTER 4. THE TRIGGERS FOR GOD
1 Granqvist found that people who experience sudden religious conversions more often have “insecure attachment histories” (distant relationship with parents, creating a need to compensate, which prompted them to see God as surrogate parent). These people are nearly twice as likely to have sudden conversions as do people who have secure relationships with their parents. They tend to be more religious if their parents are less so, and vice versa (a sort of “I’ll show you” phenomenon). People who have secure relationships with their parents tend to experience gradual conversions and religious changes. These children develop a similar relationship with “God” as their parents did, and also tend to adopt their parents’ religious or nonreligious standards. P. Granqvist and L. Kirkpatrick, “Religious Conversion and Perceived Childhood Attachment: A Meta-analysis,” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 14 (2004): 223-50.
2 Jerome Kagan, a Harvard child psychologist, told me in an interview that he’s found a link between religiousness and children who are “high reactive.” He has been following five hundred white middle-class adolescents (now sixteen years old) since they were four months old. Infants who were high-reactive—that is, they squirmed and waved their legs and arms at the smallest stimulus, such as a mobile over their cribs—tended to show greater cortical arousal throughout the years. They were more anxious and tense. By the time the children reached adolescence, twice as many of those who were high-reactive as infants had become religious, as compared with the low-reactive kids. Kagan theorized that the children were using religiousness as a coping mechanism to help them reduce tension. (He notes that the adolescents who were high-reactive and not religious—all three of them—were in therapy and on drugs.) “A spiritual outlook is helpful,” Kagan told me, “because it says, ‘Things are going to be okay, you’re in good hands, there is a supernatural force, and this supernatural force will take care of you. You just be good, be kind to others, believe in some sort of supernatural force.’ ”
3 B. Zinnbauer and K. Pargament, “Spiritual Conversion: A Study of Religious Change Among College Students,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37 (1998): 161-80. Since the 1800s, studies have shown that conversion is a radical change following a period of stress (often crisis). Some have found that 80 percent of converts reported serious distress, including feelings of despair, doubts about self-worth, fear of rejection, estrangement. Others found that converts had problematic relationships with their fathers, and that they