Fingerprints of God_ The Search for the Science of Spirituality - Barbara Bradley Hagerty [28]
Violating the Laws of the Universe
Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center, holds a less charitable view of these prayer studies. I asked him his assessment: Does the prayer of one person benefit another?
“The answer is pretty unequivocally no,” Sloan said crisply. “There’s recent evidence as well as older evidence which suggests there’s no impact of distant, intercessory prayer.”
In his book Blind Faith, Sloan has amassed an arsenal of reasons why these studies—even if they support prayer—should be discarded.23 First, they don’t take into account the prayers of family and friends who are going to pray for the patient going into bypass surgery no matter what, even if the patient is in the nonprayer “control group” and researchers tell the family not to pray. A wife will not refrain from praying for her husband just for the good of science—and Sloan argued that those “supplementary prayers” muddy the results.
Second, he said, the researchers fell into the “sharpshooter’s fallacy,” where you first empty a six-gun into the side of the barn and then draw the bull’s-eye. In this case, the researchers often asked intercessors to pray and then watched to see what happened—declaring victory when, for example, AIDS patients bathed in prayer visit the hospital less frequently.
“In science you have to specify what variable you expect to be influenced by your treatment before you conduct your study,” Sloan said. “You don’t fish around until you find something afterward.”
But Sloan’s chief complaint is that prayer studies are “a wild-goose chase that violates everything we know about the universe.”
“Physicists tell us there are four forces that we know about in the universe. That’s it, just four,” he explained. There are strong and weak nuclear forces, gravity, and electromagnetic energy. None of these could explain how a weightless thing like a thought or a prayer could affect a person five feet away, much less thousands of miles away.
“There are no plausible mechanisms that account for how somebody’s thoughts or prayers can influence the health of another person,” Sloan said. “None.We know of none.”
Proponents of distant healing are not troubled by that argument. For years, no one knew how morphine or aspirin or quinine worked. They just knew it worked. Hand-washing was standard medical practice well before anyone hatched a theory of infectious diseases: surgeons and doctors just knew patients fared better when their doctors lathered up. So what if we don’t know how prayers help another person? Eventually, they say, we will.
I confess my bias here. My own family life was peppered with these “unexplainable” healings.24 We did not chronicle these healings except in memory, but over the past century, thousands of other Christian Scientists have done so in the pages of magazines such as the Christian Science Journal or Sentinel. Perhaps a skeptic could dismiss some of the thousands of unexplainable recoveries from near-fatal accidents or Alzheimer’s or cancer or other diseases, complete with doctors’ verifications. Maybe he could dismiss most of them. But all of them?
For me, the most satisfying compromise between the proponents and skeptics of prayer came from John Astin, a research scientist at California Pacific Medical Center. Astin reviewed the early prayer studies and concluded that the seeming effects of prayer were real and not just chance happenings. But he also led a study that found that prayer did not help people with HIV.25 When I visited him, he told me he was genuinely puzzled about the conflicting results.
Astin’s hunch is that one person’s thoughts or prayers can influence someone else’s body. But they may not have the firepower to alter the course of a disease.