Does Prayer Really Work?

Some time ago, I remember a study that was done on the efficacy of prayer. If my memory serves me correctly, it was supposed to be one of the biggest studies done on prayer.

The study was set up to be a double-blind study in which religious volunteers would pray over the healing of medically compromised patients. I believe the medically compromised patients had heart disease issues.

Now double-blind in this study meant that the religious volunteers had no idea who they were praying over, and the patients had no idea of who was praying over them, if at all. And as a control group, there was a group of medically compromised patients who were not prayed over at all by the volunteers.

In order to prevent the religious volunteers from knowing who they were praying over, they were each given a code to pray to instead of any identifiers such as a name or picture. So each medically compromised patient was labeled with a specific unique code. And each religious volunteer was given one of the specific unique codes to pray for.

What do you think the results were? No significant difference in medical improvement between the group that was prayed over and the group that was not. Atheists world-wide must have been rejoicing! Is this the death knell of prayer? Has prayer finally been proven to be total nonsense? Not so fast.

You see, the act of praying is a social practice between the person doing the praying, the person receiving the prayer, and God. This involves some level of intimacy. Once you remove the social dynamics from the act of praying, it is no longer an act of praying. It just becomes poppycock.

The main problem with this study is that the religious volunteers had no idea who they were praying for. They were just given a code and told to pray to it. There were no social dynamics at all! Is it any wonder that there were no significant differences between the groups?

In actuality, the religious volunteers were praying to the codes — not to the medically compromised patients! I suppose none of the codes had heart disease.