Beyond Thoughts and Prayers
You can keep your thoughts and prayers. We prefer sauce and beers: Compassion backed by meaningful action.
Prayer Does Not Work
Prayer has been used for thousands of years as a response to illness, tragedy, hardship, and uncertainty. But when prayer is subjected to scientific testing, there is no reliable evidence that praying for someone produces the requested external result.
What Is Intercessory Prayer?
Intercessory prayer simply means praying on behalf of another person. If someone is sick and you pray for god to heal them, that is intercessory prayer. It is particularly useful for scientific study because researchers can compare people who are prayed for with people who are not, while controlling whether the recipients know prayer is taking place.
What Happens When Prayer Is Tested?
One of the largest studies was the 2006 Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer, or STEP. Researchers studied 1,802 patients undergoing coronary artery bypass surgery at six hospitals.
Among patients who did not know whether they were receiving prayer, complications occurred in 52% of those who were prayed for and 51% of those who were not. The researchers concluded that intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery. Even more strikingly, patients who knew for certain that they were being prayed for experienced complications at a higher rate: 59%, compared with 52% among patients who received prayer but were uncertain whether they were receiving it. The researchers did not establish why this occurred, so it should not be interpreted as proof that prayer itself caused the additional complications.
A separate 2006 meta-analysis examined 14 controlled studies of distant intercessory prayer. After combining the available evidence, the researchers found no scientifically discernible effect of intercessory prayer and concluded that additional resources should not be directed toward further studies of the same question.
Prayer vs. the Placebo Effect
There is an important difference between prayer having an external effect and a person experiencing a psychological response to prayer. Knowing that people are praying for you may make you feel supported, cared for, hopeful, or less alone. Likewise, praying yourself may provide comfort, structure, or a way of coping with stress. Those experiences are real psychological experiences. They do not demonstrate that prayer caused an external supernatural intervention.
This is why blinded studies of intercessory prayer are important. When the person receiving prayer does not know whether they are in the prayer group, expectations associated with knowing that prayer is occurring can be reduced. In the STEP trial, once that knowledge was controlled, the patients receiving prayer did no better than those who did not receive it.
What Does the Evidence Tell Us?
Science cannot test every possible theological claim about gods or prayer. What it can test are specific claims that prayer produces measurable outcomes. When intercessory prayer has been subjected to controlled scientific testing, it has not demonstrated a reliable beneficial effect.
Comfort may be real. Hope may be real. The psychological experience of praying may be real. But when someone needs actual help, prayer should not be confused with a demonstrated solution. Thoughts and prayers do not feed the hungry, house the homeless, heal the sick, rebuild homes, or put resources into the hands of people who need them. Real problems require real action.
A Noodly Perspective
We do not expect the Flying Spaghetti Monster to solve our problems simply because we ask Him to. His noodly appendages gave us minds capable of reason, hands capable of helping, and a world in which our actions have consequences. So when someone is hungry, we feed them. When someone needs help, we help them. When something is broken, we work to fix it.
You can keep your thoughts and prayers. We prefer sauce and beers.
This is the Whey.