A friend recently asked me, "Have you heard about that study that showed that prayer doesn't work? How do we explain that?" My friend was referring to a medical study published in the American Heart Journal in 2006 that concluded that prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery. Click here to read the story in the New York Times. Click here to read an abstract of the study, or scroll to the bottom of this post to see a summary.

This study has been used by atheists and others to attack the belief that intercessory prayer is effective.  How then, should pray-ers of any faith respond to these arguments?

We should respond charitably, of course, but my first thought was,  "Let's give God two pellets of cheese and see if he pushes the bar with his nose." I mean, if God is omniscient (all-knowing) as Christians, Jews, Moslems, Sikhs, and others claim, then isn't this study a bit like lab mice trying to do a study on the laboratory's scientists?  Can we really perform a "blind" study on a being with an omnipotent will and omniscient intellect?  Or to put it another way:  the scientists attempted to test the hypothesis that God is an impersonal force that could always be directed by our wills.  And their test results do not show that God does not answer prayer, but rather that God is not an impersonal force that can always be directed by our wills.

There are a few more things to say: 

• The study did not (and could not) control prayer outside of the study, including outside prayers for the unprayed-for group and prayer by the ill participants and their family members.
• Many pray-ers believe that God answers prayers in three ways: "Yes", "No, I've got something better in mind", or "Wait".  The study only attempted to measure one answer, "Yes".
• The study did not account for any love for the patient on the part of the pray-er and none of the pray-er participants knew any of the patients personally.  Could love make prayer more powerful?
• Pray-ers and spiritual masters worldwide attribute many other salutory effects to prayer besides physical healing.  These include, but are not limited to: interior peace, change of heart, forgiveness, and reconciled relationships.  This study ignored any effect other than physical healing.  What if physical healing is in fact the rarest of the effects of prayer?
• There are at least five types of prayer: supplication, praise (adoration), contrition, contemplation, and thanksgiving.  This study only attempted to characterize the effectiveness of one type: intercessory supplication. 
• Will God always give us what we want just because we ask for it?  The gospel of Matthew (Mt 26:39) in the Christian scriptures provides an example of intercessory prayer that seemingly was not answered - a prayer offered by Jesus Himself.  But Christians believe that it was answered - with a "no" that led to the cross.  Cannot suffering sometimes be part of God's plan?

I'll end by letting Pope Benedict XVI have the last word.  Here's an excerpt from his recent book, "Jesus of Nazareth":

"The arrogance that would make God an object and impose our laboratory conditions upon him is incapable of finding him.  For it already implies that we deny God as God by placing ourselves above him, by discarding the whole dimension of love, of interior listening; by no longer acknowledging as real anything but we can experimentally test and grasp.  To think like that is to make oneself God.  And to do that is to abase not only God, but the world and oneself, too." 

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References

Here's a summary of the study from the New York Times:

In the study, the researchers monitored 1,802 patients...who received coronary bypass surgery.  The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half the patients who received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive prayers.

Analyzing complications in the 30 days after the operations, the researchers found no differences between those patients who were prayed for and those who were not.  In another of the study's findings, a significantly higher number of the patients who knew that they were being prayed for — 59 percent — suffered complications, compared with 51 percent of those who were uncertain.

•  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html
  

• Pope Benedict XVI, "Jesus of Nazareth", Doubleday, New York 2007, p37.