Transcript

You often hear atheists say, Nothing fails like prayer.

And some even claim that scientific studies have proven that prayer doesn't work.

But in today's episode, I'm gonna show why science not only has not disproven the efficacy of prayer, but that it's impossible for science to do this.

Here's atheist Hemant Mehta describing the typical kind of study on prayer that atheists usually cite.

That's kinda like the ultimate prayer test, isn't it?

If all these people are praying for you to get better, and let's say they're not praying for the person next to you who has the exact same problem, and you got better, wouldn't that suggest that prayer had something to do with it?

It's kind of like this ultimate science experiment.

Well, guess what?

They've done that experiment.

They've done controlled experiments, at least as much as they could be controlled anyway, where some group of patients in a hospital are prayed for by strangers, and they don't know about it, and those same strangers do not pray for the control group.

And they kind of see which group does better.

Guess what?

There's no difference.

Who would have thought?

So look, prayer doesn't help.

But there are three problems with these studies that make them useless when it comes to studying the efficacy of prayer.

First, there's the problem of an impossible control group.

In an experiment, the control group are the subjects that do not receive the variable under testing.

When it comes to testing prayer, the control group would be a set of people who are not receiving intercessory healing prayers.

But it's impossible to isolate any group of people from prayer.

Of course, scientists could divide a group of sick people into two groups and tell a specific set of volunteers to only pray for one of the groups of these sick people.

The scientists would then observe the patients that the volunteers are praying for and see if they do better, do the same, or do worse than the so-called control group.

But this wouldn't be a true control group, because there's no way to isolate those people from receiving any form of intercessory prayer.

What if the friends and family of the people in this group are praying for them anyways?

What if a holy woman in a very rural area on the other side of the world prays for the healing of those who have no one to pray for them?

I can easily see God dignifying the prayers of such a holy, unknown woman by making her the mighty cause that brought healing for people who were being used in an experiment.

Participants in prayer studies also complain about the scripted nature of the prayers the researchers give them, so it makes sense that God would give preference to the genuine prayers of a holy person.

James High 16 even says, The prayers of a righteous person are very powerful.

And on The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus condemned vain repetitions in prayer as if prayer were just mechanical recitations that force God to do something.

In fact, God's attitude towards human beings trying to test His willingness to answer prayer brings us to the second problem with prayer studies, the problem of an omniscient test subject.

Testing the effects of intercessory prayer isn't the same as testing an inanimate force like gravity, because God is not a force that is automatically activated when enough prayers are uttered.

God has a will, and so He might choose to honor or not honor certain requests made through prayer.

In fact, it's been said that God always answers our prayers, it's just sometimes the answer is no.

The idea of testing God's willingness to answer prayer is even condemned in scripture when the devil says that Jesus should jump off the temple since the Bible says God will send His holy angels to prevent His Holy One from being harmed.

Jesus shuts down the devil's temptation by declaring, It is said you shall not tempt the Lord your God.

Now, science does test the reactions of people and not just forces.

Psychologists and sociologists do this all the time.

But the experiments involving these people must be blind or even double-blind.

This means the participants, and sometimes even the researchers, can't know who is receiving the test variable.

Otherwise, their knowledge will affect the outcome of the experiment.

So when it comes to an experiment on prayer, the person being observed cannot know people are praying for him.

That's because studies have shown that people who know they are receiving prayers tend to have worse health outcomes in these experiments because they're anxious about their condition being so bad that prayer volunteers have been brought in to try to help them.

However, a prayer study is, whether admits it or not, testing God to see if God will answer prayers.

But just as when humans, when they know they are in an experiment, they sometimes alter their behavior and this changes the experiment's results, the same is true for God.

The only prayer study that would count would be one where God does not know He's part of a prayer study, that is doing an experiment on His willingness to answer prayer, but that's impossible given God's omniscience, or His being all-knowing.

Here's an example to explain how omniscience messes up any kind of prayer study.

Imagine we did an experiment on a celebrity to see which kinds of fan mail he responds to.

If he knows he's part of an experiment, he may alter his response to satisfy the experimenters, or he may not participate at all because he's indignant about his response being part of some experiment and not a genuine response to his fans.

Now, a person testing prayer might try to get around this by saying, Prayer experiments have nothing to do with God per se.

The experiments only test if the physical act of prayer that we observe has any effect on the people being prayed for or in healing them.

I mean, you could do a study like that, and Christians would agree that merely saying words into the void doesn't do anything.

Such a study would also disprove New Age fads like The Secret that make it seem like you can manifest or will reality to be a certain way.

Prayers are not magical incantations that manipulate reality.

They're just requests for help.

The word prayer comes from the Latin precare, which means to make a request.

In Old English, this could be a request made to anyone, but over time, it came to mean making a request of God, even though it traditionally had a much wider usage, which is why Catholics speak of praying to Mary and the saints, or we now say seeking their intercession.

Whether scientists admit it or not, everybody interested in prayer studies is assuming that what is being tested is whether it is more likely God will heal someone based on other people asking God to heal that person.

But since God is both all-knowing and not an empirically observable part of the natural order,Science cannot study what God will or won't do.

All scientists can do is make a non-scientific inference about God's will based on extremely selective results in a prayer study, and this brings us to the third and final problem with prayer studies, the problem of interpretation.

Any study on intercessory prayer will yield one of three results: prayer has a negative effect on a patient's health, prayer has no effect on their health, or prayer has a positive effect.

And we're talking about intercessory prayer from other people.

Regardless of what outcome we observe, this cannot tell us anything about God's existence, God's nature, or God's will.

For example, suppose a truly blind prayer study showed that intercessory prayer results in worse health outcomes for the recipients of prayer.

This has been observed in some outlying prayer studies, but suppose it were consistently observed.

What would we conclude?

Is God making the patients worse to bring about a greater good?

Is the devil using his powerful yet non-miraculous powers to make people sicker in order to ruin our faith in God?

Is the creator of the universe evil rather than good?

Does karma punish organized scientific prayers and reward genuine ones?

Science can't determine which of these explanations is the correct one because science is restricted to observing the natural world.

Even if a prayer study found a positive correlation between intercessory prayer and healing, it wouldn't show that God exists.

Now, I'll admit, such an outcome would bolster my faith, at least at first, but this outcome would be plagued by problems similar to those that accompanied a study that showed prayer caused negative effects in people.

Is God the cause of this statistically anomalous healing?

Is it a psychic mutant?

Aliens?

Is it an evil creator who heals patients in order to bring about a greater evil?

Is it an impersonal karma field?

In these cases, science could only show us that intercessory prayer caused a certain kind of physical effect, but any speculations about the relationship between the cause, prayer, and the effect, healing, would belong to the realm of philosophy or religion, not science.

That's why in narrow circumstances with more data, the church can reach conclusions about miraculous healings.

In these cases, the church can use sound reasoning to determine that there is enough of a religious context, like a saintly life of an intercessor, to attribute a miracle healing to the person's intercession.

This isn't scientific proof of miraculous healing, but there is no scientific proof that all of our knowledge comes from scientific proof, so that's not a good objection.

So what if scientific studies show that intercessory prayer made no difference in a patient's health?

This seems to be the result of a large study of prayer called The STEP Project.

Atheists might say that this proves nothing fails like prayer, because if God did not exist, we would expect intercessory prayer to not have any measurable effects.

But this argument includes the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent.

That fallacy goes like this: if A, then B. B, therefore A. Now, why is this a fallacy?

Well, consider this example.

If I'm in San Francisco, then I'm in California.

I'm in California, therefore I am in San Francisco.

Of course, I could be in Los Angeles or Yosemite and still be in California without being in San Francisco.

In this argument, the consequent proposition cannot be used to support the truth of the antecedent proposition.

However, it could be used to deny the truth of the antecedent proposition, this is also called arguing by modus tollens, by saying something like, I am not in California, therefore I am not in San Francisco.

But it cannot be used to prove the truth of the antecedent.

Now, when we plug in the atheist argument from prayer, we get the same problem.

Here's the argument.

If God does not exist, then prayers made in scientific studies will not be answered.

Prayers made in scientific studies are not answered, therefore God does not exist.

But God can still exist even if certain requests made in prayer are not answered.

After all, God may have good reasons for not granting those requests, and he may be answering other prayers that are not being cataloged by scientists.

Since God is not an automatic force that acts in statistically predictable ways, extremely limited studies using some intercessory prayers cannot be generalized to give us conclusions about the efficacy of prayer for the billions of people who pray to God outside of the hundreds involved in a few studies.

But that doesn't mean we can't know anything about how prayer affects us in our own lives.

God could reveal himself to you in a subjective way that you can't prove to others, but that doesn't disprove that revelation for you.

For example, if you were falsely convicted of a crime based on good objective evidence, that wouldn't justify you rejecting the subjective evidence of your own knowledge that you are innocent just because you can't objectively share that knowledge of your innocence with other people.

So we could have subjective knowledge of God's existence through prayers we make to God that we are unable to share with other people, but that doesn't mean that we should reject that evidence that God has given us.

And sometimes we do pray for help and God doesn't respond, and that stinks, but that doesn't mean there is no God or that God does not care about us.

Sometimes when we ask for something, we're asking for something that is bad for us, or at least not good for us, but we can't see that.

James 4:3 says, You ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.

But in other cases, we aren't asking for something out of a selfish motivation and God still doesn't grant our prayer.

This is where faith sustains us and we have to trust God, who sees life from an eternal perspective that we cannot comprehend.

Romans 8:28 says, We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him, who are called according to his purpose.

Saint Paul asked the Lord three times to remove a thorn in his side, which could've been a physical ailment or even a person causing Paul a lot of trouble, and the Lord did not answer Paul's request.

Here's how he put it in Second Corinthians chapter 12.

Three times I besought the Lord about this, that it should leave me.

But he said to me, 'My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.' I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities, for when I am weak, then I am strong.

For more resources on the intersection between faith and science, check out my 20 Answers booklet, 20 Answers Faith and Science.

Thank you all so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.