What It Means to Be Moral. Phil Zuckerman

      Theistic Claim: God exists because He answers prayers.

      Skeptical Response: All stories of answered prayers are merely anecdotal. The actual answering of prayers has never been proven in any sort of controlled, unbiased setting or objective experimental design.²⁴

      Oh, wait just a minute. That’s not quite true. There was that big Templeton study back in 2006.

      Led by Dr. Herbert Benson and funded by the Templeton Foundation to the tune of $2.4 million, this was the most rigorous, empirically sound study of the possible positive effects of prayer ever conducted in the history of science. The study was double-blind and involved a control group and an experimental group—just the right conditions to objectively measure the relationship between an independent variable (in this case, being prayed for or not) and a dependent variable (improved health). Here’s what Dr. Benson’s team did: they randomly divided up over 1,800 coronary bypass heart surgery patients from six different hospitals into three groups: the first group had Christians praying for them—the Christians prayed that the selected heart patients would have “a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications”—and the patients in this group were told that people might or might not be praying for them. The second group of heart patients was not prayed for, but they were also told that they might or might not have people praying for them. The third group was prayed for, and these patients were told that they were definitely being prayed for. The Christians that were doing all the praying were given the first name and last initial of the specific patients they were to pray for. The result: there was virtually no difference in the recovery trajectories of each group, with all three groups experiencing more or less the same rates and levels of complications. The only minor differences that did arise actually worked against the prayers; for example, 18 percent of the patients who had been prayed for suffered major complications such as strokes or heart attacks, compared to only 13 percent of the patients who did not receive any prayers.²⁵

      There was also that Duke study back in 2003. In this three-year experiment, nearly 750 heart patients in nine different hospitals, all slated for coronary surgery, were prayed for by a variety of religious people, including Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, and Jews. The results of this double-blind experiment were similarly conclusive: there were no significant differences in the recoveries or health outcomes of those patients who were prayed for and those who were not.²⁶

      The scientific study of the effectiveness of prayer—or rather, the lack of effectiveness—goes back at least 150 years, with the first known formal attempt to empirically discern prayer’s efficacy being carried out in 1872 by pioneering British statistician Francis Galton. He reasoned that since the British royal family received far more prayers on its behalf than everyone else—praying for the royal family was a structured part of Sunday services throughout Great Britain—then they should live longer and experience better health than everyone else. Galton statistically tested this hypothesis and (of course) found that the regular prayers of the mass of British people had no such discernible effect on the royal family—they did not, on average, live longer or enjoy better health than anyone else, given all relevant variables considered. Galton also conducted horticultural tests in which he prayed over randomly selected parcels of land; his prayers had no effect on which sections of land bore better, richer, stronger, or more abundant plant life. And thus, between Galton’s research in 1872 and Templeton’s in 2006, no compelling evidence has ever been brought forth empirically illustrating the power of prayer.²⁷

      This doesn’t mean, of course, that people don’t experience wondrous, inexplicable things all the time, or that every now and then someone’s prayers appear to have been answered. Such things happen frequently: a wife is told that her dying husband has a zero chance of recovery. Prayers are prayed. And then—voilà—the husband suddenly recovers, astonishing the doctors who are left dumbstruck, unable to explain his recovery. It’s nothing short of a miracle. While these things do happen, what is far and away more common is that the husband dies—a heap of fervent prayers notwithstanding. And also note that for every person who miraculously recovers, there’s another perfectly healthy person who suddenly, for no apparent reason, drops dead of some minor illness, or strange disease, or undetected aneurism, or stroke, or infection. Such is the precarious randomness of the human body and its functioning—people sometimes recover when all odds are against them, but more often than not, they don’t.

      Think about it: if praying worked, no prayed-for mothers would ever die of breast cancer; no prayed-for teenagers would ever die on the operating table; no prayed-for dogs or cats would ever fail to return home; hundreds of thousands of praying Tutsi families hiding throughout the woods, alleys, attics, and cellars of Rwanda in 1994 would not have been found and hacked to death by Hutu marauders; hundreds of thousands of trains packed with praying Jewish families on the way to the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Sobibór, and Treblinka in the 1940s would have never reached their destinations; and tens of millions of praying people would never die from starvation resulting from a lack of rain. Heck, three hundred million people died from smallpox in the twentieth century alone—clearly, all of their prayers, and their parents’ prayers, and their children’s prayers, and their spouses’ prayers, did not have the hoped-for healing effect.

      In the face of prayer’s inefficacy, believers will always say: God may not answer your prayer in the way you want—but He has a plan for you nonetheless and knows better. Of course, they offer no tangible evidence for this assertion. But even if it were true—especially if it were true—then why bother praying? If you believe that God already has a plan for you and yours, then praying for any given outcome for you and yours makes no sense. It’s all so deeply irrational in a way that only religious faith can be: you pray to God to cure your child’s leukemia, and your child recovers, and that’s evidence that prayer works—or, more likely, you pray to God to cure your child’s leukemia, and your child dies, and that’s evidence that God answered your prayer but just in a different way than you wanted, because God has a plan and knows better.

      Talk about classic “heads I win, tails you lose” balderdash that defies basic rational scrutiny.

      And, well, that’s because praying is not rational. It is simply—and understandably—what most humans do when there’s nothing left for them to do in dire, scary, or painful situations. It is what theists do when they have little or no control over a situation that they’d like to change. It’s what religious men and women do when they need to comfort themselves during trying times. And if it does provide them all with even a modicum of comfort and hope during such times, so be it. Such self-consolation can be a good thing. But it doesn’t come close to proving the existence of God.

      Finally, on this matter of prayer: even if it could actually be proven that prayers to God do in fact work—that an all-powerful deity heeds earnest mental petitions—then that raises the question: What sort of deity would this be, ethically speaking? One that helps suffering or scared humans only when and if they ask/plead/implore? Seems downright malevolent. As American philosopher Georges Rey commented, “the idea of an omni-god that would permit, for example, children to die slowly from leukemia is already pretty puzzling; but to permit this to happen unless someone prays to Him to prevent it—this verges on a certain sort of sadism and moral incoherence.”²⁸