Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer
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[edit] Purpose
Like all things Templeton, this project was created to provide scientific evidence to religious action (specifically of the Christian variety). The team, under the leadership of Harvard Medical School doctors Herbert Benson and Jeffery A. Dusek, et al, was granted a large research grant (USD $2.4M) to test the efficacy of this type of prayer.
[edit] Methodology
1,802 subjects, all receiving the same surgery and who generally believed that prayer works, were divided into three groups:
- Patients who would be receiving prayers, but didn't know it.
- Patients who would be receiving prayers and were told about it ahead of time.
- Patients who would not be receiving prayers (the control group).
Three groups of religious folk (two Catholic, one Protestant) from religious states (Kansas, Minnesota) provided prayers to the study subjects in groups 1 and 2 (whom they did not know) throughout the course of the study.
[edit] Results
The results found no differences in the complications of groups 1 and 3, which a rational scientist would expect. Unexpectedly, however, patients in group 2 actually had more complications during surgery...a psychosomatic result of knowing about the prayers, perhaps?
[edit] Backlash
Of course the atheism community had a field day with these results. Richard Dawkins mentions the experiment in The God Delusion, and offers up the possibility that because prayer empirically made matters worse for the patients, that they might have a legal case against their well-wishers for willfully aggravating their conditions[1]!
The Templeton Foundation, required to release the results of the study lest they lose face as a legitimate scientific institution, panned the results and did their best to play it down in the media.
“”Our study was never intended to address the existence of God or the presence or absence of intelligent design in the universe. The study did not endeavor, either, to compare the efficacy of one prayer form over another or to assess participants' understanding of the nature and purpose of prayer. Finally, it was not our objective to discover whether prayers from one religious group work better than prayers from another.
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One wonders what their remarks would have been if the results had turned out in favor of the efficacy of prayer. And if these five things that they assert weren't part of the purpose of the study, then why spend so much money on it?
They suggested other possible reasons for the results (e.g., maybe if the patients knew they were being prayed for by loved ones instead of random strangers at a distant church), but no follow-up study was ever issued.
[edit] External links
- Press Release from the Templeton Foundation about the study
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ Dawkins says with tongue inserted firmly into his cheek, but this is just one bullet in the large chest of ammunition against the case for religion as a benevolent institution