Does prayer work?
My wife and (then) two-week-old son were settled in the taxi–meter already running–for the ride to the Budapest airport, the bags were stuffed in the trunk, and we were all set to fly to the States for grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins to see our first-born after a year of living in Hungary. All set, except my passport was nowhere to be found. My job required a lot of travel, so I used my passport all the time, but of course now as we were about to fly half-way around the world it wasn’t in any of the usual places. I frantically checked and re-checked my desk drawers, briefcase and travel bags, but as time ticked by and we were getting dangerously close to missing our flight, it didn’t turn up. So, I did what I had been taught to do in these sorts of situations since childhood: I prayed for help. After a fervent but fast prayer, I got up from my knees, walked directly to my closet, opened it up, reached inside the pocket of one of several pairs of slacks hanging there, and pulled out my passport, locked up our apartment, and went down to the taxi and we were on our way.
Did my prayer work? I’m convinced it did. But a skeptic might say there’s no way I can know that, because I don’t know what would have happened if I hadn’t prayed, but just, say, paused to collect my thoughts. That’s a good point. And of course there are all the times I may have prayed for some outcome that didn’t come to pass, but of course in a blog like this I only report on the successes (a form of publication bias).
How could I convince the skeptic that prayer works? Like a good empirical economist, I could carry out a randomized controlled trial of prayer, taking Alma’s advice literally, applying the scientific method as Tim wrote about. It could go something like this: each time I have some dilemma on which I would ordinarily seek divine help, I instead flip a coin, and pray only if it lands heads. I carefully record how it all turned out, and after enough of these I look and see if outcomes were on average different when I prayed.
Would this work? (that’s not a rhetorical question–I’m really curious what people think about this) My hunch is that it wouldn’t. The reason is it’s not prayer that I believe is important, but rather sincere, faithful prayer (see Moroni 10:4). If I decide to pray on the basis of a coin flip, it seems by definition neither sincere nor faithful. Not only that, it smacks of tempting God, which Jesus taught us not to do.
So if we can’t run a randomized experiment to test if prayer works, how can we know if it does? Only one way: in the words of Spencer W. Kimball, do it. To have personal access to the Creator of the universe is a mind-boggling gift, but even more mind-boggling is the conviction sincere prayer can bring that this same Creator actually knows you and loves you and cares about you enough to whisper to you where you left your passport.
Prayer “works” in a lot of different ways. There are many types of prayers, or rather, many purposes for prayer.
Prayer works when you have inspiration or divine help with a problem. It works when you receive a little miracle as an answer to your prayer. It also works when you are worried and distressed and you pray and feel the calming and comforting influence of the Spirit. Or, when you realize (in the words of Mark Twain) you “can’t pray a lie” and prayer effectively sheds a light on your soul that causes you to repent and more humbly open your heart and allign your desires with God’s.
Prayer works, and I was very glad it worked that day and you found your passport! I’ve also been glad that it works when we’ve been up late worried about sick kids, and the many times prayer has helped us make big decisions about our family and our future.
I once found myself in a situation where I was surrounded by people in horrible circumstances who desperately needed help. At first I told myself, “I am powerless to really help anyone, all I can do is pray.” It took several weeks of prayer and experience in this situation to finally realize, the BEST thing I can do is pray sincerely and unceasingly.
I love your points about the different ways prayers “work.” I think most of the value of prayer (at least for me) is in the comfort, inspiration, or nudging to repentance it brings along the lines of your comment, rather than any specific intervention.
Loved the coin toss analogy…sounds so much like an economist. I got to say the prayer after losing things works! I’ve prayed countless times over lost items, and without fail I’ve find them. This has worked 100% of the time. That’s just about all the proof I need. Just do it repetitiously, and see if it works for you. Thanks, Brigham.
-B
One of my first memories of receiving an answer to a prayer was as a 5-year-old looking for the dime I was going to pay for tithing (I must have earned a dollar somehow). I prayed and I found it!
Brigham,
As an experiment, the one you propose is flawed in the way you point: the prayer would not be sincere. This does not preclude the feasibility of conducting a better designed experiment. Of course, for the believer, there is no need for the experiment, since the result is a foregone conclusion.
Roberto
So what would be a better-designed experiment? My sister points out there have actually been a number of studies of the effect of prayer with mixed results. Just skimming through them, they either look questionably done, or suffer from the same weakness you pointed out in my hypothetical experiment–if the underlying decision to pray is based on a randomization, it would seem to preclude the sincerity and faith that we believe are prerequisites for prayer to have an effect!
That is a good question. I am no expert in experiment design, nor in the psychology of religion, nor in theology. But I would propose that we may look at natural experiments, e.g. events that happen without being created in an experimental setting. And we can compare the outcomes of things for people likely to pray (religious people) and those unlikely to pray (non believers). Obvious weaknesses of this are that you do not know if people actually prayed or not. But as an approximation, it would go like this:
Parents of kids with a grave illness: the religious ones (by religious I mean those that subscribe to faiths that preach a providential god) are likely to ask god to heal their children, whereas the unbelievers are less likely to do so. What is the outcome? One could argue that one outcome is that this group of parents had more peace during the ordeal than this other group, etc. But if we look at hard outcomes: are the children of praying parents healing at a higher rate, or are the children of atheists dying at a higher rate, from the illness in question?
Second possible setting: a natural disaster hits. Religious people in the affected area are likely to pray, whereas the atheists are not. Do religious people survive at a higher rate than atheists?
None of these experiments are perfect. The fact that I cannot design a perfect experiment to test it today, however, does not preclude that an expert on relevant areas could design it.
Now, if we argue that the answer to prayer can be “no”, then, of course, one could argue that prayers are answered, the same way I could argue that Microsoft Windows works, but sometimes the way it works is by crashing.
My 2 cents.
Loved the post Brigham. I have been thinking about this a lot recently – had a situation where two job opportunities came up simultaneously. They were both good. Kim was leaning one way, I was leaning the other, and we prayed a lot to figure out what would be right for us. The jobs were in different places, and we have learned from past experience that where we are has a big impact on our life, so we really wanted to get this right. We believed that there was a “right answer” to this question but did not feel like God was answering our prayers to know what it was.
So we flipped a coin. Literally. It was an interesting experience – I guess I thought God could work with the Brownian motion of the air molecules colliding with the spinning coin and give us an answer that way.
We accepted the outcome (it was Kim’s preference – to move close to family in Arizona!) and started making preparations. Then the next morning at work I received a third offer that we had no way of foreseeing. It was immediately clear to both of us that we should take this one, so we did. Don’t know yet how it will work out.
Sorry for the long comment – wanted to share a story of both prayer and coin flips, although not in the way you propose above. Great blog by the way. Thanks for writing.
Wow, I’ve always heard the advice given to people making a choice between close alternatives just to flip a coin, but I’ve never heard of anybody actually doing it for such a high-stakes decision!
Your point about God potentially intervening in the outcome of the coin flip presents another difficulty for the coin-flip prayer experiment I proposed…
Brigham,
Thought provoking as always. As someone who prays and feels that I have had prayers answered but also believes strongly in retroactive sensemaking in our lives the powers of prayer I think come in many guises.
I think the effect of many prayers might actually have to do with things like calming the mind, tapping into our subconscious or casing us directly to change our behaviors or feelings. In your example, does it really matter of God led you to your passport or that your prayer helped you connect with you deep intuition about where it was? Either way it is effective.
Just as the “intent and faith” element make it hard to do randomized trials all the justification and retroactive sensemaking that we believers go through to explain differential outcomes of prayers make it hard to turn our experiences into valid proofs of its efficacy. After all we can always say that if our most heartfelt prayers aren’t answered its because “it will happen in the Lord’s time” or “It was not the Lord’s will” or “It was not the best for us” or “I must not have been faithful enough” or “This is a trial of my faith”..or..or..or. I think we just need to acknowledge this in how we come to understand the way prayer operates. I actually think the way we choose to make causal sense of our lives is an important element of our own agency that then comes to effect how we act in the future. It is our moral right and obligation to make sense of our own lives.
I think we need to be mindful that these type of things can sound understandably hollow when it comes to considering prayers for intervention in truly high stakes situations. While finding a passport helps you avoid all manner of unpleasantness and is a pressing issue at the time of the prayer I can’t imagine any prayer you or I have uttered has been as sincere, intense, or needed as the woman in the Congo praying her daughter won’t be found and raped by the soldiers coming through camp or a young child praying over his ill mother so he will not become an orphan. So why I want to think that God cared enough about me to help me find my lost hamster (true story) I have a hard time thinking that he intervenes in this situation due to my faithfulness or child-like sincerity or need while trying to explain why God does not intervene to stop imaginable horrors to someone who believes just as much as me and is probably praying much harder for something so, so much more important.
Yet I want my children to believe in the positive power of prayer. I want to believe it in. I think it is super powerful precisely because it connects us not only with the divine but with our own inner desire for good things for ourselves and most importantly others. If everyone prayed the prayers of so many more would come true. I am open to the possibility of miraculous, divine intervention, but I don’t think there is any lack of faithfulness in believing that prayer may also work through some other more worldly mechanisms as well.
Prayer works for me. Two times in particular have completely erased any doubt about the reality of God answering prayers. I know for a fact that prayer, when done selflessly, asking what God would want for others and for me, those prayers are answered. Reading the scriptures for 5 minutes before prayer can get you in the right frame of mind. Also after praying, reading the scriptures is about 10x’s more enlightening for me and I tend to have more ah-ha experiences.
It is all in the mind. Pyaying people feel secured and that is probably help to cope up with unpleasant results.
there is nobody to listen to prayer, why waste time. It happens whatever is going to happen, prayer or no prayer.
It’s an interesting experiment, but we already know the answer. Think of it this way:
1. People pray about health. (Given we all care about our health, religious and non-religious alike, and we can’t control our health, I think this is an uncontroversial statement — if people pray intercessory prayers, they will pray about health.)
2. People of all religions die at about the same rate, of the same causes.
In other words, if prayers about health affected our health, we would know.
If a set of religious people died at a different rate than a different set, or at a different rate than the non-religious, we would already know it. If god answered prayers and people prayed about health, we’d be able to know which religion is true based on statistical analysis of death rates.
In other words, either (1) people don’t pray about health, (2) god skews the statistics (it’s silly, but it’s theoretically possible god heals a random person from every other religion each time he heals because of a believer’s prayer), or (3) god doesn’t answer intercessory prayers about health.
Roberto & Keith have already provided the answer — while the coin toss experiment has flaws (it would measure potentially non-sincere prayers), you can easily gather the data to test the general premise of whether prayers work by taking population samples as suggested.
Religion is not a statistically significant factor in health outcomes, and the simplest explanation of this is that prayer does not work.
Note that following a religion that has dietary laws or other ethics that promote healthy living will affect health outcomes (but no more than following those practices without religion would do so).
In some cases pausing to quietly contemplate an issue could have benefits, so praying could work in that sense. It cou
[oops, continued...] It (prayer) could also have some placebo effect in health outcomes (peace of mind, help with symptoms such as pain), but the evidence that it has no objective statistically measurable outcome or effect in major situations (health, disaster survival, personal tragedy such as abduction cases) is pretty clear.
By all means pray if you want to, but it doesn’t alter the outcome.
Prayers don’t work, idiots. God is nothing more than a vain, worship-me-cuz-I-said-so-without-any-real-reason “creature”.