Prayer fails

Can it be tested?

“When I was a little boy, I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realised, the Lord, in his wisdom, doesn't work that way. So I just stole one and asked Him to forgive me.”

—Emo Phillips

The empirical testing of prayer is a controversial issue.

Rationalists might offer the task to prayerful people to cause some slight change in the world via the power of prayer, such as tipping a pen off their desk. Religionists might respond that such tasks are beneath the dignity of their gods, so as to avoid the inevitable loss of face at being unable to do so. A search in PubMed on "intercessory prayer" shows that much of the medical ethical boards and philosophy gurus are all dubious if one can even study such a thing.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18757618

Some woo-meisters take the position that prayer and other religious twaddle can have documented effects on a person's health. In some cases they go so far as to claim that they put a sick person in one room, and an alternative guru in another room behind a two-sided mirror, and that when the guru prayed, the sick person got better.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19370557

Case study: the Pope

Every time a pope falls ill and ends up on his deathbed, we may assume that a sizable fraction of the one billion Catholics in the world all pray for his recovery. Despite this enormous effort of prayer, 100% of popes eventually die.

Prayer in the Bible

British Roman Catholic theologian  addressed the lack of meaningful outcomes resulting from prayer, pointing out how people tend to treat prayer as some kind of childish butler bell for wishgranting, implying that prayers only appear to go unanswered due to the excessively inflated expectations of the praying.

“Some people think that prayer just means asking for things, and if they fail to receive exactly what they asked for, they think the whole thing is a fraud.”

—Gerald Vann

The actual problem, however, is that this is precisely how Jesus himself defines prayer in multiple places in the Bible, corroborated by all four gospels — thus effectively closing the door on any attempts by Christian theologians to invent some kind of requirement that prayer must be "modest" or consist of "realistic demands" to be likely to be answered.

“Amen, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, 'Be lifted up and thrown into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it shall be done for him. Therefore I tell you, all that you ask for in prayer, believe that you will receive it and it shall be yours.”

—Jesus (Mark 11:24-25), instructing the faithful on how to tell if a prayer worked or not, and what to expect in terms of results.

Jesus in fact stresses the flamboyant disproportionality of answered prayers as the definitive proof of their success, underscoring that the only mechanism causative of unanswered prayer is a lack of faith, however obscure this splinter of doubt may be even to the praying individuals themselves — and not any divine regulation against supposedly "over-the-top" demands in prayer (since the whole point of prayer is that faithful worshipers may be rewarded by an omnipotent God).

“And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.”

—Jesus (Mark 6:5), telling the faithful that praying just to be seen praying isn't getting you anywhere.

This is a problematic state of affairs regarding Christian prayer theology, since an imaginary opportunity for the church to get away with specifying prayer as "only that which is so subtle as to blend in perfectly with random chance" would at the very least allow for reliances on vagueness in the defence of prayer — strategies with their own set of problems.

Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer

The Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) is an experiment that was carried out by the Templeton Foundation on the effectiveness of intercessory prayer on patients recovering from coronary artery bypass graft surgery (e.g., to treat heart disease).
http://archive.is/HuH0e

This project was created to provide scientific evidence for 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.

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.

Results and reaction

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”

—Søren Kierkegaard

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? Indeed, in the study quoted, prayer had a small negative effect on the health of the patients prayed for.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/31/health/31pray.html?pagewanted=all

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.”

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.

Quantity of prayer

“The man who prays is the one who thinks that God has arranged matters all wrong, but who also thinks that he can instruct God how to put them right.”

—Christopher Hitchens, Mortality

Congregations are frequently exhorted to pray for something or someone. The idea apparently being that if entire groups of people pray for something, then the being being prayed to is more likely to perform miracles — not unlike the idea that the more people shake a vending machine, the faster it dispenses treats.

Exactly why they believe this is not clear. Possibilities include:

They believe their eternally perfect supreme being may, in fact, be slightly hearing impaired.

They believe that as the being has to listen to all the prayers, it simply gets bored and performs a miracle to shut the believers up.

They believe that if more people demonstrate faith then their God will be more impressed than if only one person demonstrates it.

They believe that a certain number of "prayer hours" are necessary for each miracle and consequently collective action gets things done more quickly (essentially a real life equivalent to the very dignified process of "grinding and farming" in video games).

They believe that prayer is like a lottery: one gets picked out of the hat each day so the more entries you have the more likely thy will be done.

Many of these "get blessed quick schemes" constitute textbook examples of magical thinking, and the suggestion that "the more people who perform the prayer, the more power it has" implies that the faithful don't really believe in an omniscient deity after all, or perhaps don't really believe in an omniscient and omnipotent God who helps His people without being repeatedly asked.

Rarely do the faithful connect this supposed need for some kind of game theory-inspired "prayer meta" to affect the output of an omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent eternal creator, with the suggestion that: maybe your pointless suffering is noted and even intended?

Paradox of prayer

“Trillions and trillions of prayers every day asking and begging and pleading for favors. 'Do this' 'Gimme that' 'I want a new car' 'I want a better job'. And most of this praying takes place on Sunday. And I say fine, pray for anything you want. Pray for anything. But...what about the divine plan? Remember that? The divine plan. Long time ago God made a divine plan. Gave it a lot of thought. Decided it was a good plan. Put it into practice. And for billions and billions of years the divine plan has been doing just fine. Now you come along and pray for something. Well, suppose the thing you want isn't in God's divine plan. What do you want him to do? Change his plan? Just for you? Doesn't it seem a little arrogant? It's a divine plan. What's the use of being God if every run-down schmuck with a two-dollar prayer book can come along and fuck up your plan? And here's something else, another problem you might have: suppose your prayers aren't answered. What do you say? 'Well it's God's will. God's will be done.' Fine, but if it's God's will and he's going to do whatever he wants to anyway, why the fuck bother praying in the first place? Seems like a big waste of time to me. Couldn't you just skip the praying part and get right to his will?”

—George Carlin, You Are All Diseased

A number of paradoxes appear to take place anytime prayer is seriously considered. One strange aspect of prayer is that the deed being prayed for has often been rendered necessary by the actions of the deity prayed to. A natural disaster or "act of God" often leads to prayers to the same God to alleviate the consequent harm. It would seem to give more bangs for the prayer bucks to pray for there to be a reduction in such disasters.

Another obvious problem is that prayer entails the idea of attempting to make an allegedly omniscient entity aware of something. It also involves messing with an allegedly divine plan, and divine plan or — indirectly arguing that the person praying could somehow improve upon God's intent or design.

To complicate matters further, the logic behind designing and creating life forms intelligent enough to not reliably offer uncritical praise, yet perpetually demand this of them unwaveringly seems to land our diagnosis of said creator somewhere between "unintelligent" and "malevolent".

One problem that at least one Christian has admitted that prayer won't solve is scrupulosity, a form of obsessive-compulsive disorder that can take the form of praying obsessively. Martin Luther is believed to have suffered from scrupulosity.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/gleanings/2008/march/scrupulosityor-obsessive-compulsive-disorder.html

Aho JA. Confession and Bookkeeping: the Religious, Moral, and Rhetorical Roots of Modern Accounting. Albany: State University of New York Press; 2005. Martin Luther and scrupulosity. p. 95–8.

“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”

—Friedrich Nietzsche

“If God can influence the course of events, then a God who is willing to cure colds and provide parking spaces but is not willing to prevent Auschwitz and Hiroshima is morally repugnant.”

—Unnamed philosophy professor