It’s called flowers wilt,
It’s called apples rot,
It’s called thieves get rich and saints get shot,
It’s called God don’t answer prayers a lot.
Okay, now you know.
— “Now You Know” by Stephen Sondheim from Merrily We Roll Along

So, does God answer prayers a lot? Or ever?

That would be quite a trick given that there are no gods, all of them having been conjured up from the imaginations of humans.

Still, back in 2006 there was a scientific study that tried to see if intercessory prayer (you know, when you pray for someone else) actually worked. 

Here is how Seth Andrews described it in his book Christianity Made Me Talk Like an Idiot:

In 2006, Dr. Herbert Benson and his team at Harvard University received a $2.4 million grant to study the effects of prayer in cardiac bypass patients. The experiment involved patients at six US hospitals randomly assigned to one of three groups:

Group One: 604 patients were to receive intercessory prayer and were told they may or may not receive prayer.

Group Two: 597 patients were to receive no intercessory prayer and were told they may or may not receive prayer.

Group Three: 601 patients were to receive intercessory prayer and were told they would receive prayer.

The prayers for groups one and three started the night before the bypass procedures, which took place over the course of two weeks. The results were gauged in terms of post-op complications.

Now given that God is imaginary, I would predict that the results would be pretty much equivalent across all groups, although perhaps, given the possibility of a placebo effect, maybe the outcomes for Group Three, the ones who were told they would be prayed for, might be a bit better, though of course, that would depend on whether they believed that prayers would work in their favor.

Interestingly, those in group one, who received intercession without a prayer guarantee, experienced a 52 percent complication rate. Those who received no intercession and no prayer guarantee experienced a 51 percent complication rate. Not only were the numbers nearly identical, but those who were not prayed for actually fared better in their recoveries by a percentage point.

Even more interesting is the finding from group three. Those 601 patients received prayers and knew people were praying for them, yet their post-op complication rate was 59 percent. These patients fared almost 10 percent worse than the other two groups even though they were aware that they were being lifted up by religious intercessors.

Huh! 

Writing for Psychology Today, Dr. Stanton Peele notes a statistical analysis of prayers conducted by Francis Galton. Galton ran patients through a similar prayer gauntlet only to discover that the recovery rates of prayed-for people didn’t increase at all. In light of the Harvard study, not only do prayers fail to produce positive results, they sometimes make things worse.

Why? Did the unfortunate members of group three feel more pressure to recover knowing they were being prayed for? Did they feel objectified? Did they feel a personal responsibility to improve lest they let everyone down? There is little doubt that prayer recipients can experience tremendous pressure, and any lack of improvement might make them feel like they failed in their faith under the prayers of the faithful. “I didn’t get better. It must be my own fault.”

Even those who don’t blame themselves might be quick to blame, or even sue, the doctors for incompetence or malpractice. Hence, physicians get placed in the lose-lose position of being blamed for bad outcomes, while God is thanked for good ones. Even as they bring decades of education, training, and skill to humanity’s medical interventions, doctors are often tragically ignored when the wounds heal, when the tumor shrinks, when the virus dies, when the pieces get put back together. In the dense fog of pleas and praises, the true healers vanish as the faithful shout, “Glory to God, who guided the hands of the surgeon.”

Now one might be tempted to suppose that God decided to play a trick on the researchers and withhold answering any prayers during the course of that study, or, even worse, to make the folks who knew they were being prayed for to suffer more complications just to screw up the results of the research. If one supposes that, one is an idiot. And in the extraordinarily unlikely event that there is some sort of creature that might be called a god, if it behaved like that, it certainly wouldn’t be worth worshipping as far as I’m concerned.

What about folks who say that they know prayer works because they feel better after praying. Of course they do. Praying is pretty much like meditation and we know that that does have benefits.

So why not dispense with the imaginary god and just meditate?

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