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Commentary on "experiments on distant intercessory prayer" in archives of internal medicine
Journal of Parapsychology, The, June, 2002 by J.E. Kennedy
The article "Experiments on Distant Intercessory Prayer: God, Science, and the Lesson of Massah" by Chibnall, Jeral, and Cerullo (2001) may be a pivotal commentary in the medical literature that precipitates a decline of interest in research on intercessory prayer. It may also have important implications for other types of research on distant healing.
Chibnall et al. originally intended to design a study to investigate possible healing effects of intercessory prayer. However, after delving into the methodology and existing findings, they concluded that this line of research will not be productive.
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Their evaluation discussed several issues that had also caused me to lose interest in initiating research on possible healing effects of prayer. As background for discussing their article, it may be useful to summarize my previous rationale for not pursuing the topic of research on intercessory prayer.
The first issue was the implication that certain types of prayer or prayers by certain individuals are more effective than others. Virtually all severely ill patients are the recipient of prayers, their own and/or from others. The idea that a "treatment" group has greater healing than a control group implies that certain prayers are better than others. I believe it is inevitable that some people and organizations would attempt to profit from the alleged ability to provide more effective prayers. When a patient does not recover, will family members have reason to feel guilty that they did not pray enough or pay enough for special prayers to get a different result? I did not want to start down this path.
The second issue is that research on prayer has the same basic methodological difficulties as research on survival of death. Intercessory prayer involves the concept that a divine or supernatural being will produce the desired results. A more parsimonious and therefore more scientifically testable hypothesis is that the person praying produces the effects directly, without the need for a nonphysical entity. For prayer research, the scientific issues are compounded by the strong profit potential noted above.
The third issue is that I came to view prayer studies as basically another type of parapsychological test method that will have the same problems of unreliability as other psi research techniques. In my early years in parapsychology, I believed that application of new technology, statistical methods, and special psychological situations might produce a breakthrough for reliable psi effects. However, after three decades of watching research methods come and go and learning about similar patterns in prior decades, I have come to believe that accepting and understanding the intrinsically unreliable nature of psi may be the best strategy for progress (Kennedy, 2001). Of course, this idea has been raised by others before (e.g., Beloff, 1994; Pratt, 1978).
Chibnall et al. discussed topics that relate to each of these issues. A summary of the key points in their article is given below, followed by some comments from a parapsychological perspective.
SUMMARY OF KEY POINTS
Chibnall et al. started their study design efforts by trying to identify factors that may possibly influence effective prayers. Their list included type, duration, frequency, and intensity of prayer; number of people praying; and the training, experience, and spiritual worthiness of those praying. When they looked into information from existing studies, they found great differences among studies and little guidance for designing a study. The significance of identifying effective prayer techniques was brought into focus when they noted that Catholics have weekly prayers for all the sick, which presumably provides a background level of prayer for everyone. Chibnall et al. then confronted a key issue:
If prayer is a metaphysical concept linked to a supernatural being or force, why would its efficacy vary according to parameters such as frequency, duration, type, or form? ... Why, then, attempt to explicate it as if it were a controllable natural phenomenon? ... there is no reasonable theoretical construct to which to link prayer because of, we would argue, its very nature. (p. 2530)
Chibnall et al. concluded that the hypothesis of intervention by a supernatural being does not meet the basic requirements for science of having explanatory relevance and being testable. They recognized that there are other options for research: "Clearly, there are alternatives to testing for God's intervention, alternatives that are fascinating, useful, and, above all, consistent with a scientific approach without being theologically untenable" (p. 2532). They objected to using God as the scientific explanation for "mysterious findings."
They particularly found problems with the fact that in existing studies intercessors have often been blind as to who they were praying for, and generally had little link with the prayer targets. They believed that this feature requires intervention by God for success, and therefore is testing God rather than testing people.
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