Fingerprints of God

by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

  10 R. C. Byrd, “Positive Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in a Coronary Care Unit,” Southern Medical Journal 81 (1988): 826-29.

  11 F. Sicher and colleagues followed forty patients with advanced AIDS. Half received different types of prayer and psychic healing for ten weeks; the other half did not. The patients receiving prayer developed fewer AIDS-defining illnesses, experienced less severe illness when they were sick, made fewer trips to the hospital or their doctors, and spent less time in the hospital. However, there were no significant differences in CD4 cell counts, a biological measure that charts the progression of the disease. F. Sicher et al., “A Randomized, Double-Blind Study of the Effects of Distant Healing in a Population with Advanced AIDS,” Western Journal of Medicine 169, no. 6 (1998): 356-63.

  12 W. S. Harris studied 990 patients admitted to a coronary care unit at a private hospital. Prayer intercessors were each given the first name of one patient (and it was guaranteed that each did not know the patient) and prayed for that patient every day for four weeks. Half of the patients received no prayer. The group receiving prayer did better overall. W. S. Harris et al., “A Randomized, Controlled Trial of the Effects of Remote Intercessory Prayer on Outcomes in Patients Admitted to the Coronary Care Unit,” Archives of Internal Medicine 159 (1999): 22-78.

  13 The 219 women were in Seoul, while the prayer groups lived in the United States, Canada, and Australia. K. Y. Cha, D. P. Wirth, and R. A. Lobo, “Does Prayer Influence the Success of In Vitro Fertilization-Embryo Transfer? Report of a Masked, Randomized Trial,” Journal of Reproductive Medicine 46 (2001): 781-87. Later, one of the researchers was found guilty of fraud in an unrelated study, which cast doubt on these findings in the minds of many researchers.

  14 I love this study. Twenty-two bush babies (Otolemur garnettii) with “chronically self-injurious behavior” were monitored over four weeks. Half received prayer and medication on their wounds each day; the other half received only medication. The bush babies receiving prayer healed more quickly, for both biological reasons (a greater increase in red blood cells, for example) and behavioral reasons (they didn’t lick their wounds as much, which allowed them to heal). K. T. Lesniak, “The Effect of Intercessory Prayer on Wound Healing in Nonhuman Primates,” Alternative Therapies in Health & Medicine 12 (2006): 42-48.

  15 L. Leibovici, “Effects of Remote, Retroactive Intercessory Prayer on Outcomes in Patients with Bloodstream Infection: Randomized, Controlled Trial,” British Medical Journal 323: 1450-51.

  16 J. M. Aviles and colleagues monitored 799 coronary care unit patients between 1997 and 1999. Half were prayed for by five different intercessors once a week for twenty-six weeks. At the end, the group receiving prayer scored slightly better (but not in a statistically significant measure) in areas such as death, cardiac arrest, rehospitalization for cardiovascular disease, coronary revascularization, and emergency department visits for cardiovascular disease. J. M. Aviles et al., “Intercessory Prayer and Cardiovascular Disease Progression in a Coronary Care Unit Population: A Randomized, Controlled Trial,” Mayo Clinic Proceedings 76 (2001): 1192-98.

  17 The researchers measured not just prayer among the 748 patients but also an alternative therapy of music, imagery, and touch. Neither prayer nor the alternative therapies seemed to affect the outcomes as measured by death or major cardiovascular events. M. W. Krukoff et al., “Music, Imagery, Touch, and Prayer as Adjuncts to Interventional Cardiac Care: The Monitoring and Actualisation of Noetic Trainings (MANTRA) II Randomized Study,” The Lancet 366 (2005): 211-17.

  18 Researchers at California Pacific Medical Center split 156 patients into roughly three categories: those who received prayer or distant healing from professional healers for ten weeks; those who received prayer or distant healing from nurses who had no prior training in healing (also ten weeks); and those who received nothing. No significant effects were observed for those who received prayer from trained healers or nurses. J. A. Astin et al., “The Efficacy of Distant Healing for Human Immunodeficiency Virus: Results of a Randomized Trial,” Alternative Therapies in Health & Medicine 12 (2006): 36-41. However, there was what I consider a fatal flaw in this study, something the authors called a “limitation.” Namely, they lost much of their data: 40 percent of the prayer groups and 24 percent of the control group never showed up at the end of the ten-week period to be analyzed. This made me wonder about the robust nature of other studies. And it prompted Dr. Larry Dossey, who sent me the article, to note: “I don’t know why people publish stuff like this. It just pollutes the literature. Now people will cite this study as evidence that prayer is worthless in HIV/AIDS, a wholly unjustified conclusion based on this experiment.”

  19 Researchers studied forty (mostly female) patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Some received in-person intercessory prayer; others received prayer from people far away as well as in person. Patients who received prayer in person were found to improve significantly, but the distant prayer did not add any benefit. D. A. Matthews, S. M. Marlowe, and F. S. Mac-Nutt, “Effects of Intercessory Prayer on Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis,” Southern Medical Journal 93 (2000): 1177-86.

  20 The study looked at ninety-five patients with end-stage renal disease. The upshot was that the people who expected to be prayed for said they felt significantly better than did those who expected to receive another mental treatment (positive visualization). But on every other measure, prayer made no difference. W. J. Matthew, J. M. Conti, and S. G. Sireci, “The Effects of Intercessory Prayer, Positive Visualization, and Expectancy on the Well-being of Kidney Dialysis Patients,” Alternative Therapies in Health & Medicine 7 (2001): 42-52.

  21 E. Harkness, N. Abbot, and E. Ernst, “A Randomized Trial of Distant Healing for Skin Warts,” American Journal of Medicine 10 (2000): 448-52.

  22 H. Benson et al., “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in Cardiac Bypass Patients: A Multicenter Randomized Trial of Uncertainty and Certainty of Receiving Intercessory Prayer,” American Heart Journal 151 (2006): 934-42.

  23 Richard P. Sloan, Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008).

  24 One of the more remarkable involved my own infant ears. When I was a few months old, I developed an excruciating ear infection. I shrieked for several days straight to announce the problem. After days of intense prayer by my mother and our Christian Science practitioner, Mrs. Wooden, I grew quiet. Gratified by the silence, my mother tiptoed into my room. Lying on either side of my head, next to my ears, were two pieces of a hard yellow substance in the shape of honeycombs—double mastoids that had somehow emerged from my ears on their own. Of course, a skeptic would say that my mother did not document this “healing” by getting a doctor to confirm it, or that if such a “healing” did occur, you could say it was the natural course of events. Everything depends on how you read the “evidence.”

  25 See Astin et al., “The Efficacy of Distant Healing.”

  CHAPTER 4. THE TRIGGERS FOR GOD

  1 Granqvist found that people who experience sudden religious conversions more often have “insecure attachment histories” (distant relationship with parents, creating a need to compensate, which prompted them to see God as surrogate parent). These people are nearly twice as likely to have sudden conversions as do people who have secure relationships with their parents. They tend to be more religious if their parents are less so, and vice versa (a sort of “I’ll show you” phenomenon). People who have secure relationships with their parents tend to experience gradual conversions and religious changes. These children develop a similar relationship with “God” as their parents did, and also tend to adopt their parents’ religious or nonreligious standards. P. Granqvist and L. Kirkpatrick, “Religious Conversion and Perceived Childhood Attachment: A Meta-analysis,” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 14 (2004): 223-50.

  2 Jerome Kagan, a Harvard child psychologist, told me in an interview that he’s found a link between
religiousness and children who are “high reactive.” He has been following five hundred white middle-class adolescents (now sixteen years old) since they were four months old. Infants who were high-reactive—that is, they squirmed and waved their legs and arms at the smallest stimulus, such as a mobile over their cribs—tended to show greater cortical arousal throughout the years. They were more anxious and tense. By the time the children reached adolescence, twice as many of those who were high-reactive as infants had become religious, as compared with the low-reactive kids. Kagan theorized that the children were using religiousness as a coping mechanism to help them reduce tension. (He notes that the adolescents who were high-reactive and not religious—all three of them—were in therapy and on drugs.) “A spiritual outlook is helpful,” Kagan told me, “because it says, ‘Things are going to be okay, you’re in good hands, there is a supernatural force, and this supernatural force will take care of you. You just be good, be kind to others, believe in some sort of supernatural force.’ ”

  3 B. Zinnbauer and K. Pargament, “Spiritual Conversion: A Study of Religious Change Among College Students,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37 (1998): 161-80. Since the 1800s, studies have shown that conversion is a radical change following a period of stress (often crisis). Some have found that 80 percent of converts reported serious distress, including feelings of despair, doubts about self-worth, fear of rejection, estrangement. Others found that converts had problematic relationships with their fathers, and that they were actively seeking a conversion experience to resolve life difficulties.Zinnbauer and Pargament studied 130 college students at a Christian college, ages eighteen to twenty-eight. They found that religious converts—those who convert to a sacred, transcendent force such as Jesus, God, or Allah, and feel connected to that force—have undergone more stress in the six months before their conversion. They did not actually have more stressful lives than the nonconverts, but they thought they did. They also had a greater sense of personal inadequacy and limitation. One problem with this study, of course, is that students attending a Christian school do not greatly differ from one another, so you have the sense that the researchers are straining at gnats.

  4 P. McNamara, ed., Where God and Science Meet: How Brain and Evolutionary Studies Alter Our Understanding of Religion, 3 vols. (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger Perspectives, 2006).

  5 Raymond F. Paloutzian, Erica L. Swenson, and Patrick McNamara, “Religious Conversion, Spiritual Transformation, and the Neurocognition of Meaning Making,” in McNamara, Where God and Science Meet, vol. 2: The Neurology of Religious Experience, pp. 151-69.

  CHAPTER 5. HUNTING FOR THE GOD GENE

  1 W. Miller, Quantum Change (New York: Guilford Press, 2001), p. 94.

  2 The Gospel of Thomas is one of the Gnostic gospels, not included in the Bible. Don Eaton closely paraphrased verse 77, in which Jesus tells his disciples: “Split a piece of wood; I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there.”

  3 C. R. Cloninger, D. M. Svrakic, and T. R. Przybeck, “A Psychobiological Model for Temperament and Character,” Archives of General Psychiatry 50 (1993): 975-90. Cloninger’s self-transcendence trait is determined by three criteria. One is called “spiritual acceptance versus rational materialism” and involves phenomena such as mystical experience or a belief in miracles, the supernatural, and a force greater than oneself directing one’s life. Another is “transpersonal identification,” that is, a connectedness to the universe and everything in it, including nature and people. Finally, there is “self-forgetfulness,” or absorption with beauty, music, and the task at hand, to the point of forgetting oneself, time, and space. One’s spirituality is measured by how one responds, “True” or “False,” to a series of statements such as “I believe in miracles” or “Sometimes I have felt like I was part of something with no limits or boundaries in time or space.”

  4 Researchers make a distinction between spirituality, which involves personal experience, and religiosity, which pertains to doctrinal beliefs and external religious practices. One way to distinguish the two is to consider intrinsic and extrinsic religiousness. Spirituality is often equated with intrinsic religiousness—that is, an inward-looking faith that is not necessarily tethered to a particular religion; it involves private prayer, meditation, and a strong sense of God’s presence; one’s whole approach to life is based on religion. Extrinsic religion is outward-looking: I go to my church or synagogue to spend time with my friends; I pray because I’ve been taught to pray; I don’t let religion affect my daily life. Saroglou found that people who are intrinsically religious (more spiritual than traditional) score high on agreeableness and conscientiousness, and openness to experience. Those who are more extrinsically religious (traditional) are conscientious and agreeable, but are not open to new experience. They also show high levels of neuroticism. V. Saroglou, “Religion and the Five Factors of Personality: A Meta-analytic Review,” Personality and Individual Differences 32 (2001): 15-25.

  5 On the heritability of spirituality, see the following:K. Kirk, L. Eaves, and M. Martin, “Self-Transcendence as a Measure of Spirituality in a Sample of Older Australian Twins,” Twin Research 2 (1999): 81-87. In a sample of more than 3,000 twins (identical and fraternal), genes appeared to explain 41 percent of the variation of spirituality in women, and 37 percent in men.

  L. Eaves, B. D’Onofrio, and R. Russell, “Transmission of Religion and Attitudes,” Twin Research 2 (1999): 59-61. The researchers found that variation in personality is partly genetic, but there are large effects from the family environment.

  T. Bouchard et al., “Intrinsic and Extrinsic Religiousness: Genetic and Environmental Influences and Personality Correlates,” Twin Research 2 (1999): 88-98. This study of thirty-five identical and thirty-seven fraternal twin pairs raised apart found that intrinsic religiousness is 43 percent heritable; extrinsic religion is 39 percent heritable. The rest is attributed to nonshared environment.

  6 Dean Hamer, The God Gene (New York: Doubleday, 2004).

  7 Hamer’s idea of a “gay gene,” as proposed in his 1995 book The Science of Desire (coauthored with Peter Copeland), stirred controversy, and large sales; the book was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Hamer’s findings never appeared in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, and scientists were unable to replicate them. By the time other scientists were commenting that they could not find a gene that inclines one toward homosexuality, Hamer had moved on to his next project: the God gene.

  8 Francis Collins, The Language of God (New York: Free Press, 2006).

  9 This has put Collins in hot water with evangelicals, who take the Bible literally. For example, he believes in evolution, and when he said so in The Language of God, major evangelical figures refused to endorse his book.

  10 D. Comings et al., “The DRD4 Gene and the Spiritual Transcendence Scale of the Character Temperament Index,” Psychiatric Genetics 10 (2000): 185-89. (Note that neither the serotonin study nor the dopamine study has been replicated.)

  11 As in many studies, the researchers tried to compare similar subjects, and thus did not compare across gender. In addition, most of this spirituality research is done on a shoestring, and researchers often recruit their subjects from already existing treatment programs or trials; therefore, researchers do not have much of a choice of subjects.

  12 In both the serotonin and dopamine studies, it was the subset “spiritual acceptance versus material rationalism” that accounted for most of the difference in spirituality. This makes intuitive sense to me. It seems logical that believing in miracles or that one’s life is directed by a spiritual force greater than any human being, or feeling in contact with a divine being, describes a more classic spirituality. Transpersonal identification (feeling connected to others and being willing to sacrifice for the good of other people, animals, nature, and the world) seems more a qualification for the Humane Society than evidence of a spiritual worldview. Self-forgetfulness (losing oneself in thought, time, and space) ap
pears to me a measure of one’s ability to focus—a trait surely found as readily in the atheist biologist or agnostic violinist as in the pastor or mystic.

  13 D. E. Comings et al., “A Multivariate Analysis of 59 Candidate Genes in Personality Traits: The Temperament and Character Inventory,” Clinical Genetics 58 (2000): 376.

  14 Comings et al., “The DRD4 Gene,” p. 188.

  15 J. Borg et al., “The Serotonin System and Spiritual Experiences,” American Journal of Psychiatry 160 (2003): 1965-69.

  16 What they found was an inverse relationship: the higher the subjects’ spirituality score, the fewer the number of serotonin receptors that lit up. A couple of theories were offered to explain what that might mean. One was that spiritual people have less of that neurotransmitter. The researchers reasoned that the serotonin system regulates a person’s perception and the various sights, sounds, and other stimuli that reach his awareness; therefore, if there is a weak “sensory filter,” they wrote, that would allow for “increased perception and decreased inhibition.” In other words, the filter is more loosely woven, so that more spiritual experiences get through. Think about a soccer team playing without a goalie: it’s much easier for “God” to kick spiritual feelings and ideas into one’s psyche if a key player in the defensive line is missing.The researchers considered another theory. Maybe the serotonin neurons were firing a lot, and so when the radioactive tracer drug came along looking for a place to dock, the receptors were otherwise occupied. Imagine you are throwing your six-year-old a birthday party in your backyard. His friends begin to arrive, and you launch the festivities with a game of musical chairs. More and more six-year-olds arrive, and you run out of chairs. Soon, too soon, you have two dozen six-year-olds cavorting around the yard, kicking up the grass and trampling the daffodils. Such euphoria, such joy and awe! That is a transcendent moment in the serotonin system.