by Lee Strobel
After all, Jesus wasn’t averse to his own miracles being scrutinized. He told eyewitnesses to his miracles to report what they had personally seen,4 and he instructed a person healed of leprosy to show himself to the priest so he could be examined.5
So what is the legitimate role of science in investigating supernatural claims? Equally important, what can’t it contribute? And is STEP the final word on the efficacy of intercessory prayer? Does this study really establish, as Michael Shermer suggested, that when scientific analysis is applied, there is no persuasive evidence for the miraculous?
Those were some of the questions prompting my nearly two-hundred-mile journey northward from Keener’s house to the campus of Indiana University in Bloomington. I checked my watch as I drove my rental car. Still plenty of time to make my appointment with a Harvard-educated scholar who is figuring out ways to use the magisterium of science to investigate the magisterium of faith.
The Interview with Candy Gunther Brown, PhD
Candy Gunther Brown, who earned her undergraduate degree summa cum laude, master’s degree, and doctorate at Harvard, is a professor of religious studies at the sprawling Indiana University, which has forty-eight thousand students at its campus fifty miles southwest of Indianapolis.
A scrupulous scholar eager to maintain academic neutrality, Brown takes a nonsectarian approach to religious studies. “I do not assume the existence or nonexistence of a deity or other suprahuman forces,” she explains. “What I argue is that people’s religious beliefs often have real-world effects that can be studied empirically.”6
Her books include Testing Prayer: Science and Healing, published by Harvard University Press, and The Healing Gods: Complementary and Alternative Medicine in Christian America, published by Oxford University Press; and she is the editor of Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, also published by Oxford.
Brown has taught a variety of courses at the university, including Religion, Illness, and Healing; Sickness and Health; and Evangelical and Charismatic Christianity in the Americas. She’s a popular online writer for the Huffington Post and Psychology Today, and her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Academic Medicine and numerous other scholarly journals.
What brought me to Indiana was her focus on studying the impact of intercessory prayer on healing. Since the university’s campus was bustling with traffic and parking was at a premium, we decided to meet at the nearby house she shares with her husband, Joshua, who’s also a professor at the university, specializing in cognitive science and neuroscience.
Wearing her dark hair short and parted on the side, and peering through black-rimmed glasses, Brown is a live wire, bounding with energy, her voice strong and clear from years of lecturing in classrooms. She thinks—and speaks—in a well-organized manner, unfolding her points systematically and with clarity. We chose adjacent wingback chairs in her front sitting room and settled in for our discussion.
“What’s your response to skeptics who say science shouldn’t investigate prayers for healing?” I asked her. “For example, the textbook Psychology of Religion says, ‘The evidence of the effectiveness of prayers, as they touch events in the material world, remains outside the domain of science. The faithful who want to believe can believe, and the skeptic who chooses not to believe could not be convinced.’”7
Replied Brown, “I think that ignores a third category of people, which may be the largest: those who don’t have a predetermined conclusion. These people just want to know where the facts point.”
“They’re open to wherever the evidence leads them,” I said.
“Exactly. Let’s face it: people get sick, and when they do, they often pray for healing. Whether scientists or medical doctors think this is a good idea or not, it’s going to happen. So it only makes sense to find out what occurs when there are prayers for healing. Are they beneficial, whether for natural or supernatural reasons? Or do they cause people to get worse? Policy makers, scientists, physicians, patients—it’s relevant to all of them.”
“How can science be used to investigate the effects of prayers?”
“In several ways. For one thing, medical records can be compared before and after prayer occurs. Was there a condition that was diagnosed? Do X-rays, blood tests, or other diagnostic procedures show illness or injury? And then was there some resolution of that condition?”
“Of course, you can’t prove God healed them, even if their illness disappears,” I observed.
“Correct. There may have been medical treatment, or the placebo effect may be involved, or a spontaneous remission. Even diagnostic tests can be open to interpretation. Plus, relapses might occur later,” she replied. “On the other hand, if there’s no improvement or a worsening of their illness, then we can say a miracle cure definitely didn’t take place. Science is better at disproving things than proving them.”
“Clinical studies can be of help too,” I offered.
“I believe so. They’re set up for a short-term window of time so we can measure what happens after people pray. Now, there can be complications, such as people outside the study who are praying for people inside the study, or the application of medical treatment, or subsequent relapses. And, of course, everyone brings their own assumptions when they interpret the data, depending on where they are on the spectrum.”
“The spectrum?”
“Yes, on one end of the spectrum are those who expect miracles to be very, very likely. They believe God frequently intervenes in nature. They may be quick to conclude, ‘God has healed this person through prayer.’ But people on the opposite end of the spectrum start with the assumption that miracles never happen. If there’s a zero likelihood, then regardless of how strong the evidence is, there has to be a more plausible explanation, right? So there is going to be a preconditioning to interpret things depending on where you start off.”
The Effects of Intercessory Prayer
I asked Brown for her opinion of the STEP project that Shermer had cited as having shown no impact—or even a slightly harmful effect—on recovering cardiac patients. I anticipated this to be a rather routine conversation, but frankly I ended up thoroughly surprised—even stunned—by what she disclosed.
“Let me start by saying that there have been ‘gold standard’ studies before and after STEP that reached the opposite conclusion: that the group receiving prayer had better outcomes,” she said.
“Really?” I asked. “Can you give me some examples?”
“One of the first widely publicized studies was by Dr. Randolph Byrd, published in 1988 in the peer-reviewed Southern Medical Journal,” she said. “It was a prospective, randomized, double-blinded, controlled study of four hundred subjects.”
She explained that born-again Christians, both Catholics and Protestants, were given the patient’s first name, condition, and diagnosis. They were instructed to pray to the Judeo-Christian God “for a rapid recovery and for prevention of complications and death, in addition to other areas of prayer they believed to be beneficial to patients.”
“What were the results?”
“Patients in the prayer group had less congestive heart failure, fewer cardiac arrests, fewer episodes of pneumonia, were less often intubated and ventilated, and needed less diuretic and antibiotic therapy,” she said.
“That’s very interesting,” I replied. “Do you think this study was scientifically sound?”
“I believe it was. Of course, in any study like this, you can’t control for such things as people praying for themselves or other people praying for them outside the study,” she said.
“What was the reaction when it came out?”
“The journal got flak from readers who didn’t like prayer being studied this way. One doctor wrote in to say the journal had done ‘a disservice to the science of medicine and, therefore, to mankind in general.’”
“Well, that’s pretty strong!” I said.
She smiled. “I thought so too. The editor wrote back to say Byrd’s article had
been subjected to the usual peer-review process and was judged to be a properly designed and executed scientific investigation. Then a decade or so later, a replication study by Dr. William S. Harris and colleagues was published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.”
“Were the results similar?”
“This was a ‘gold standard’ study of the effects of intercessory prayer on almost a thousand consecutively admitted coronary patients. Half received prayer; the other half didn’t. And again, the group that received prayer had better outcomes than the control group.”
“Was there controversy this time as well?”
“Even more, probably because this journal has a higher profile and the article was published in a cultural climate that was more hostile to the idea of prayer being studied scientifically. One critic even cited the biblical injunction against putting God to the test.”8
I looked back over my notes. “So let me get this straight,” I said. “These studies affirmed that the recipients of prayer had better outcomes than those who didn’t receive prayer.”
Brown nodded. “That’s right.”
Now I was confused. “Then why do you think STEP reached such a different conclusion?” I asked.
“Ah,” she said, “that’s where things get very intriguing.”
“A Classic New Age Cult”
Brown began dissecting the STEP project by asking me an uncontroversial question. “If you’re going to study prayer,” she said, “wouldn’t it be important who was praying, who they were praying to, and how they were praying?”
That seemed intuitively obvious. “Of course,” I replied.
“In the Byrd study, the intercessors were ‘born again’ Protestants and Catholics, who were active in daily devotional prayer and in fellowship with a local church. They were praying to the ‘Judeo-Christian God.’”
That made sense to me. As born-again believers, they would have faith in a personal God who is loving and who possesses the power and inclination to supernaturally intervene in people’s lives.
“Yes,” I said, “it seems reasonable that if you’re studying the effects of Christian prayer, you would want people whose theology is mainstream.”
“Exactly. Similarly, in the Harris study, the intercessors were required to believe in a personal God who hears and answers prayers made on behalf of the sick.”
Again, that seems entirely appropriate. “What about STEP, which found no beneficial effects of prayer?” I asked.
She shifted in her chair so she was facing me more squarely. “Here’s where the difference comes in,” she said, as if letting me in on a professional secret. “The only Protestants recruited to participate in the study were from Silent Unity of Lee’s Summit, Missouri.”
A red flag shot up in my mind. “What?” I blurted out. Truly, I was taken aback—in fact, I was staggered. “Unity isn’t genuinely Christian,” I said.
“They claim to be Christian—the group’s full name is the Unity School of Christianity9—but I agree that many Christian scholars wouldn’t give them that label,” Brown replied. “They trace themselves back to the New Thought movement of the late nineteenth century.”
I have studied Christian apologetics, or evidence for the faith, for decades, and I am a professor of Christian thought at a university. Never have I encountered any expert on religious movements who would classify Unity as being traditionally Christian in its theology.
With more than three hundred Unity congregations, a thousand licensed ministers, programs on more than a thousand radio and television stations, and thirty-three million pieces of mail dispatched annually, Unity has been described as “one of the largest metaphysical groups in the United States.”10
The sect’s views on the divinity of Jesus, sin and salvation, the Trinity, the Bible, and just about every cornerstone of Christian doctrine would be unrecognizable to any mainstream Christian.
Reading through Unity’s beliefs, I detected a mixture of Hinduism, Spiritism, Theosophy, Rosicrucianism, and Christian Science, blended with an esoteric species of Christianity. Biblical concepts have been emptied of their historical meaning and refilled with ideas more suited to New Age mysticism or pantheism.
Indeed, Ruth Tucker, an expert on cults and alternative religions, wrote, “Unity’s acceptance of non-Christian tenets such as reincarnation and its rejection of various biblical tenets have placed the movement outside traditional Christian orthodoxy.”11
Ron Rhodes, who has a doctorate in systematic theology and has authored sixty books on religious beliefs, wrote, “The Unity School of Christianity may have a Christian sounding name, but it is definitely not Christian.”12
Probe, a respected apologetics organization, calls Unity “a classic New Age cult [that] is not Christian in any aspect of its doctrine or teaching.”13
How Not to Study Prayer
“What’s particularly relevant is Unity’s attitude toward prayer and the miraculous,” Brown continued. “Unity leaders have long denied that prayer works miracles and have even called petitionary prayers ‘useless.’”14
Cofounder of the sect, Charles Fillmore, once wrote, “God never performs miracles, if by this is meant a departure from universal law.”15 The other founder, his wife, Myrtle, said, “We do not promise to say a prayer of words and have the saying work a miracle in another individual. Our work is to call attention to the true way of living and to inspire others to want to live in that true way.”16
The group practices what it calls “affirmative prayer,” which involves repeating positive statements, such as, “We are imbued with divinity and are physically healthy.”
The sect’s website reads, “When most people think of prayer, they think of asking God for something. Not so in Unity. Unity uses ‘affirmative prayer.’ Rather than begging or beseeching God, this method involves connecting with the spirit of God within and asserting positive beliefs about the desired outcome.”17
Although there is some diversity among those affiliated with Unity, essentially Unity doesn’t believe in miracles, doesn’t believe in a personal God outside of us who intervenes in people’s lives, and doesn’t believe it’s even appropriate to ask for supernatural help.
I was still shaking my head in disbelief when Brown spoke up again.
“So why do we see different results in STEP?” she asked. “Well, you’ve got different inclusion criteria. Look who’s doing the praying and how they’re doing it. It’s apples and oranges compared to the Byrd and Harris studies.”
I mulled the implications, which are clearly enormous. “This means you can’t draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of traditional Christian prayer from STEP,” I said.
“That’s right,” she replied. “None.”
With Shermer’s comments in the back of my mind, I asked, “Would you consider STEP to be definitive or a final word on prayer research?”
No hesitation from Brown. “Not at all,” she said.
I posed one more question along those lines: “In the end, does this study tell us anything that’s helpful?”
She thought for a few moments. “Well,” she said, “it is instructive on how not to conduct a study of Christian prayer.”
Distant versus Personal Prayer
In addition to her specific critiques of STEP, Brown raised several concerns about the overall approach in these “double-blind” prayer studies.
“First, these studies don’t take into consideration that healing seems to be clustered in certain geographical areas,” she said, which prompted me to recall J. P. Moreland’s observation that miraculous healings often break out in Third World locales where the gospel is making new inroads.
“Second,” she continued, “these studies don’t recognize that certain people are reputed to have a special ‘anointing’ or success rate with healing prayer. Third, these studies obscure the presumed role of faith on the part of those offering and receiving prayer. After all, a person receiving prayer can’t respond with faith if the
y don’t even know someone is praying for them.”
I said, “Basically, you’re suggesting that these studies don’t reflect the way that prayer is actually practiced, especially among Pentecostals and charismatics who emphasize healing prayer.”
“That’s right,” came her response. “These studies focus on distant intercessory prayer—intercessors are given the first name and condition of someone they don’t know and told to pray for a complication-free surgery. But when Pentecostals actually pray for healing, they generally get up close to someone they know; they often come in physical contact with them; and they empathize with their sufferings. It’s what I call proximal intercessory prayer.”
As I thought about healings performed by Jesus, this seemed to be his pattern. He often touched those he was about to heal; for instance, Luke 4:40 reads, “At sunset, the people brought to Jesus all who had various kinds of sickness, and laying his hands on each one, he healed them.” What’s more, the Bible says that the ill should be anointed with oil, which also involves proximity and touching.18
“Have any studies looked at the effects of this kind of up-close-and-personal prayer?” I asked.
“Dale Matthews and his team did a prospective, controlled study of the effects of intercessory prayer on patients with rheumatoid arthritis, published in the Southern Medical Journal in 2000,” she said. “They found no effects for distant intercessory prayer; however, they did find that patients experienced statistically significant improvement with direct-contact prayers, compared with patients who only received medical treatment.”
“How was the study set up?” I asked.
“Over a three-day period, subjects received six hours of in-person prayer, plus another six hours of group instruction on the theology of healing prayer,” she said. “This particular study didn’t clarify whether improvements resulted from the prayer itself, or from attention, touch, social support, counseling, and exchanges of forgiveness that were offered—all of which have been shown to have therapeutic effects.”