In Recovering the Soul Larry Dossey writes: “Most people today believe that in science there is no place for prayer. Perhaps this idea is a holdover from some three centuries ago, when ‘action at a distance’ was deplored by the best minds. Galileo condemned Johannes Kepler’s views on gravity as ‘the ravings of a madman’ when the latter proposed that invisible forces from the moon, acting across gigantic distances, were causing the earth’s tides.
“Obviously the modern mind has sided with Kepler,” Dossey writes, “by accepting the action at a distance that is gravitation, but we have not been so generous in our attitude toward prayer. However, in perhaps the most rigidly controlled scientific study ever done on the effects of prayer, cardiologist Randolph Byrd, formerly a university of California professor, has shown that prayer works and that it can be a powerful force in healing.
“Byrd designed his study as ‘a scientific evaluation of what God is doing.’ Dossey explains: “During his ten-month study a computer assigned 393 patients admitted to the coronary care unit at San Francisco General Hospital either to a group that was prayed for by home prayer groups (192 patients) or to a group that was not remembered in prayer (201 patients). The study was designed according to the most rigid criteria that can be used in clinical studies in medicine, meaning that it was a randomized, prospective, double blind experiment in which neither the patients, nurses, nor doctors knew which group the patients were in. He recruited Roman Catholic groups and Protestant groups around the country to pray for members of the designated group. The prayer groups were given the names of their patients, something of their condition, and were asked to pray each day, but were given no instructions on how to pray.”
“The results were striking. The prayed-for patients differed from the others remarkably in several areas:
1. They were five times less likely than the unremembered group to require antibiotics (three patients compared to sixteen patients).
2. They were three times less likely to develop pulmonary edema, a condition in which the lungs fill with fluid as a consequence of the failure of the heart to pump properly (six compared to eighteen patients).
3. None of the prayer-for group required endotracheal intubation, in which an artificial airway is inserted in the throat and attached to a mechanical ventilator, while twelve in the unremembered group required mechanical ventilator support.
4. Fewer patients in the prayed-for group died (although the difference in this area was not statistically significant).
If the technique being studied had been a new drug or a surgical procedure instead of prayer, it would almost certainly have been heralded as some sort of ‘breakthrough.”
Dr. William Nolan, author of a book that criticizes faith healing, has acknowledged: “It sounds like this study will stand up to scrutiny.” Even suggesting, “maybe we doctors ought to be writing on our order sheets, Pray three times a day. If it works, it works.”
Dossey adds: “This rigorous study suggests that something about the mind allows it to intervene in the course of distant happenings, such as the clinical course of patients in a coronary care unit hundreds of thousands of miles away. In this prayer study the degree of spatial separation did not seem to matter.” And this fact “suggests that the effects of prayer do not behave like common forms of energy; that no ‘signal’ is involved when the mind communicates with another mind or a body at a distance.” In other words, no matter how those praying may conceive of their prayers “going somewhere”—to the patients or to God—there is no known energy that would explain prayer as actually moving from one place to another.
This “nonlocal’ characteristic of prayer should not be a surprise for anyone familiar with the major theistic religious traditions. For their teachings have never confined God to a particular place. Instead, God is everywhere, transcending space and time. In Dossey’s words, God “is nonlocal, an attribute shared by our own minds. Thus we can say without hesitation that something about us is divine.”
Larry Dossey, Recovering the Soul: A Scientific and Spiritual Search (Bantam, 1989), 45-48.
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