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.
