Keep your psalms to yourself

In the news Thursday was this unusual report about a medical study that found prayer may have actually been worse than useless for its subjects.

In the largest scientific test of its kind, heart surgery patients showed no benefit when strangers prayed for their recovery. And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications. Doctors could only guess why.

Oh, but those of us without advanced degrees can also guess why, which is what makes this country grand. These results do seem strange, because you would think believing people are praying for your recovery, if anything, would contribute to some kind of placebo effect.

Yet I know I'm always deeply unsettled to learn some well-intentioned stranger is praying for me (partially because it would have to be a stranger). If they're doing anything, I can't help but suspect they're just interfering and metaphysically messing things up. Taken to its paranoid extreme, I sometimes suspect they're jinxing it all because their God knows I don't believe in him. Regardless, they're just plain creeping me out. Which in turn forces me to divert time, energy and focus, however trifling, toward being unnerved.

Perhaps that's what was going on here–some kind of strange spiritual transference. Maybe these subjects shifted some of the burden of hope and striving toward their own recoveries off to a third party and, confident it was taken care of, started internally slacking.

Also, prayer is quite possibly the lowest-cost means of "helping" other people for the agents. And as long as they say they're doing it, they don't even have to follow through.

Perchance these people paused to wonder that if the strangers praying for them supposedly cared so much about them having "a successful surgery with a quick, healthy recovery and no complications," why weren't they there doing something tangible?

But of course, the religious nutbags (this time sporting lab coats and letters after their names as if they afford them more credibility) can simply respond that, specific procedural flaws aside, science has no business studying prayer at all.

Science "is not designed to study the supernatural," said Dr. Harold G. Koenig, director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at the Duke University Medical Center. ...

Within the Christian tradition, God would be expected to be concerned with a person's eternal salvation, he said, and "why would God change his plans for a particular person just because they're in a research study?"

So, what, this study just happened to sample a bunch of people not blessed with the divine grace to have their suffering eased in this life? And by that logic, how can the faithful argue religious phenomena are pre-ordained, yet still claim prayer is powerful?

And if prayer had made a real, physical, observable difference, why couldn't a scientific study have measured it? I'm sure this supposed epistemological problem wouldn't have even popped into the discussion at all had the study found a prayer to be correlated with improved patient health–the religious kooks would be waving it as "proof."

But what do I know? Maybe someone should pray for me to see things correctly. Just let me know before you do so I can go put on my tinfoil hat.