Petitionary Prayer

As to the question of "how significant", I'd imagine that if the RSSs outnumber the RNSSs to any statistically significant extent, then that is good evidence for the efficaciousness of petitionary prayer -- provided that we are confident that prayer is the only variable in our treatment of the two groups. And that proviso is of course the whole difficulty; it's the reason why a small slant in favor of RSSs is dubious as evidence for the power of petitionary prayer. The point is maybe most familiar in terms of the issue of prayer and medical recovery, where a worry is that studies supporting the power of prayer are best explained by the fact that the religious are likelier to have more social/familial support, etc. So the answer to the "how significant" question in general is I think wholly dependent on how "clean" we think our data is.

Several reactions:

1. Petitionary prayer does not take a lot of time, or effort, or money. It is not a resource-intensive practice. This suggests that the question is Why not bother? Rather than Why bother?

2. For all events, we have no idea whether or not natural laws have been violated in their causal history. For one thing, nobody knows more than a small fraction of the causal history of any event. For another, most interesting events occur via human will at some point. Only if a strict materialism is true of human beings would these events fail to violate natural laws. Or in short, anything is a could-be miracle.

3. We generally have no idea what consequences, even natural-law-abiding consequences, our prayers will have. It may be that God has arranged things so that the act of folding your hands, closing your eyelids, and whispering a few words causes the answer to your prayer via a butterfly-leads-to-Chinese-typhoon effect. Who knows?

4. The prayer to be saved from sin and its effects—i.e. the exercise of faith—is a petitionary prayer. If one does not think petitionary prayer is valuable, one might reconsider whether one thinks any kind of religious activity is valuable. Or maybe become a Pelagian.

5. I think the NT is clear that not just any petitionary prayer can expect a positive answer. Understanding “The Father will give good gifts to those who ask” requires understanding that “good” here is an important qualifier. James tells us we often “ask with wrong motives” and that this prevents a positive answer. John’s gospel tells us that we will get whatever we ask for “according to the Father’s will.” God never casts himself in the role of Santa Claus.

6. All that said, there are plenty of unanswered petitions where we human beings have no good explanations. Basically, this is an aspect of the problem of evil, and the usual possibilities are available. We can appeal to inscrutable divine purposes. We can say that the unanswered prayer is a soul-shaping challenge to overcome, a maturing dark night of the soul. We can say that miracles of the sort requested would harm our or others’ ability to understand the world, or operate wisely in it. We can say that human beings screwed it up, in one or both of two ways: (a) the pray-er asked with wrong motives, or failed to understand what was good for him, etc. (b) God is for some reason incapable or unwilling to violate somebody’s free will in answering the prayer. In short, there is a whole catalog of well-canvassed options. Finally, we can accept the evil appearances and abandon faith in God.

An important question that seems to me to be in need of an answer in order to justify spending one's time doing petitionary prayer is whether it is reasonable to expect that God will answer one's prayer.

This seems to assume that divine intervention is the only possible benefit from petitionary prayer--that if a petitionary prayer doesn't result in a change in the workings of the physical world, the time spent on it has been wasted. But I'm not sure that this is obviously true.

While this will not likely sway anything the author says it may perhaps indicate the advantage of other starting points. I begin with the assumption that all things work for the good of those who love God to those who hav been called according to his purposes (I also assume that I am amongst those who love God and have been called). Given that assumption I ask God to reveal to me how the various things that occur in my life and the lives of others (that fall within the relevant class) do in fact work our good. I have thus far not been too disappointed (which is not to say that I have never been disappointed). Now given my nature and my background, etc the fact that my awareness of God's good gifts in my life and the lives of others has increased seems to me to count as a miracle of sorts (I'm not sure what to say about the of sorts but I think it probably needs to be said).

Now perhaps the talk of miracles is really beside the point (I may not hav read the post closely enough so this may be way off). When I petition God I do not ask for miracles (not explicitly as least). Rather I ask for his will to be done in general and in various specific ways that I hope do not conflict with his general will.

Lastly, I am not sure that the notion of miracles assumed in the post is the best one on offer. What if there are not laws of nature or if the laws of nature are as the scientific essentialists suppose. In either case it would seems as though the idea that a miracle is a violation of a law of nature would not make much sense. So perhaps the way to go in addressing some of the concerns raised in the post is by reassessing the notion of miracles assumed.?

Hey, the code that needs to be entered to post is 5cra6p. Given that my above remarks are crap, this may very well be a miracle.

There was a study done a while back -- unfortunately I don't remember the details -- where they divided people into a main group and a control group. I believe people in both groups were sick. The authors of the study had people in the main group have people praying for them to get better -- without the people in the main group knowing this. Not so for people in the control group. The hypothesis that petitionary prayer is effective predicts that the people the main group will have better recovery rates. In fact, they did -- the prediction was confirmed.

I should mention that I'm not inclined to think one should put much significance into this study. If it confirms that petitionary prayer is effective, I don't think it confirms it a lot. Nevertheless, I think it's worth thinking about, and thought I should mention it. (There was a discussion of this study on the Freakonomics blog a year or two ago, if anyone is interested in getting at least a few more details. I think one serious problem with this approach to studying the effectiveness of prayer is that you really can't ever know to what extent people in the control group do have someone praying for them (the people themselves also might not know it of course).)

This is a complicated topic. I have sometimes reflected on the fact that when people pray, they tend to ask for things that might, for all they know, be consistent with the laws of nature. E.g., people ask for a safe trip, but no one asks God to beam them instantly to the intended location.

I think part of the problem may be in thinking of an answer to prayer (a special act of God) as normally involving a "violation" of a natural law. First, it's notoriously difficult to define "miracle" in terms of natural laws. (I recall a series of attempted definitions by Alvin Plantinga in a discussion group, but in the end, they were all deemed unsatisfactory.)

Perhaps it is better to think of "miracles" as simply events caused or planned by God that have a more special purpose than the usual order of events (which are also caused or planned by God). (There is a molinist story in which God plans the laws of nature based in part on God’s foreknowledge of what people would pray for, but this isn’t what I mean here.) The situation may be more like this. There are laws describing the normal operations of God’s universe. Some of these laws are “spiritual”: e.g., if you hunger and thirst for righteousness, you’ll be satisfied; if pleasure is your highest goal, you won’t be happy; if you seek God, you’ll find Him (though God may not be as you expected); if you pray for physical healing for yourself or someone you are relationally close to, you increases the chances of healing (see, for example, “Can Positive Thoughts Help Heal Another Person”.) These laws might have psychological explanations that may in turn be rooted in more fundamental laws of physics, but on the assumption that God is the ultimate source of the laws, this reduction of some “spritiual” laws to physical laws doesn’t make the “the answer to prayer” less of an act of God.

I think it also makes a huge difference if we are praying with the right motives and for things that God cares about the most. If I’ve learned anything about the heart of God (assuming there is such a being), it is that the top priorities on his list are things like intimate relationships, kindness, honesty, lovers and seekers of what’s true. My hypothesis is this: if you pray for those sorts of things (things on the top of his list), you will find a statistically significant pattern of getting what you pray for (though I realize it can be difficult to test how things would have gone had you not prayed). Now this statistically significant pattern may (or may not be) rooted in more fundamental laws, but that is to be expected in a theistic world.

To be sure, I’m not saying that God could, or would never do something “off-beat” or perform an isolated act that isn’t subsumed under a higher principle (or law), but my sense is that this is extraordinarily rare. I think it’s a mistake to think of physical laws as somehow constraining God’s answers to prayers. If God is the author of physical things and their natures, of people and their natures, then it would not surprise me if he rooted many answers to prayers within law-like, predictive principles.

Just some thoughts…

"I am not convinced that many, if any, people I know of have experienced any obvious miracles, either."

Nonetheless, there are numerous reports of obvious miracles throughout the last twenty centuries, and at least some of these reports appear reliable. Interestingly, however, a number of these do not seem to be the results of explicit petitionary prayer.

Here are two minor ones reported by eyewitnesses I know: When my wife was preparing for entry into the Catholic Church, the nun in charge of the classes once mentioned that she had seen someone who was levitating at prayer, and--as a psychological detail that adds a bit of veracity to the story--the person levitating found it quite an embarrassing experience. This nun was a particularly no-nonsense and clearheaded nun. A close relative of mine who is a careful observer and a scientist reports having seen--somewhat funny as this seems--a bag of sugar carelessly placed on a picture of St Albert of Zakopane moving off the image. He assures me that investigation turned up no natural explanation, and hence this is an apparent violation of Newton's first law.

Among medical miracles, there are a number reported where the macroscopic laws of nature appear to have been positively violated. For a 20th century example, there appears to be good evidence that a man had an eye restored in an empty eye-socket by the prayers of St Pio, and for a much earlier example, there are two apparently independent sources who talk of a group of Christians at the time of the Arian heresy who had their tongues cut off by Arians, but continued to speak fluently and clearly (and one of the sources says one can go to the court of the emperor and meet a deacon with cut-off tongue). Or for a whole bunch of examples, take St. Bede's life of St. Cuthbert, which is chock full of impressive miracles. If memory serves, St. Bede assures us in the introduction that he took good care to examine eyewitnesses as often as he could.

The quantity of reports of obvious miracles over the last twenty centuries is very high, at least among Catholics. (One of the criticisms that Catholic apologists made at the time of the Reformation was that such a major call to reform should have come backed up with miracles if it were from God, but didn't.)

Now, after examining an individual case, one might come to the conclusion that the reporter(s) is (are) lying or unreliable. But unless one has good independent reason to think that obvious miracles are non-existent or very rare, one cannot dismiss the multitude of reports en masse. On the plausible assumption that testimony to an obvious miracle is prima facie evidence of an obvious miracle (which assumption should remain in place even if miracles are rare; reporting having won the jackpot in the lottery is prima facie evidence of having won the jackpot in the lottery, even though winning the jackpot is rare), one should expect at least about half of the reports to be correct.

All that said, I agree with the previous commenters in questioning the assumption that in petitionary prayer, we are asking for something that would require an obvious miracle. Consider the sorts of things that people ask for in petitionary prayer, where I am giving a mix of the serious and the trivial (nothing wrong with praying for trivial goods--God is omniscient and omnipotent, so it's not like we're taking up his time with trivialities--unless by so doing we take time away from more serious prayer):
- salvation
- spiritual healing
- physical healing
- mental healing
- relief from financial distress
- a job
- rain
- solution to relationship difficulties
- help in solving homework problems (I did a lot of that in math grad school, always successfully :-) )
- winning in a competition
- finding a lost object
- faith

Of these, only the last one (and even that, not necessarily) is likely to involve a request for an obvious miracle--and there is good evidence, both anecdotal and in the words of Jesus about those who ask for a miracle, that God rarely gives miracles for those who want a miracle just for show for their own benefit.

In some of these cases, an obvious miracle might even defeat the point. It would not help the runner praying to break a record if God miraculously teleported her to the finish line--what she needs is an increase of her natural powers. Similarly, the person praying for a strengthening of the gift of faith might well be harmed by an obvious miracle, as she might start to rely on the miracle rather than on what Kierkegaard calls the argumentum Spiritus Sancti.

So, in most cases, people aren't praying for an obvious miracle--they are praying for a particular good, like rain or a job. And given how common chaotic systems appear to be, and given an underlying indeterministic physics, it does not seem that any obvious violation of the laws of nature is called for.

Regarding experimental evidence for the efficacy of prayer (mentioned by Dylan, above), Philip and Carol Zaleski, in their 2005 book Prayer: A History, review the history of "prayer studies" (pp. 331-346), including criticisms of the various studies. The study mentioned above sounds like Randolf Byrd's 1988 study conducted at San Francisco General Hospital. Critics have pointed out that it seemed not have adequate controls (e.g., there was no way to guarantee that no one was praying for the people in the "no prayer" group, double-blind failed because the person tracking the data knew which group was receiving prayer and which wasn't, etc.). Or it could be the 1998 study at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, conducted by William Harris, which was also supposedly successful in demonstrating that patients receiving prayer did better than those not receiving prayer. Critics pointed out this time that if Harris had used Byrd's standards to determine whether a patient was doing well or not, the patients receiving prayer actually fared worse than those not receiving prayer.

In the end, they quote approvingly the Britain's medical journal the Lancet as giving the most judicious assessment of the various studies in 1999: "Even in the best studies, the evidence of an association between religion, spirituality, and health is weak and inconsistent."

I agree with the Zaleski's theological criticism of the tests: that they "assume God will play along with the experiment and obligingly cure only those for whom prayers have been said," mechanistically responding on a quantitative basis. This is a theologically unacceptable assumption.

Regarding the original post, I'm a bit confused by this: "it seems that there is evidence for divine providence, on the whole, only to the extent that request-satiation sequences (RSSs) significantly outnumber request-non-satiation sequences (RNSSs)"; the post starts with a question apparently concerning how to justify spending time praying, an apparently pragmatic concern, so it seemed puzzling to me that the topic seemed to switch to the justification of belief in divine providence altogether. Am I confused? Should I be reading "divine providence" as specifically "divine providential response to prayer" or something like that? It seems to me that someone could believe strongly in divine providence, and not believe in the efficacy of prayer at all, perhaps by being some kind of determinist.
If I should understand the claim as "there is evidence for divine response to prayer only to the extent that...", then it seems false. Suppose that the ratio of RSSs to RNSSs is very small. Let's say Elijah has prayed 50,000 times in his life for various things, and 49,900 of those requests have gone unsatiated. But let's also suppose that 100 of those have been satisfied, one case being fire coming from heaven to consume a sacrifice at the moment of Elijah's request. Does Elijah lack "evidence for divine response to prayer" or "evidence for divine providence"? Perhaps he has reason to believe that God often doesn't respond to prayer (assuming that God has responded only if the request has been satisfied), but so far as I am aware, no one is arguing that God always or even usually answers prayer with yeses. It seems that Elijah has good reason to believe that God at least sometimes answers prayer. Is he irrational or otherwise acting unwisely to use time praying, since it might be "wasted" time? It doesn't seem so to me, as long as there is the possibility of God responding. Or am I missing the point?

The following is taken from the abstract of the 2009 Cochrane Review on intercessory prayer and health: "MAIN RESULTS: Ten studies are included in this updated review (7646 patients). For the comparison of intercessory prayer plus standard care versus standard care alone, overall there was no clear effect of intercessory prayer on death, with the effect not reaching statistical significance and data being heterogeneous (6 RCTs, n=6784, random-effects RR 0.77 CI 0.51 to 1.16, I(2) 83%). For general clinical state there was also no significant difference between groups (5 RCTs, n=2705, RR intermediate or bad outcome 0.98 CI 0.86 to 1.11). Four studies found no effect for re-admission to Coronary Care Unit (4 RCTs, n=2644, RR 1.00 CI 0.77 to 1.30).Two other trials found intercessory prayer had no effect on re-hospitalisation (2 RCTs, n=1155, RR 0.93 CI 0.71 to 1.22). AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: These findings are equivocal and, although some of the results of individual studies suggest a positive effect of intercessory prayer,the majority do not and the evidence does not support a recommendation either in favour or against the use of intercessory prayer. We are not convinced that further trials of this intervention should be undertaken and would prefer to see any resources available for such a trial used to investigate other questions in health care."

Generally, if one wants to know what the evidence is on some medical treatment thing, Cochrane Reviews is where one turns to.

As already pointed out, God performs miracles that aren't answers to prayer, and answers prayers in ways that aren't miracles (whether by sub-quantum manipulations that don't count as "breaking" the laws of natures, or by starting off the Big Bang in such a way that history naturally unfolds the right way, or some other way), so prayer and miracles are only incidentally connected.

As also pointed out, scientific experiments are useful only for studying scientific objects. Since God is not an electron or a quark, I'm never sure why people would expect Him to react like one. Or to look at it the other way around, any situation where God did behave in a completely regular and predictable pattern would be a natural law, since the laws of nature are in fact just those events that we can measure scientifically.

And again, not getting what you expect from a prayer doesn't mean God hasn't answered it. This is sometimes expressed as "God answered, but the answer was 'no'!", but there's more to it than that: prayer can be seen as a way to build up our faith. Faith can move mountains, but most of us have very little of it. An athlete who didn't win after a single day of training would be wrong to conclude that therefore training doesn't work; it's cumulative, and can be undone by straying from the course.

But even moreso, prayers can seem to go unanswered because we're looking for the wrong thing. The point of prayer is ultimately to align our will with God's; sometimes this happens by God doing what we want, but more profoundly, it happens when we will what God wants. That is, prayer can be satisfied by getting what we want, but better by wanting what we get. Learning to accept whatever God sends us makes for poor experiments, but is really what prayer is all about.

One methodological difficulty with the prayer studies is that in most cases when someone is critically sick someone probably prayers for that person, even if he's supposed to be in the control group that doesn't get prayed for.

In fact, there are some people who pray for all who are sick, suffering or otherwise in need. So everyone is prayed for. One might think that the greater the number of people that pray for one, the more likely one is to be healed, but I think that as long as one is dealing with at least "two or three" people praying, there is no warrant in Scripture in thinking that greater numbers increase probabilities.

I actually think that if we pray with the right dispositions and the thing prayed for is something that it is possible for God (e.g., it may be pointless to pray for God to break one of his promises, create a square circle, or, if theological compatibilism is false, make x do A freely), God always gives us that which we pray for--or something else that is at least as good (probably, better).

there is no warrant in Scripture in thinking that greater numbers increase probabilities.

Yes — again, we are not dealing with scientific objects. And even if one person's prayers were more effective than another's (perhaps depending on how holy the person is??), how could we possibly quantify that?

As for giving us something as good or better, we also have no way of knowing whether God might choose to "redirect" prayers (if for some reason, God decides it is better not to grant your prayer in exactly the way you were thinking, that doesn't mean it's "wasted" — for example, He might choose instead to heal someone else who is unknown to you).

Furthermore, there is C.S. Lewis's objection to praying-experiments: if your object is to test God, then you aren't really concerned with the good of the person you're supposed to be praying for. Or that you can't honestly will for a person in group A to be healed while willing for a person in group B to stay suffering. (I think that's different from simply praying for A and not thinking about B at all. I would argue that you can be at least somewhat sincere in praying for only group A, but it definitely muddies one's motives, and therefore makes the results indeterminable.)

I think the muddying of motives objection might not apply to some of the studies, because the prayer groups are independent of the studies--the prayer groups are simply given names of people to pray for, and they don't know anything about the people in the control group. A good question is whether the prayer group participants know they are participating in an experiment, though. In the Cochrane review, I don't think they said. It does seem relevant.

It's interesting to see Jay presenting a question on The Prosblogion. Perhaps I could just respond to Jay this week in class, but I'll just briefly register my affirmation of a couple of points already made.

First, I don't know why belief in special divine activity is reasonable only if clear and distinct divine activity can be identified more often than not as a result of petitionary prayer. If Elijah prayed 50,000 times and only the Mt. Caramel episode occured, I think Elijah would be abundantly justified in believing in God's intervention.

Secondly, if one holds that Jesus is the unique Son of God who rose from the dead and one accepts that the Scriptures are authoritative in some important sense, then the instruction to pray should be obeyed without inordinate concern for how God answers. It's a matter of trust and obedience.

Thirdly, prayer is more about fallible creatures who are prone to question and doubt God coming to a place where they can trust Him. Prayers that are not answered in spectacular ways that conform to the expectations of finite minds may, in fact, be a tool for spiritual growth inasmuch as it requires greater trust. At least that seems true of me. It results in perseverance, and perseverance results in character.

Fourthly, and this is related to the third point, demanding God answer our prayers in the way we specify seems a bit presumptuous.

Fiftly, I am perplexed by attempts to quantify the effects of prayer (i.e. prayer group studies for medical patients, etc.) As mentioned in previous post, this too, seems presumptuous. We are essentially creating a test for the existence of another rational being (incidentally, this being knows what we are up to). How can we expect that He is automatically disposed to play along?

Sixthly, and this is related to the fifth point, if divine hiddeness on the global scale is important to God, and I am strongly inclined to think it is, why should we think that He will suddenly decide that studies on medical patients, or any other test is sufficient reason to unveil Himself in heretofore unprecedently perspicuous ways? Frankly, the fact that attempts to quantify the effects of prayer appear inconclusive is precisely what I would expect.

So that's my $0.02.