At Religion Dispatches, Wendy Cadge questions how prayer and prayer studies work:
I do not know why physicians and scientists conducted these studies. Some may have been motivated by their personal religious beliefs, while others may have just been curious. As a group, these studies suggest that prayer does not heal people; at least not according to double-blind clinical trials. The bigger question, though, is whether such trials are even the right tool for answering this question. Probably not.
Perhaps more interesting than their ability to determine, once and for all, “whether prayer works,” these studies may be seen as cultural artifacts illustrating how researchers’ understandings of prayer were influenced by their contexts. From single Protestant-based prayers in the 1960s, to some more recent attempts to combine Christian, Jewish, Buddhist and other prayers, researchers’ approaches to prayer reflect changing American religious demographics, evolving ideas about the relationship between religion and medical science, and the development of the clinical trial as a central biomedical research tool in this period.
Read the full post here.