One of These Is Probably the Answer

William Saletan's list of possible reasons that Prayer Doesn't Aid Recovery:

1. God doesn't exist.
2. God doesn't intervene. God may be there, but He's not doing anything here.
3. God is highly selective. Maybe God heeds prayers, but not enough of them to reach statistical significance.
4. God ignores form letters. Form letters don't impress Congress; why should they impress God?
5. God requires a personal reference. A congressman may care whether your lobbyist knows the congressman, but what God cares about is whether your intercessor knows you.
6. God is unmoved by the size of your lobbying team. Evidently, the 1,000 prayers delivered on your behalf by strangers in this study added no discernible effect to the prayers God heard from people who knew you.
7. God ignores third parties. Why should God do what a fax from one stranger tells another stranger to ask for on your behalf?
8. God takes His time. Maybe the study didn't follow patients long enough.
9. God has a backlog. Patients' names were faxed to intercessors "starting the night before each patient's scheduled surgery," according to the protocol. Was that too late?
10. God ignores you if you don't pray hard enough.
11. God ignores you if you're wicked. James 5:16: "The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective."
12. God helps those who help themselves. Deeds, not pleas, save lives.
13. God does not hear the prayer of a Christian.
14. God chooses His own outcome measures. The study measured the effect of prayers on "postoperative complications defined by the Society of Thoracic Surgeons." But as the accompanying editorial notes, "many prayers for the sick contain the implicit objective of easing the passage of the spirit out of the body, an outcome which, by Society of Thoracic Surgeons definition, would be coded as death."
15. God doesn't participate in studies. The authors say 1,493 people refused to participate in the study because they had other priorities or were "not interested in clinical research." Why should God, who has a lot more to do and nothing to learn from a study, react differently?
16. God hates being told what to do. Several clerics argue that the kind of intercessory prayer used in the study is "manipulative … of divine action" and sinfully treats God "as our instrument." The editorial accompanying the study, noting that patients who were prayed for "had worse absolute rates of complications" than those who weren't, asks "whether it was the intercessory prayer per se that may be unsafe."
17. God is malevolent.