Can Prayer Heal?

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The best evidence for healing prayer comes from personal experience. There are millions of stories in which people attribute a healing effect to prayer. Many people have gotten deathly ill and asked a god, spirit, or angel to intervene in the natural course of their illness. If they recover, they give credit to the spirit. Likewise, millions of people have prayed for intervention on behalf of another person who is injured, ill, or diseased. If the one being prayed for recovers, the recovery is thought to be due to the intervention of a god or some other spirit.

One can’t deny the emotional force of such anecdotes. Nor can one deny the apparent strength of the evidence that comes from the accumulation of millions of such stories from around the world in every era of human history. When analyzed, however, the weakness and flaws inherent in such anecdotal evidence become apparent.

The emotional force of any evidence, while relevant to the persuasiveness of the evidence, is irrelevant to its logical force. The fact that a person feels that a prayer was heard by a spirit is not proof that there was an intervention. A baseball fan may cross his fingers and hope a batter gets a hit, but if the batter does or doesn’t get a hit, the fan’s feelings are not relevant to whether the superstitious action had any effect on the batter’s performance.

The cumulative effect that comes from the sheer quantity of anecdotes is illusory for two reasons. First, the collection of anecdotes is always selective due to confirmation bias, the tendency to seek out and recognize instances that confirm one’s beliefs or hypothesis. This process is faulty, however, because it does not consider all the evidence: it omits all the stories that indicate a contrary belief or hypothesis might be true. In this case, we are talking about the millions or billions of cases where someone prayed for a healing but the healing did not happen. The negative stories, however, are just as relevant to the issue as the positive stories. Second, the cumulative effect of evidence must be considered in light of the strength of each piece of evidence, as well as in light of any counter-evidence. Each healing prayer anecdote, whether positive or negative, is essentially very weak, logically speaking, because the data show little more than that one thing happened or didn’t happen after another. If by the question “Can prayer heal?” we mean “do some people recover after they’ve been prayed for?”, then the answer is “yes.” But if we mean “was prayer a causal factor in the recovery?”, then the answer is “we don’t know and no amount of anecdotal evidence can answer that question.” So, even if there are millions of anecdotes of healing prayer that are unquestionably true, we are not justified in claiming on that basis alone that prayer can heal. Anecdotes can’t tell us if the prayer was a causal factor in anyone’s healing. To determine whether prayer is a causal factor in healing, scientific studies must be done.