Tested under controlled conditions, intercessory prayer fails.

Question

The 2006 STEP study (Templeton-funded, ten years, 1,800 cardiac patients) found no benefit from intercessory prayer — and a slight negative effect for those who knew they were prayed for. Amputees never regrow limbs. Catholic and Protestant child mortality rates track local medicine, not local devotion. If prayer is real communication with an omnipotent friend, the silence on the line is deafening.

C.S. Lewis · Answer

Prayer is not a vending machine.

The objection imagines prayer as a system of inputs and outputs: enough prayers in, the desired outcome out. On this model, of course prayer "fails." It would also fail as a model of friendship, or marriage, or any relation between persons. You do not summon your wife by repeating her name with sufficient sincerity. She is not a vending machine, and neither is God.

Prayer in the Christian tradition is not primarily a mechanism for getting things. It is the alignment of the creature with the Creator — a participation in the divine will, not a manipulation of it. Thy will be done is the model, not an afterthought. When Jesus prays in Gethsemane, he asks; he is refused; he submits. This is the pattern.

That said, prayers are answered. I have seen them answered. But the answer comes on God's terms and his timing, and is often not what was asked. Asked for relief, we are sometimes given strength to bear. Asked for the dead to be raised, we are sometimes given the courage to bury them.

Thomas Aquinas · Answer

We pray not to change God, but to be changed by God.

A common confusion: that prayer is meant to alter God's mind, and that if it doesn't, it has failed. God's will is eternal and unchanging. We pray not to inform him of our needs (he knows them already) nor to persuade him to act (he has eternally willed what he wills) but because he has eternally willed that certain goods come to us through our asking.

Prayer is thus a real cause in the chain of providence — but its primary effect is on the one praying. To pray rightly is to conform one's desire to God's, to learn what to want by asking for it, to become the kind of creature for whom the petition makes sense. The petition that is answered changes the petitioner more than the world.

The Templeton study tested whether God could be made to function as a magic spell when invoked by strangers about strangers. The result — that he cannot — is exactly what the tradition predicts.

Augustine · Answer

My mother prayed for years. She got something better than she asked for.

My mother Monica prayed for years that I would not go to Rome, because she feared I would be lost there. I went to Rome anyway, and there I was found — converted, baptized, returned to the faith she had wanted for me. She had asked for one thing and been given another. The thing she had been given was the thing she had really wanted, but she had not known how to name it.

This is the shape of prayer in a fallen world. We pray with the desires we have, which are mixed and partial. God answers, when he answers, the deeper desire we did not know we had. The prayers that look unanswered are sometimes answered at a depth we could not have specified.

I will not pretend this consoles every grief. The mother whose child dies prayed in a depth I have not touched. But I will say what I have seen: that those who pray long and honestly are rarely surprised, in the end, that God did not give them what they asked. They are surprised by what he gave instead.

The Pastor · Answer

I have been at the bedsides. I will not lie about what I saw.

I have prayed for healing and seen it. I have prayed for healing and watched the person die. I will not give you a clean theology that flattens this. The honest answer is that intercessory prayer is real, and its results are unpredictable, and any pastor who tells you otherwise is selling something.

What I have seen, more reliably than miraculous healing, is this: the people who are prayed for, and who pray, die better. They are less afraid. Their families are less shattered. The community around them is more present. None of this shows up in a Templeton study because none of this was what the study measured. The study measured cardiac complications. Prayer was never primarily about cardiac complications.

The amputee question is the cleanest version of the objection, and I will be plain: I do not know why limbs are not restored. I know that other things are restored — marriages, addictions, the will to live — and that I have watched it happen. The atheist is right that the data on prayer-for-things is messy. He is wrong that this settles the question of whether God listens.

Tested under controlled conditions, intercessory prayer fails.

The objection, in full

Prayer is not a vending machine.

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