Prayer, does it work? No one really knows for sure. Is that really true?

The old saying goes, “Work like it all depends on you and pray like it all depends on God.” Or “God helps those, who help themselves.”

On the face value it makes sense that God is not just going to hand everything to you on a silver platter. It also highlights that it is, in fact, you that make things happen and not some unseen being that may exist.

I had a lot of heartbreak from unanswered prayers. From my experience prayer has been “hit and miss” at best and I have become reliant on myself to make things happen because no one else will.

When believers are faced with the reality of prayers going unheeded, the only way they can deal with it is to rationalize, “God has plans for me that I don’t know about.”

Am I the only one that can see the utter breakdown of rational thinking here?

There are so many caveats that it makes it impossible to know whether prayers are answered or not. Even for a believer, God does what he pleases regardless of what we supplicate him for in sincere prayer.

I can certainly understand how one arrives at this conclusion from false suppositions. God is all-powerful and all loving. I am suffering and pray earnestly for relief. No relief comes. There is nothing God cannot do. He could intervene, as it is recorded over millennia in religious writings. Why doesn’t he? Am I a forsaken sinner? God is all loving, so he would never forsake anyone. That cannot be it. Is God so cruel that he wants me to suffer? That’s not it for sure. God is not cruel by all loving.

Instead of questioning God’s existence or whether there is any point to praying, it must be that God has some greater plan for me; like genuine, real suffering has anything to teach any of us. What do you learn for being psychologically damaged by torture? Nothing; Period; End of story.

Since experience doesn’t match belief, there is a the caveat of free will that God has given man to do whatever they want to each other. This noninterference is in direct conflict with the history of God’s dealings with man in the Bible. Didn’t the Romans have free will when they were drowned in the Red Sea? Well, actually, no they didn’t. If you read the story. God “hardened” pharaoh’s heart on several occasions so he wouldn’t release the Israelites. This was done so God could make a demonstration of his power to his people.

Not all suffering comes from the hand of man. What about disease? There is a caveat for that too. Some use the same illogical rationalization by attributing free will at the physical level. God’s hands are once again tied.

If both of these reasons hold true, God’s hands are tied by free will, then how does this differ from a godless world that is ruled only by the laws of physics and not by a supernatural being? It seems to me that if God was all loving he would intervene to save his children, as he has done for millennia. What all loving parent would not save their child from danger?

What of prayer then? If God doesn’t answer prayers because of free will or that he has “better” plans for us, then what is the purpose of prayer? Does its benefits only lie in the psychological benefits in that it may make you feel good and may give you hope?

How can we know? Can we approach this scientifically and test the effects of prayer? Has there been a study done? There was a study done to see what were the measurable effects of prayer. The religious community was very excited about this study.

There were three groups in this study. One was the control group, where they were told that a group of people may or not be praying for them. No one was praying for them. The second group was told the same as the control group, but people were in fact praying for a smooth and complication free recovery. The third group was told that someone was praying on their behalf and there were indeed people praying them.

Believers would expect that the latter two groups would fare better than the control group and non-believers would expect no difference among all three groups. There was a surprising result based on the psychological effects of being told someone was praying for you. The control group and the first group had the same results, showing that it didn’t matter whether someone prayed for you or not. The two group were told the same thing and had the same results. This highlights that it is what the groups were told that affected the results.

What about third group that was told that someone was definitely praying for them? Did they get a psychological boost from knowing someone was praying for them? As it turned out, the third group had more incidents of post surgery complications. Since they were told someone was definitely praying for them you would think they would do better. Right? Well, not really. Think about it. If someone, out-of-the-blue, told you that someone was going to pray for you right before you went into surgery, I think I would be a bit more nervous than usual. This may be why they did not fare as well as the other two groups.

So the worry that they were so bad off that someone needed to pray for them, had an adverse psychological effect on them and there were more incidents of complications. Again, it was what the group was told and not whether someone was actually praying that had an effect on how the patients fared.

This is the only effect of prayer, I can see; purely psychological. This would be for all parties involved with the knowledge of the prayer; the person giving the prayer (obviously), possibly the person receiving the prayer (if they know they are the subject of the prayer) or any other person who may know about the prayer. Keep in mind this psychological effect can be positive or negative (as we saw in the prayer study).

For the person performing the prayer they will have a positive psychological benefit if they feel that the prayer will help. The person performing the prayer can also get negative psychological effects from praying, if, for example, the person was frustrated from unanswered prayers, feeling anger towards God, feeling punished by God, or that God no longer loved them.

From the study on the effects of prayer, it has been demonstrated that there can be negative effects from prayer, but there, obviously, can also be positive effects from prayer. This is where I concede is the most benefit of prayer. It is not in an unseen being interceding, but the positive psychological effects that ia derived from knowing someone cares about you (the person giving the prayer) and is thinking of you. This is much like the positive effects from support groups that can lead to a better quality of life (there are mixed results as to whether support groups actually have any effect on physical health). Prayer therefore is purely a human experience that may have psychological benefits.