For centuries, people have insisted that prayer works. Whisper the right words into the void and presto, cancer melts, floods recede, planes land safely, and Aunt Mabel’s bunions ease up. At least that is the pitch.
Unfortunately, when you take this mystical hotline to heaven into a clinical trial, the results are about as impressive as asking Alexa to cure leprosy.
The biggest prayer experiment of all time, the STEP trial, poured millions of dollars into testing whether heart patients fared better if strangers prayed for them. Spoiler: they did not. The prayed-for and the un-prayed-for recovered at exactly the same rates. The only group that did worse were patients who were told they were being prayed for. Apparently “God is watching you” is less comforting than it sounds.
And yet, religious organisations keep trying. They pour money into prayer research as if it is divine venture capital. Time after time the data rolls in. Time after time it says the same thing: prayer heals exactly as well as not praying.
Let us be honest. Prayer is not a cosmic delivery service. It is self-soothing. A glorified stress ball. A ritualised way of talking to yourself. If you want to lower your blood pressure, you would be just as well off knitting, meditating, or watching cat videos on YouTube.
The real kicker is that every time someone claims “the power of prayer saved me,” they are ignoring the nurses, doctors, cleaners, surgeons, scientists, engineers, and drug developers who actually did the heavy lifting. It is like thanking the stadium announcer instead of the football team for scoring the winning goal.
Prayer does not move mountains. Excavators do. Prayer does not cure disease. Medicine does. Prayer does not keep planes in the sky. Physics does.
But please, keep clasping your hands. Not because it changes the universe, but because it keeps them too busy to legislate against science.
👉 Amen.