In the January/February 2000 issue of The Humanist, the journal of the American Humanist association, author David Shafer, Ph.D., discusses scientific investigations of the claim that intercessory prayer can affect cardiac patients who are not even aware that they are being prayed for, bringing about alleviation of pain and faster recovery times. If it were true, it would certainly be a paranormal event. In these tests, the patients were divided into two groups: the control group was not prayed for -- at least not so far as the experimenters were aware -- and the other group had fervent prayers offered up for them by a dedicated group of religious folks who volunteered for that purpose. Every means was used to assure that patients would not become aware of whether or not they were being prayed for, and that those who subsequently judged the results were similarly kept `blinded.'
Now, it's a fact that scientists are often, to most of the public, pretty strange folks. We've pretty well gotten over the notion that they all wear white coats, carry smoking test-tubes, and are male, but even they sometimes admit that they may not see things quite the same way that the rest of us do. One thing has always made me wonder about their world-view -- they almost never consider the possibility that a fellow- scientist might be directly cheating, or might be merely exceedingly naive. And, even if they do suspect such a situation, they scrupulously avoid even hinting at it, particularly in writing.
Author Shafer provides his readers with adequate caveats concerning the claims of the prayer advocates, and then ventures to suggest that perhaps there might have been a problem with security in the very comprehensive set of tests that, in any case, yielded only a 10% percent advantage for prayer -- far less than one might expect a deity to grant a supplicant. In my opinion, he handles this possibility very kindly, when he writes:
"But one doesn't have to be a cardiologist or rocket scientist to know that, no matter how honest and upright the `blinded' participants in this research may have been, it ordinarily would be very difficult to maintain total ignorance of the relevant circumstances for an entire year among such a large group of people. Furthermore, one especially odd feature of the experimental design was having the chaplain's secretary be responsible for the assignment of patients to the two groups -- according to whether their chart numbers were odd or even. Certainly a computer could have done at least as well and with more assurance of objectivity. These are just two examples of what seems to me a general disregard or denial of obvious security issues in research of this kind."
That's a very good observation. Before -- and especially since -- that time, we have been made aware of a great number of examples of flummery in the laboratory. Trusted assistants, passers-by, disgruntled staff members, hoaxers, and simply dishonest and/or incompetent experimenters, have altered data, "edited" numbers and facts, selected out data, and misinterpreted material so grossly that the discipline and reputation of science has been thus violated, again and again. This has happened in all sciences, but is particularly evident in parapsychology. Of course, much of the deliberate cheating in parapsychology has been done by the subjects, who are the ones that most directly benefit if a positive result is declared. Scientists are notoriously incapable of detecting trickery, dealing as they believe they do with a reality that does not include human chicanery as an option. We're discussing here only the participation of the scientists conducting such tests, and their possible involvement in skewing results and/or the final reports.
But other authorities have commented in a similar fashion, before, as Schafer points out:
This is a very expected academic reaction. In July of 1988, when I was invited by Nature Magazine to visit the INSERM (the French national health service) laboratory at Clamart in the company of Walter Stewart of the US National Institutes of Health, and Sir John Maddox, then editor of Nature, to investigate tests of homeopathy that had appeared to yield highly significant positive results, I had a surprise within an hour of arriving at my Paris hotel. Awaiting me in the foyer was a pair of solemn French academics, who presented me with their impressive credentials and then settled down to express their amazement that our team could even consider questioning the results obtained by the very reputable and respected scientist who had produced such startling results. These two gentlemen pointed out to me a number of the awards and other public recognition that had been given to the researcher, and told me quite bluntly that no French academic would accept any conclusion we might arrive at that would put in question the reputation or ability of the head of the Clamart laboratory. I am no stranger to the attitude of academics who see a colleague possibly being accused of carelessness, incompetency, or dishonesty. I hasten to add here that at no time did I or any of my colleagues suspect that the man in charge of that laboratory was involved in any sort of chicanery. A much more detailed account than has ever been published before about this episode will appear in one of my next books, "A Magician in the Laboratory."
Schafer continues: "At the time I was among those shocked by my colleague's unmannerly attitude, which seemed so egregious that Time picked up his argument (`Challenge to Psi') in its next issue. Price was subsequently lionized for his bravery (or foolhardiness) by some in the scientific community and shunned by others -- perhaps the majority -- for his indiscretion. Many years later, however, I was forced to change my reaction. It was after a stint as acting associate chief of staff for research at a Veterans Administration medical center and later as chair of its research committee, and especially after making the painful discovery that a worker in my own laboratory had knowingly submitted `adjusted' data to me, that I realized that it can be a good deal harder to detect folly or fraud than most scientists would like to think."
Part of the problem here, as I have pointed out above, is that scientists have a genuinely very difficult time stepping outside of their disciplines and looking at their results and the results of their colleagues as possibly flawed, for any one of several reasons. They just may have private thoughts about the matter, which are never expressed, and that fact can be very damaging to the progress of science and technology.
Schafer continues:
I don't believe that really "extraordinary" means are always needed to be employed to solve most of the cases in which deliberate cheating might be taking place. Simple common sense, coupled with the ability to ignore the mythology that has been generated about so-called "psychic"abilities -- that such elements as negative vibrations, bad attitudes, inhibiting pressure, shyness, fear, nervousness, not being blindly trusted, etc., can inhibit results -- would go far toward equipping the average scientist with the basic tools that are needed in such matters. In any case, I repeat this suggestion that I have made many times: in scientific research where human chicanery might be the modus operandi, an experienced magician can be out of great advantage, if allowed to participate and to help design the protocol.
Regarding tests of the power of prayer, I certainly do not see the need for a conjuror. However, David Schafer's caveats as quoted above are important, and I hope that they will be heeded. I'm cheered to note that Harvard University is presently conducting a test of "prayer power" with 1800 patients admitted for heart surgery. Results, according to Schafer, are to be expected later this year. I look forward to seeing those results, especially if the controls on information leakage can be tightened up.
(Additional information on this subject can be seen in my book, "The Faith Healers," available by mail through this web page.)
"George Robert Price addressed this problem in a notorious 1955 paper, `Science and the Supernatural,' published in Science. Emboldened by the words of David Hume that `no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falseness would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish,' Price called on the scientific community to demand only the most rigorous standards of evidence from all investigators claiming to have observed phenomena -- in this case those collectively known as `extrasensory perception' -- that appear to violate known laws of physics. He went on to suggest -- unwisely, in the opinion of many who otherwise agreed with him -- that the possibility of deliberate fraud must be considered if all other explanations fail."
"The power and beauty of careful scientific inquiry lies in its self-corrective nature, which we can never take for granted. It is especially important to be critical of the design of certain kinds of experiments that by their nature (complexity, cost, unprofitability to potential investigators, and so on) are unlikely ever to be replicated sufficiently to be truly self-correcting. In such cases, Hume's dictum that `extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' might well be clarified by specifying `obtained under extraordinary security' as a part of the requirement."
