uneasy alliances 297controls, and the controls did not do better than the prayed-for groups on any
of the measures.^28
In 1999, a Kansas-based researcher, William Harris, claimed to have rep-
licated Byrd’s findings with a larger population sample. Significantly, perhaps,
the Harris replication actually did not find improvement on any of the specific
measures of improvement identified by Byrd, but rather found improvement
on other measures.^29 Currently, Herbert Benson’s lab at Harvard University is
attempting what is being touted as a definitive replication of the Byrd study,
using multiple sites.
It should be said that this final piece of the larger argument for the health
benefits of religion does share with the first three pieces a clear pragmatic
orientation, at least in some of its renderings. Some insist that the most im-
portant thing to take from the research is the alleged fact that prayer works;
the theological and metaphysical implications of this fact, they say, can all be
worked out later. Thus, one of the scientists involved in the studies, Dale Mat-
thews, exhorted a 1997 graduating class of medical students to get ready, be-
cause—he said—“the medicine of the future is going to be prayer and Pro-
zac.”^30
Most people, though, clearly see that much more is at stake than a change
in clinical practices, and some are not prepared to defer the larger discussion.
Again, the specific issues that are at stake set this final piece of the larger
argument for the health benefits of religion in a distinctly uneasy relationship
to the first three claims. Proponents of the other three claims are always careful
to leave open theoptionof God’s reality, but the force of their arguments does
not inherently depend on whether or not God really exists. Matters here are
different. If prayer works—works in a way that cannot be reduced to the pla-
cebo effect, social support, or stress reduction—then God, or at least some
kind of divine energy, as Larry Dossey has qualified it,^31 must both exist and
be active in the world. This is why one finds the prayer studies being discussed,
not just within medicine, but within forums concerned to document ways in
which science is finding evidence for the existence of God. There it sits beside
reviews of the anthropic principle from physics (the idea that the universe was
deliberately constructed to support intelligent life), alleged fundamental prob-
lems with evolutionary theory and evidence for Creation, and presentations of
the evidence for near-death and out-of-body experiences.^32
There is another important way in which this final claim for the health
benefits of religion differs from the other three. The other three, implicitly at
least, have adopted a view of religion or spirituality that sees itself as theolog-
ically neutral. It is a view that assumes that a distinction can be made between
the personal experiences that people have of the divine—what is generally
called “spirituality”—and the specific theological systems within which they
interpret those experiences. It then goes on to insist that none of those systems
can be judged better than the others, because all of them work equally well in