HEALTH AND PRICES

PRAYER AND HEART ATTACKS

If you have a heart attack and undergo bypass surgery, does having other people pray for you improve your chances of survival?

The most scientific study to date, which required ten years to complete and is based on almost 1,800 patients, concluded that prayer offered, at least by strangers, has no effect.

Actually, the news was less providential. More people who knew they were being prayed for had complications (59%) than those who were unsure they were being prayed for (51%). Researchers said the higher rate for those on the side of supplication might be due to “performance anxiety.”

It wasn’t the first study, and you can be sure it won’t be the last, to determine if prayer helps people heal. Statistics, we expect, will tell.

Our question is, why bother?

Let’s explore why. Ever since the dawn of religious discussion, it has been characterized by terms the participants won’t define, for example, exactly what we mean by the devoted laudation God.

The latest study illustrates the point. What is evidence for or against divine intervention expected to prove? That God does or doesn’t exist? Or that God may or may not intervene in our daily lives, even when we’re in the hospital? And, regardless of what the results are, will they change anybody’s mind?

Here’s a suggested alternative. We decide to define God in a way we can all agree on.

Is such a feat possible?

Of course. But we must be exceedingly careful. We won’t say, for instance, that God is the “cause” of all we behold, because Hume’s tribe will rebel and inform us that cause and effect are an illusion; there is, instead, only sequence, which appears to us susceptible observers as the now suspect item, cause and effect.

So, cleverly skirting that neatly lain bear trap, let’s just say we agree there has to be a “source” for everything that exploded every which way in The Big Bang and produced the universe, even if was just a tiny ball of hyper-compressed matter and energy that, having been sucked into one end of a black hole, finally dropped out the other end like a finely wrought marble and, finding itself uncompressed for the first time in eons, just let go with all of its pent-up contents.

And let’s agree to call whatever the source of all that matter and energy is, as well as the source of the black hole that compressed it and any other universes that might be lurking out there, God. In short, we agree to define God as the ultimate source of everything. ( We won't even get into what the source of God might or might not be. The answer to that seems beyond our earthly needs and was covered about as well as we can do it about 2,400 years ago by the remarkably resilient Aristotle with his not entirely transparent idea of "the first mover" or "the unmoved mover.")

Now, all that’s left to determine is, if something big enough to do all that can still make itself small enough to drop by the hospital and check on our stitches or to be involved in our individual selves enough to send by a medically adept emissary. What study can answer that question to the satisfaction of anyone?

None. Because we’ve moved from the admittedly slight but achievable possibility of consensus that objective reasoning can bring us to. And we’ve landed in the infinitely various predilections of personal conviction.

We can only smile at the diversity we find in personal belief – and expect that a God as capable as the one we have defined, if watching, will at least be as understanding as we are. In fact, like us and any other merciful person who ever lived, we expect that such a God delights in diversity. After all, why is the gene pool so deep that no two of us ever looks quite the same?

So, should you have a heart attack and people offer to pray for you, we recommend that you just say, “Thanks. Much appreciated.” And know that, whether or not the prayer helps get you back home alive, you’re sure that believing in the power of prayer at least does wonders for the spiritual well-being of the people who are doing the praying.

That generous sentiment alone might make you feel good enough about yourself to help you recuperate.

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