But many people also pray for things—for an outcome to change, for an illness to heal, for a surgery to go well, for a war to end, for a relationship to mend. That kind of prayer is different. If it were literally effective, it would mean that events in the physical world were being altered—that something in the ordinary chain of causation was being nudged off course on request. And if that were happening consistently and repeatably, you would expect to see clear clusters of unusually good outcomes wherever people pray the most, or wherever the “right” kind of prayer is most common. You would expect the world to look, in its more devout regions, as though the rules of physics were being bent to order. I am not aware of any such pattern.
When researchers have tried to test this carefully—especially with intercessory prayer, praying for someone else—the results have produced no solid, repeatable signal. The best-known example is the STEP trial in cardiac bypass patients: people were randomly assigned to receive or not receive intercessory prayer, with a third group told with certainty that they were being prayed for. Overall, prayer did not reduce medical complications. The one statistically reliable effect ran the wrong way: complications struck 59% of those who were certain they were being prayed for, against 52% of those left uncertain. One plausible reading is psychological: being told “people are praying for you” can quietly raise the stakes. What if I don’t get better? What would that mean—about me, about my faith, about God? For someone already frightened and vulnerable, that extra layer of expectation and scrutiny, the sense that a spiritual test is under way, may add stress rather than comfort.
The same logic can be run at the scale of whole societies. If prayer—or divine favour more broadly—were an instrumental force that altered physical reality, then the most devout regions ought to enjoy a measurable dividend: higher rates of recovery, fewer disasters, lower mortality, all else being equal. The striking thing is that no such supernatural dividend appears. When prosperous democracies are compared, the more secular ones tend to score at least as well as the more religious ones—often better—on the standard markers of societal health. I want to be careful about what this does and does not show. The comparisons are correlational and run at the level of whole nations, so they cannot, by themselves, establish that secularism produces the good outcomes; the causal arrow may well run the other way, with the security and prosperity that reduce human suffering also eroding the felt need for religion. What the data do undercut is the stronger, supernatural claim. If devout populations enjoyed real divine protection, the secular societies should be visibly worse off—and they are not. Whatever genuine benefits religion confers—and they are real: comfort, cohesion, a shared story for making sense of loss—appear to travel through ordinary social and psychological channels rather than through any bending of the physical world.
Spatial Language
One small feature of religious behaviour, inherited from ancient practice, is its spatial language: “God above.” People sometimes literally look upward when they pray. But “up” points in different directions depending on where you stand on Earth, and it changes minute by minute as the planet rotates, orbits the sun, and travels through the galaxy. A person in Australia looking up toward Heaven is facing the same direction as a person in North America looking down into the ground. It is a pre-Copernican metaphor, entangled with the older intuition that up is good and down is bad—one of the most basic ways the human mind maps value onto space.
Of course, looking upward is often figurative—but many people do take it quite literally, and if one were going to, it would be just as “valid” to look downward, or inward into one’s own body. If God is omnipresent, shouldn’t God be as present in the depths of the planet, or in our own cells, as in the sky? The gesture tells us less about the geography of a deity than about the structure of the human imagination.
A related embodied gesture appears in some fundamentalist worship: people in an entranced state reach forward with their hands during songs or prayer—eyes half-closed, rocking, repeating sacred phrases, the emotional intensity magnified by the synchrony of the crowd. This is a normal human ecstatic capacity, present in all cultures with or without religion. But the gesture still implies a location for God—reaching out to take God’s warmth in one’s hands, as though God were physically just ahead, perhaps at the front of the building. Again, the scene tells us a great deal about embodied human longing and very little about the whereabouts of a deity.
Prayer and Empathy
The moral structure of prayer often mirrors the moral structure of empathy. Many prayers are genuinely compassionate: people think of struggling friends, of relatives in trouble, of terrible events in the news, and ask for comfort, protection, and healing. But if prayer is believed to cause divine comfort to arrive, an uncomfortable counterfactual follows: had the prayer not occurred, would the comfort have been withheld? Shouldn’t a loving deity comfort the suffering regardless of whether anyone happened to pray—especially since some of the worst suffering on earth happens in isolation, unwitnessed, with no one even aware enough to pray? It implies a troubling arrangement in which help depends not on who suffers most, but on who is fortunate enough to be noticed.
This is where it helps to recall Paul Bloom’s critique of empathy, which I have reviewed at length elsewhere. Empathy, Bloom argues—provocatively, and against much received opinion—works like a spotlight: it is biased, and therefore often unjust. It is pulled toward those who resemble us, toward vivid stories and dramatic suffering, while it neglects the quiet, the distant, the stigmatized, and the statistically larger tragedies that arrive without a single tear-streaked face. Prayer tends to inherit the same distortion. We pray intensely for the salient and the familiar, and far less for abstract fairness, or for the invisible victims who never enter our field of attention.
Many prayers, of course, are not about others at all; they are wishes for oneself. There are battlefield prayers, prayers before surgery, prayers for money or a job or the return of an ex-partner, prayers for relief from pain, prayers over the outcome of a baseball pitch. As a meditative act this is entirely understandable. But it can set up a reinforcement loop of exactly the kind I described earlier in connection with other unfounded but comforting beliefs. If the prayer is followed by a good outcome, it naturally feels as though it worked, and the person is bolstered to pray again. If the outcome is bad, the failure is easily absorbed: perhaps the prayer was not sincere enough, or not faithful enough; perhaps God said no, or was testing them. Either way the practice is insulated from disconfirmation—validated whatever happens.
That is why prayer can “work” psychologically even when its supernatural claims are false. As meditation and reflection, it genuinely calms and organizes the mind. As a lever on the physical world it shows no measurable effect—yet it remains self-confirming, and that combination carries a hidden cost. It quietly places the burden on the believer, fostering the illusion that one’s own spiritual effort is the decisive factor in how events unfold. We glimpsed the sharp end of this in the prayer trial, where the patients most certain of being prayed for fared slightly worse: once an outcome is felt to ride on the sufficiency of one’s faith, comfort and pressure become difficult to tell apart.
References
Benson, H., Dusek, J. A., Sherwood, J. B., Lam, P., Bethea, C. F., Carpenter, W., Levitsky, S., Hill, P. C., Clem, D. W., Jr., Jain, M. K., Drumel, D., Kopecky, S. L., Mueller, P. S., Marek, D., Rollins, S., & Hibberd, P. L. (2006). Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer. American Heart Journal, 151(4), 934–942. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ahj.2005.05.028
— The largest and most rigorous trial of intercessory prayer. Prayer made no difference to complication-free recovery from bypass surgery; the only statistically reliable effect was that patients certain they were being prayed for had slightly more complications (59% versus 52%). The study was funded by the John Templeton Foundation.
Bloom, P. (2016). Against empathy: The case for rational compassion. Ecco.
— Argues that empathy—feeling what another feels—operates like a biased spotlight, favouring the near, the vivid, and the similar while neglecting the distant and the statistical, so that it frequently misguides moral judgment; Bloom proposes “rational compassion” in its place. The broad thesis is deliberately provocative and much debated, but the specific point borrowed here—that empathy is skewed toward the salient—is well supported.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago Press.
— The founding work of conceptual-metaphor theory, arguing that abstract thought is structured by bodily, spatial metaphors. Their “orientational metaphors”—GOOD IS UP, MORE IS UP, and their downward opposites—underlie the chapter’s point that “God above” reflects the architecture of the human imagination rather than the location of a deity.
Norris, P., & Inglehart, R. (2004). Sacred and secular: Religion and politics worldwide. Cambridge University Press.
— Develops the influential “existential security” thesis: populations facing insecurity and hardship tend to be more religious, while security and prosperity drive secularization.
Paul, G. S. (2005). Cross-national correlations of quantifiable societal health with popular religiosity and secularism in the prosperous democracies: A first look. Journal of Religion & Society, 7 (open access).
— A cross-national comparison reporting that the more secular prosperous democracies tend to have lower rates of societal dysfunction than the more religious ones; the source of the chapter’s “no supernatural dividend” observation. As the author’s own subtitle concedes, it is “a first look”: the analysis is ecological and correlational, and was sharply criticised (notably by Rodney Stark) for the ecological fallacy and selective measures, so it cannot by itself establish causation.
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