Heeding the new creation story: farewell to formulaic prayers of petition.

The earliest prayer I can remember is "Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep." Head on pillow, tiny palms pressed together, parent sitting close at hand, I sleepily mumbled the words. "If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take." The prayer was formulaic. It might as well have been a nursery rhyme, or a string of made-up words like "abracadabra." It was in fact an incantation, a magical plea to the powers of the universe to guide me through the little sleep of night into the light of another day.

I was raised in a culture of petition, from an early age inculcated with a repertoire of formulaic prayers addressed to God, his angels, or his saints. All the prayers assumed a response: Here I am, Lord, deserving of your attention, favor, healing, forgiveness. Never did it pass my mind that my prayers were not heard. My education was hemmed about with a huge body of stories affirming God's intervention in human affairs. Had not every Catholic experienced firsthand the power of prayer - a return to health, a financial difficulty resolved, a lost object found? Were not the shrines full of abandoned crutches? Did not every chapel gleam with votive candles lit in thanks? The evidence of efficacy was overwhelming.

Or rather, the evidence for the efficacy of prayer appeared overwhelming to a mind predisposed to belief. Later, I trained as a scientist and also studied the history and philosophy of science. I learned something about controlled experiments, the statistical analysis of data, and the appropriate exercise of educated skepticism. Most importantly, I learned how belief can influence judgment even the judgment of scientists - and how scientists seek to minimize the role of belief in the evaluation of evidence. No knowledge system can be entirely free of personal and cultural predispositions, which is why scientists place so much emphasis on peer review, mathematics, diagrams, photographs, specialized language, and the strict exclusion of personal, religious, political, and philosophical affiliations from scientific communication.

In the light of my new scientific skepticism, the evidence for the successes of petitionary prayer became a thing of smoke and mirrors, a compilation of mere anecdote. On the face of it, evidence for the ineffectiveness of petitionary prayer appears more convincing. Millions of Indians pray for sons rather than daughters, yet the sex ratio of Indian babies remains fairly even. Countless prayers offered for sovereigns and clergy produce no detectable extension of their lifetimes. According to one study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Christian Scientists pay a price for their confidence in the healing power of prayer: their median age at death is younger than that of their fellow citizens.

A medical context would seem to be the ideal environment to empirically test the efficacy of petitionary prayer; it is the only context in which we find large numbers of human subjects in a reasonably controlled scientific environment. Significantly, as part of a growing interest in alternative therapies, the therapeutics of prayer has lately received increased attention within the medical community.

Of course, no one denies that prayer might have a placebo effect. If patients in clinical trials are given sugar pills or other imitation treatment in place of real therapies, some - as many as a third - will nonetheless get better. Physicians ascribe the success of placebos to some as yet mysterious mind-body interaction. Prayer might heal in the same way: if you believe it helps, perhaps it will. Prayer might also achieve a therapeutic result through stress-reduction. Many physicians believe that relaxation leads to lower blood pressure, alleviation of hypertension, pain reduction, and other beneficial physical states. The scientific evidence for relaxation therapy is somewhat ambiguous. However, if relaxation exercises are therapeutic among certain populations of patients, then prayer or any relaxing meditation might produce the same results.

Neither the placebo effect nor therapeutic stress-reduction requires miraculous explanations, nor does either seriously challenge conventional medicine. Almost all scientists accept that mind and body interact in many complex ways that are as yet only poorly understood. But can prayer addressed to God on a patient's behalf - without a patient's knowledge - heal? On this matter, the medical literature is nearly silent.

In 1988, Randolph Byrd published study results in a Southern Medical Journal article that have been widely quoted as offering scientific evidence for the medical benefits of intercessory prayer. Over a ten-month period, Byrd randomly divided nearly four hundred patients in a coronary-care unit at the San Francisco General Medical center into two groups. There were no statistically significant differences between the two groups upon admission. One group was prayed for by born-again Christians outside the hospital; the control group received no assigned prayer. Neither physicians nor patients knew to which group the patients had been assigned. According to Byrd, the patients who received intercessory prayer required less ventilatory assistance, antibiotics, and diuretics than the control group. His qualified conclusion: "Based on these data there seemed to be an effect [from intercessory prayer], and that effect was presumed to be beneficial."

Byrd's study has been faulted on statistical and procedural counts, even by some who believe in the power of intercessory prayer. Furthermore, no significant differences were noted in such variables as length of hospital stay or mortality. These reservations are seldom mentioned when the results of Byrd's study are quoted, as, for example, in a 1996 Time magazine cover story on alternative healing strategies. Nor do we hear much about two earlier medical studies that failed to provide statistical support for the success of intercessory prayer.

Given the impossibility of knowing who has actually been prayed for, by whom, and how often, it is hard to imagine how any scientific study of intercessory prayer can be conclusive one way or the other. However, if Byrd's ostensibly positive results were somehow confirmed in an unambiguous way, it would certainly represent a stunning challenge to the scientific world view, which is disinclined to admit the willful intervention of God in the course of nature. Suffice to say, most of the medical community is highly skeptical.

But not universally so.

Larry Dossey is a physician and successful author who has made a name for himself as a proponent of alternative healing strategies, including prayer. He has expressed reservations about Byrd's study, but is open to the healing power of prayer, even if the patient is not aware of being prayed for. He argues for a new kind of medicine that takes account of a "collective mind," a mind not localized to brain or body.

The respected Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson is another traditionally trained physician who is pushing for the scientific study of alternative therapies. He also recognized flaws in Byrd's study, but thinks intercessory prayer should be studied in a rigorous, scientific way. With his colleagues, Benson has designed a test of intercessory prayer that he believes will meet the strictest scientific standards. The study is funded by the Templeton Foundation, a private foundation that supports the use of scientific study to reveal knowledge of God.

A good scientist, Benson is interested in the causal mechanisms at work in alternative therapies, including prayer. And certainly, the mind-body connection is pretty much unexplored territory in science. Nevertheless, skepticism remains high among scientists.

Believers in the power of intercessory prayer are unlikely to be dissuaded by a dearth of respectable scientific support; after all, God in his omniscience may simply refuse to cooperate with any empirical test of his power. However, many persons, such as myself, who are skeptical of miracles and respectful of experiment, are left with rather a hole in our lives. We were taught that God hears and answers prayers; a careful examination of the evidence reveals no compelling measure of response.

For many of us, the hole in our lives has been filled by a new story of the creation that does not require a God who interferes in the day-to-day unfolding of events: an evolutionary story that reaches inward to the ceaseless dance of the DNA and outward to the spiraling galaxies. It is a scientific story that places human life and consciousness squarely in a cosmic flow of complexifying energy. This new story is solidly grounded in the empirical method, but open to revision as we learn more.

The Roman Catholic priest and cultural historian Thomas Berry urges us to assimilate the new story into our religious and prayer lives. He writes, "The universe, the solar system, and the planet earth in themselves and in their evolutionary emergence constitute for the human community the primary revelation of that ultimate mystery whence all things emerge into being." The forms of religious belief that have guided us in the past are inadequate to energize the future, he says. The ancient Christian creation story has functioned well in its institutional efficiency and moral efficacy, but it is no longer the integral story of the Earth or humankind. It is a sectarian story, focused on the personality of the Savior and the interior spiritual processes of the faithful. It has become "dysfunctional." For Berry, the significance of the new scientific creation story is this: The universe is a unity, an interacting, evolving, and genetically related community of beings bound together inseparably in space and time. Our responsibilities to each other, to the planet, and to all creation are implicit in this unity. Each of us is profoundly implicated in the functioning and fate of every other being on the planet.

So far, the majority of religious people have recoiled from the new scientific creation story, instead seeking security and comfort in Scriptures and traditions that derive from an older, more human-centered cosmology. In the older cosmology, an Olympian God mostly listens and responds individually to our prayers. In the new cosmology, God reveals himself in and through his creation, as law and chaos, light and darkness, creator and destroyer. He is, in the words of the Jesuit theologian David Toolan, "the Unnamable One/Ancient of Days of the mystics, of whom we can only speak negatively (not this, not that), a 'wholly other' hidden God of Glory." Or again, in the words of the Greek novelist Nikos Kazantzakis: "We might have given it any other name we wished: Abyss, Mystery, Absolute Darkness, Absolute Light, Matter, Spirit, Ultimate Hope, Ultimate Despair, Silence. But we have named it God because only this name, for primordial reasons, can stir our hearts profoundly. And this deeply felt emotion is indispensable if we are to touch, body with body, the dread essence beyond logic." The God of the new story does not take note of our childish cry: Here I am, Lord, deserving of your attention, favor, healing, forgiveness. Rather, he sweeps us along on the grand wings of his abiding plan and presence.

How are we to pray in such a universe, to such a God? Thomas Merton says, "The option of absolute despair is turned into perfect hope by the pure and humble supplication of monastic prayer." He defines monastic prayer as "a prayer of silence, simplicity, contemplative and meditative unity, a deep personal integration in an attentive, watchful listening of 'the heart.'" Learning to pray, then, as I understand it, is learning to listen with the mind and heart - making oneself attentive to what the poet Mary Oliver calls "the light at the center of every cell." It is a fearsome task, best suited to solitude and silence. Our prayers are not answered with miraculous gifts, tagged with our names or those of loved ones, but with beauty and terror. For the prayerful listener, the world becomes the sublime scripture, full of stories of structure and chaos, law and chance, complexification and decay, including the individual stories of the human persons in whom the universe becomes conscious of itself.

David Toolan writes: "We are here to make sacraments of nature - signs that give grace, life, hope - whether in raising a family, educating children, running a corporation, governing a city, searching for a synthesis of all physics, collecting garbage. All such activity takes nature's energy and transforms it, tries to pour soul into it, makes poetry of it, a thing of beauty. Liturgy is the big clue: here we regularly take fossil fuels, stone, metals, silicon, water, fire, grain, grape, animal stuffs, air waves, and sound - indeed, as much of space-time as we can sensuously lay our hands on - convert it into a gathering of voices, a ceremony of praise and thanksgiving."

Praise and thanksgiving: these are enduring motives for prayer. All of my life has been a re-learning to pray - a letting go of incantational magic, petition, and the vain repetition "me, Lord, me": instead watching attentively for "the light at the center of every cell," listening for the "dread essence beyond logic." It is a watching and a listening that is informed by science, because reliable knowledge is a prerequisite for love. "Less and less do I see any difference between research and adoration," wrote the great Jesuit scientist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin near the end of his life. A scientific experiment that rebuts the effectiveness of intercessory prayer could itself be a revelation of God's modus operandi in the world. Let me watch and pray, then, in utter silence, or aloud in a gathering of like-minded souls, raising our voices in praise and thanksgiving. Prayer is for me now being mindful of a story - the story of the unfolding of life and consciousness in a universe of godly dimension - an activity summed up in Saint Augustine's words Noverim te, noverim me, "May I know you, may I know myself."

Chet Raymo's most recent book is Skeptics and True Believers: The Exhilarating Connection Between Science and Religion (Walker and Company). He writes a weekly column on science for the Boston Globe.