What Can Science Say About the Study of Prayer?

Most adults in the USA say that they have prayed for the healing of others. But does petitioning God (intercessory prayer) for the healing of others lead to better health? This question provoked controversy in 1872 when the Irish physicist John Tyndall proposed a grand study of prayer to answer it. The answer would be obtained by choosing “one single ward or hospital” for sustained prayer by the faithful and comparing healing and mortality rates to those in comparable wards or hospitals. This idea led to the “prayer-gauge debate” and was so controversial on both sides of the Atlantic that the experiment was not done.