Free Fingerprints of God by Barbara Bradley Hagerty Page B

immune system.
    Her patient Sheri Kaplan put it this way: “I have the power to control my mind. That’s one thing that I can control, before it gets to a physical level or an emotional level. So if you can nip it in the bud, you can stop anything from moving forward into a direction you don’t want it to. If I visualize the virus not being there, the virus is not there.”
    “You’re saying you can overpower the virus with love or good thoughts like washing it out of your body?” I asked her.
    “Oh, yeah. Washing it out—I do that every day in the shower. I watch the virus go down the drain.”
    Scientists would differ with that conclusion. The virus is still lurking in Sheri’s body. But tell that to the HIV, which has failed to make an inch of progress since the day it invaded her life.
     
     
     
    Is Anyone Up There?
    Neither Sheri Kaplan’s story nor Gail Ironson’s research claims that there is a God who puts a restraining hand on the HIV. It is the belief that there is a God who guides, not abandons, loves, not punishes, and occasionally intervenes to cause the miracle. This keeps everything in a closed—and safe—loop. The materialist can argue that the power to affect one’s own body originates in the mind of the believer, not from an external or supernatural source. In other words, the skeptic can point to a material mechanism, and there’s no need for a God to fill in the gaps.
    So now let’s launch into far more turbulent scientific waters: the prayer studies. The premise of these studies is that one person’s thoughts (or prayers) can affect another person’s body. The vast majority of Americans believe in the power of prayer, and spend a lot of time demonstrating that belief, whether in church, or the hospital room, or as part of their morning devotion. And why not? It’s all mind over matter anyway, right?
    Apparently not. I soon learned that conflating prayer (for someone else) with the mind-body connection amounts to scientific blasphemy. Prayer and positive thinking may appear to share some characteristics, scientists told me, but that is a mirage. It is a little like equating the opening scene of the movie Saving Private Ryan with actually losing your leg on Omaha Beach in the D-Day invasion. They seem to portray the same sort of event, but in reality everything is different, including the mechanism by which they are experienced—pixels of light on a movie screen versus a physical bullet shattering your thighbone.
    I asked Anne Harrington at Harvard to explain why some scientists embrace the mind-body connection in one breath and repudiate intercessory prayer in the next.
    “It’s a gigantic leap. It’s a whole different ball game,” Harrington said.
    When talking about the mind-body connection, science can explain the mechanism in which a person alters his own experiences through prayer and mental discipline.
    “But with interpersonal prayer, you’re making, at least potentially, a metaphysical claim—a claim about the nature of external reality. You’re arguing either for the existence of invisible mysterious forces—which science doesn’t know anything about—which somehow emanate from the praying person to the person being prayed for. Or you’re making an argument for a miracle, for an intervention into a disease process that would not have happened otherwise. I think it’s a very big step.”
    One of the first scientists who dared to test God (and the wrath of his colleagues) was R. C. Byrd at San Francisco General Medical Center. In the late 1980s, he monitored nearly four hundred patients admitted to the coronary care unit for heart problems. Half the patients received prayer from Christian intercessors, the other half received no prayer. The patients knew they were in the study (they signed consent forms) but no one—not the patients, not the researchers—knew who was receiving prayer and who was not. This eliminated the placebo effect, in which a person who thinks