The Efficacy of Prayer Revisited

Many readers of the Newsletter will regret that Galton’s paper of 1872, Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer, did not receive more consideration at the Institute’s 1991 Symposium in Galton’s honour. It is easy to dismiss the work as an aberrant curiosity, showing Galton at his most maverick and iconoclastic, but the richness and vigour of the language in which it is written suggest that in it Galton was writing very much from the heart. It surely merits looking at again from a perspective in which scientific procedures have become more precisely codified and religious practice perhaps less so.

It must be said at the outset that The Efficacy of Prayer contains some inconsistencies which even Galton, with his argumentative skill fully deployed, cannot conceal. At first all goes well and Galton is elegantly rational: the data he has available on the life span of Members of Royal Houses allows him to conclude immediately that the prayers offered on their behalf by the population at large are without effect, and the hypothesis that prayer is efficacious is summarily dismissed. But when he turns to the effects of prayer on those who pray, rather than on those who are prayed for, the data become more ambivalent, and as he tries to maintain the direction of his argument some elements of a personal animus begin to intrude. His use of Dr Samuel Guy’s data on the mean age of death of the upper and middle classes (1) is, to say the least, transparently selective. Guy presents two sets of data for the clergy, lawyers and medical men, the first culled from Chamber’s Biographical Dictionary representing only those who have achieved eminence in the Church, and a second set extracted from obituaries in the Annual Register which includes a larger and more representative sample of the clergy:

Guy points out that there is a difference in rank order.

Galton dismisses the evidence of the larger population including the less distinguished, which unfortunately for his purpose shows the clergy to be the longest lived of the three, on the grounds that

‘‘...the easy country life and family repose of so many of the clergy are obvious sanatory conditions in their favour’’.

But he claims to have already demonstrated in Hereditary Genius (1869) that

‘‘...divines are not specially favoured in those worldly matters for which they naturally pray, but rather the contrary, a fact I attribute to their having as a class, indifferent constitutional vigour’’.

Galton clearly recognises that this proposition reduces the force of the argument about the efficacy of prayers. In the face of the assertion of generalised morbidity, for Galton to ascribe an inconveniently enhanced life span to an easy life style rather than to a pious and prayerful one could be seen as no more than a value judgement designed to support a prejudice. We might, in passing, ask here to what extent the ‘‘indifferent constitutional vigour’’ of the clergy can be explained by the Victorian custom of sending the youngest son into the Church (younger sons being born to older mothers etc)?

Galton chooses to depend on the smaller sample of the eminent clergy, whose mean age at death is lower than that of their fellow professionals, for his evidence:

‘‘Hence the prayers of the clergy for protection against the perils and dangers of the night, for protection during the day, and for recovery from sickness, appear to be futile in result.’’

Guy’s interpretation of the data is more detached and academic: despite the change in rank order he notes a similar trend in all three professions, as also in literature, science and art, and suggests that

‘‘...high professional distinction is only to be attained by a sacrifice of health and vigour, leading to a curtailment of life’’.

We can note that the sacrifice involved in achieving eminence appears to be greater by a few percentage points for clergymen than for members of the other two professions. So for this group, indifferent vigour is compounded by a stressful life style, rather than being compensated by an easy one. Certainly the data provides no evidence that prayer is efficacious in counteracting this double disadvantage, but the professional samples are not matched or controlled for ‘‘constitutional vigour’’, and perhaps only multivariate analysis, which Galton did not quite get round to inventing, could satisfactorily identify prayerfulness as the principle component of early death.

Galton could have argued further that one might reasonably suppose that the efficacy of prayer is related to the eminence and divinity of those offering it, and therefore that its failure in the case of the eminent is more noteworthy. On the other hand, it would be possible to argue from Guy’s data that the impaired survival of the more eminent members of the clergy could be attributed to these gentlemen making a greater altruistic sacrifice of their health and vigour, compared both to members of other professions and to their less distinguished colleagues, in response to the demands of their particular vocation and the call to high office. But Galton avoids being so magnanimous.

In a later section of The Efficacy of Prayer Galton abandons the close study of mortality data in search of further evidence to demonstrate the fallacy of popular belief in the efficacy of prayer. His examples are widely drawn, and his arguments are as ever ingenious and entertaining, but there is less of an attempt at academic detachment. Perhaps having already established his main scientific thesis to his own satisfaction, he feels able to explore a hidden agenda and to expose some more subjective attitudes. The nobility are subjected to a withering barrage of criticism and scorn, for everything from fecklessness through illegitimacy to insanity, while the clergy are brought back into the arena again, missionaries in particular, for a polemical display of scarcely veiled contempt and ridicule. Some other groups are however treated more respectfully. Insurance companies for example are cited as reputable allies, perhaps because of their rational and pragmatic attitude to quantitative considerations:

‘‘If prayerful habits had influence on temporal success, it is very probable that insurance companies, of at least some descriptions, would long ago have discovered and made allowance for it. It would be most unwise, from a business point of view, to allow the devout, supposing their greater longevity even probable, to obtain annuities at the same low rates as the profane. Before insurance offices accept a life they make confidential inquiries into the antecedents of the applicant. But such a question has never been heard of as, ‘Does he habitually use family prayers and private devotions?’ Insurance offices, so wakeful to sanatory influences, absolutely ignore prayer as one of them.’’

For the second time, and in a different context, Galton chooses to ignore Guy’s data on the longevity of the larger mass of the clergy. And here I can confirm on the authority of the Research Actuary of a large insurance company (3), that he is not alone: The Company ‘‘...does not allow for variation in mortality between occupations, except for very extreme risks.’’ While such a policy may be justifiable commercially, it is not supported by more modern mortality data (4)

which show that exactly 100 years after Galton’s work the clergy have still retained their slight advantage over doctors and lawyers, and indeed over the professional classes as a whole.

We live however in times which change more rapidly than in Galton’s day. The corresponding OPCS data for 1979-83

show the medics to have forged ahead and the lawyers to have shown considerable improvement. Doubtless Galton would have turned such data to his purpose as cleverly, and with as much felicity of phrase, as he did in 1872. He might however have been gobsmacked by the figure for university academic staff, who record an almost unbelievable Standardised Mortality Ratio of 48! He might well have been tempted to argue that if they have done a deal with anyone in exchanging the tenure of job for tenure on life, it has been with the Devil rather than with God. My own personal belief is that university teachers have taken to prayer as the only opportunity left to them to exercise academic freedom and to give lectures where Nobody answers back.

If we have to conclude that Galton’s valiant attempt to deny the efficacy of prayer is, to use a cognate metaphor, something of a curate’s egg, I hope to show in a subsequent article that Statistical Inquiries nonetheless represents a significant landmark in the history of the development of scientific method.

Clive Turner

References

(1) S. Guy, 1859: Quarterly Journal of the Statistical Society, xxii, 337-357.

(2) M.D. Elcock, 1993: Personal communication.

(3) OPCS, 1968: Occupational Mortality Decennial Supplement 1979-83, HMSO

(4) OPCS, 1978: Occupational Mortality Decennial Supplement 1970-72, HMSO.