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Chibnall and colleagues¹ are to be congratulated for many points made and supported in their recent commentary concerning research on distant intercessory prayer. The lack of a comprehensive model, the explanatory relevance concerns, and the testability issues are all notable. However, I am concerned about their comments and implications in 2 areas, (1) syncretism and (2) encouragement of future research.

Comments on pages 2531 and 2535 of their article¹ (eg, Would anyone "dare" to study differences as a function of specific theological belief systems?) support religious syncretism. That is, the authors support the general notion that all value systems are somehow basically alike, and research into differences between specific systems is inappropriate. Faith systems such as orthodox Judaism and Christianity make some rather exclusionary statements (eg, Exodus 20:3 and John 3:16). While we need to work together in publicly supported institutions, claims of equality among religious systems seem to be . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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Experiments on Distant Intercessory Prayer: God, Science, and the Lesson of Massah
John T. Chibnall, Joseph M. Jeral, and Michael A. Cerullo
Arch Intern Med. 2001;161(21):2529-2536.
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