This statement was made by faith healing advocates after the recent death of (Madeline) Kara Neumann here in Wisconsin. Kara was an eleven year old girl with undiagnosed diabetes who died without receiving medical treatment because her parents attempted to heal her via prayer. The Neumanns belong to a non-denominational bible study group, and this group apparently believes that healing can only be achieved through prayer. I saw this statement on the bible study group's website, which I will not be linking to due to a number of repugnant opinions found therein. (Among other lines I found literally disgusting, they speculated that Kara's awful death from a preventable illness might have been caused by a lack of faith on her part.)
This was all over the news, and much has been said about the Neumanns and their faith healing ilk. For the record, the Neumanns have been charged with reckless homicide, they have publicly stated that they would not do anything differently if one of their other three children fell ill, and many other Christian faith healers have been ardent in their support of the Neumanns. In this post, I'm going to try and avoid discussing faith healers themselves and focus on the statement at hand.
More Logical Fallacies … Who'd Have Thought?
The titular statement basically equates faith healers with doctors, and thus appears to be guilty of the equivocation logical fallacy. (I'm no logic expert, so I might be miscategorizing this statement. However, as you'll see, it is very wrong regardless of what I call it.) Modern medicine is evidence-based, with many decades of well documented and mind-boggling success. Healing via prayer, on the other hand, has no supporting evidence beyond anecdotal stories. The general merits of prayer are a matter of faith, in my opinion. However, once it is hypothesized that prayer influences sick peoples' health, we can scientifically test the efficacy of prayer as a medical treatment.
Well I'll be damned; someone else thought it would be good to test that hypothesis, too. A seminal study ending in 2006 tracked ~1800 heart patients, and asked three different Christian groups to pray for certain patients. (Citation: H Benson et al, American Heart Journal, Apr 2006, 151(4), 934-42.) Two-thirds of the patients weren't sure whether or not they were being prayed for (half of these were, and half weren't), and the remaining third was knowingly prayed for. The groups prayed for a successful surgery and complication-free return to health, starting their prayers the night before the surgery and continuing for two weeks after. Unfortunately for faith healing advocates, being prayed for had no effect on the recovery of the control patients (52% complication rate for those actually prayed for, 51% for those not prayed for). In addition, the people who were knowingly prayed for actually had a slightly higher rate of complications (59%). Not only does prayer not heal people, it might actually make things worse!
Of course, faith healers (and religious people overall) claim that an omnipotent god cannot be constrained to fit a scientific study. This is called special pleading, yet another logical fallacy. If someone makes a testable scientific claim about a religion or deity, then that claim can be studied scientifically. Since the healing power of prayer fails that test, faith healers rely on anecdotes and shoddy reasoning. If someone is healed, even if they received months of modern medical treatment, it was due entirely to their faith. If someone perishes, they just didn't have enough faith. The term you're looking for is "non-falsifiable," and it's a bad word.
Faith Healing Malpractice (Malprayer?)
If you're going to allow faith healers equate prayer and medical treatment, you have to consider all the ramifications of such a concession. When doctors screw up, they get sued for malpractice. They're dragged into court, they have to account for their actions and decisions, and they can lose the right to practice medicine if they messed up badly enough. If faith healing is medicine, why aren't there malprayer cases in front of juries? Why doesn't the family call a lawyer when someone dies after seeing a faith healer, or after their priest gives them the anointing of the sick, or after their congregation prays for them? Unless you resort to the special pleading fallacy mentioned above, doing this ought to be no different than suing a doctor for malpractice.
The Neumanns sent out an email to their bible study group during Kara's last few hours, begging for "emergency prayers" from their faith healing friends. By the reasoning in this week's statement, all these people are guilty of malpractice. Perhaps they could have prayed harder, or used different prayer techniques. They could have prayed longer; I doubt they all prayed from the moment they saw the email to the moment god willed Kara to die. Imagine if an emergency room doctor stopped operating on you to go fold their laundry; it isn't unlikely that one of these faith healers did just that as Kara slipped into a diabetic coma and died.
Intercessory Prayer Is Not a Medical Treatment
Prayer may do many things for many people, but it does not heal the sick. Modern medicine does. People have prayed for millennia, but the average human life expectancy only skyrocketed when modern medicine entered the equation. Every person on the planet has benefitted from modern medicine; yes, even isolated hunter-gatherers, because past vaccination efforts have ensured that they can never get smallpox. On the other hand, relying on prayer for healing only leads to tragedy.
Equating faith healing with actual healing is a deadly mistake. If you're going to pray for a loved one when they are ill, pray for the ambulance to get them to the hospital quickly.