You know, I think I would have taken the deal offered by the senator on last night’s episode of The West Wing. Throw a little federal money at a study of the healing effects of "remote prayer" in return for a key vote on an important foreign-aid bill? Sorry if this is disappointing, but President Nice Blog probably would have done it. I say this as a lapsed-Catholic atheist and a proud supporter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Of course, the senator on the show was hoping to poke yet another hole in the wall of separation between church and state. But I don’t see this as a wall-of-separation question, strictly speaking.

The point of the study would be to find whether or not the human body is somehow hard-wired to respond to prayer it doesn’t know about from people it’s never met. It’s an absurd idea, but either it’s true or it isn’t, and if it’s true, it’s true whether we discover the truth or not. Now, as long as the government and its surrogates don’t compel or coerce a specific religious response to the results of such a study -- as long as we still have exactly the religious freedom we have now after the results are published, as long as we’re free to act on or ignore the results as we see fit -- the wall of separation isn’t violated.

Of course, that’s true only if studies that test the effect of any religious practice -- or no religious practice -- have an equal chance of being funded. But I say let a hundred flowers bloom -- after the government funds the remote-prayer study, it should probably fund a double-blind study of atheist/agnostic substitutes for prayer (perhaps the healing effects of remote volunteers who sit around reading the Sunday New York Times over brunch?).

In real life, as it turns out, a study of remote healing through prayer did get federal funding -- about a dozen times as much funding as the senator requested on The West Wing. And the bizarre conclusion of the study was that remote healing works.

But, unsurprisingly, there’s a huge catch.

As Po Bronson points out in an article in the December 2002 issue of Wired, the scientists who conducted the study tortured their data until they squeezed out one dubious correlation between remote prayer and healing. (Other data showed that patients who’d been prayed for did worse on many measures of healing.). The scientists went on to unblind and reblind their data to help them find further correlations suggested to them after the fact. The journal that published their article had no idea that such violations of proper research procedure had taken place.

(And in a particularly weird twist, the lead researcher contracted one of the diseases she’d been studying -- a particularly nasty form of brain tumor -- and was herself the recipient of lots and lots of remote prayer. It did her absolutely no good.)

Obviously, the government shouldn’t fund bad science, religious or otherwise -- but even so, the the scientific method, with its emphasis on ongoing critique and openness to attempts at replication, is designed to encourage detection of sloppiness, error, and outright fraud. This experiment got a pretty nasty critique -- a rare debunking in the popular press.

I say it’s OK to throw religion -- and atheism -- into the scientific mix, and it’s OK for government to fund such research, as long as religious and irreligious notions have an equal chance at funding, and as long as government doesn’t try to compel you to pray after one study says it might shrink some stranger’s tumor.