Can Science Determine if God Answers Prayer?

An Arizona State research team has found support for the theory that intercessory prayer works, says EurekAlert.  David R. Hodge averaged 17 studies on intercessory prayer, including some that measured no effect.  His overall result contradicts a Harvard study (2006) by Benson that prayer has no influence on a patient’s health.  Still, he could not say without qualification that prayer alone should be used as treatment.

Well-meaning as these studies are, they have many problems.  This is not the kind of phenomenon that can be reduced to scientific experimentation.  For one thing, the complexities of the pray-er and the pray-ee are beyond classification.  While the “effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much” (James 5:16), one cannot know the spiritual integrity of the one praying, nor the willingness to receive God’s blessing by the recipient.  Can sincerity be measured with a meter?  What about the need for persistence in prayer?
    In addition, God cannot be put in a scientific box.  His ways are not our ways (Isaiah 55:8).  He works by intelligent design, not by natural law.  Trying to figure out God’s ways by the methods of science is like trying to calculate the square root of Abraham Lincoln.  Intelligent beings can choose to go against expectations.  God is under no obligation to respond, like a stimulus-response machine, to inputs.  He sees beyond the immediate crisis and works things out according to His own will, incomprehensible as it may seem to finite beings.
    Third, it’s not the act of prayer as a rote behavior that gets a response.  The right relationship between a prepared supplicant and the one true God is crucial.  The prophets of Baal prayed, wept and cut themselves in their earnestness, but nothing happened (I Kings 18).  If a supplicant prays to an idol or other false god, no measurable quantity of prayerful activity will register.  Yet even men as righteous as Moses, Job, and Peter sometimes got “no” (or “wait”) for an answer.
    Does God answer prayer?  Millions know by experience and by the promises of God.  Science has no method to investigate such things.