Reasonable Doubt
The Science of Miracles
Is God all in our heads—a product of brain chemistry? Or is the human brain like a radio that can tune into the divine?
The line between faith and science has always figured prominently in my life. Long before my decade as a religion correspondent for NPR, I was raised in Christian Science, the religion that privileges prayer over medicine. I reached adulthood without ever going to the doctor, getting a shot, or taking a vitamin, much less antibiotics. In my early thirties, I left the religion after a happy encounter with Tylenol: A single pill eviscerated my three-day fever within the space of 10 minutes. But I never lost respect for the Christian Science belief that how you think and pray can have a physical effect on your body.
Still, I was often surprised when other people expressed the same openness to prayer. On an April day in 2011, I walked into the production area of “Morning Edition” to find my young, hip colleagues debating a story I had written about a boy who’d made a seemingly miraculous recovery from a horrible disease. I, who was neither young nor hip, was on the fence about whether luck, medical treatment, or divine intervention had saved the boy. I was surprised that these well-educated, coastal, twentysomething journalists…
