Time Isn’t Linear

In July 2000, Israeli doctor Leonard Leibovici conducted a double-blind, randomized controlled trial involving 3,393 hospital patients. The patients were divided into a control group and an “intercession” group. The purpose of the experiment was to see whether prayer could have an effect on their condition.

Prayer experiments are often used as examples of mind affecting matter at a distance. But this particular study is especially interesting because the story is not quite what it appears to be at first.

Leibovici selected patients who had suffered sepsis, an infection, while hospitalized. He randomly designated half of the patients to have prayers said for them, while the other half were not prayed for. He then compared the results across three categories: how long fever lasted, length of hospital stay, and how many patients died as a result of the infection.

The prayed-for group benefited from an earlier decrease in fever and a shorter hospitalization time. The difference in the number of deaths between the prayed-for group and the group that was not prayed for was not statistically significant, although mortality was slightly better in the prayed-for group.

At first, that sounds like a powerful demonstration of the benefits of prayer and the possibility that intention may influence the body through thoughts and feelings. But there is one additional element to this story that makes it even more provocative.

Did it strike you as odd that in July 2000, one hospital would have more than 3,000 cases of infection at once? Was it a very poorly sterilized place, or was some kind of contagion running rampant?

That is where the study becomes strange.

The people praying in 2000 were not praying for patients who were infected in 2000. Unbeknownst to them, they were praying for lists of people who had been hospitalized between 1990 and 1996, four to ten years before the experiment took place. The patients being prayed for had already gone through their illness years earlier.

In other words, the study examined remote, retroactive intercessory prayer.

That means the prayers were said after the medical events had already happened. The prayed-for patients appeared to show measurable differences in outcomes, but those outcomes had taken place years before the intervention was performed.

That is what makes this study so difficult to categorize.

If read literally, it seems to challenge the way we usually think about time, cause, and effect. We normally assume the past is fixed, the present is unfolding, and the future has not happened yet. Cause comes before effect. An action happens, and then something follows from it.

But in this study, the “intervention” happened years after the outcomes being measured.

This does not mean the study proves that time is not linear. It does not prove that prayer can change the past. It does not prove that intention can rewrite medical outcomes across time. A careful reading should avoid turning one provocative study into a final conclusion.

What it does show is that evidence can sometimes raise questions that do not fit neatly into the assumptions we already hold.

That may be the real value of the study. It forces us to sit with something uncomfortable: what if our ordinary model of time is incomplete? What if cause and effect are not always as simple as we assume? What if consciousness, intention, and biological systems are connected in ways that are not yet fully understood?

The study was published in the British Medical Journal in 2001 under the title “Effects of Remote, Retroactive Intercessory Prayer on Outcomes in Patients with Bloodstream Infection: Randomised Controlled Trial.” Its conclusion stated that remote, retroactive intercessory prayer was associated with shorter hospital stay and shorter duration of fever in patients with bloodstream infection.

Again, “associated with” matters. This should not be treated as proof that a later prayer caused an earlier recovery. But it is still a fascinating example of how certain findings can disturb the clean categories we use to understand reality.

Most of us experience time as linear. We remember the past, live in the present, and move toward the future. That experience is practical and necessary. It allows us to organize life, make decisions, and understand consequences.

But studies like this invite a different kind of reflection. They do not require us to abandon reason. They ask us to stay open to the possibility that reality may be stranger than the simplified model we use to navigate it.

Maybe time is linear in the way we experience it.

Maybe it is not linear in every possible sense.

Maybe the deeper point is that our perception of time may not be the same as the full nature of time.

That is why this story matters. It does not need to be embellished. It is already strange enough on its own. A randomized controlled trial was conducted in 2000 using patients from 1990 to 1996, and the group prayed for years later showed shorter fever duration and hospital stays in the original records.

Whether that points to prayer, probability, study design, consciousness, or something we do not yet understand, it challenges the assumption that all causation must move in the direction we expect.

Sometimes the most important studies are not the ones that give us clean answers. They are the ones that force us to ask better questions.

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Reference

Leibovici, Leonard. “Effects of Remote, Retroactive Intercessory Prayer on Outcomes in Patients with Bloodstream Infection: Randomised Controlled Trial.” BMJ 323, no. 7327, December 22, 2001, 1450–1451. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.323.7327.1450