Briefly Noted

Proving a Miracle:
Unlocking the Power of Prayer to Heal
by joshua w. brown
harper, 256 pages, $25.60

Contrary to its titular claim, Joshua W. Brown’s Proving a Miracle does not prove that miracles can happen. It does, however, prove that we can’t disprove miracles. As cofounder of the Global Medical Research Institute, Brown specializes in testing the empirical effects of prayer on healing. But this book is no triumphalist apologetic. Brown spends the page count calmly positing that the scientific study of spirituality—especially intercessory and petitionary prayer—is a worthwhile academic pursuit.

Brown shows that every prediction we make about reality carries psychological implications, from whether our home’s security system will function as intended to whether our suffering is meaningful. This framework allows him to approach prayer without falling into either reductionism or supernaturalism. He supplements this position with research that shows that perceiving sickness as a divine punishment can lead to intense emotional distress. Other studies reveal that prayer can improve emotional regulation, support addiction recovery, and increase general resilience.

Yet Brown is transparent about the difficulties of studying healing prayer: placebo effects, unreliable self-reporting, and the near impossibility of double-blind experimentation. Even after his international efforts to find definitive proof, the burden of evidence required to “prove” a miracle remains too elusive to trap within the scientific method. So Brown does not exactly satisfy his title’s goal, but he does demonstrate that spiritual belief, regardless of its truth value, deserves a place on the mantle among other plausibility structures that promote human healing.

—Griffin Gooch

Prophets and Pretensions:
A Critical Examination of Islamic Truth Claims
by nick goffin
stonyfield, 268 pages, $19.99

Islam is now the fastest-growing religion in the West, and Christian apologetics has been slow to catch up. Nick Goffin, with Prophets and Pretensions, attempts the book that needed writing: a systematic primer on Muslim belief and the reliability of the Qur’an, followed by a direct engagement with Islam’s own truth claims.

Goffin is at his best diagnosing a peculiar asymmetry between the two faiths’ internal cultures of doubt. “Christianity does not require you to become fluent in Koine Greek and 1st-century Jewish culture before you are allowed to question the resurrection or the reliability of the Gospels,” he writes. “Islam, however, sets the bar for serious internal critique so high that the vast majority of Muslims can never realistically reach it.” He also challenges the Qur’an’s own claim to authority, arguing that it simultaneously relies on and undercuts the credibility of Scripture. He is most incisive, though, when discrediting the classical argument from the text’s eloquence: “The resulting faith was dependent on aesthetic persuasion rather than God’s own demonstration.”

These are real hits, delivered in plain, well-organized prose rather than the jargon that usually clutters comparative-religion polemics. But the book’s argument depends throughout on a settled Christian starting point that it never quite defends, only assumes. Readers already inside the fold will find their convictions sharpened; readers outside it, the secularists and skeptics whom Goffin’s own preface identifies as most vulnerable to Islam’s proselytizing, have little reason to grant him his premises about Jesus and Scripture. The irony is that the book’s likeliest audience is the one that needs it least.

Goffin’s driving question—is Islam actually true?—deserves the wide hearing he wants for it. Prophets and Pretensions is a genuinely useful primer for catechesis and a serviceable start for interfaith debate, even if its apologetic reach will need to extend further before it converts anyone not already convinced.

—Sarah Berk