It’s a beautiful November day in New York. Stan Praimnath, a cheerful fellow raised in Guyana, leads me to the mezzanine overlooking the so-called pit, the void where the World Trade Center once stood. “When I look down in the pit today,” Stan tells me, “I see myself lying with a group of dead bones down there . . . I may never know why the Lord intervened on my behalf.”

Interviewing survivors around the world, I have noticed a remarkable pattern. Overwhelmingly, they share a belief that God and faith sustained them through their trials. As many as 75% or 80% cite a higher power as an important reason for their survival. Either they face their crisis with strong faith or they discover it in the crucible, believing God had a plan for them and gave them the strength to overcome.

Stan escaped death in the World Trade Center twice. On February 26, 1993, he was on the 79th floor of the South Tower eating a takeaway lunch of Chinese pork chops and rice when a bomb went off in the car park below the North Tower. The building shook and the lights went out.

“I thought I was going to die,” Stan says. Yet as people screamed and ran in every direction, Stan calmly ate his meal. His supervisor shouted, “Stan, how can you eat at a time like this?” He replied: “Lord, if today’s the day I’m coming home, I’m coming with a full stomach.”

Six people died; Stan survived. At 9.03am on September 11, 2001, he was standing at his desk on the 81st floor of the South Tower, where he worked as an assistant vice-president in the loans department of Fuji Bank. He remembers looking out toward the Statue of Liberty and seeing the most terrifying sight: a giant grey aircraft flying straight at him.

Shouting, “Lord, I can’t do this; you take over”, he dived beneath his metal desk just as the 767 slammed into the building between the 77th and 85th floors. When he peeked out, the destruction was unbelievable. The fire sprinklers showered the floor with water, and blue sparks arced in every direction. The wing of the plane was wedged into his door 20ft away. Everything else was obliterated, but Stan noticed that his Bible was resting undisturbed on his desk. “The Word of God was not to be destroyed,” he says.

Stan cried out again to God. “Lord, send somebody, anybody. I have two small children! I don’t want to die. Why am I alone? Send someone, Lord.” He crawled through the debris, looking for help or a way out. Then, in the distance, he saw a light through the smoke.

It was a torch in the hands of a fire warden, a broker from the 88th floor. Stan believes this was his guardian angel, sent by the Lord. “I would never understand why people pray all their lives, not see the results,” Stan says, “and here I am calling out on God, this split second, and He sends someone for me.”

His face beams at the thought. “I’m not a religious fanatic, and here I am screaming out to God.” Stan marvels that God answered so quickly. “I call, He heard and He intervenes. And, like I said, I’m not a religious fanatic. I’m a practising churchgoer, that’s who I am.”

If you want to grasp the power of religion in survival, consider this statistic from a 1999 study at the University of Texas at Austin. It found that people who go to church regularly live around seven years longer than people who don’t.

Dr Harold Koenig of Duke University Medical Center is a pioneer in the field of faith and health. The fancy name for this is psychoneuroimmunology, the science of how social and psychological factors such as religion affect your immune and nervous systems. I ask him about the seven-year statistic.

“That has nothing to do with whether God exists or doesn’t,” he explains. It’s based entirely on the fact that religious attendance has “psychological, social and behavioural consequences” that help you live longer. People with committed religious beliefs tend to have stronger support systems and more solid relationships; they are more likely to follow teachings that reinforce a healthier lifestyle. In short, observant people usually don’t smoke, drink, or engage in risky business.