A reply to Steven Novella

Steven Novella has written a post taking exception to some things I’ve said, specifically on the issue of the overlap of science, skepticism, and religion. I have to say, though, that what his post actually does is confirm my claim: that a lot of skeptics strain to delimit the scope of skepticism in ways that are not rational, but are entirely political and emotional.

But there’s also a lot I agree with. He has a lengthy introduction in which he lists many of the core elements of skepticism, including for example, promoting science and critical thinking, opposing pseudoscience, etc. (he also includes “methodological naturalism”, a claim I’ve grown disenchanted with…but that’s something for another day. Here’s something from Larry Moran for a contrary view.)

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Witch-Doctors on display

There is an organization in the UK called the Christian Medical Fellowship. OK, no problem, you might think — nothing wrong with Christian fellowship, nothing wrong with doctors who go to church or pray together. But you’d be wrong. Religion poisons everything. This is what the 4000 members of that organization talk about: demons.

The New Testament tells us that Jesus has commissioned us to ‘drive out demons’ (Mk 16:17), and we must be ready to respond to this commission if and when we are called to do so.

Psychiatry, then, is not the only domain within which we need to be aware of demonic influence, and perhaps it is not even the most important such domain. Furthermore, we cannot expect to make a simple differential diagnosis according to certain signs or symptoms of demonisation. However, this does not exclude the need to consider other possible links between demonic activity and mental illness.

Demon possession and mental illness, then, are not simply alternative diagnoses to be offered when a person presents with deliberate self harm or violent behaviour, although they may need to be distinguished in such circumstances, whether by spiritual discernment or the application of basic psychiatric knowledge. It would seem reasonable to argue that demon possession may be an aetiological factor in some cases of mental illness, but it may also be an aetiological factor in some non-psychiatric conditions, and in other cases it may be encountered in the absence of psychiatric or medical disorder.

How about some truth in advertising: I suggest they change their name to Christian Witch-Doctor Fellowship. I would not want to go to a doctor to discover that he would diagnose depression as possession, or that an ulcer was demonic.

Unfortunately, the US has its own national quack, Dr Oz. The New Yorker has an excellent exposé of Oz.

“I want to stress that Mehmet is a fine surgeon,” Rose said, as he did more than once during our conversation. “He is intellectually unbelievably gifted. But I think if there is any criticism you can apply to some of the stuff he talks about it is that there is no hierarchy of evidence. There rarely is with the alternatives. They have acquired a market, and that drives so much. At times, I think Mehmet does feed into that.”

At times? The man uses his bully pulpit to endorse destructive quacks, and peddles snake oil himself. I don’t care if he is a fine cardiac surgeon; he operates, presumably with high competence, on one patient a week, and then misleads millions.

There are many legitimate and articulate opponents of genetically modified products and, for that matter, of conventional medicine itself. But Oz has consistently chosen guests with dubious authority to argue those positions. Joseph Mercola, an osteopath, runs mercola.com, one of the most popular alternative-health Web sites in the country. Oz has described Mercola as a “pioneer in holistic treatments,” and as a man “your doctor doesn’t want you to listen to.” This is undoubtedly true, since Mercola has promoted such alleged experts as Tullio Simoncini, who claims that cancer is a fungus that can be cured with baking soda. Mercola has long argued that vaccines are dangerous and that they even cause AIDS. When Oz says that Mercola is “challenging everything you think you know about traditional medicine and prescription drugs,” it’s hard to argue. “I’m usually earnestly honest and modest about what I think we’ve accomplished,” Oz told me when we discussed his choice of guests. “If I don’t have Mercola on my show, I have thrown away the biggest opportunity that I have been given.”

It’s bizarre. He thinks his position within the bona fide medical profession means he now has a responsibility to open the door to frauds. It makes no sense…until you discover that the man doesn’t have the slightest understanding of science.

I was still puzzled. “Either data works or it doesn’t,” I said. “Science is supposed to answer, or at least address, those questions. Surely you don’t think that all information is created equal?”

Oz sighed. “Medicine is a very religious experience,” he said. “I have my religion and you have yours. It becomes difficult for us to agree on what we think works, since so much of it is in the eye of the beholder. Data is rarely clean.” All facts come with a point of view. But his spin on it—that one can simply choose those which make sense, rather than data that happen to be true—was chilling. “You find the arguments that support your data,” he said, “and it’s my fact versus your fact.”

Millions worship this guy, and watch his show religiously for medical advice. But his story is to simply throw away evidence-based reasoning.

I told Oz that I was aware of no evidence showing that Reiki works. He cut in: “Neither am I, if you are talking purely about data. But this is one of the fundamental disconnects between Western medicine and what people often refer to as complementary medicine. Not everything adds up. It’s about making people more comfortable. I offer things like massage therapy, and offered Reiki if people wanted it. I did not recommend it, but I let people know it was their choice.”

Please. Give me medical treatments that are backed up by data, rather than ones that make Dr Oz feel good.

Revisionaries now!

I’m watching this documentary right now, and I have to tell you…every time Don McLeroy or Terri Leo or Cynthia Dunbar come on, I’m snarling obscenities at the screen. What wretched ignorant people.

If you can’t watch it yourself, the creators are doing an IAmA on Reddit right now. And, oh, boy — McLeroy has shown up to make an ass of himself. Go chew him out.

The video is temporarily available for streaming on the PBS website.

She’s baaaack

Remember Republican legislator Cathrynn Brown’s bill that would have criminalized abortion on the claim that it would destroy evidence? She scurried to retract it after nationwide public shaming, but now she’s revised the bill and is trying to promote it again.

Good news! It no longer threatens women who get an abortion after a rape with a felony charge for tampering with evidence! Yay!

Now it only charges the doctor with a felony for facilitating the destruction of evidence. Progress! Oh, wait…it still criminalizes a legal procedure, and still specifically oppresses the victims of violent assault.

I guess that counts as practically no progress at all. How about the next iteration being a bill that criminalizes lawmakers who attempt to make an end-run around women’s rights to bodily autonomy?

More TV tonight!

Maybe for you, maybe not for me. PBS is supposed to show the documentary The Revisionaries tonight, a show about the Texas Board of Education and it’s horrendous abuse of the educational system, but looking at my local television schedule, I can’t see it. We’re in a conservative rural area with a rather chickenshit public broadcasting channel that often either disappears these ‘controversial’ shows or schedules them at bizarre early morning hours. I’ve been cursed over this show; the makers were going to send me a screener, and assured me multiple times that it would be mailed to me, and it somehow never arrived.

At least I can see the trailer. Maybe my blood pressure can be thankful that I may not get to see the rest of it.

Grrrr. Don McLeroy. The personification of the banality and jovial stupidity of evil.

Good news! Errm, or is it bad news? It is being shown here in the Morris area tonight. The trick is that the stations aren’t advertising it as “revisionaries”, and they aren’t mentioning creation/evolution. Look for “Independent Lens”, a documentary about textbooks.

Morris people: it’s on channel 10 at 9pm tonight. The makers did write to me, though, and say that the PBS version had a half hour cut from it to make it fit the time slot — we’ll see what gets on.

Can you see through this ploy, Arizona?

A group of Republican legislators have proposed a new anti-science bill in Arizona. It doesn’t come right out and say that it’s anti-science, of course: they know better than that. They claim instead that the purpose of the bill is to promote “critical thinking skills,” which we certainly all endorse. But they give the game away with the details.

The targets of the bill are explicitly listed in a section that presents as legislative findings that "1. An important purpose of science education is to inform students about scientific evidence and to help students develop critical thinking skills necessary to become intelligent, productive and scientifically informed citizens. 2. The teaching of some scientific subjects, including biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming and human cloning, can cause controversy. 3. Some teachers may be unsure of the expectations concerning how they should present information on such topics."

Somewhat redundantly, SB 1213 provides both that "teachers shall be allowed to help pupils understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories covered in the course being taught" and that state and local education administrators "shall not prohibit any teacher in this state" from doing so. The bill also insists that it "protects only the teaching of scientific information and does not promote any religious or nonreligious doctrine, promote discrimination for or against a particular set of religious beliefs or nonbeliefs or promote discrimination for or against religion or nonreligion."

Wow. These people have no imagination at all, no creativity in the slightest. This is essentially boilerplate taken from every goddamn creationist bill proposed in every legislature for the last decade or so. Singling out a few specific ‘controversies’, like evolution and climate change (which actually aren’t controversial at all); “strengths and weaknesses”; the denial that this is promoting a particular religious doctrine; these are such a familiar drone that my brain falls asleep reading them anymore.

Time for the residents of Arizona to rouse themselves — it’s not as if you’ve been suffering from a barrage of lunacy and bigotry lately, right? — and write to your representatives and yell at them to kill this stupid Senate Bill 1213.

A common complaint I hear a lot nowadays…

If you’re loafing about on a Sunday morning and looking for something to read, here’s a long form argument requesting skeptical consistency regarding political economy. Oh, man, is this familiar.

Unfortunately, the majority of high-profile skeptics in our community seem to promote scientific skepticism and so do not address political economy, citing a pre-requisite of hard data in forming skeptical conclusions: SGU doesn’t do politics (and when it does, as with Rebecca Watson’s work on feminist issues, you end up with petitions calling for their removal.); Brian Dunning, amongst others, blithely say that skepticism is not applicable to political “values”; and economic and political issues are barely represented at conferences, on podcasts, and in blogs, despite the disproportionate suffering it causes compared to staple feed such as homeopathy and psychics.

Yes. Yes. Yes. The modern skeptical movement is built on a very narrow foundation; a lot of the Old Guard spend an incredible amount of effort restricting the range of allowed topics to a tiny set of staples, which means that too often we hear lots about the bogosity of Bigfoot, but almost nothing about the bogosity of an economic system that maintains gross social inequities. And which belief do you think does greater harm?

We’ve been struggling for years just to get the established skeptics to recognize that religion, that citadel of lies, is a legitimate target for public criticism. The arguments to exclude that topic have been strained and absurd; most commonly, we’re told that since the claims of religion are completely evidence-free and untestable, True Skeptics™ are not able to address them…and usually these gatekeepers are as bad as creationists in claiming that they have the mantle of science in so constraining their range. They disregard the fact that scientists tend to be extremely dismissive, and appropriately so, of extravagant claims made in the absence of substantive supportive evidence.

Similarly, I can predict that skeptics will now struggle to exclude politics and economics from any debate; economics is notoriously fuzzy, and politics is wracked with extremes of opinion. But of course both fields do have hard evidence that can be addressed. Does the American political and economic system cause great hardship for many people? Does it promote stability and international cooperation? Are some of our expenditures unnecessary and others insufficient? Are there evidence-based alternative strategies that work better? Can we compare economies in different countries and assess their relative performance?

And most importantly, should rational skeptics take a stand on these issues, discuss and debate them, and come to reasonable conclusions? I don’t think it’s true that they are unresolvable.

Unfortunately, opening up the skeptic community to actually discussing these topics would lead to Deep Rifts that make the one over religion look insignificant. We’re riddled with wacky libertarians and their worship of the capitalist status quo (or worse, demanding a greater reduction in government and compassion). A libertarian speaker who openly espoused the opinions of a loon like Ron Paul — and there are people in this community who regard him as a saint — would pretty much guarantee a kind of noisy riot in the audience, and lead to a big chunk of organized skepticism decamping in fury.

Which would probably be a good thing.

Those annoying New Atheists

I was amused lately to be reminded of this debate between John Cleese and Michael Palin, on one side, against Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark, on the other — arguing over The Life of Brian…in 1979. It’s two smart, open-minded people with the ability to critically evaluate truth claims against a pair of pompous old farts who are indignant at the lack of reverence for their ridiculous dogma.


Nothing has changed, has it?

In case you needed it, here is a rebuttal.