No Sacred Cows

by David G. McAfee

  32. Project Apollo Archive, www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/albums.

  33. Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011).

  34. “Astronaut Avoids Assault Charges,” Los Angeles Times, July 5, 2002.

  35. James W. Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong (New York: New Press, 2008).

  36. Direct adoption of the Greek concept by Islam: F. Jamil Ragep, “Astronomy,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed., ed. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2010), referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/astronomy-COM_22652?s.num=179&s.start=160.

  37. Robert Schadewald, “Scientific Creationism, Geocentricity, and the Flat Earth,” Skeptical Inquirer 6 (1981): 2.

  38. Cole Hamel, “Flatter than a Pancake,” Scientia Review, www.scientiareview.org/pdfs/324.pdf.

  39. Flat Earth Society, www.tfes.org/.

  40. It’s worth noting that this quote, while found in a 1676 letter from Newton, can be traced back at least as far as Bernard of Chartres in the twelfth century.

  41. Rachel Feltman, “Dear Tila Tequila: Here’s Why the Earth Isn’t Flat (Even When It Looks Like It Is),” Washington Post, January 8, 2016, www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/01/08/dear-tilatequila-heres-why-the-earth-isnt-flat-even-when-it-looks-like-it-is/.

  42. J. Cook et al., “Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature,” Environmental Research Letters 8, no. 2 (June 2013).

  43. Sybille van den Hove, Marc Le Menestrel, and Henri-Claude De Bettignies, “The Oil Industry and Climate Change: Strategies and Ethical Dilemmas,” Climate Policy 2, no. 1 (2002): 3–18.

  44. A. C. Revkin and K. Q. Seelye, “Report by EPA Leaves Out Data on Climate Change,” New York Times, June 19, 2003.

  45. Jason Barbose, “Momentum Builds in California to Hold Fossil Fuel Companies Accountable for Climate Science Misinformation,” Union of Concerned Scientists, May 16, 2016, blog.ucsusa.org/jason-barbose/fossil-fuel-companies-accountable-climate-science-misinformation.

  46. Lydia Saad, “One in Four in US Are Solidly Skeptical of Global Warming,” Gallup, April 22, 2014.

  47. J. J. McCarthy, ed., Climate Change 2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

  48. National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Science of Climate Change, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 2001).

  49. American Meteorological Society, “Climate Change Research: Issues for the Atmospheric and Related Sciences,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 84 (2003): 508–515.

  50. American Geophysical Union, Eos 84, no 51, 574 (2003).

  51. Naomi Oreskes, “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change,” Science 306, no. 5702 (2004): 1686–1686.

  52. “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.”—Neil deGrasse Tyson

  53. “International Poll: No Consensus On Who Was Behind 9/11 World Public Opinion, September 10, 2008.

  54. David Johnston, “Two Years Later: 9/11 Tactics; Official Says Qaeda Recruited Saudi Hijackers to Strain Ties,” New York Times, September 9, 2003.

  55. Osama bin Laden, “Full Text: bin Laden’s ‘Letter to America,’” Observer (London), November 24, 2002.

  56. “World Records,” Controlled Demolition, Inc., www.controlled-demolition.com/world-records.

  57. “If conspiracy theorists applied even a tenth of the scrutiny and demand for evidence they place on the ‘official story’ upon their own theories, those theories would crumble like a sandcastle under a wave.”—Unknown

  58. Glenn Canady, “Smoking Gun Proof Holographic Planes Used on 9/11—Left Wing Disappears Before Plane Hits Building!” Before It’s News, March 1, 2015, beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2015/03/smoking-gun-proof-holographic-planes-used-on-911-cockpit-disappears-into-thin-air-after-going-through-building-3115708.html.

  59. Final Report on the Collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster, National Institute of Standards and Technology (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, November 2008).

  60. A. S. Usmani, “How Did the WTC Towers Collapse: A New Theory,” Fire Safety Journal 38, no. 6 (2003): 501–533.

  61. Ramon Gilsanz and Willa Ng, “Single Point of Failure: How the Loss of One Column May Have Led to the Collapse of WTC 7,” Structure Magazine, November 2007, 42–45.

  62. “NCARB’s 2013 Survey of Registered Architects,” National Council of Architectural Registration Boards, December 30, 2013, www.ncarb.org/News-and-Events/News/2013/12_2013ArchitectsSurvey.aspx.

  63. I should note that, while you’re not necessarily wrong just because the vast majority of the best scientists in a field disagree with you, unless you have evidence to prove them wrong, it’s a good indicator that you should reexamine your position.

  64. “Homepage,” Dissent From Darwin, www.dissentfromdarwin.org/.

  16

  FAITH HEALING AND “ALTERNATIVE” MEDICINE

  “It is unethical and potentially dangerous for licensed health professionals to naively and uncritically accept paranormal treatments. Yet I have seen physicians and therapists embrace the mystery energies of qi, the curative power of prayer, and the healing magic of shamans—and pride themselves for their openness to alternative cultures, and sensitivity to non-Western wisdom.”

  —Jonathan C. Smith

  At some point in time, in order to achieve our full potential, humans as a collective will have to acknowledge that prayer and other faith-based “healing” techniques are nothing more than false hopes dressed as miracles. Unfortunately for us, however, today many people still rely on them … and we have the death certificates to prove it.

  The follies of faith are represented by more than just holy wars and deadly attacks inspired or justified (often only in part) by religion. Every day, people around the world are harmed by myths and superstitions not only through allegedly “divine” acts of violence, but also by a lack of medical attention due to misplaced confidence in prayer or other unsubstantiated rituals posing as treatments. Falling prey to the snake-oil salesmen of our time, unsuspecting patients by the millions become victims of false hope and, more importantly, false remedies. The bottom line: friends don’t let friends rely on any form of placebo-based faith healing when they require real medical treatment. If you keep someone from seeing a medical professional in favor of prayer or homeopathy or any other so-called alternative medicine, you aren’t “doing it the natural way” or “leaving it in God’s hands.” You’re causing real harm and putting lives at risk.

  Seth Andrews, author of Deconverted: A Journey from Religion to Reason and other titles, points out that prayer “can give comfort in times of medical crisis,” but cautions people not to rely on it.

  “It can also be a cop-out … an excuse for people to do absolutely nothing substantial and yet declare they have moved mountains,” he wrote. “As science-based medicine fights in the trenches to win the battles against malady and misfortune, the vacuous appeals to magic bellow from the fringe, and the faithful stand ready at every victory to claim that their specific god should get the credit.”

  WHAT IS FAITH HEALING?

  When you hear “faith healing,” you likely think of a religious televangelist who carefully chooses subjects and manipulates viewers into thinking they’ve been healed. You probably think of someone like Benny Hinn, who claims to have healed blindness, deafness, cancer, AIDS, and more at his Miracle Crusades,1 yet was admitted to a conventional hospital for his own ailments when he suffered from heart problems.2 Or perhaps Christian minister Rod Parsley comes to mind. He also advocates miraculous faith healing practices but decided to seek help from medical doctors in the form of radiation treatments when he was diagnosed with throat cancer
.3 When you hear “faith healer,” you probably think of people who heavily exaggerate for religious effect—people like those charismatic pastor John Richard Wimber spoke out against.

  “I also visited several healing meetings … and became angry with what appeared to be the manipulation of people for the material gains of the faith healer … Dressing like sideshow barkers,” Wimber wrote.4 “Pushing people over and calling it the power of God. And money—they were always asking for more, leading people to believe that if they gave they would be healed.”

  People like Hinn, Parsley, and other conventional faith healers do a huge amount of harm, but the fact is that there are a lot of so-called alternative treatments out there that—just like traditional faith healing—are not really medicine at all. I’ll be referring to these practices, which have no proven health benefits and are often performed for a fee and at the expense of real medical services, collectively as “faith healing.” To me, faith healing is defined as any attempt to improve one’s health through a means that has not been scientifically proven—and therefore requires blind faith. Today there are probably too many of these “alternative medicine” practices to list, and many people rely on them, but, as Australian actor Josh Thomas has said, “you can’t really put the word alternative before medicine.”

  “You can put the word alternative before ideas, you can have alternative fashion, you can have alternative music, but you can’t have alternative facts,”5 Thomas said on a 2015 episode of Please Like Me. “Putting alternative before medicine, that’s like pointing at a dog and saying that’s my alternative cat. It’s still not a cat.”

  Does the fact that there are so many forms of fraudulent healing (too many to cover in this chapter, to be sure) show it has merit? No—all it reveals is that people are regularly deceived based on wishful thinking. But the fact that there are millions of false cures and faulty healing processes does lead to an interesting phenomenon: True Believers in one form of faith healing might outwardly reject others as nonsense, while remaining ignorant of the fact that they all have exactly the same amount of scientific backing—zero. For instance, I’ve met people who spent years studying and teaching the “science” of crystal healing yet think homeopathy and religious faith healings are “preposterous.” I’ve also met a great number of religious believers who pray for good health all the time, but would never consider trying something like acupuncture. It’s important to acknowledge that these various methods of faith healing, while they may be different in origin, method, and levels of cultural acceptance, are the same when it comes to their lack of established effectiveness.

  The fact that faith healing isn’t reliable doesn’t seem to bother many practitioners, from homeopaths to Christian Scientists, who often (conveniently) claim that their methods simply take belief, time, and patience to work. But anyone considering this argument should keep in mind that any ailment cured with faith healing and time could equally be cured absent the magic. Your common cold, anxiety, headaches, etc. will all likely go away with nothing more than the passage of time, rendering faith healing useless or redundant in these cases. However, if you can show that homeopathy or an equivalent practice cured you of a terminal illness, or any significant and verifiable disease for that matter, then the scientific community will be more than interested in your findings.

  THE PRAYERCEBO EFFECT

  Relying solely on intercessory prayer (divine petition)6 to better your health is like taking your sluggish car into the automotive shop for a tune-up, only to have the mechanic pop the hood for an hour and do absolutely nothing. You might leave the shop happier, believing the mechanic had done his or her job, and you may even notice small things that seem like improvements. Maybe you feel as though the car accelerates more quickly or the brakes seem to be functioning better. But, just as is the case with prayer and positive thoughts, any purported results likely stem from the customer’s (or patient’s) own mind. I call this the prayercebo effect: a positive effect, produced by a request to a god, that can’t be attributed to a god and must therefore be a result of the belief itself. The prayercebo effect is obviously modeled after the placebo effect, which was pioneered by French psychologist Émile Coué and others in the 1800s and continues to be studied and utilized in modern medicine today.

  Given what we know about medical placebos and spiritual or religious prayercebos, we can conclude that, whether a patient is exposed to prayer, Reiki, homeopathy, therapeutic touch, or any other faith-based “healing,” the person in need of medical help is actually the active ingredient in his or her own “treatment.” This means that the patient—and not the so-called healer—is the ultimate cause of any beneficial changes experienced due to psychological factors, willful deception, or coincidence. Faith-based systems that utilize the placebo effect also include Ch’i, prana, and other mystical and unmeasurable energies that have never been shown to exist in observable scientific settings. Considering the enormous number of tests involving these mysterious powers, the most likely explanation for the lack of positive data that has been published on them is that the ideas are simply made up, much like the strikingly similar Force of Star Wars fame, with the obvious difference being that the Force was shown to be a real and demonstrable power within the fictional universe created by George Lucas. In reality, however, these so-called cosmic energies and forces only “work” because people believe in them—it’s the placebo effect in action. This phenomenon is responsible for any and all positive changes resulting from faith-based nontreatments because they, by definition, lack any real substance capable of providing legitimate relief.

  Some say that faith healers and other frauds who utilize the (well-documented) placebo effect and keep people from seeking real medical care are still benefitting those they serve—after all, if someone is feeling better, that’s good, right? But people who make this argument often don’t acknowledge or realize that the placebo effect is already regularly utilized by “mainstream” physicians when appropriate, to make people feel healthier without expensive procedures or dangerous medications. If a small feeling of improvement is all that is needed, then—in some instances—that may be the best action. The problem begins, however, when the placebo effect is mistaken for a “cure” or used instead of necessary medical advice. There is no need for entire multibillion-dollar industries to be built around false cures, especially when those who sell them often discourage patients from seeking legitimate therapies and spread misinformation about modern medicine, because the placebo effect is already being put to use. In fact, I think one of the best aspects of the placebo effect is that, according to recent research,7 it can sometimes work even when you know it’s a placebo8—rendering the deception component of homeopathy and other woo-based faith-healing methods completely unnecessary.

  In addition to generally “feeling better” due to the placebo effect, some believers purport to experience overwhelming emotions, tingling sensations, and other positive feelings when being prayed for or touched by so-called healers. But what they are experiencing has been shown time and time again to be the result of their own internal emotions and hormones—and not an external force or deity. Psychologically, we tend to feel comforted by touch,9 especially in times of extreme stress. In fact, the feeling can be comparable to what some music fans report at their favorite concerts, or even what you might experience when you see a loved one for the first time after an extended absence. These feelings might be caused by a number of different feel-good chemicals in the brain, including dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, and endorphins. In other words, it’s simple brain chemistry—and not religion or pseudoscientific miracle cures—that is responsible for the euphoria you might get during group prayer or a one-on-one session with a faith healer of any kind.

  A REAL-LIFE HORROR STORY

  You might not always think of demons and possessions when the topic of alternative medicine arises, but so-called exorcists are a form of faith healer because they utilize many of the same deceptive tactics
to achieve their results. In fact, you might say exorcisms were among the earliest faith-healing methods. Long before Christianity arose, the practice was linked to Hinduism through the Atharva Veda,10 one of that religion’s four holy books, but today most people associate exorcisms with the Catholic Church—and for good reason. The Jesus of the Bible was said to have performed at least seven major exorcisms, including on a blind and mute man11 and other people who couldn’t see12 or speak.13 Presumably, because the New Testament writers didn’t understand the genetic and environmental factors that can cause these problems, they attributed them to demonic possessions that Jesus could then cure. In the modern era, however, we have more information on these subjects and you won’t find too many thinking people who believe blind people are possessed by evil spirits. That’s a good thing, but it needs to go even further … we need to realize that no illnesses are caused by demons so that we can focus on real medicine and not fantasy.

  Today exorcisms are well known thanks to horror movies, but the reality is actually much more terrifying because real people can be seriously injured, killed,14 or convinced that a life-threatening ailment from which they still suffer has been eliminated. Demons have never been shown to exist, so, in most cases, “exorcisms” are performed on those suffering from hysteria, Tourette’s syndrome, epilepsy, schizophrenia, trichotillomania, or dissociative identity disorder, and even occasionally on presidential candidates, such as Senator Ted Cruz as he campaigned in New Hampshire,15 and not on people who have been hijacked by the devil. In addition to those common ailments, anti-NMDA (N-methyl D-aspartate) receptor antibody encephalitis, a form of encephalitis categorized and named in 2007, can cause agitation, paranoia, psychosis, violence, seizures, and bizarre movements—all symptoms that mimic what some believers might think of as demonic possession.1617 To make matters worse, those conducting exorcism ceremonies often create the illusion that they actually work by utilizing the placebo effect, groupthink, and the power of suggestion (i.e. hypnotism). Not only are people with legitimate illnesses not getting the real treatments they need, they and their families are also regularly led to believe good health is only a few “the power of Christ compels you!” chants away when the issue is likely much more complex.