Believers are unbiased and objective

While in a car on a 10-minute ride with, among others, a pastor and his wife, the conversation turned to health and disease. The pastor's spouse (who turned out to be far more voluble than her preacher husband) spoke of the power of prayer and advised the person I was with to pray to God and Jesus to address her various chronic conditions. To show just how powerful and effective entreaties to the Lord are, she related the story of a 60-year old female member of their congregation who had been diagnosed with stage 3 cancer. Through prayer she completely recovered. It's been five years now and this elderly lady has regained the weight she lost and is in the pink again. Here's where it gets interesting. Without being prompted or asked she nonchalantly added that this woman had undergone chemotherapy and that the prayers helped her endure its nasty side effects. Given the circumstances a confrontation was totally out of the question and so I merely chuckled to myself.

After years of having been exposed to the mindset and the reasoning of those who believe in prayer and faith healing, I'm beginning to see that these people are prone to confirmation bias in some of the most egregious ways possible. Suppose that a patient had undergone a set of medical interventions. Let's say that prayers/faith healing rituals (let's call that P) are then also thrown in for good measure. If it turns out that the patient gets well, believers will attribute efficacy to P. They will thank God and praise the Lord. Interestingly, however, even if P is not initiated, you still have believers chalking up the positive outcome to their invisible leader, but oddly enough not attributing it to the work and effort over the years and decades of the hundreds and thousands of men and women who've contributed to the development and implementation of the diagnostic procedures, instruments, equipment, pharmaceuticals and treatments that were employed. (After undergoing emergency surgery in 2006 philosopher Daniel Dennett delves into this in "Thank Goodness!")

Were we to confront the pastor and his wife with the question, "If the 60-year old woman had not resorted to any medical treatment whatsoever, do you think that prayers alone would have licked her cancer?" I believe they'd hesitate. I doubt they'd glibly say, "Oh yes, without a doubt." I imagine they'd say something like, "God works through doctors." It almost seems to me that for most believers such as the preacher and his spouse it is an accepted fact that science and medicine are part and parcel of health and healing. What they do and have done is to hitch prayer onto the proven efficacy and track record of medicine (and then blissfully and blatantly commit the non causa pro causa fallacy). I'll hazard a guess that for most believers prayers are not there to replace doctors and drugs but rather they're there in the belief that they will assist, promote, or even ensure the effectiveness of the medical treatments. I wonder if it ever enters their mind that P may be superfluous, that the surgery, pharmaceuticals, chemotherapy, etc. may be sufficient, or in the case when even the best of medical technology is ineffective or futile or too late, that the absence/presence of prayers is irrelevant. So how does the pastor know prayers had anything to do with the recovery of his female congregant? What of his other church members who had cancer, were prayed for, but who got worse or died? What does or would that say about the power of prayer?

During services and bible meetings, when members share their testimonies you don't hear them tell such stories as, "I prayed to the Lord. Everyday, for two months, my family and friends all prayed with me. But the Lord did not save my son." With such a story how in heavens' name will the minister and the fellow members utter the mandatory twice-a-minute refrain "Praise the Lord!"? What you do hear are stories that ostensibly confirm the efficacy of prayer, the goodness and trustworthiness of their deity, and other things they believe in. If you do hear a downer as the one above, it will surely be followed by something that will end the testimony on a bright note, even if it's just the hope that things will turn out for the better. And on the off chance that the person testifying doesn't provide it, his peers will. In the world of religion, disconfirming evidence is a (mind) virus that triggers the immune response and is dealt with immediately at all costs.

The end result of exposure to predominantly positive stories, to spins on even negative outcomes of prayer/faith, is confirmation bias. Believers tend to see prayer and faith in a very positive light: Prayer does work and if it apparently doesn't then one's continuing faith is called for, for God's ways are mysterious and he knows best.


You may initially have thought that the title of this blog entry had a typo. But the declarative is there to prod you to supply a question mark. Try asking Christians the questions below. You can wait for their reply to each before asking the next, or you can just fire all questions at once. (It's my guess that the two approaches will elicit quite different responses to question #1.)

1. Are believers unbiased and objective evaluators of the effectiveness of prayer and faith healing?
2. What do you think are the means by which an unbiased and objective assessment can be made?
3. How do you know these means are unbiased and objective?

Using the second method of questioning I asked a Christian friend the first two items. To the first she replied that believers are probably not unbiased and objective, that those who are not fully into religion may be more objective. To the second question she candidly admits she doesn't know what such means would be. I'm of course wondering how she would've replied to #1 had I withheld #2. Would she have been less thoughtful/careful and answered yes?

Question #2 makes the person examine what he takes to be the means by which prayer and faith healing are efficacious. Are they objective and unbiased? #2 can't be answered with a yes or no. It involves thinking and elucidation. It's a question that's bound to give Christians pause. Hopefully the mental rigor, inspection and even introspection involved would lead to the realization that objective evaluation (which is taken to be good in contrast to a biased assessment) is more than just believing and that it isn't some facile, illogical method as with what the preacher and his wife employed.

If #2 was a toughie, then question #3 is a reinforced concrete wall. This is the end of the line for most believers. Stumped, some of them will switch to irrational mode and will let anger end the line of inquiry.

There are those who will contend that there is no objective way to test the efficacy of prayer. Such a claim sounds eerily like that of previous Chair of the Society of Homeopaths Felicity Lee. In her special pleading she claims placebo-controlled RCTs aren't suited to testing homeopathy's effectiveness. Questioned as to why this is, Lee had no answer. So how does she and her fellow practitioners know that homeopathy works? Case studies. In other words, anecdotes by homeopaths. Bottom line is that for alt. med including faith healing the only "evidence" is subjective in nature.

Holy placebo (and snake oil)

In his March 20 2008 article "Reflections on healing, faith, funds, Fr. Suarez" Fr. Virgilio Aderiano Abad Ojoy, theologian and professor at the University of Santo Tomas, tells us that for healing by the Catholic Church and its priests to be effective "faith in Jesus Christ, Son of God and Savior of humankind is a conditio sine qua non, a requirement without which no healing could ever take place." And that faith need not be of the sick. His loved ones or the community's faith would be sufficient to effect healing.

As a professor in a school that teaches medicine, Ojoy may have heard of the placebo effect which, as doctors are well aware of, is dependent upon the patient's belief in the effectiveness of the treatment and in the expectation of cure. A placebo is any intervention which, unbeknownst to the patient, has no therapeutic value. A placebo may be a lactose pill, or flavored sugar syrup, or even sham surgery. The placebo effect is not a cure much less a cure-all. It is merely the body's chemical response resulting in a transitory sense of well-being including a reduction in pain. This felt effect is isn't surprising because the substances released into the body are related to opiates.

When drugs and various treatments are tested to determine their efficacy they are deemed effective only if they perform better than placebos. Now to make therapeutic claims for something that works no better than a placebo borders on deception. On the other hand, to simply believe that something can cure when clinical studies have yet to be performed to determine efficacy is to subscribe to a delusion--one is merely hoping that it works; one cannot claim that it works or worked.

It thus behooves us to ask whether "faith healing" is really effective. Is faith yet another placebo? Fr. Ojoy provides us a number of anecdotes to show that faith healing does work. But stories and even testimonials are never accepted as evidence in the assessment of therapeutic efficacy. Worse, what Ojoy provides are stories dating to a pre-scientific society, stories which not even biblical scholars can say with confidence were in fact historical to begin with. Quite conspicuously, Ojoy provides no case studies from our time, cases which can be examined and investigated by medical experts to rule out hoax and trickery, misdiagnosis, spontaneous remission, natural regression, cure via medical treatment(s) the patient had received, and a host of other mundane explanations.

In search of evidence, Ojoy might point us to the officially declared miracles by the Church. May we then remind this theologian of the Budd-Chiari embarrassment in the 1960s, in which the miracle turned out not to be so. As with all declared miracles it was considered so on the basis of current lack of scientific understanding of the nature of the phenomenon, of the disease and its course. But the Church knows very well that while it can declare miracles it cannot claim to be certain they are indeed miracles. The Church merely relies on science and medicine's current inability to explain a cure. But then our knowledge of the human body and the nature of disease is progressive in nature. As research continues our understanding grows. What boggles the minds of Einsteins today may be no more mysterious and inexplicable to high school students generations hence than lightning is to us today. Even the Vatican confesses this to be so.

What Ojoy is asking us to do is to take it on faith that the biblical stories he cites are historical and accurate. He's asking us to take it on faith that faith is necessary to be miraculously cured. He is asking us to take it on faith that the afflicted need not himself have faith but that the faith of those around him suffices to cause healing. That's a lot of "faith-ing" in there. But rather than resigning ourselves to mere hoping and believing, wouldn't it be much better to put faith healing to the test and find out whether it's any better than placebos? And if it isn't wouldn't it be the ethical duty of the Church and faith healers like Fernando Suarez to desist from making therapeutic claims?

Fr. Ojoy will probably remind us that faith alone is insufficient. That God is also part of the equation, that it is God's choice to conjure a miracle or not. And that if we are foolish enough to test the claims of faith healing and find to our chagrin that no healings had taken place then this only means either that people had insufficient faith or that God had chosen not to heal. As a theologian I'm sure Ojoy knows that to embark on such a line of reasoning would make his claim nonfalsifiable. In other words, he would've covered all his bases such that even negative results cannot refute it, not least because his ad hoc explanations can never be tested. Hopefully, he won't drag us into that dark pit where speculation rather than edification reigns.

Ojoy considers faith a panacea, a cure-all, Deo concedente (God willing). But, pray tell, Fr. Ojoy, why is it that God, faith, and prayers have never ever restored a lost limb?

Another ending

The end of the world ... again.

The group follows no Bible. It doesn’t even have a name. The followers of "Pagtulun-an sa Dios Amahan", a name outsiders have called them, only rely on the word of God, which is delivered to one of their members. For those who follow the Pagtulun-an sa Dios Amahan, the word is delivered by Jessica Sayson, who inherited it from the founder, Billy Robusto. Since Robusto, a faith healer, died of an illness, many thought his wife Leonora would take over the group. Instead, they said, his powers were transferred to Jessica, Leonora’s sister. Jessica said they had to stay inside the house because God the Father was about to pass judgment on the living and the dead.... “A few hours from now, judgment will be rendered. We don’t want to leave because there is evil outside,” Jessica explained in a voice that, to her mother Milagros Pasaje, did not sound like her own.... Jessica had alleged that God the Father would cleanse the earth of all evil and will send a catastrophe.

The world did end for Jessica and her followers. But not the way they envisioned it at all. Because children had been among those inside and because authorities feared a mass suicide, cops were ordered to raid the house and take the children. As it turned out Jessica and the other adults were arrested. What a catastrophe indeed for Jessica and her cult.

Tell me this isn't grave negligence

Another child dies because of religion, because of belief in the supernatural, because of faith in the supposed incredible/unlimited power of prayer.

An 11-year-old girl died after her parents prayed for healing rather than seek medical help for a treatable form of diabetes, police said Tuesday. Everest Metro Police Chief Dan Vergin said Madeline Neumann died Sunday. "She got sicker and sicker until she was dead," he said. Vergin said an autopsy determined the girl died from diabetic ketoacidosis, an ailment that left her with too little insulin in her body, and she had probably been ill for about 30 days, suffering symptoms like nausea, vomiting, excessive thirst, loss of appetite and weakness. The girl's parents, Dale and Leilani Neumann, attributed the death to "apparently they didn't have enough faith," the police chief said. They believed the key to healing "was it was better to keep praying. Call more people to help pray," he said. The mother believes the girl could still be resurrected, the police chief said.... The family does not attend an organized church or participate in an organized religion, Vergin said. "They have a little Bible study of a few people."

Here are some excuses you'll hear from believers:

- It was Madeline's time and God took her home. She's now having a grand time in the Pearly Playground with other kids that God had taken out.
- As her parents claim, they did not have enough faith. Apparently their faith didn't quite reach the size of a mustard seed.
- It was Madeline who didn't have enough faith, or she didn't believe at all (which means she's now on her way to Jurassic Park).
- There weren't enough who prayed. You see God's not only judge, jury, and executioner, he's also a compulsive bean counter. The numbers must be right, or prayers land on deaf ears.
- The Neumanns weren't part of the Lutheran/Baptist/Catholic/Landover/Vodoo/.... church and so their entreaties were null and void
- The devil meddled and the healing was thwarted. Perhaps The Evil One was able to jam the parents' mental transmissions and so God failed to receive the text messages.

The one thing religionists will not admit, will not accept is the simplest hypothesis: that prayer does not work. It doesn't matter a whit that scientific studies have refuted the claim that intercessory prayer is efficacious. Since religionists firmly believe in prayer and is part of their core belief, this belief trumps any and all disconfirming evidence. Their faith in the power of prayer must win over their commonsense and critical faculties, else their worldview crumbles, their hopes are dashed, and they experience a psychological death of sorts. Vis-a-vis prayer, cognitive dissonance leads to a myriad rationalizations and ad hoc explanations, practically never an admission that belief in prayer is a delusion.

Why does Michael Tan say faith healing works?

[I sent a copy of the following to the Inquirer but doubt it was published]


In his March 14, 2008 article "Faith Healers" Michael Tan wrote:

When I’m asked if faith healing works, I wear my anthropological hat and say, “The question shouldn’t be, ‘Does faith healing work?’ but ‘Why and how does faith healing work?”’ My view is that faith healing works, not all the time, certainly, but the same thing can be said of “modern” medicine. I still feel you stand a better chance with modern medicine, but some “faith” can be useful, whether in supernatural beings that are invoked, or in the healer—or even in the processes and procedures. One psychic surgeon I interviewed many years ago said he really didn’t need to do all those bloody procedures, but the “drama” helped to validate his power to heal. The same can be said today about the doctor’s white coat, and the pills and the fancy, gleaming diagnostic tools and machines.

When Tan claims faith healing (FH) works does he mean it can cure diseases such as diabetes, cancer, atherosclerosis, hepatitis, Down syndrome, schizophrenia, etc.? Should this be his contention would he please share the scientific evidence that show the therapeutic efficacy of FH?

As a scientist (I presuming he's an anthropologist by training), I'm confident he knows that there is little question in the medical field that the placebo effect kicks in in a substantial number of individuals who believe in the treatment modality they're receiving or opting for and who expect it to be effective, whether that treatment be pills with active ingredients, pills without any active ingredient (unbeknownst to the patient of course), acupuncture, homeopathy, magnet therapy, chelation therapy for vascular disease, mammary artery ligation for angina pectoris, ..., or faith healing. Of course we know the placebo effect does not cure disease; it merely leads to a reduction in people's assessment of pain and an increase in their sense of well being. It's also transitory. As far as we know the placebo effect has its basis in the body's release of endogenous opioids such as endorphins. I think Tan very much alludes to the placebo effect in the above quote when he speaks of faith (belief or confidence) in the supernatural as well as in men and women in white lab coats with a stethoscope slung around their neck.

When a new treatment modality is offered or arrives in the marketplace of touted cures, one question investigators pose is: Does treatment X work better than a placebo? Thus, one question I dearly wish answered is, Is FH more than just a placebo? For that we'd need randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled studies, which of course is much much easier said than done. A sham faith healing that's double-blinded is hardly a study that's easily designed.

Physicians know that a good number of conditions resolve themselves on their own even in the absence of intervention such that it is easy to mistake an initiated intervention as having caused the illness to go away. Moreover, even serious conditions such a cancer can undergo natural/spontaneous regression or remission. And then there are chronic conditions in which the severity of symptoms can vary widely over time (e.g. arthritis and multiple sclerosis), whereby the patient feels fine for, say, several weeks or months but then deteriorates for some time, only to have a run of good days once more thereafter. Should any treatment commence before the remission or the good days of the patient, we could easily be fooled into believing that the treatment had caused the improvement. In short there are many phenomena that can confound the situation, thwarting our objective to determine whether FH is efficacious. We can easily be misled by the above factors (and then some) in perceiving causality where there is none.

As Tan rightly tacitly recommends, psychic surgery should be approached with skepticism, not least because it's been exposed as a scam (for a detailed look see The Faith Healers by James Randi where he provides insight into the legerdemain they employ). I think we should extend this skepticism to all faith healing claims, not least because of the existence of confuting evidence. For instance, in Randi's work he exposes the various tricks that faith healers have used, including the "shotgun method" employed by Pat Robertson and Kathryn Kuhlman, outright deception through the use of concealed electronic transmitters/receivers in the case of Peter Popoff and through illusions in the case of W. V. Grant. Barring trickery, it's also quite possible that those who believe they have supernatural powers of healing are simply delusional--as was probably the case with Catholic priest Ralph de Orio. The best evidence, however, come when we can actually investigate the claimed healings, i.e., when we can check the patients before and after the FH. As one example of such a study, the claims of Benny Hinn, a famous faith healer who's had a healing crusade or two in the Philippines, was investigated in 2001. To cut to the chase, the researchers found no evidence of (supernatural) healing. Furthermore, since prayer is intimately related to FH, the best scientific study on prayer thus far conducted shows that they don't work.

Some may argue that miracle cures have been declared, particularly by the Catholic Church. Unfortunately, being declared a miracle such doesn't mean it is one. Even the Vatican's Rev. Peter Gumpel admits that, "What seems like a miracle now may not be one in a hundred years. Such are the advances of science. Declarations of miracles are not infallible teachings." In the Church's determination of whether a miracle healing has occurred, a team of medical experts are called upon to investigate. Should they be stumped as to how the person was cured, the Church then declares the cause to be supernatural. Such a conclusion, however, is not warranted. In fact it is a fallacy to do so. Mere ignorance of the cause or explanation cannot logically lead to the conclusion that our pet theory (whatever it may be) is the right one. That ages ago humans did not know the nature and cause of lightning and earthquakes did not mean they were supernatural.

Lastly, besides the placebo effect--which can be elicited by all types of medical intervention, efficacious or not--there is no known mechanism by which people can be cured of diseases via prayers or laying of the hands or what have you. Given our understanding of the nature of infection and diseases, biology, physiology, anatomy, physics, it is an incredible leap of speculation to believe in the efficacy of shamanistic practices as faith healing.

Tan says that when asked whether FH works he believes the the proper question is: Why and how does faith healing work? I'm certainly all ears as to his answer and slew of evidence.


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April 1, 2008 Update

It's been more than a week since I emailed Michael Tan (his address is available at the end of his article). In it I requested him to respond since I sincerely am interested as to what he's alluding to when he says that faith healing works. Given he's an anthropologist I hold him to a higher standard than your garden variety believer. When a scientist makes a claim, particularly with something as extraordinary as this, I presume he's responsible enough to have evidence to it back it up with. Unfortunately, Tan has refused to produce such evidence or even make any clarification. I therefore have to conclude his claim has no foundation at all.

As implied by his statement, he's held this unsupported belief for some time. As to how long he's been under the spell of this delusion, we can only guess.

666 + 2

Mark your calendars folks. June 6, 2008 will be a red letter day. That is, if we are to believe a Frenchman who goes by the name of Antoll Ma. On that auspicious date extraterrestrials will be arriving and will be seen in Dromon, a region somewhere in southeast France.

According to Antoll his first encounter with the extraterrestrials was on June 6, 1975 when he was 24 years old. He saw an orange ball of light in the sky. Soon thereafter he was able to talk to (or with) the occupants of what I presume to be the spacecraft. If his claim is that he talked to the aliens, I'd like to know whether they talked back. If they didn't I'd say he might as well have talked to Allah or Yahweh or Apollo. On the other hand, if he did hear voices, he'd better have had made a recording or shrinks would want to see him in their office.

I got to know of Antoll after stumbling upon one of his videos in a discussion board. Antoll has been quite busy promoting that video all over the Net, posting a link to it in a smorgasboard of discussions forums (try googling "extraterrestrial world contact June 6th"). In the video, he talks about the Dromon event. However, for that to happen Antoll says he needs our support--our presence, our belief, wish, etc. That drew a guffaw from me. He's got an out right there--if nothing happens on June 6, if no spaceship or little/giant green humanoids show up, then Antoll can blame it on a lack of numbers, lack of faith, or whatever it is he says is a prerequisite.

Early on in the video he claims that the aliens come every 6th of June. I'm just wondering why, given his cinematographic skills, he hasn't gone to the site on June 6 and filmed the orange light, spacecraft, and/or its passengers. Wouldn't that be far more convincing than just giving us a scenic tour of France and telling us his tale? Among the various ad hocs he can use to explain this away are: ETs are camera shy. Or perhaps photographic equipment suddenly malfunction in their presence. Or they only appear in Antoll's mind via telepathy. Or the idea has just never ever crossed his mind. (Having a slow Internet connection, I didn't bother checking his other videos where he might have actual photographic and other types of evidence.)

In his June 24, 2007 entry, Antoll posted what he claims to be a page from the magazine Le Nouveau Détective. The first line, "'Je suis Antoll Ma, le futur maître du monde,'" piqued my curiosity since I wanted to know what "future ___ of the the world" he was claiming to be. I ran "maître" through the Babel Fish translator and discovered Antoll to be suffering from delusions of grandeur. In earlier blog entries he had mentioned and talked about "masters of the world." Perhaps after years of intense deliberation Antoll finally found who the grand master is. I'm surprised he didn't make the connection earlier since he blatantly tells us in a 2004 entry that "Antoll Ma" is a name like that of Jesus Christ.

Come June 6 we just might just see Antoll and his "Ma-ians" gathered in Theopolis, the "land of the Apocalypse" (which must be that mountaintop in Dromon). May I suggest they do so in 2012 instead when the Mayan calendar supposedly abruptly ends. Antoll believes in Jung's synchronicity so I'm sure he'll be ecstatic about this wondrous homonymic discovery I've made. (Maybe in appreciation he'll make me one of the masters. Well, if so, I sure hope the ETs speak English.)

Nanu nanu.

Imagine no religion

Imagine yourself being attended to in the ER: your blood pressure has dropped to a dangerously low level, your white blood cell count has shot through the roof, you want to say something but you're too weak to even move your lips. You slip in and out of consciousness, though at one point you distinctly hear wailing around you (sounds like your wife or daughter) and you're able to make out what looks a priest at the foot of your bed. That last bit makes your heart race, if only your body had enough strength to make it race in the first place. You would've heard the EEG go monotone but you'd already blacked out a full minute before they started CPR ... to no avail.

A week after the funeral your family finally receives the autopsy report. You succumbed to a most virulent form of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). How did you get the superbug? Well, speculation among the hospital staff has it that you probably got infected when you had your coronary bypass surgery a few weeks ago. You see ever since they started accepting female Muslims the number of surgery-related infections such as MRSA has gone up by over 400%. Does that mean these females are carriers of MRSA? Well, not exactly. The fact of the matter is that these Muslim women vehemently oppose the standard hygienic practice of scrubbing their hands and arms before entering the operating room and handling patients. Specifically, these women did not wash and scrub their forearms to rid themselves of various pathogens nor did they follow the standard practice of having bare forearms when performing and assisting in surgery. It's quite possible that one of those women had inadvertently infected you.

Now merely a psyche--a soul--being ferried by Charon across the River Styx you see your family filing a malpractice suit against the hospital. But you nearly dash across the water when you hear the judge dismiss the suit on grounds that the Muslim women were merely exercising their religious rights. The fact that it was against their religion to expose their forearms during the scrub and in the surgical theater is more than enough reason to exonerate these women and the hospital. In this age of political correctness and appeasement, religious sensibilities trumps science, rationality and patient welfare. If medical practices and procedures conflict with religion then we must respect the latter and cross our fingers the pathogens respect and spare the lives of the patients. Could you have avoided the fatal infection had you insisted on a surgical team sans Muslim women? Certainly not, for that would've definitely been construed as religious intolerance and prejudice, an offense which could very well have landed you in court!

The above is fictional, but look at how we may be inching toward such a scenario:

Medics in hospitals in at least three major English cities have refused to follow the regulations aimed at helping tackle superbugs because of their faith, it has been revealed. Women medical students at Alder Hey children's hospital in Liverpool objected to rolling up their sleeves when washing their hands and removing arm coverings in theatre, claiming it is regarded as immodest. Similar concerns were raised at Leicester University -and Sheffield University reported a case of a Muslim medic refusing to "scrub" because it left her forearms exposed.... [T]he Islamic Medical Association insisted that covering all the body in public, except the face and hands, was a basic tenet of Islam. It said: "No practising Muslim woman - doctor, medical student, nurse or patient - should be forced to bare her arms below the elbow." The new Department of Health guidance was introduced this month in a bid to restrict the spread of potentially fatal infections such as MRSA and Clostridium difficle. [link]

If religionists could have it their way, Jehovah's Witnesses would ban all blood transfusions and organ transplants, Muslims would forbid all women from exposing, scrubbing, and disinfecting their forearms, and Christian Scientists (who believe that only prayer can cure) would shut the pharmaceutical industry down, close down all medical schools, and force all doctors to switch careers.

We must not bow down to religion. Irrational beliefs, beliefs that have no foundation in reality do not deserve respect. They deserve unceasing criticism and derision.

Appeasement of Muslims, immigrant or otherwise, is not the way to go. People, whatever their creed may be, must submit to the will of secularism. No ifs, no buts. No special privileges, no special treatment.



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Note: The various symptoms and other circumstances that accompany MRSA infection are just made up. The symptoms and course of the disease may not be so.

4ever trying to rip us off

"4G Antioxidants" is one of the latest food supplements to hit the market. The 4Gs refer to substances contained in each capsule of the product: gingko biloba, grape seed, ginseng, and garlic.

To promote their product there's a health show on radio (more of an infomercial really) that's sponsored by 4G. The hosts of the show, unsurprisingly, constantly plug 4G and recommend it to their audience. The format and objectives of the show are not unlike those of a weekly program on the same radio station where the doctor who co-hosts incessantly, indefatigably, unrestrainedly, unscrupulously tells his listeners and callers week after week to take the products imported by HNC, namely, Liveraide, Fitrum, and My Marvel Taheebo Tea. Now tell me this doctor is not on HNC's payroll.

There's also a 4G tv ad you can vew online. In it you see and hear a young and popular airhead, I mean, actress bubblingly endorsing the product (in other words, reading the script and singing praises in return for an irresistibly handsome wad of lucre). The whole ad is little more than marketing drivel. It claims that 4G "helps protect our bodies from the harmful effects of oxidation and free radicals" thereby preventing disease, strengthening our body, and making us "4ever looking young and 4ever feeling healthy." In other words, we're being sold snake oil. I probably wouldn't have written this entry if not for one claim therein that I simply cannot let pass without unbridled censure.

According to the makers of 4G its product is "all natural so it's proven safe and effective." In that case, since hemlock, ricin, botulin, E. coli, guano, tapeworms, death cap mushroom, among others, are all natural, by 4G's logic they must be safe and effective. To prove this I'd like the board of directors of 4G to take the above, singly or as a cocktail, and show the world once and for all how natural = safe + effective.

I don't know whether to cry or blow my top (perhaps both). How can the mere fact that something is "all natural" lead anyone to conclude it being safe and effective? This is flagrant bad logic. This is flat-out falsehood. It's flim flam. It's a con job! The statement exists simply because the makers/sellers of 4G want to bamboozle the public into believing that their product is "proven safe and effective," giving the silliest of reasons simply to make a sentence.

I see a potential legal case to be made here too. Does the Bureau of Food and Drugs allow ads to claim their product "proven safe and effective" without robust scientific evidence? I should hope not. But then again I am hardly delusional about the ethical integrity of any government agency.

As for the whole antioxidants brouhaha, Dr. Steven Novella has just recently written a piece that addresses the issue of just what the current state of scientific evidence is on this matter. Hop on over to the highly recommended Science-Based Medicine blog and read his Antioxidant Hype and Reality. In one sentence: The jury is still out; there is still much research, studying and testing to be done. Novella's advice: "When it comes to the marketing hype for antioxidant products I can make a clear recommendation--healthy skepticism." I think we can extend that recommendation to all "food supplements" including vitamins. As the late astronomer and science popularizer Carl Sagan might have said, when it comes to medical hype make sure your baloney detector is switched on and kept on.

Don't toss your brain out

About a week ago, in the comment section of one of my blog entries, a woman shared her story:

My husband, a patient with kidney disease, has recently attended Father Suarez's healing mass. I am a skeptic myself, but if he is healed, I will happily throw clear thinking out the window.

As I implied in my curt, if not seemingly cryptic, reply to her, the logic is fallacious. Her implied reasoning as to why she would throw out skepticism and critical thinking is as follows.

Her husband H attended event E
Some unspecified time later H's renal disease is cured
Therefore E was the cause of H's healing.

Unfortunately, she has failed to take into account the other events her husband had gone through besides Suarez's healing mass. Was he taking medication? Was he on a certain special diet? What other treatments was he undergoing? We're also not told whether the particular renal disorder is such that no natural/spontaneous remission is possible or has ever been documented.

Presupposing that H's kidneys do become disease-free, which of the various events in H's life actually caused it? Without investigation we won't know. And even with investigation we might not know with certitude.

Non causa pro causa. This is the false cause fallacy--an error in causal reasoning. In particular, the woman above commits the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Just because two events are temporally proximal to one another does not warrant the conclusion that one caused the other. For any particular X there are many events that are temporally proximal to it. We can't just pick and choose which one is the cause.

It's quite revealing when she said that she would "happily throw clear thinking out the window." That she would toss her brain out only indicates that she wasn't thinking clearly in the first place. While I commend her for being skeptical, she has quite some studying to do in the area of causal reasoning.

On the other hand, she seems to be implying that if her husband doesn't get well, she'll remain a skeptic or won't believe in the powers of Suarez. Well, good for her, because indeed the lack of cure would mean that none of the events in H's life--including attendance of the Suarez healing mass--led to healing. If the claim of the proponents of a certain treatment X is that X leads to cure, and if X fails to lead to a cure, then such lack of cure falsifies the claim. Thus, the continued presence of renal disease falsifies the claim of miracle healing powers.

In practice of course there are various reasons--licit or illicit--that can be churned out to explain why X failed. Perhaps for X to be efficacious we need twice the dosage we had given our subjects, or perhaps it is efficacious only for those whose disease has not progressed beyond a certain point, etc.

However, in the case of miracles, it boggles the mind how there can exist any constraint that can hamper a supposedly omnipotent and omnibenevolent being from supernaturally curing its own creation. In fact an all-powerful being could most easily restore lost limbs, split conjoined twins, make normal those born with Down syndrome and other genetic disorders. If one is all-powerful and all-loving and dispenses miracles, how can it be that the majority suffer from disease and so many die from horrible diseases? Yet the fact is clear. Lourdes has a dismal record of miracles and Suarez isn't some medical Midas who cures everyone he touches (the number of testimonials is less than the number of those who've attended the healing services). Furthermore, in the case of Suarez, there has yet to be a single officially declared miracle^{1, 2}. Moderator of the Companions of the Cross Fr. Scott McCaig admits that. “[God] doesn’t heal everybody and I don’t understand why necessarily.” Martin Rovers, professor of human sciences at Saint Paul University in Canada, offers an explanation:

[Miraculous healing is] a gift and it happens at a time that we’ll never know. It happens to the saint and to the sinner and it happens to the strong and the lowly. The word that people use for that – that’s just mystery.”

Unfortunately, thinking up a reason doesn't mean that the offered explanation is true. And Rovers' explanation is hardly satisfactory--the implicit premise therein that a deity exists and the Christian one at that is not even known to be true (McCaig makes this unwarranted assumption as well). That it involves positing an entity not yet known to be true/real means it's not a parsimonious explanation. And that it assumes miracles to be true makes it doubly unparsimonious (as we have seen it is fallacious to jump to the conclusion that a miracle has taken place on the basis of inexplicability). More importantly, however, Rovers' hypothesis is an illicit ad hoc explanation. It is untestable and unfalsifiable; it can never be known to be true or false. In short it will forever remain in the realm of pure speculation. And that is why it can be relied upon as a psychological crutch by believers. Its nonfalsifiability perpetuates the delusion that miraculous healing is factual.

Finally, calling something mystery or Mystery does nothing to add to our understanding. "Mystery" merely is a stand-in and placeholder for "we don't know." It would be more to the point and in fact more intellectually and epistemologically honest if Suarez, McCaig, Rovers, et al. came out and said, "We don't know whether the supernatural exists. We don't know whether deities exist. We don't know whether the particular god we believe in exists. We don't know whether there in fact are miracles. And so the biggest mystery is whether any of our beliefs has any basis in reality, whether any of the things we believe in are true."

The emperor really has no clothes

Last week I sent the same email to all three addresses provided in the Suarez healing ministry contact page. I wrote:

The website of Fr. Fernando Suarez (http://www.fatherfernando.com/) has a number of articles purporting miraculous healings. The same website has also published quite a number of testimonials claiming the same.

Given all the anecdotal material, I would just like to inquire whether there have been investigations of the claims of miraculous healings by Suarez. If so, may I please have the names of the medical experts involved, their contact information, and what their findings have been thus far. Any other pertinent information as to evidence for miracles would be appreciated.

Thank you.

Thus far, I've received replies from the ministry's U.S. and Canadian offices. US contact person Manny Abalos told me he knows of no investigation. On the other hand, Mary Sheridan of Canada, Suarez's secretary, didn't answer my question directly but instead quoted a couple of parts of the Statement of Clarification the Companions of the Cross issued last February 6, the relevant one being the part about how only the bishop and medical experts can determine whether a miracle has occurred. She also bounced back what I had already said in my email--that testimonials were being published in their website.

From these responses, it appears Suarez and Companions of the Cross don't really have anything except lurid claims. Sure, they've got reams of testimonials and anecdotes, and unwavering belief, but they don't even have a single medical investigation which they confess is essential.

To believe wholeheartedly without evidence is to be deluded. I'll bet not a few in this healing mania are irredeemably so, beginning with that strutting naked emperor Fernando Suarez.

In many pre-scientific societies shamans play the role of doctor. Among other things they are said to harness or channel spirits and supernatural forces to cure the sick among their tribe. Suarez is a modern-day, city-dwelling shaman. The trouble is shamanic bunkum imported into the 21st century, into the cities, and into the Internet is still shamanic nonsense. While we can't fault Stone Age shamans and their tribe for not knowing any better, given their circumstances Suarez and his cohorts can only be seen, if not judged, as freaking imbeciles.

Why reported miracle healings should be taken not with a grain but with a sack of salt

To those who believe in the powers of Fr. Fernando Suarez and cannot imagine how the healings can be anything other than genuine, and to those who think that witnessing a healing firsthand is sufficient evidence, the following account will hopefully bring some needed illumination. It is from a 50-year old woman who had stomach cancer that had metastasized (spread) to her liver and spine.

At the service, as soon as she [the faith healer] said, "Someone with cancer is being cured," I knew she meant me. I could just feel this burning sensation all over my body and I was convinced the Holy Spirit was at work. I went right up on the stage and when she asked me about the brace [to support her spine] I just took it right off, though I hadn't had it off for over four months, I had so much back pain. I was sure I was cured. That night I said a prayer of thanksgiving to the Lord and [the faith healer] and went to bed, happier than I'd been in a long time. At four o'clock the next morning I woke up with a horrible pain in my back. It was so bad I broke out in a cold sweat. I didn't dare move. [Hines, p.332]

What did the doctors find? X-rays revealed that one of the bones of her back had collapsed--because she had removed her brace and ran across the stage as directed by the faith healer. Was this woman really healed of her cancer? Two months after the "miracle" she died from the very thing she was supposed to have been miraculously cured of [Hines, p.332].

This case is an exemplar and affords a number of lessons.

1. Faith healing as with other types of quackery cannot be claimed to be harmless. This woman broke her back believing she was already healed. Some people stop taking their medications believing they've received a miracle cure. People have died because they resorted to faith healing instead of evidence-based medicine [Randi, p.293-296]

2. Testimonials are not evidence; they're just claims. This terminally-ill woman believed she was cured of her cancer. People in the audience believed she had been cured. She wasn't. She died.

3. Belief in the treatment--whether faith healing, one's preferred snake oil, psychic surgery, herbs from the 10th mountain of the Himalayas, or whatnot--creates the setting for perceived cure. Notice how the woman above felt a "burning sensation" all over her. Her excitement over believing she'd been singled out for a miracle cure had probably triggered the release of endorphins. Endorphins can mask pain. [Hines, p.333]

4. Many take reports of miracles at face value. There is no effort to look beyond tabloid reporting. People rarely, if ever, ask "What have I not been told?" "What was the diagnosis before the miracle and after the miracle?" "How is the person doing 1 week, 1 month, 1 year after the miracle?" People focus on the fleeting spectacle and fail to look at the whole picture.

5. Some people even arrogantly believe they have the knowhow and expertise to rule out trickery and any and all natural explanations/causes: "But I saw the miracle with my own eyes!" Well, imagine you had been one of the thousands in the audience and witnessed this woman take off her braces and run across the stage. Would you have concluded that a miracle had taken place because you had seen it with your own eyes? Even if you're an oncologist, how could you possibly know that the cancer was gone without doing sonograms, MRIs, blood exams, or whatever diagnostic tests are required and without doing follow ups over a period of time?


Now read the following. It's a supposed healing by Suarez circa 2006.

An usher brings Suarez to the front pew to see a dark-haired woman in a wheelchair. Suarez prays with the woman, who’s in her 40s. He helps her stand up and the woman falls limp. Two men help lay the woman on the floor. After a few minutes, the woman gets up and makes her way to the pulpit. “I have for years had pain in my legs, cancer has torn them apart,” the woman tells the crowd. “Now I don’t feel pain right now, so I praise the Lord.”

The pain was gone--at that moment. We are given a snapshot. What we don't have is the movie providing us a detailed intro to her condition and a time-lapse account by which we can follow her condition through to the present. I cannot but wonder if and when the pain returned and how she faced and resolved the cognitive dissonance--the belief that she'd been healed and the fact that the pain had returned and things were as they had been before the miracle.


In the 70s Dr. William A. Nolen followed up a number of cases of claimed miracle healings by faith healers. He found no evidence for them [Hines, p.333]. In the late 80s James Randi investigated various faith healers including Pat Robertson, Oral Roberts, Ernest Angley, W.V. Grant, Peter Popoff, and Fr. Ralph DeOrio. While he was able to uncover the tricks and deceptions of faith healing, he found no evidence whatsoever of miracle healings.

This book is an account of my earnest efforts to discover one example of faith-healing that can stand examination. I have found none [Randi, p.268].

I have tried to obtain from all possible sources direct, examinable evidence that faith-healing occurs. My standards are simple. I need a case that involves a living person, healed of an otherwise non-self-terminating disease who recovered from that disease as a result of a faith healer's actions and can produce before-and-after evidence to establish that fact. I have failed in any and all cases I have investigated to obtain a response that satisfies these simple requirements [Randi, p. 287-288].

The healing claims of Benny Hinn have been investigated. They too have been shown to hold no water.

Suarez is just one of the latest in a long list of people who've claimed to possess (or to channel) supernatural powers of healing. There is yet to be solid evidence for this. Given the paltry track record of his predecessors, given that anecdotes and testimonials are hardly good evidence, and given the fact that it is fallacious to equate inexplicable with miraculous, to believe in Suarez is to surrender to a delusion. Instead, we ought to confront the claims with utmost skepticism.



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References:

Terence Hines. Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, 2nd ed. Prometheus Books. 2003.
James Randi. The Faith Healers. Prometheus Books. 1987.

The Suarez marketing machinery

Healing priest Fr. Fernando Suarez belongs to the community of priests known as Companions of the Cross. On February 6, 2008, prompted by "questions and concerns," it issued a "Statement of Clarification Regarding the Healing Ministry of Fr. Fernando Suarez." Among other things, we find the following very interesting caveat.

We delight that the Lord continues to bring consolation to the sick and suffering through prayers for healing. However, we leave it entirely to the competent authorities to confirm or deny claims of miraculous healing. It is the local Bishop, in consultation with medical experts, who makes such a determination.[emphases added]

The Companions of the Cross are now neither confirming nor denying that there have been miraculous healings, notwithstanding its unabashed publication of testimonials (that webpage even has a form allowing people to conveniently send in their stories), and notwithstanding its promotion of Suarez as a healer (in that page Fr. Shannon even avers, "I can personally attest to the authenticity of the many healings which have taken place through Fr. Fernando's ministry"). In its Statement of Clarification Suarez's group is admitting that, in reality, they don't know if any of the healing claims have substance. They don't know whether miracles have in fact taken place (it stands to reason that if one or more miracles have in fact been officially certified by the Church the website would be advertizing it/them like crazy, given how they currently have no qualms in posting all the testimonials and anecdotal material).

The question is, Are they making this most important fact clear to the public or not? I don't think so. On the contrary. Judging from the contents of the Suarez healing ministry site (apart from the Clarification) they've been making it appear that he does have powers of healing and that there have been miracle healings.

It is a general principle that if the only evidence for any touted cure (be that Chinese herbs, triceratops horns, beetle juice, psychic surgery, ... or faith healing) are anecdotes and testimonials, then there is simply no good reason to believe that it works. Only scientific and medical studies can determine the efficacy of a substance or treatment. The Companions of the Cross know this. They say so in their Clarification. And yet they continue to promote Suarez as having healing powers.

Caveat emptor.

The incredible dearth of miracle healings

The shrine at Lourdes, France is perhaps the most famous site the Catholic Church has officially recognized as having had miraculous healings. Since 1860 a total of around 200 million have visited.

There are three interesting facts about Lourdes (or any other miracle healing phenomenon for that matter) which taken together make claims of miracles unreliable and, as we shall we see, ultimately illogical and untenable.

1. The number of sick people who've gone to Lourdes is much larger than the number who claim to have been healed. Since 1858 an estimated 2 million have made the pilgrimage. The number of claimed miracles on the other hand hovers at around 6,000 [Hines, p.348]. The ratio of claimed healings to the number of sick is therefore 6,000 / 2,000,000 = 0.003 or a third of a percent. This translates to 3 positive testimonials for every 1,000. This is a very small number. Assuming for a moment that those who claim to have been healed were in fact cured, the rate of failure of Lourdes is a staggering 99.7%. As a way of assimilating this, ask yourself if you would enthusiastically spend some USD3,000.00 (an off-the-top-of-my-head estimate of the cost of a Lourdes pilgrimage) to undergo a medical treatment that advertised a success rate of 0.3%.


2. If a third of percent doesn't dissuade you, the truth is the figure is much worse. You see, testimonials are not accepted at face value by the Church, for very good reasons. All claims are first scrutinized and investigated by the Lourdes Medical Bureau "to rule out trickery, acting, illusion, a possible hysterical or delirious pathology." When a claim passes the preliminary screening the case is handed over to the International Medical Committee of Lourdes (CMIL) which is composed of Catholic doctors from various European countries. It is CMIL that determines whether a case of healing is in fact medically inexplicable. However, the final say as to whether the said case is a miracle or not rests upon the Church. [Hines, p.348] So how many claims has the Church certified as miracles? A mere 67. Thus, out of the 6,000 claims only 67 have been able to pass through the eye of the needle. If we now take this as the definitive number of miracles, the success rate of Lourdes is in fact 67 / 2,000,000 = 0.00335%. In other words Lourdes has a failure rate of 99.996665%. (I didn't even dare round it off to 2 decimal places!)

Imagine the following: 30,000 people with a certain disease have been invited to try a drug. You are one of them. You're told that only one of the 30,000 will benefit from the drug, and that to become part of the program you need to pay a fee of USD3,000.00. And no, you don't get a refund if you're amongst the 29,999 who go home still sick. Those are the odds at Lourdes: 1 in 30,000.


3. If you think it can't get any worse than that, you better pop an antacid. Among those who've been miraculously healed in Lourdes is a young woman who had Budd-Chiari syndrome, a condition wherein the veins of the liver become blocked. In 1963 she was certified as having had a miraculous healing. There's a slight problem though. She eventually died of Budd-Chiari seven years later. What happened to the miracle? CMIL admitted that "when they reached their decision [that the woman had had a miracle cure] they were insufficiently aware of the natural history of Budd-Chiari syndrome and the possibility of natural remission." [Hines, p. 349-350] Bottom line: the determination of miracles is hardly foolproof and error-free.

CMIL is quite cognizant of the fact that medical and scientific knowledge advances such that what is currently inexplicable may not be so in the future, as implied in their of use of qualifiers/caveats as "in the present state of scientific knowledge." Rev. Peter Gumpel is "an official at the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of the Saints, which investigates reports of miracles by candidates for sainthood." He echoes the CMIL's understanding of the cumulative and progressive nature of scientific understanding, admitting that,

What seems like a miracle now may not be one in a hundred years. Such are the advances of science. Declarations of miracles are not infallible teachings.

We simply don't know all there is to know about the human body and disease, even as we have made great strides.

The mere fact that we currently don't understand X or cannot explain X does not at all imply that it's a miracle. It would be fallacious to say it is.

We can't explain X.
We conclude that X is supernatural.
But this implies that we know what X is.

The contradiction is easy to see if we make explicit the fact that we don't yet know and understand everything about the natural world.

We are not omniscient.
We cannot explain X
Therefore, X is supernatural.
This implies that we have ruled out all natural explanations.
But this means we are omniscient.

Since the premise that we are not omniscient is evidently true then it must be that our inference "X is supernatural" is unwarranted. Just to further show why it is unwarranted: Given an X which eludes explanation, rather than pointing to the supernatural we can just as well say that X is extraterrestrial in nature, that an advanced and very benevolent civilization has caused the cure. The supernatural is just one hypothesis among hypotheses. Our inability to explain something is not evidence for our favored hypothesis. Rather, our inability to explain merely expresses our ignorance of the explanation.

So why does the Church make the unwarranted conclusion? Why does the Church not stop at what is indubitably and medically accepted as true--that X is currently inexplicable, that given our present understanding the healing cannot yet be explained? Whatever its reason, and given CMIL's lucidity on the matter and Gumpel's admission, the certification and declaration of any unexplained cure or remission as miraculous--i.e., that it is supernatural in nature--is an act of hubris.


In conclusion, even with 67 certified miracles, these are not known to be in fact miracles, but rather simply declared as such. The Church arrives at its conclusion via a version of an argumentum ad ignorantiam whereby they take the current lack of natural explanations as license to call the event supernatural. This as we have seen is overtly fallacious. If, as Gumpel rightly says, a hundred years from now medical science is able to explain any or all of these 67 cases then they will lose their "miracleness," which is just saying that they were not miracles in the first place.



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References:

Terence Hines. Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, 2nd ed. Prometheus Books. 2003.

Clear thinking: the contagious powers of Suarez

Montemaria, Batangas is the site where Fr. Fernando Suarez is planning to build a shrine dedicated to Our Lady of the Poor. Among the more impressive structures in the planned 5-hectare shrine will be a statue of Our Lady as tall as the Statue of Liberty.

Fr. Nap Baltazar is one of the true believer in the powers of Suarez. During his first ever visit to to Montemaria, and among other things he did there, Baltazar gathered a few stones from the area and gave one to each of the four who accompanied him on the trip. The very next day he received a call from one of them. The "frantic, weeping parishioner" told Baltazar that "he [had] rubbed the stone on his shoulders, which he had not been able to move for years. And now, he said, he could move his shoulders and even lift his arm."

Clearly, this man believed the Montemaria stone had some healing powers else he wouldn't have rubbed it on the affected shoulder. Can the stone really have magical powers? Not impossible but it is highly improbable (give me evidence of stones that have been scientifically shown to have such therapeutic powers). Instead of pebbles with some yet to be explained healing properties, there are simpler candidate explanations for the "healing." What did this man do with the stone? Along with some oil or lubricant I presume, he massaged his shoulders. It is more probable that the massage and not the Montemaria stone per se that loosened up his shoulders enough to give him (temporary) mobility of his arm. Furthermore, this man had a prior (strong?) belief in the supernatural curative powers of the stone. This psychological inclination of his could have pushed his threshold of pain a few notches up, thus enabling him to lift his arm. But whether the effect has been permanent or not we are not told. Whether his ailment is merely psychosomatic to begin with or is caused by some degenerative disease (such as arthritis), whether he could not in fact move his shoulders and lift his arm before the massage, we don't know.

After news of the above event spread, "more reports of healing flooded the parish—cancer cells disappearing, pain vanishing instantly, chemotherapy schedules cancelled, dead kidneys revived." Cancer cells vanishing? Dead kidneys revived? These are very incredible claims, although, for starters, what a "dead kidney" is exactly isn't clear. But more importantly, what we have here are mere hearsay. We don't know if the claims are true, or how much they've been blown out of proportion, whether or not doctors and lab tests were involved in reaching the diagnoses.

What is very misleading in the article is that it implies the stones were the cause of these various remissions and cures. But what is the probability that the patients were not receiving some form of medical treatment before they tried the stones and during the period they were using them? Whatever medication they were taking and treatment they had undergone or were undergoing need to be taken into account. This is more or less obvious since medicines and medical treatments are known to lead to what we colloquially describe as healing. Thus, it stands to reason that one would and should put more confidence in treatments by the MDs as being the cause of relief and healing, rather than on a piece of nondescript stone that the patient had rubbed on his/her body.

If we've been on medication for three months and we rub Himalayan sand all over ourselves because we've heard through the grapevine that it's effective, and if on the fourth month our doctor gives us a clean bill of health, was it the sand that licked our condition? Post hoc ergo propter hoc. We can't just willy nilly assign causation to what we want to believe is the cause.

What piques my interest is that after this one person had come to believe the stone has healing powers and had reported a healing of sorts, others clambered on board the bandwagon and began submitting their own testimonials. The psychology is fascinating.

Now, I'd like to turn to what would be a most revealing experiment. I really wish there are medical researchers, scientists, skeptics who would test these stones. How would we go about it? [1] First we'll have to procure a batch of genuine Montemaria stones, preferably either from Baltazar or from the exact site(s) where he obtained his. Then we would gather a bunch of similarly looking and sized stones from some place not at all related in any way to Suarez. Let's say we import a box of pebbles from Mongolia. Without informing any of the participants that there are non-Montemaria stones in our cache, we would then randomly assign all these stones to about a hundred or more subjects, say, the parishioners of Baltazar (people who believe in the healing powers of the Montemaria stones and who are suffering from some ailment). We'd then sit back and wait for a certain time period to elapse. At the end of the period if we find that the percentages of those who report healing are around the same for both groups (those provided with Montemaria stones vs those with Mongolian stones), we conclude that the Montemaria stones have no special powers and that it was the placebo effect and other factors that gave rise to the claimed healings. The healing powers attributed to the stones, and for that matter to Suarez, are quite testable. And they should be tested, unless the faithful are averse to disillusionment and would rather remain ignorant of the truth.

So now it's not only Fr. Suarez who possesses the miracle healing touch, even stones from a place where the planned shrine will be built have caught it. But hold on. It not just stones, for in lieu of them, mere stampitas will do:

[A] doctor who was healed of cancer had stampitas of St. Francis of Assisi printed and distributed to parishioners. An ailing woman eventually reported that because the healing stones were hard to come by, she put a stampita on her belly and found that her pains had disappeared by the next morning.

And now even electronic media have been imbued with the same magical healing powers.

Lolit Esguerra writes: “I prayed with Father Suarez his Youtube healing prayer and the pain in my shoulders, which no medicine could remove, disappeared.” The Lord’s healing is becoming global through the Internet. He heals by touch, by cellular phone, or by land line. Too old to go to church, 87-year-old Rosella Purugganan said all her pains vanished after she heard Suarez’s healing Mass on television.

Since computers, television, telephones, cell phones send data via electricity, microwave, and light, it must be that the "healing code" or software if you will gets encoded in the analog and digital electrical signals and thereafter gets transmitted electromagnetically via copper cables, fiber optics, antennas, satellites, cell sites, .... Fascinating, don't you think?

Is it far-fetched then to say that in time there will be those who will claim that photos of Suarez, pictures of the shrine, water, leaves and bark from around Montemaria, and practically anything that has some connection with Suarez have exhibited healing properties? Can we dub this as "potency by mere association"?

There are many questions that need to be asked and there are various candidate naturalistic explanations for the claimed events and healings. Ignoring these leads to very muddled thinking as is in the case of those who've hastily concluded that they've actually been healed, and by magical means. I am so pained that such a profusion of delusions has been engendered by a single man.


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Notes:

1. There are of course other experiments that can be designed/performed and variations of the one I suggest to determine whether the Montemaria stones are unique or not in eliciting (claims of) healings and how they compare to other objects in eliciting the same.

Clear thinking: Suarez and the signs

Reading the following news article brought to mind pre-scientific animistic tribes. It reports a collection of supposed signs and omens that followers have seen in connection with Fr. Fernando Suarez's activities. Signs and omens? The anachronism was jarring at first but ultimately comical.

So what are the said signs that accompanied Suarez's plans and activities? The article begins with the following:

Last Christmas eve, the security guard at Montemaria in Batangas saw from afar a bright glow on the makeshift altar-stage. He thought the electricity had been installed. But then, he thought, why now in the middle of the night, on the eve of Christmas? When he went out to check, the light was gone. The guard sent a text message reporting the incident to Paz Monteclaro of the Mary Mother of the Poor Foundation (MMPF), which supports Fr. Fernando Suarez, the now famous healer of the blind, deaf, mute and lame. Both Suarez and the MMPF wondered: Was this mysterious light, which came at the time of the birth of Jesus, perhaps n omen of His coming to this remote hillside?

If in the middle of the night if I see a light where there's supposed to be none my first reaction would be fear. Why? Because among the members of Homo sapiens are those commonly referred to as thieves. Paranormal concerns are way way down my list of possibilities. Now if I had been the security guard I would've reported what I'd seen before checking out the premises, since presumably I'd been hired to protect property from being stolen/vandalized/trespassed upon by someone.

So consider the following possible explanations:

* Thieves had been on the prowl for possible valuables such as chalices.
* The guard had experienced a hallucination
* The guard had glasses on and had seen on the lens a reflection of a light source behind him
* Someone had lit a candle within the vicinity of the said altar
* Mischievous teens illuminated the altar, perhaps with a flashlight.
* He had mistaken a firefly much closer for a light in the altar located much further away.
* The guard had had a couple of shots or was drowsy from being lulled by the crickets and saw a light but in a different area altogether.
* Sparklers or a type of fireworks had been used in the area (there are those in the Philippines who celebrate Christmas by setting off fireworks and firecrackers)
* There had been a ball lightning lasting several seconds in the vicinity of the altar.
* Orbiting high above the Earth, a cloaked flying saucer had directed a high-powered laser beam (operating in the visible spectrum) at the altar.
* Loki, the trickster god, had zapped the guard's optic nerves and made him see a light (when none in fact existed)

There are a number of mundane explanations (each of which can potentially be ruled out given more details about the event). There are also less parsimonious and less probable explanations such as ball lightning. And then there are any number of wacky (though strictly speaking not impossible or falsifiable) explanations as the last two above illustrate.

As for the light being a sign from Yahweh or Christ, it sits right next to the Loki hypothesis.

We are told then told of the other signs.

During the groundbreaking and blessing of the altar-stage in January 2007, just as Suarez was beginning his homily, the calm was broken by a violent wind. When others, including a bishop, spoke, everything became calm once more.... Just as Suarez began sprinkling holy water on the altar-stage, an eerie drizzle of fine raindrops descended on the 500-odd people attending the ceremony. It was as if the heavens were joining him in blessing the place.

I don't know how the weather is over in Montemaria, Batangas, but where I am--some hundred or so kilometers from Batangas--some types of rain are preceded by high winds.

We need to ask: During the week/month when the fine drizzle was said to have occurred, had there also been other instances when such fine drizzle did occur, regardless of whether there was a mass or prayer service? Is this meteorological event unique? Has it never occurred at all in this area? Given that it's already happened twice (the second in October 2007 during a Mass celebrated by a different priest), it's a good bet drizzling of the type reported is normal for the area. Similar questions can be asked of the so-called violent gust of wind. Perhaps local weatherpersons and records can shed light on this.

To add to the list of portents from the heavens, even clouds apparently were communicating something:

Some of those present reported an odd, circular cloud hovering above them.... Suarez himself said he saw a cloud in the form of a hand.

Looking for faces in the clouds would normally be just an entertaining past time activity. But throw in a religious setting and it becomes quasi-divination, akin to reading tea leaves and animal entrails. So when one fluff of water vapor turns out to resemble a human hand (even if only for a few seconds/minutes before shapeshifting into something else) it is enlisted as yet another sign. I am actually surprised why they didn't continue to look for more shapes to add to their collection of omens since it is rather easy to do.

My own omen from heaven: On a bright sunny day several years ago while waiting for the light to turn green I gazed up and watched the white cumulus clouds as they slowly crossed the sky. One caught my eye and upon closer inspection it turned out to be in the shape of a robed and hooded woman. Ah! the Virgin Mary I chuckled to myself. If only I had a camera. But even before the traffic light changed color she had gradually changed and shape shifted into Dick Tracy, who not long thereafter transformed into something my unenviable faculties of imagination and creativity could no longer apprehend and interpret.

While Suarez may not have come across the term pareidolia, I hope he doesn't tell us he's not heard of the childhood game of looking for shapes in the clouds. Gazing upwards, perceiving a simulacrum in the clouds, and then interpreting it as a sign from heaven is, frankly, plain superstition.

Finally, in the collection of signs, there are the stones from Montemaria collected by Fr. Nap Baltazar which purportedly have healing powers and have cured those with diabetes and cancer. (I'll have more to say about these healing pebbles in a later post.)

The problem with Suarez and his band of believers is that they so dearly want to believe that all this supernatural healing stuff is real, that he/they have somehow been been blessed or even specially chosen by their deity, and that Montemaria is the place that's been prophesied to be the next miracle healing shrine of the world, so much so that they're highlighting trivial phenomena and making a big fuss out of them. I suspect this is a simple case of selective attention and confirmation bias of sorts. It's an overzealous attentiveness to or even search for eerie, synchronistic events and coincidences to bolster the significance of Montemaria and Suarez's supposed superpowers (perhaps not unlike the frantic search for miracles when Catholics embark on a quest to have some beloved and popular individual of theirs canonized).

Clear thinking: Suarez and the dead

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. After this, therefore because of this. I've dealt with this fallacy several times before but it's such a common pitfall in causal reasoning that even priests--supposedly trained in philosophy--fall into the trap.

If I click my heels three times and it starts raining, did my Dorothy act magically cause the floodgates of heaven to burst open? If my alarm clock rings and the sun rises did my clock cause the sunrise? (Interestingly, there was a tribe that believed that if it didn't perform its pre-dawn ritual the sun would fail to rise and mankind would be doomed.) What if I pop a tablet of paracetamol (acetaminophen) and my headache disappears minutes later? Did the pill cause my headache to up and go?

Patently, heel-clicking and alarm clocks don't cause rain and sunrises. But even in the pill example, it would be fallacious to claim with absolute certitude that the drug licked the headache. At best--given that we know from clinical trials that paracetamol is efficacious--we can say that it probably did. Why the lack of surety? Because for all we know the headache was on its way out even before the pill started having any effect. Depending on their etiology, some headaches are self-limiting and transitory (and need not be medicated).

I hinted above that supposedly well-educated people such as Catholic priests are hardly very smart people. Well, given that they really honestly believe that invisible and undetectable superheroes and supervillains exist in some realm outside the universe and that pieces of bread they chant over magically turn into the dermal and muscle tissue of a 2,000-year old Middle Eastern male, I think we have enough evidence to say they're not very smart at all.

Now there's this bloke by the name of Fr. Fernando Suarez who claims to have, unwittingly, raised someone from the dead [1].

The Canadian woman was declared dead by doctors at the Ottawa Civic Hospital some eight hours before Father Fernando Suarez arrived. With doctors present and ready to harvest her organs, the Filipino-Canadian priest who was then a seminarian, prayed over her. She opened her eyes and lived. Suarez was stunned. “Let me out of here,” was all he could say. The woman is now well, Suarez says, and has resumed her normal life.

Are you convinced that Suarez and his prayers caused the "resurrection"? If so then the following is yet another option for bringing your loved ones back if and when medical science fails.

Years ago one of the local dailies reported that a woman who'd already been sent to the morgue came back from the dead. While her supposedly lifeless body was being prepared, a mortician or some other person took the opportunity to sate his carnal cravings. But much to his consternation the deceased suddenly had life breathed back into her. The report says the family of the "resurrected" filed no criminal charges since this necrophiliac of sorts had somehow been responsible for bringing their loved one back to life.

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. Just because event A preceded event B, does not imply that A caused B.

Can we outright dismiss Suarez and necrocoitus as causing resuscitation of cadavers? No. Can we test whether they are causative? Yes!

Going back to our rain example, what if I go to different parts of the world and whenever I click my heels it begins pouring within a couple of seconds? What if this happens even in deserts during seasons when no rain is expected? Well, then there would be some reason to suspect a casual link. I say some reason to suspect because we'd still need to perform formal experiments to rule out chance and various other confounding factors.

Now apply that to Fr. Suarez and his Lazarus act. And for that matter to necrocoitus. If Suarez in fact possesses powers to bring the dead back to life then all we have to do is to have Suarez pray over several dozen or hundred corpses (properly scrutinized and diagnosed as really lifeless) and start counting how many of them come back to life. Likewise with intercourse with cadavers, if anyone cares to do that test.

It is quite conspicuous that Suarez has not reported any other such miracle. Are we to assume this is the first and only corpse he's prayed over? One single episode is not enough to establish a causal link. You would need to be able to replicate the results many times to attain some confidence. Suarez has jumped the gun and already reached a conclusion.

I wonder if Suarez has ever considered coincidence as an explanation. If not then he shouldn't consider it either vis-a-vis necrocoitus. Perhaps he should include that in his act (as added insurance).

So how did these two dead people come back to life? That would be a most intriguing question, if we actually were certain that the two women were in fact dead to begin with. But the most parsimonious explanation is that they weren't; that their status had been misdiagnosed. They had been pronounced and presumed dead when in fact they weren't. We'd first have to rule this mundane hypothesis before even entertaining fanciful notions of resurrections (or for that matter, aliens out in space zapping the dead with their Miracle Life Ray).

And this is a rule of thumb that's not at all ingrained in the religious or believers in the paranormal: Occam's Razor. Entities should not be multiplied without necessity. In short, keep things simple. And simple here means don't assume or include new phenomena in your explanation/hypothesis, phenomena that are not known to be true/real, phenomena that have not been tested/confirmed to be so. Thus, supernatural and paranormal explanations and those that involve extraterrestrials are not parsimonious because they assume the existence of entities which are known to be true. The misdiagnosis explanation, on the other hand, is simpler than these. We know that misdiagnosis happens all the time. And misdiagnosis of death is something that has occurred in the past. Quite common before our lifetime, it still is with us even in this age of hi tech medical instruments and equipment (just a couple of examples: woman wrongly diagnosed as dead, misdiagnosis of death shocks rural town). There is even what is known as "return of spontaneous circulation" (ROSC) or the Lazarus phenomenon whereby blood circulation of a presumably dead patient spontaneously returns even after resuscitation efforts have ceased. While currently lacking a scientific explanation, we know that this phenomenon exists.

It is rather unfortunate that Suarez ostensibly lacks skepticism and the critical thinking skills necessary to put the various events in his life in perspective. Simple tests would be enough to falsify the belief that he has supernatural powers. But as in the case of faith healer Benny Hinn, despite an investigation that has already falsified his claims of being able to heal, he still continues to delude (and dupe) the multitudes who come to his services, and likewise the diseased, disabled, and desperate still flock to him like innocent little children mesmerized by the Pied Piper's performance. I'm afraid the same will be true of Suarez. The quick, the easy, the free, and the magical are far more enticing than the tested and the true. When it comes to winning the hearts of people, science must hand the game over to quackery. It is only when objective results become the criterion does science win hands down. The bottom line is what really works, not what we believe or want to believe works.


----

Notes:

1. I have doubts about Suarez's mental condition (something I hope to expound on in case I am goaded enough to pursue further critiques). I certainly don't put too much stock on anecdotes by him about himself including this one. I don't know if he's subject to delusions of grandeur, I don't know how much he's into self-aggrandizement, I don't know which parts of his stories are true/false, I don't know if there are confabulations, I don't know how much of it is hyperbole.

The real story of God, Abraham and Isaac

And God called out, "Abraham!" "Here I am," he replied. And God said, "Take your son, your only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there for a burnt offering on the mountain."

So Abraham gathered wood for the burnt offering and put it on his son Isaac, and he took the fire and the knife in his hand; and the two of them went to the mountain. Isaac said to Abraham, "My father." And he replied, "What is it, my son?" And he said, "Here is the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?" And Abraham said, "God will provide, my son."

When they came to the place that God had told him about, Abraham built the altar and arranged the wood. Then he bound Isaac and placed him on the altar. Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. Then the Lord called to him from heaven, and said, "Abraham! Stop! Stop!" But Abraham's dagger had already dug into his son. And so the Lord swoop down from heaven and knocked Abraham to the ground with the force of a gale.

As Abraham lay in the dust the Lord berated him: "Why?! Why in heaven's name were you trying to kill your son, your only son, whom you love?!" And Abraham replied, "But my Lord, you asked me to! It was your will and I was fulfilling it."

And the Lord roared, "You desert idiot! I wasn't after your loyalty; I was testing whether you had the brains to distinguish between what's crazy and what's not! Woe to you for you have failed miserably. Any father who actually went out to kill his own child just because some higher-up told him to ought to be locked up for life! And anyone who employs the Nuremberg Defense is nothing but a groveling, irresponsible, unthinking, pass-the-buck moron! You're a sick man, Abraham. Very, very sick in the head, indeed.

---

And Abraham is supposed to be the father of the three "great" monotheisms?

Novelist Salman Rushdie contrasts the Abraham story with one he grew up as child, that of the Muslim emperor Barbur (1483 - 1530 CE) and his son Hamuyan. It is said that when Hamuyan fell gravely ill, Barbur prayed and cried to Allah to take him instead of his son. Soon thereafter Barbur fell ill and as his condition worsened his son recovered. Barbur eventually died. His son lived.

A father's sacrifice that his son may live is worlds apart from the Genesis myth of a father who will without question take his son's life. To say that the Abraham story is perverse is an understatement. It boggles the mind to find an ethicist who will give a thumbs up to (attempted) filicide. On the other hand, Barbur's ultimate self-giving is what any parent in his right mind would do. It is something we "know" is good and right.

Anyone who still says the bible is a perfect book of morals is as unthinking and ethically blind as Abraham.

I was wrong ... but still I was right

Just got wind of this via Unscrewing the Inscrutable. Here's the latest failed prophecy - cognitive dissonance case. Back in 2004 a lady by the name of Shelby Corbitt published a book simply entitled 2007. It details a prophecy she allegedly received via a dream back in 1986. According to that revelation the Rapture was to occur in September 2007.

It's 2008. Yep, it was a dud. And Shelby knows all too well. In her website, in huge type, she writes:

I SAID :

THE RAPTURE OF THE CHURCH IS GOING TO HAPPEN, THIS YEAR
2007!!

I WAS WRONG!!!

Just to head off any possible misunderstanding, cognitive dissonance does not mean denial of the situation. One precisely experiences dissonance because one is unable to deny the disconfirming evidence. In this particular case Shelby very much knows and acknowledges that the Rapture did not occur in 2007 as she predicted. The dissonance stems from the fact that she believes she got a prophecy from her deity and from the undeniable fact that it did not come to pass.

Now Shelby can reduce the dissonance by either admitting she did not receive a prophecy--that she was mistaken in interpreting it as such--or she can stick to her belief that she had received a revelation and churn out hypotheses to explain away the failed prophecy.

Her admission of error is laudable. But what in fact is she admitting? That she was wrong in interpreting the dream as a prophecy? The following statements from Shelby tell us that she merely is stating an incontrovertible fact--that the Rapture did not take place as predicted. But she still believes she had been given a prophecy.

I STILL BELIEVE THE PROPHETIC DREAM I HAD WAS FROM GOD. I HAVE TOLD THE DREAM JUST AS GOD GAVE IT TO ME. THE ONLY THING I CAN THINK OF IS THAT I RELEASED THE DREAM AT THE WRONG TIME AND GOT THE BOOK PUBLISHED TOO EARLY. MAYBE THE DREAM HAD SOME KIND OF SYMBOLIC MEANING INSTEAD OF A LITERAL MEANING THAT I HAVE NOT BEEN ABLE TO FIGURE OUT YET. I STILL DO NOT KNOW WHAT I HAVE DONE WRONG AND WHY THE PROPHECY FAILED. I PROMISE ALL OF YOU THAT I DID NOT INTENTIONALLY MEAN TO HURT OR MISLEAD ANYBODY. I PROMISE I DID NOT MAKE UP THE DREAM. I KNOW MANY OF YOU ARE VERY DISAPPOINTED, BUT I ASSURE YOU NO ONE IS AS DISAPPOINTED AS I AM. PLEASE FORGIVE ME IF I HAVE SHAKENED ANYONE'S FAITH WITH THIS PROPHECY. I KNEW I WAS GOING TO GET MUCH OPPOSITION TO THE PROPHECY SO I WAS PREPARED FOR IT AND WAS DETERMINED NO ONE WOULD CHANGE MY MIND. THE CRITICISM REALLY DID NOT BOTHER ME ANY. I STILL BELIEVE IN A RAPTURE OF THE CHILDREN OF GOD BEFORE THE TRIBULATION BEGINS. I STILL BELIEVE IT HAS TO BE SOON BECAUSE OF ALL THE WARS AND FIGHTING AROUND THE WORLD AND THE HATEFULLNESS AGAINST ISRAEL, GOD'S CHOSEN PEOPLE!! I STILL BELIEVE THE RAPTURE OF THE CHURCH WILL BE IN MY LIFETIME AND IT WILL HAPPEN THE WAY GOD SHOWED ME IN THE DREAM. I STILL BELIEVE GOD WILL SEND A VERBAL VOICE TO WARN THE NATION BEFORE HE COMES BACK. MY TIMING WAS WRONG AND FOR THAT I DO APOLOGIZE. I SHOULD NOT HAVE RELEASED THE PROPHECY WHEN I DID.

(Her use of all caps is quite disturbing. When I see all caps I see crank.)

You can clearly see that even with total failure of the prophecy she does not for a moment doubt that she had a revelation from some supernatural entity. Her core belief is untouched. What she has done is to offer a host of rationalizations (wrong timing, symbolic instead of literal meanings, etc.). The one thing she won't consider is that the dream was simply a dream and nothing more. What she won't entertain is that she's been under the spell of a delusion for the past 21 years.

Back in the 1950s psychologist Leon Festinger infiltrated and studied a group of believers led by a Marian Keech. This group believed that the world was about to end. But for those who were part of their group a spaceship would arrive and fly them off to safety. In anticipation of this event, the die-hard believers among them quit their jobs and sold their property. When the appointed time came and went and no destruction occurred and no aliens arrived, what do you think Mrs. Keech and her group did? Abandon their belief in doomsday and aliens altogether and admitted delusion? As dissonance theory predicts, they kept their core belief intact and rationalized away the failed prophecy. After mulling the situation for a few moments Mrs. Keech came out saying that she had received a new vision: that because of the faith of their small band of believers, the end of world had been averted. Hallelujah, their group had saved the world! Reinvigorated, her followers went out to the streets and proselytized with a renewed zeal. [Mistakes Were Made, p. 12-13]

According to Shelby "I STILL DO NOT KNOW WHAT I HAVE DONE WRONG AND WHY THE PROPHECY FAILED." Oh, don't worry Shelby, you'll think of something. Dissonance theory prophesies just that. You've been at it for 21 years and made your prediction public via your book and website. You're just too heavily invested to quit. You're not going to admit delusion anytime soon. Probably not in your lifetime.

Cognitive dissonance and self-justification

Just finished reading Mistakes Were Made (but not by me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (Harcourt 2007) written by social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson. I highly recommend it. You can also listen to an interview on Point of Inquiry where Tavris discusses this book.

When confronted with evidence contrary to one's belief the gut reaction of those who've already invested their hearts and minds in the belief and/or who stand to experience humiliation/embarrassment if they are mistaken, is to justify their belief. They resort to an arsenal of excuses and psychological tricks to defend their belief:

They downplay or dismiss contrary evidence. This is the famous confirmation bias, wherein the person only looks for or at the evidence that supports his/her position, while turning a blind eye to or being hypercritical of those that don't. In one experiment, for instance, a report detailing the pros and cons of capital punishment was given to a group of subjects. It was found that those in favor of capital punishment emphasized the evidence that supported their position. Likewise for those who were not in favor. And both sides downplayed anything in the report that did not support their view. In the end, regardless of the fact that the report contained disconfirming evidence, instead of being overcome with doubt, both camps came out even more convinced of their position! [p.19-20] Confirmation bias is at work whenever our beliefs are challenged. And the more one is entrenched in one's beliefs the more it is employed

The believer may even do mental gymnastics and use the lack of any favorable evidence to convince others/themselves they're correct. During World War 2, when Pres. Roosevelt ordered Japanese-Americans to be detained in camps, General John DeWitt admitted there was no evidence whatsoever that any Japanese-American was sabotaging the war effort against Japan. But DeWitt rationalized, "The very fact that no sabotage has taken place is disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken." [p.20] So guilt is guilt and innocence is guilt. You can imagine the megaton justification necessary to convince themselves that dropping the atomic bombs on Japan and killing and irradiating hundreds of thousands of men, women and children was right and necessary.

And from an entry some time ago, after one of the latest doomsday prophecy failed, the leader of the religious sect House of Yahweh issued this statement:

We previously thought it (the world) would end on the night of September 12th [2006] but it failed to happen. We have given it the next 100 days. Within that period, he says, we're foreseeing powerful nuclear weapons which will strike the world and bring it to an end."

When after a year the vaunted nuclear war was still nowhere in sight, the sect offered the following nonsense: "What actually happened is that a ‘nuclear baby’ was conceived on September 12, 2006." People who have heavily invested themselves in a belief and who have publicly professed their belief are very unlikely to ever drop the belief even when faced with indubitable, incontrovertible disconfirming evidence. Psychologist Leon Festinger's dissonance theory is daily supported by the likes of House of Yahweh.

But why do people dig their heels in? Tavris and Aronson note that most people have a positive self-image of themselves. They consider themselves morally upright people. They see themselves as smart people. They may not think of themselves as geniuses, but they certainly don't consider themselves stupid. Thus, when they do something really bad or stupid, their reaction is not to admit that they have committed a bad or stupid thing, since that contradicts their self-image. Instead, in order to reduce or eliminate the dissonance between how they see themselves and what they have done, they resort to self-justification. They justify their actions such that they are able to convince themselves what they have done isn't really that bad or that stupid. In fact they may go to the extent of convincing themselves they actually did good. In order to get away with this, they may even blame others (the victim of their misdeed for example as in DeWitt's case). We fool ourselves in order that we may live with ourselves. Self-justification is a psychological survival mechanism. But like technology its self-preservation function cuts both ways. It cannot discern when it is warranted and when its use leads to false beliefs and unethical behavior.

In the case of theism, there is simply no evidence that any of the thousand deities of the world exist, there is good scientific evidence that prayers don't work, there is no evidence of souls, there is no evidence for virgin births, no evidence for miracles, no evidence that a realm other than the universe we live in exists. Worse, claims by different religions clash with each other, meaning they cannot all be true simultaneously.

The dogmas of the Catholic Church as enshrined in the Creed are pure fantasy. Ask any theologian how they know any of the declarations therein is true, and he will give you the runaround. He will not be able to give you any evidence whatsoever of its truth. He will not be able to provide means by which you can test its veracity/validity nor provide objective tests/studies that have been conducted. In the end and in so many words, these men ask you to believe because they say so, or because it has been believed in by men before. But then why not believe in Hinduism since those are the very same reasons Hindus believe? Or in Islam? Or in any other theistic religion?

Dissonance theory predicts that those who have invested money, time, effort, etc. in their beliefs will not suddenly deconvert when confronted with rational arguments and evidence. On the contrary. Dissonance theory predicts they will believe even more. Why? Because of their self-image. They unconsciously tell themselves: "I'm not a stupid guy. I can't possibly have wasted 10,20,30,40 years of my life in some delusion. I can't possibly have duped my children by teaching them a bunch of fairy tales. I can't possibly be wrong after having stood in front of hundreds of people and declared my belief. I can't possibly be that gullible to have fallen for flimflam and claptrap. I simply am not that stupid!" And so in order not to fall into a really major depression and face humiliation by admitting that they have been irrational and wrong, they resort to justifications.

Intellectual integrity is a most precious commodity. You will find it in science. Indeed it is sine qua non to progress in science. But you will not find it in theism, for faith is the antithesis of intellectual integrity.