Faithing all the way

When I asked a Christian friend how her church defined faith, she directed me to the bible, specifically to Hebrews 11:1. Her text follows the KJV: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Since I flunked Shakespeare, I asked her what "substance" in this context means and what "evidence" was being alluded to. Well, she was as stumped as I was. So I hunted down other translations in the hope of finding something in modern colloquial English. Here are the various renditions (site 1, site 2) I found:

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, and the sign that the things not seen are true.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.

Faith assures us of things we expect and convinces us of the existence of things we cannot see.

Faith is a sure confidence of things which are hoped for, and a certainty of things which are not seen.

Now faith is a well-grounded assurance of that for which we hope, and a conviction of the reality of things which we do not see.

And faith is of things hoped for a confidence, of matters not seen a conviction,

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for, being convinced of what we do not see.

Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see.

The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It's our handle on what we can't see.

I think the key words are assurance, being sure, confidence, conviction, certainty. If this is what faith is in the biblical sense--being sure of receiving/attaining things that one hopes for, being sure of the reality of things one does not and cannot see (perceive)--then it is quite synonymous with how we usually understand "faith," i.e., a firm belief without evidence or strong belief despite the lack of evidence.

Immediately, however, as with believing in any other thing Hebrews 11:1 runs afoul of epistemology. However sure, confident, and certain we are that what we hope for and what we cannot see is true, our fervent belief tells us nothing about whether in fact we are right or wrong, whether or not what we believe in is true/real. For example, there are adherents of every religion who are die-hard believers. But since many claims of the various religions of the world conflict with one another and therefore cannot be true simultaneously, then clearly faith (belief) does not lead to (an apprehension of) the truth. Surety, confidence, certainty are just that. They do not imply that what is believed in is true, much less make it true.

Given that they planned and trained for years with the ultimate goal of sacrificing their lives, the 9-11 terrorists must be counted among those who had the most faith in their beliefs. However, it's rather comical to conclude that simply because these hijackers firmly believed their deity would reward them with six dozen virgins each for their murderous deeds, they in fact are now wallowing in a sea of young females in some dimension.

So faith is irrelevant to the truth of the belief. But Christians believe in Hebrews 11:1. And some believe in it with all their hearts. But as we have already said believing will not suddenly make that which is believed in true. Merely believing in Hebrews 11:1 or being certain (having faith) that the claim therein is true does not tell us anything about the truth of that passage. The pertinent question for Christians therefore is: Why do you believe that verse? Why do you believe the claims therein? What makes you sure that it is true? Queried, they will almost surely whip out some lame reason (e.g. "because it's in the bible," "because it's God's word") which does not at all justify the belief, or which contains implicit premises that have not been substantiated and known to be true, or which ultimately ends up begging the question (circular reasoning).

I am led to hypothesize that believers are not truth seekers at all. "The truth will set you free" is paid lip service. Instead believers are in the business of taking as truth that which they want to be true and that which they hope for (remember, they cherry pick) regardless of whether or not these beliefs are rooted in reality, plausibility, and rationality. In effect they unconsciously tell themselves: "I like the idea of an afterlife, of spending an eternity with my loved ones, therefore I will hold this belief despite and regardless of ...." "I feel solace and comfort in the idea of a benevolent deity who hears and answers prayers therefore I will continue to believe in it despite and regardless of ...." Preference trumps evidence and rationality. And there's an obstinacy and hard-headedness to it that appropriately deserves the epithet "blind faith." Believers seem to be declaring: I believe this to be true and real whether or not it is true and real.

Faithing in contrast to thinking seems to be prime mover amongst Christians. As the Apostle's creed epitomizes there's an emphasis on believing. Believe and you will be saved. Believe and you will be healed. Just believe. And when Christians run into disconfirming evidence and cognitive dissonance, they just go over the bumps, forget about it in no time, and move on, their belief engine chugging along as if nothing had happened.

It seems to me in order to arrest this runaway train takes a mountain of cognitive dissonance, something their faith can't move or go over or around. But what will actually break the spell (not exactly as Dan Dennett used the phrase) is idiosyncratic for every believer, as stories of deconversion show.

Cherry-picking Cathy the Catholic

The number of variants among believers was brought home to me recently when I confronted Cathy of Touched by a Miracle about my comments on her blog which she deleted, comments which don't contain ad hominems but instead well-reasoned arguments and explanations (see below for the comments I left in her blog, as well as her replies; you be the judge). Apparently, two Catholics may not at all believe in the same thing, leaving us with a number of variants of the Catholic species. And as you will shortly see John Paul 2 and Cathy's beliefs are hardly congruous. Given what the successor of Jesus declares I wonder if heresy would be too strong a word to describe Cathy's obstinacy.

After I discovered the deletions, I wrote Cathy and asked her for her reasons. Since I've suspected that this postgraduate degree holder had poor critical thinking skills and would probably be averse to penetrating analysis (perhaps fearing it would burst her bubble of delusion or those of her readers) I told her that in his encyclical Fides et ratio Pope John Paul 2 declares that faith and reason do not clash but rather complement one another. In fact according to the pope,

It is an illusion to think that faith, tied to weak reasoning, might be more penetrating; on the contrary, faith then runs the grave risk of withering into myth or superstition.

I told her that as a Catholic I thought she would know better than to censor rationality. Well I never received a reply. Instead I discovered she's appended the following to her "About this blog."

This is my sanctuary and not a forum to argue about faith. I respect other people's faith and religion for I believe God is the God of the Universe. Please respect mine. If you have issues about religion, you can write about it in your blog.

The above reminds me of psychiatrist M. Scott Peck's observation in his visits to asylums. Peck relates how when he called the inmates' attention to the first snow of winter, they in effect told him: Don't bother us, don't interrupt our delusions. It looks like Cathy wants me and her Pope not only to not interrupt her delusions, but to respect them.

Poor Cathy. She won't even acknowledge that her god is not the god of other religions (and not even the god of some Christian denominations and sects). And that if she respects the beliefs of those religions then she is subscribing to a form of subjectivism. I really have to wonder if "truth" has any currency in her worldview at all. It almost seems like her religion is just a "feel good" thing bereft of any substantive thinking or intellectual consistency.

Hence, while Cathy may call herself a Catholic, she cherry picks what Catholic doctrines she will believe in, what she will espouse, and what she will listen to. Even as the Vicar of Christ himself has told her to value rationality, she summarily rejects this. Thus, as predicted by John Paul 2, she has pitifully slid into superstitious beliefs.


----


What seems to have prompted Cathy to take down my comments (and her replies to the same) is the fact that after disappearing for a week I sent another comment. Perhaps there was something in there that ticked her off. I'd like to think that sometimes the light of reason can bring people to lash out at that which threatens to pull the rug from under them. Or perhaps she had already told herself that if I ever post a third comment she'd strafe all my posts to kingdom come. Or perhaps Easter Sunday marks the beginning of her spring cleaning, and she was just nonchalantly taking out the garbage--meaning any comment that dare invoke skepticism, logic, rationality, and critical thinking. Seriously though, it now seems clear that it was my last submission that got her goat. Given that she now says her blog is not a venue for debating faith, my excursus on the nature of faith must've made her go into conniptions and triggered the deletion frenzy. What follows are the comments Cathy fed to the delete button.

By me on March 15 in "How do you know if your prayers are answered?":

There's a fallacy in causal reasoning known as post hoc ergo propter hoc ("after this, therefore because of this"). Given that event A comes before event B, it is fallacious to conclude that A caused B. We all intuitively know that mere temporal precedence is insufficient to conclude causality. Thus, just because I sang right before a downpour doesn't mean that my singing really sucks so much so that the clouds uncontrollably burst into tears.

Applying this to prayer it means that if I pray to entity Z and shortly thereafter I receive what I prayed for, I cannot say whether or not I got what wanted because I prayed. If I pray that I won't meet an accident during my trip and in fact I arrive safely at my destination, I would have to have knowledge that I would've had a mishap had I forgone with the prayer. Only then can I say that prayer was in fact essential and causative. Of course neither I nor anyone else has the luxury of knowing the consequences of "what if I hadn't prayed."

Thus, we cannot say whether prayers are answered simply because what we want or wish came to pass.

As for prayers not being answered, this is more straightforward. Given my above prayer, should the plane or car I'm in figure in a crash, then I can conclude that my prayer did not work. Of course there are an infinite number of explanations that can be offered to rationalize this away. For instance I can say that Z was too busy attending to prayers by other people. Or that Z wanted to teach me a lesson and so allowed me to get nicked. Etc. These, however, are all ad hoc explanations whose truth/falsity cannot be determined, cannot be tested. They are mere speculations to explain away the negative outcome.

By Cathy on March 17 in the same blog entry:

As always, faith defies logic.

There would be no word miracle if everything can be explained by science.

By Cathy on March 17 in the same blog entry:

As Albert Einstein had said:

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.

By me on March 17 in "Let there be a miracle":

According to the most rigorous study thus far conducted, intercessory prayer has no measurable empirical effects. Dr. Herbert Benson et al. conducted the Study on the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP). To date it's considered the definitive scientific study/experiment on prayer. It involved 1,800 patients in 6 different hospitals who were recovering from heart bypass surgery. The study and its results appear in the April 2006 issue of the American Heart Journal. To cut to the chase, they found that there was no difference in the rates of recovery and improvements between those prayed for and those who weren't; there was also no statistical difference in the number of deaths between the two groups. In short, prayer did not work. There was, however, an interesting side discovery. The researchers found that those who knew they were being prayed for suffered more post-operative complications. The difference was small but statistically significant. So knowing that one is being prayed for could be hazardous to one's health, which according to one hypothesis may be due to some type of performance anxiety. Intercessory prayer has all but been proved to have no efficacy. http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2006/04.06/05-prayer.html

It may be claimed that Fernando Suarez is no ordinary mortal, that he has certain paranormal/supernatural abilities, or that he has a hotline to the Judeo-Xian deity. Thus, unlike the participants in STEP, Suarez may in fact have powers to heal through prayer. This hypothesis can in principle be tested. Here's a rough sketch of how we may test the healing claims. Patients are first diagnosed by medical experts to determine their condition (appropriate lab tests should be performed as well). Medication and various other treatments these patients have been receiving should be terminated in order not to confound the study. This is probably unethical but for now let's disregard bioethical issues for the sake of illustration purposes. After the effects of previous medication/treatments have worn off, Suarez then prays for these people (or performs whatever it is he does). Thereafter, the patients are once more diagnosed and tested. Daily/weekly/monthly medical follow-ups and tests are then conducted to monitor and track the progress/regress of the patients condition. Should we find improvement that cannot be attributed to the medications/treatments that the patients had undergone previously, to the natural course of the disease and the expected variability of severity of its symptoms, to natural regression and remission, to placebo effects, to misdiagnoses, and to any host of known causes/explanations, then we can tentatively say that such improvements may be due to Suarez's healing techniques. We can then perform further studies. On the other hand if we find the patients regress or even die from their conditions then we have falsified Suarez's healing claims. (The latter was in fact the case with healer Benny Hinn after an investigation was conducted. See http://csicop.org/si/2002-05/i-files.html)

I've posted more detailed critiques of the claims surrounding Suarez over at http://hokum-balderdash.blogspot.com/. While anecdotes may seem to evince the efficacy of faith healing, it is only via objective testing, studies, and long term medical investigations can we arrive at a determination of the efficacy of any treatment modality.

I posted the following on March 25 in "How do you know if your prayers are answered?" but Cathy never approved it. Shortly after submitting it Cathy took down the two comments I left on her blog:

I'm not sure what you mean by "faith defies logic." But allow me to say some things about faith.

* St. Thomas Aquinas said that faith is inferior to knowledge because it lacks rational justification. Faith, precisely, is belief despite the lack of justification/substantiation/evidence. When we do have good reasons/arguments/evidence to justify our belief, we call it knowledge.

* No matter how much we believe in X our belief cannot make X true (or false). Even if a trillion people believe in X it will not make X true (or false). No matter how long X has been believed it will not make it true (or false). Example: Members of the Heaven's Gate cult very much believed their salvation was at hand in 1997 when Comet Hale-Bopp came within naked eye view. The cult members had so much faith that they went as far as committing suicide in order to board the extraterrestrial ship they believed had come for them. Clearly, even if Heaven's Gate had a trillion members and had been the earliest human religion ever, it would not have made their beliefs in the Hale-Bopp extraterrestrial spaceship true.

* All religions have their staunch believers. Since all religions rely on faith (none of them have any good justification/evidence for any of their theological claims), we are left with a major conundrum if we claim that faith leads to truth: It would mean all the claims, including all the gods of all religions are true/real. That would of course be a contradiction since the beliefs of a lot if not most religions conflict with one another and cannot be simultaneously true. For instance, if the Hindu gods are real then neither the Islamic nor the Xian deity nor gods of a good number of other religions can be real. Thus, merely having faith does not lead to the truth.

* Since religions cannot all be simultaneously true, then it follows that most religious beliefs are false--regardless of how many believe in them, how long they've been believed in, and however much faith has been invested in them. Faith isn't correlated with truth. In fact it is irrelevant to the issue of truth.


You said, "There would be no word miracle if everything can be explained by science." I think you're alluding to the God of the gaps argument (GOPA). In simple terms the GOPA goes as follows: there is currently no scientific explanation for X, therefore X is supernatural or supernaturally caused. The problem with GOPA is that over the centuries things that used to be thought of as being caused by gods are now known to have naturalistic causes. Lightning, earthquakes, disease, eclipses, etc. used to be imbued with so much supernatural overlays. But every high school student now learns about their true nature and causes in science class. So what is currently unknown--what Einstein dubs the mysterious--will most likely be understood and known in the future. What the Einsteins of today don't understand--but are intensely motivated to study--will become common place knowledge to the high school students generations hence. Thus, to call the unkonwns of today "miracles" is in fact simply admitting ignorance of their real nature and cause. But as we've learned from history if we don't know X and call it a miracle we (or most probably our descendants) will almost surely find ourselves wrong.

In logic and epistemology, when we don't know what X is, we cannot conclude that X is Y, where Y is our pet theory (e.g. Y = "a miracle", or Y = "extraterrestrially caused," or Y = "due to psychic powers", etc.) Precisely, we don't know what X is and so the only thing we can say is that we are ignorant of X, of its nature, of its cause. To say that X is Y is to implicitly claim knowledge of X, which of course is arrogance and implies we have omniscience (since we are claiming that X cannot be anything else other than Y, meaning we have ruled out any and all other possible explanations, now or in the future).

Moreover, if we were to say that X is a miracle, then it behooves us to produce evidence that our claim is true. One cannot point to the lack of scientific explanation since that doesn't prove anything. As we said the current lack of scientific understanding/explanation merely means that humans still don't have knowledge of what X is. Furthermore, the burden of proof is always upon the one making the claim. Thus, if I say that X is not a miracle but rather caused by a super-advanced super-intelligent race of extraterrestrials, then the onus of proof is upon my shoulders to produce evidence for what I have claimed. If I cannot then I am merely speculating and my (wacky) claim can be dismissed. Worse I have made a nonparsimonious claim, ie., a claim that assumes the existence of entities that are not known to be true (in this case aliens).

And so vis-a-vis the claim that "X is a miracle":
1. It is a claim that isn't warranted by humanity's current state of ignorance of what X is.
2. to insist that X is a miracle is to imply omniscience (which is hybristic)
3. burden of proof is upon those who claim miracles; they need to produce persuasive evidence
4. the assumption of deities and the supernatural violates the principle of parsimony, more commonly known as Ockham's Razor, first annunciated by the Catholic monk William of Ockham in the 14th century

Does Suraez have a FPP?

Some 25 years ago psychologists Sheryl Wilson and Theodore Barber identified what they called fantasy-prone personality (FPP). The 14 characteristics of FPP are:

(1) being an excellent hypnotic subject, (2) having imaginary playmates as a child, (3) fantasizing frequently as a child, (4) adopting a fantasy identity, (5) experiencing imagined sensations as real, (6) having vivid sensory perceptions, (7) reliving past experiences, (8) claiming psychic powers, (9) having out-of-body or floating experiences, (10) receiving poems, messages, etc., from spirits, higher intelligences, and the like, (11) being involved in "healing," (12) encountering apparitions, (13) experiencing hypnagogic hallucinations (waking dreams), and (14) seeing classical hypnagogic imagery (such as spirits or monsters from outer space).

According to Wilson and Barber a minimum of six of the above "diagnostic criteria" (if we may call it that) would indicate FPP. We all have the faculty for fantasizing and we all have had fantasies so all of us would have a couple of the characteristics above. In my case #3 definitely applies. But I have no idea of my hypnotizability. I don't remember having had imaginary friends as a child nor having adopted a fantasy identity (although am not sure exactly what that means). I may have on occasion imagined sensations as being very real. On the other hand, How vivid is "vivid sensory perceptions"? An operational definition is necessary. What does "reliving past experiences" mean exactly? As to #8 to 14 I am confident they do not apply to me. Bottom line--I check positive for at least two items while the worst case scenario is that I'm a point shy of the half dozen mark.

Let's see how Suarez fares. Suarez claims to have seen apparitions of the Virgin Mary, who also gave him a message: "She told me that I would go to a far away place which was cold and windy, and there proclaim the word of God." In a tv interview (with Boy Abunda) he's admitted to having encountered the devil (I need a reconfirmation on this). Suarez has also had a vision of Jesus "pouring on graces upon him." And, needless to say, he's very much involved in healing. Given these we can safely tick numbers 10, 11, and 12. Because we lack a book-length biography on Suarez, I'm most interested in how he will rate himself on the other items (except perhaps for #1 which would require an actual test by a qualified hypnotist).

It's been suggested that faith healers Kathryn Kuhlman and Benny Hinn have FPP given that their backgrounds show they have many FPP traits. It would thus not be surprising if we find Suarez to be of the same feather. However, I doubt we can settle Suarez's fantasy proneness if we rely merely on Suarez, for I surely am doubtful he would willingly provide the pertinent and necessary information about himself [1]. Too much is at stake. He and his cohorts have invested too much psychologically and in time and effort. Suarez has hundreds of thousands if not millions of followers. He's in too deep. Interviewing relatives, friends, schoolmates, teachers, colleagues, the seminaries that rejected him may be more revealing.


----

Notes:

1. Ever since I read about Suarez's past I've been skeptical. For instance he says that at age 16 he prayed over a paralyzed woman and the woman got up and walked. And about a decade ago he prayed over a dead woman who then came back to life. I take these anecdotes with more than just a grain of salt since memory is very much reconstructive in nature--it is nothing close to a videotape that faithfully records events. I am thus very wary of confabulations and embellishments that may have crept in. So much more if Suarez is in fact fantasy-prone. While I don't believe Suarez to be a fraud who's made up all these stories, I certainly would want solid evidence for what actually took place when he was 16 and with the resurrectee. Given these, even if Suarez were to be very open and tell us whatever we wanted to know, I'd be most cautious in taking his answers at face value.

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.


----

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.



----

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.



---

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.



----

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.


---

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.