Skeptico

Atheism is Not a Religion

This is a refrain I’m hearing a lot from religious apologists – atheism is a religion. Also its equally fallacious siblings, science is a religion and evolution is a religion. It’s a sign of their desperation that the best argument they have is not that atheism is wrong, or that god does exist (supported by evidence of course), but that atheism is a religion too. A strange argument for a religious person to make on the face of it.  Is it supposed to strengthen the atheist’s position or weaken the theist’s one? In reality it’s a sign they have run out of arguments.

Still, this argument is widely made, and so it needs to be addressed. Atheism (and here I mean the so-called “weak atheism” that does not claim proof that god does not exist), is just the lack of god-belief – nothing more and nothing less. And as someone once said, if atheism is a religion, not collecting stamps is a hobby.

That really ought to end the discussion right there. Clearly, a mere lack of belief in something cannot be a religion. In addition, atheism has no sacred texts, no tenets, no ceremonies. Even theists making this argument must know all that. So they must have something else in mind when they trot this one out, but what is it? What are they really thinking? Well, if you look at various definitions of religion, the only things that could possibly apply to atheism would be something like this:

6. Something one believes in and follows devotedly

or this:

4. A cause, principle, or activity pursued with zeal or conscientious devotion.

Obviously I don’t know if that’s what they mean – I don’t read minds. But I can’t see what else it could be. They must be referring to certain activities of atheists – writing books and blogs, financing bus ads, joining atheist groups, etc. They think atheists are “religious in their atheism” as one person put it to me – the word “religious” being used here colloquially to mean something felt very strongly, or followed enthusiastically. But this definition of religion is so broad that virtually anything people enjoy doing very much, or follow strongly or obsessively, is a religion. It’s a definition of religion that is so broad that it’s meaningless. In reality, most of the things that people follow enthusiastically, are just hobbies. And ironically, although not collecting stamps is not a hobby, getting involved in atheist activities (writing books and blogs, attending atheist meetings) might well be a hobby for some people. But it is a hobby, not a religion.

What Is Religion?

I’m sure that argument won’t convince all theists to abandon this rhetorical trope they love so much.  To really address the argument, we have to define religion, and then see if atheism fits the definition. While I don’t think I can define religion completely, I think I can state the minimum that religion has to have to still be a religion. And it seems to me that there is one thing at least that is common to all religions. It’s this. In my view, religion at a minimum, has to have the following characteristic:

Religion must include something you have to accept on faith – that is, without evidence commensurate with the extraordinary nature of the belief.

Most religions will include other things too, but they must require faith. Of course, not all things that require faith are religions, but all religions must require faith.

The minimum definition covers all the religions I’m familiar with. For example, it includes any religion that involves belief in god or gods – something you have to believe in without evidence. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism… all require you to believe in god or gods as a minimum, without evidence. The minimum definition would also include religions that don’t require belief in god, but require faith in other things. For example, I believe it would include Buddhism, which (for example) includes the belief that living beings go through a succession of lifetimes and rebirth. It would also include Scientology – no evidence for Xenu, that I’m aware of. Maybe you can think of some actual religions that would be excluded, but I haven’t been able to so far.

So religion requires belief without evidence. And by that definition atheism cannot possibly be a religion because atheists do not have to believe in anything to be an atheist – either with or without evidence. QED.

Now, some religious people may say, “but that’s not my definition of religion”. To which I say, OK, then give me your definition. Give me your definition of religion, that doesn’t require belief without evidence, that includes your religion, the others I named, and atheism. And it needs to be better than the two dictionary definitions I cited above.  Give me that definition. Because here’s the thing. The problems I have with religions are:

1. They are not based on fact or on any reasonable evidence commensurate with the claims they make. In many cases, the claims they make are plainly absurd and are actually contradicted by the evidence.
2. Religious proponents demand respect, and adherence to their delusions by others. This despite (1) above.

Those are the aspects of religion that I object to. Clearly atheism doesn’t fit 1 (or 2) above, so it is nothing like any of the religions I object to. If your religion does not require belief without faith, then I probably wouldn’t have a problem with it. Assuming, of course, all the tenets of your religion are actually backed up by evidence extraordinary enough for the extraordinary claims your religion makes. But they never do. 

In my view, theists will have their work cut out to deny this minimum requirement for religion.  Come on – they even refer to their religion as “my faith”. 

Evidence and Extraordinary Evidence

Some religious people will claim that their religious beliefs are backed by evidence. This is where it gets tricky, because many religious people genuinely believe their religion is rational and backed by evidence. For example, one Christian I debated cited that the evidence Christianity was real, was (and I quote), “the resurrection of Christ”. Of course, the resurrection of Christ, if it had actually happened, would be pretty good evidence for Christianity. But, unfortunately, there is no good evidence for the resurrection. Certainly, nothing close to the extraordinary evidence we would need to accept this extraordinary claim.

Extraordinary Claims

This needs explaining in more detail. Why do extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence? Well, all claims require exactly the same amount of evidence, it’s just that most "ordinary" claims are already backed by extraordinary evidence that you don’t think about. When we say “extraordinary claims”, what we actually mean are claims that do not already have evidence supporting them, or sometimes claims that have extraordinary evidence against them. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence because they usually contradict claims that are backed by extraordinary evidence.

So why is Jesus’ resurrection an extraordinary claim, and why is the Bible not extraordinary evidence for it? Well, the resurrection goes against all the evidence we have that people do not come back to life, spontaneously, after two days of being dead. Modern medicine can bring people back from what would have been considered in earlier years to be “dead”, but not after 2 days of being dead with no modern life support to keep the vital organs working. In fact, it is probably reasonably safe to say it has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that people cannot come back to life after being dead for two days without modern life support. So, extraordinary claim it is.

On the other hand, the evidence we are offered in support of this extraordinary claim consists only of accounts written decades after the event, by people who were not there when the events described were purported to have occurred. We are offered nothing but hearsay anecdotes from superstitious people with a clear reason for wanting others to think the story true. This is hardly acceptable evidence to counteract the fact that this never happens. Christians might ask, what evidence would an atheist accept for such an extraordinary claim? And in reality, it is hard to imagine that there could possibly be any evidence good enough for us to accept the resurrection as true. Christians may claim that this is unfair, or that we are closed minded, but the fact that you are unlikely to find extraordinary evidence for this event 2,000 years after the fact, is hardly the non-believer’s fault. The real question, considering the weakness of the evidence, and the wildly extraordinary nature of the claim, is why would anyone believe any of it in the first place?  The truth is, they accept it on faith.  In fact, the acceptance of this story on faith alone is usually considered to be essential to the true believer. And although that was just Christianity, the same lack of evidence, and belief based on faith alone, applies to the claims of all the other religions that I’m familiar with.

Religions require belief in extraordinary claims without anything close to the extraordinary evidence that is required.  Atheism requires no belief in anything.  The contrast couldn’t be clearer.

But the believer has one final shot – one last desperate rhetorical item to fling at the atheist.  Here we go.

More Faith To Be An Atheist?

The final argument many religious apologists throw into the mix is it takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to believe in god. That certainly took me by surprise the first time I heard it. I think what they’re trying to say is this. Atheists think matter just appeared out of nowhere, that something came out of nothing. But where did the matter come from? To think that matter appeared out of nowhere requires more faith than to think a creator made everything. Why is there something rather than nothing? To think that matter just appeared by itself, requires faith.

Atheists don’t think matter came out of nowhere. Atheists say we don’t know where matter came from; we don’t know why there is something rather than nothing. Maybe one day we’ll know, or maybe we won’t. But we don’t know now. Theists are exactly the same. They don’t know either, but the difference is they make up an explanation (god). But it’s just a made up explanation – they have no reason to suppose it’s true, other than that they just like it.

And it’s a useless explanation. Unless they know something about this “God” – how he created everything; why he created it; what he’s likely to do next - it’s a lack of an explanation. It’s just a placeholder until a real explanation comes along. Except that the theist won’t be open to the real explanation when and if science is able to provide one. The god placeholder prevents investigation into any real tentative explanations. The theist who says god created everything, is the one with the faith – faith that “god” is the explanation and that no other is possible. The atheist is content to say “we don’t know”. For now, anyway. And it’s obvious that saying “we don’t know,” requires no faith.  That may be a hard thing to do for people who want all the answers, but it certainly isn’t religion.

One last thing.  Some theists have responded to the “if atheism is a religion, not collecting stamps is a hobby” argument by pointing out that non stamp collectors (aphilatelists?) don’t write books or blogs about not collecting stamps, don’t post anti stamp collecting ads on buses, don't ridicule stamp collectors, etc.  This is meant to demonstrate that the “stamp collecting” analogy is weak.  It actually demonstrates that the analogy is very good, since it highlights one of the main problems atheists have with many religious people.

Here’s the thing they are missing, and the real problem most atheists have with religion.  If stamp collectors demanded that people who don’t collect stamps obey their stamp collecting rules, started wars with groups who collected slightly different types of stamps, denied non-stamp collectors rights or discriminated against them, bullied them in school, claimed you had to collect stamps to be a suitable person to run for public office, tried to get stamp collecting taught in schools as science in opposition to real science, demanded that people be killed for printing cartoons that made fun of stamp collectors, claimed that non-stamp collectors lacked moral judgment, made up ridiculous straw man positions they claimed non-stamp collectors took, and then argued against those straw men positions etc etc, - then non-stamp collectors probably would criticize stamp collectors in the way atheists criticize many religious people. And with good reason. Not collecting stamps would still not be a hobby.  Or a religion.

Emergency Acupuncture

I thought Battlefield Acupuncture was a joke.  (Sadly, it wasn’t.  Well, not in the conventional meaning of “joke”.)  Now, from reader Joe, I learn that a hospital in Australia is planning to use acupuncture in emergency departments to treat acute migraine, back pain and ankle injuries after its “success in lowering pain levels in patients attending a busy public hospital”.  What was this “success”, you ask?  This is the description of the pilot study, as reported in the Sydney Morning Herald:

Dr Parker said patients who turned up at casualty were given the option to be treated by final year or graduate acupuncture students from RMIT in conjunction with standard medical treatment.

Regular readers will have no problems seeing the problems with this study, and the reasons that it does not show that acupuncture does anything, which are:

1. Not randomized – participants self-select to receive acupuncture, meaning that probably only those who start off believing it will do something, will be included in the trial.
2. No blinding – participants know which group they were in (acupuncture or no acupuncture).
3. No sham acupuncture.
4. Standard medical procedures were used in addition to acupuncture – so patients received the benefits of pain medication that actually works in addition to the magic needles.

And yet on the basis of this patently useless pilot study, more than $400,000 (Australian) has been allocated for a three-year clinical trial.  This despite the fact that we know acupuncture is a placebo that provides no difference in pain intensity. 

So, yet another useless acupuncture pilot study followed by (undoubtedly) another useless acupuncture study.  And after that, you can bet that yet “more studies” will be called for.  I’d put money on it.

More Acupuncture Links

Articles by Steven Novella:

Does Acupuncture Work or Not?

Acupuncture Does Not Work for Back Pain

Acupuncture and Back Pain - Part II

Orac’s Yawn...another overhyped acupuncture study

Several posts by me:

Placebo - pregnancy pain cure

Acupuncture does not cut blood pressure

Still no evidence acupuncture works

Acupuncture – it really really doesn't work

No point to acupuncture on animals

Equivocation on acupuncture

One More Time - Acupuncture Does NOT Work

Acupuncture - Still Doesn't Work

Proof That God Exists (Not)

From PZ I found Proof That God Exists – a series of questions designed to force the conclusion that (you guessed it), god exists.  The site presents a series of yes/no questions about whether laws of logic, science and absolute morals exist – questions to which I answered “yes”.  Sure, I guess “absolute moral laws” might be debatable, but I thought, murder is always bad and so I answered yes.

When I answered the last question with “I do not believe that God exists”, I got the following “proof”.  Well, not so much.  I imagine the logical fallacies employed will be obvious:

Denying the existence of God is not unbelief but an exercise in self-deception. You may know things, but you cannot account for anything you know.

And neither can you.  The difference is that you make up an answer - “God” – and put him in the place where you have no answer.  But it’s just a made up explanation – you have no reason to suppose it’s true, other than that you just like it.  And it’s a useless explanation. Unless you know something about this “God” – how he created everything; why he created it; what he’s likely to do next - it’s a lack of an explanation. It’s just a placeholder until a real explanation comes along.

Arguing against God's existence would be on par with arguing against the existence of air, breathing it all the while.

False analogy.  If a living animal is deprived of air, it will die.  This is a repeatable, reliable and undoubted observation.  I wouldn’t have to put up some lame 20 questions website to prove it either.

You use the universal, immaterial, unchanging laws of logic, mathematics, science, and absolute morality in order to come to rational decisions, but you cannot account for them. These laws are not the only way God has revealed himself to you, but they are sufficient to show the irrationality of your thinking, and expose your guilt for denying Him.

Pure assertion, unsupported by arguments presented so far. 

There is a reason that you deny the existence of God and it has nothing to do with proof. I can show this to you. Examine what your initial reaction was to the proof of God's existence offered on this website.

OK.  My initial reaction was… “let’s list the logical fallacies you’re using and put up a blog post”.  What’s your point?

Did you think that you could continue to deny God because you are not a scientist, or philosopher but 'Surely somewhere, sometime, a philosopher or scientist will come up with an explanation for universal, immaterial, unchanging laws apart from God?' Did you try to come up with an alternate explanation on your own?

No – see above.  I don’t need to come up with “an alternate explanation” – you’re the one making the claim so it is up to you to support that claim.

OR Did you even consider that the proof was valid?

First – it wasn't proof.  Proof only exists within math.  This was an attempt to prove something using logic only.  Even if the logic wasn’t flawed (which it was, but let’s say it wasn't), it would still not be “proof”, or even particularly good evidence.  Logic is great, but at the end of the exercise when you have your logical conclusion, you still have to test your conclusion against reality to see if it is true.  Science is full of experiments that seemed logically sound but failed the experiment and were discarded.  When I agreed the laws of logic exist, I didn’t agree that logic is always correct and will always lead you to the correct solution.  So for many reasons, your “proof” is quite obviously not valid.

Hoping that an alternate explanation for universal, immaterial, unchanging laws can someday be found apart from God, is a blind leap of faith, or wishful thinking. Isn't it interesting that this is exactly what professed unbelievers accuse Christians of?

Yeah, but that’s not what I did.  I’m just saying that if you or I don’t have the answer, you don’t get to say “therefore God” by default.

Please examine the real reason why you are running from God. It is my prayer that God will open your eyes and change your heart so that you may be saved from your sin, embraced by His forgiving love, and come to know the peace which passes all understanding.

I’m not running from something that (probably) doesn’t exist.  And we know that prayer is useless so go on, knock yourself out, pray for me.  Pray for some better logic while you’re at it.

The whole website was an exercise in argument from ignorance – you can’t explain it, therefore God.  Throw in an argument by bad analogy, some confident assertion that you have proved your point, and the customary attempt to assign motives to disbelief (“running from God”) and it’s the same standard vacuous religious drivel we’ve all heard before.  Nothing to see here.

Cargo Cult Religion

Several bloggers have commented on this article by Tom Stern about Ken Ham’s creation museum published in The Point magazine.  While Stern’s article was generally OK in its presentation of Ham’s museum as pseudoscience unsupported by facts, he spoils the ending with a false conflation of science with religion.  And although he claims he isn’t doing this (“Of course science isn’t a faith: it builds bridges…” etc), he really is and in a most intellectually lazy way.  This is what you find towards the end of the article:

I was taught the earth is four billion years old and, going around the Museum, I realized I don’t actually know how “they” know that.

This isn’t the tired retort, often aimed at Dawkins et al., that science is just another faith. Of course science isn’t a faith: it builds bridges, it puts Americans on the moon and finds extraordinary new ways for us to kill each other. But it has more in common with faith than either the religious or scientific community would like us to admit. For Nietzsche, this was particularly evident in the consideration of scientific methods: there’s something comforting about the repetitive rituals of the scientific and technical life, which mimics the priestly cure of the Hail Mary or morning prayer. And there’s something silencing, too, about the way facts are presented to the public—as fossilized nuggets of information not to be questioned. Where once we used to turn to the priest for advice and guidance, now we turn to the scientific expert; we bend to the stamp of his authority, his status, his style—compare the expert witness in the courtroom to the priest at the hanging.

So science isn’t faith, but Stern doesn’t know how we know the age of the Earth and Nietzsche wrote something about the rituals of science being like religion, and so science really is like faith, except it isn’t.  I find it telling that Stern finds the the time to mention Nietzsche seven (count them) times (why?) but apparently doesn’t have ten seconds to put earth is four billion years old into Google and find out how we know the age of the Earth.  (If he had, he would have soon found this nice explanation of Isochron Dating.) 

So what if there is “something comforting” about the rituals of science?  Many secular activities include comforting things.  The rituals of baseball are comforting to fans, the ritual of cooking a meal for friends can be comforting, the rituals associated with Star Trek fandom can be comforting to trekkies… you get the idea.  But that doesn’t make these things religions.  Or if it does it uses a definition of religion that is so wide as to be virtually meaningless.  If everything is like religion, then nothing is.  In reality, the “rituals” of science (which are not “rituals”, but procedures), since they are performed for a reason, are further from religion than the rituals of baseball etc.  And frankly, I imagine many of the detailed procedures necessary for many science experiments are more tedious than comforting, anyway.  So Stern is wrong here in at least two different ways.

This idea that science has religious-like “rituals”, scientists are “priests”, or “men of the white cloth” (lab coats), science journals are “holy scriptures” etc etc is something I have heard a lot of recently.  It’s old, tired drivel.  Science can be questioned.  And, amazingly, this applies even to subjects that Tom Stern does not fully comprehend.  Science is questioned by both scientists and non scientists.  Only, unlike with religion, there is a basis for questioning and determining what scientific theories we accept and what we don't – the evidence.  What do they use in religion to determine what to accept?  Well, nothing really, other than what some authority just happens to think.  They have no externally verifiable basis for determining what is true and what isn’t.  By comparing scientists to priests, Stern is just lazily looking at the surface – what might appear to be happening – without delving any deeper.  Then it occurred to me this is just cargo cult religion. 

In 1974 Richard Feynman gave a lecture at Caltech where he described what he called cargo cult science - work that has the semblance of being scientific, but is missing the things necessary for real science:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas--he's the controller--and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land. [My bold.]

It struck me that referring to scientists as “priests”, or science journals as “holy books” is cargo cult religion.  Stern is examining scientific things that look similar to religion and using this to conflate the two.  But this conflation of science and religion is cargo cult religion the same way as pseudoscience is cargo cult science.  It may have the semblance of religion, but is missing the things necessary for real religion.  (Thankfully.)  Although science may have the appearance of some aspects of religion, it is different in all the ways that actually matter.

Of course, in an ideal world we should not just accept everything scientists tell us, but should examine their arguments to see if they are valid.  But not everyone has the time or the inclination to do this with every claim they hear.  Stern himself is proof of this.  And even scientists cannot be experts in fields that are not their own.  But just because each one of us hasn’t personally performed every scientific experiment ever performed in the history of the world, that doesn’t mean our acceptance of scientific knowledge is like religion.  We trust what science tells us because science has a track record of being right more often than any other method of inquiry.  But trust is not faith, and trusting experts in areas where we are not experts, is not religion.

Few if any of the similarities between science and religion are interesting or useful.  On the other hand, the differences between science and religion are profound.  Stern spoiled what could have been a reasonable expose of Ken Ham’s silly museum by dragging out this discredited canard once again.

Do You Have Frog's Legs?

…Then hop over the bar and get me a drink.

Ba-Boom!

A frog that constantly changes color is being worshipped as a god in India:

Hundreds of people are flocking to Reji Kumar’s home in India daily to pray and ask for miracles.

[…]

The frog was a dazzling white colour when Reji, who is from Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala, in south India, first spotted it.

Then it changed to yellow and had gone grey by the time he got it home.

“By night the frog was dark yellow, and then it became transparent so you could see its internal organs," Reji, a life worker, reportedly said.

"It seemed like a miracle to me that this frog had so many different coats. So now people come to see him and pray to him.”

I suppose it’s about as much use as praying to any other god.  Which is to say, completely useless.  There is a more serious problem though – it seems the frog won’t eat anything:

My one problem is that this frog does not appear to eat. I keep trying to feed it but it doesn’t eat anything. I don’t know what else to give it

Yeah that's right - they're worried he might croak.  (Croak.  Frog - croak.  I kill myself sometimes.)  But why?  Hey, it couldn't be down to the fact that he's keeping the damn thing in a glass jar could it?

Seriously - that's no way to treat your lord and savior.

I pray that you buggers let me go.

Oprah Dissembles

Several bloggers have reported on the recent Newsweek story that exposed some of the dangerous nonsense and pseudoscience that Oprah Winfrey insists on including in her TV show. From obviously crackpot ideas such as The Secret to dangerous pseudoscience such as the anti-vaccine nonsense spouted by celebrity idiot Jenny McCarthy, Newsweek did a pretty good job of calling nonsense nonsense.

Now Oprah has responded with a statement, as reported by EW.com:

I trust the viewers, and I know that they are smart and discerning enough to seek out medical opinions to determine what may be best for them.

This is a highly dishonest statement from Oprah.  You’ll note there is no attempt to justify any of the bogus* medical advice given on her show; no evidence that any of the quackery* she features actually works or is valid in any way.  So what is she saying, exactly?  That, yes, my TV show includes crap but my audience will realize it’s crap?  No, sorry, not good enough. If you have the sort of power that Oprah  has to influence opinion, you have a responsibility to make sure that the advice you give is good.  You should not just show any old crap and expect your viewers to do their own research to determine what is real and what is not, you should determine for yourself if it is real before you feature it in front of millions of viewers.  And you should then be able and willing to defend what you have promoted and rebut any criticisms with facts and evidence, or retract and admit you were wrong.  Instead Oprah hides the truth of what she is doing behind this sham claim that she trusts her viewers to discern what is real and what is not. It’s dishonest, unethical and cowardly.

You only have to read the comments to that EW story to see that many of Oprah’s viewers are neither smart nor discerning enough to distinguish between science and pseudoscience. Just a couple of comments in and you will read the regurgitated lies and logical fallacies of the anti-vaccination loons, repeated in all their idiotic glory.  Those comments are, unfortunately, proof of the damage that Oprah has already done.  Her lame self serving statement does not even begin to address her critics.

More on Oprah’s support of pseudoscience:

Combatting the Oprah Effect

Say It Ain't So, O

Oprah's ugly secret

The Oprah-fication of medicine

* Deliberate deception not implied.

Moron

That’s the word to describe Thomas Sam, the homeopath pictured above who watched his daughter die of a curable disease while he repeatedly ignored what he was told by real doctors, to treat her only with magic water.  Sam and his wife have just been found guilty of manslaughter for this crime, although my guess is it’s the husband who should shoulder most of the blame.

I won’t labor the details - read Orac’s earlier posts on this: A real death by homeopathy and Homeopathy kills a child.  But here are some brief lowlights:

The court heard the couple took Gloria to various health professionals, but while they abandoned each conventional medication she was prescribed within a short time of starting it, they solidly pursued homeopathic remedies.

[…]

By the time she died, she was the weight of an average three-month-old, her body was covered with angry blotches and her once black hair had turned completely white.

[…]

A general practitioner booked them an appointment with a dermatologist they did not attend because they took the child to India instead, a course of action the doctor told them was "cruel".

They also visited two doctors in India, but discarded the advice of one to return to him every second day, instead consulting a succession of homeopaths including Thomas Sam's brother, who had recently completed his dissertation on eczema.

The arrogance and stupidity is breathtaking. This homeopath decided it was more important to him to treat his sick child with his own brand of magic water and/or sugar pills than to seek real treatments.  And even after this experience he had still not learned his lesson, as can be seen from this quote:

"Conventional medicine would have prolonged her life ... with more misery. It's not going to cure her and that's what I strongly believe."

Yeah, I’m sure he believes this.  Unfortunately for this child, just because her moron father believed that homeopathy was real medicine, that didn’t make it so.

This Includes Everything

From James Randi this morning I give you this link to the International Academy of Classical Homeopathy’s website – specifically their Basic ideas of homeopathy page. I think you’ll find it contains all the evidence for the efficacy of homeopathy in one easy to read summary.

Reproduced below, just in case.

July 09 - Edited to add

They have changed the page.  Well, almost.  It is the same as before but they have added the words, "You are not authorised to view this resource. You need to login." Yeah.  Right.

The Misreporting of Evolution

I occasionally glance at the Disco ‘Tute’s “Evolution News & Views” blog (which it isn’t, since they don’t allow comments), just to marvel at what easily refutable drivel they’re writing today. Usually I don’t bother to delve too deeply, but today for some reason I decided to click their linked article to see if it really said what they said it says. I concluded that their site tagline - “The misreporting of the evolution issue is one key reason for this site” – still holds true.  Today’s article is by Logan Gage who writes Hello Evolution, Nice to Meet You, and it certainly misreports evolution. Gage is commenting on the recent “Seed” interview with Alison Gopnik, entitled To Be a Baby. His interpretation of what Gopnik said is:

Gopnik notes that the helplessness of young children seems to be an evolutionary disadvantage and thus would never have developed via the Darwinian mechanism

Note, children would never have developed through evolution.  Never!  So how come there are children? Intrigued, I clicked the link to the Seed article, where Gopnik says:

It doesn’t make tremendous evolutionary sense to have [children] that can’t even keep themselves alive and require an enormous investment of time on the part of adults.

You’ll note that “it doesn’t make tremendous evolutionary sense” is not quite the same as “would never have” evolved. Of course, factual inaccuracies have never stopped a creationist from making his point.  If you read on, you’ll find that Gopnik does actually explain the Darwinian process involved in the development of children:

The evolutionary answer seems to be that there is a tradeoff between the ability to learn and imagine — which is our great evolutionary advantage as a species — and our ability to apply what we’ve learned and put it to use.

Gopnik’s opening “it doesn't make sense” is just a rhetorical device that then allows her to provide the answer and explain how evolution might actually account for the existence of helpless children and babies. The answer is that there is a tradeoff – one that we humans are able to take advantage of because of our evolved child rearing tendencies.  Far from saying children would never have developed through evolution, Gopnik explains exactly how and why they could have evolved.  Gage continues to completely miss this point by concluding with this piece of drivel:

Rather than see the amazing design of the world, the Darwinian is forced to the absurd position of personifying "Evolution." Evolution intended this and that. And yet this rings hollow when you read the genius of child development which she ably describes.

What “personifying" evolution even means (or why the word “evolution” is in scare quotes) is not explained. Nor is there any justification given for saying that evolution “intended” anything – since Gopnik never even used the word “intended”, and evolution does not “intend” anything.  Typical clueless Discovery Institute sophistry, in other words.  To paraphrase Gage’s words back at him, rather than try to understand the amazing process of evolution, the creationist is forced to the absurd position of denying it, even when the article he is critiquing explains exactly how the observed world evolved. 

And of course, it goes without saying that there is no explanation at all from Gage for why the “designer” would have created helpless children who need the enormous investment of time on the part of adults.  How would “helpless children” be a prediction of design?  Surely an intelligent designer would have created children who are not helpless?  Once again, Intelligent Design is shown to be useless vacuous posturing, and the only reason for the Discovery Institute and its lame website is still to misreport evolution.

Upper Stratosphere Cooling

After a couple of months absence, I decided to take a look again at the pit of denialism and logical fallacies that is this thread on Joanne Nova’s “global warming isn’t caused by humans” blog. If you scroll down to comment #110 you’ll see I responded to someone who had asked, “Can you name a single piece of empirical evidence that man-made carbon raises temperatures?” Note, a “single piece of empirical evidence” – not numerous pieces, not proof, but just one thing.  You’ll see that I replied with, “…the cooling of the upper stratosphere.  And no, that’s not due to ozone.” Follow the link and you’ll see that cooling of the upper stratosphere is a prediction of global warming caused by increased carbon dioxide. If such a prediction were found to be true, then this would be one piece of evidence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

Now, Joanne Nova has a sleazy little habit, which is to wait several weeks after a comment is made, and then go in and edit in her replies/rebuttals to comments such as the one I made. I was following this discussion for at least three weeks after I made that comment, with no response from Nova. But if you look now, at some later point she edited in the following undated reply:

Yes Sceptico [sic], still waiting for you to cite any evidence that it's not due to ozone, and here's the real kicker - even if it isn't all due to ozone, that doesn't prove it's due to carbon. Argument from Ignorance rears it's head again. Just because you can rule out other things proves nothing about carbon. For someone who points out logical errors, you sure make a lot of them yourself.

I’ll come to the evidence it’s not ozone in a minute. First, though, Nova demonstrates again her total cluelessness regarding logical fallacies.  My comment was not argument from ignorance because my claim included positive evidence that the stratospheric cooling was due to CO2. By rebutting Nova’s claim that this cooling is due to ozone, I am not saying just because it’s not ozone it must be CO2; I’m just saying it’s not ozone. I had already said that cooling of the upper stratosphere is a prediction of global warming due to increased CO2. A prediction that is confirmed cannot possibly be argument from ignorance.

Ozone?

So why did I say the cooling in the upper stratosphere is not due to ozone depletion?  From the Stratospheric cooling page I linked before:

The impact of decreasing ozone concentrations is largest in the lower stratosphere, at an altitude of around 20 km, whereas increases in carbon dioxide lead to highest cooling at altitudes between 40 and 50 km (Figure 3).  All these different effects mean that some parts of the stratosphere are cooling more than others.

And they produce these graphs of cooling rates from 1980 to 1994 at different altitudes:

4. Cooling trends at different altitudes in the stratosphere.  source: Ramaswamy et al., Reviews of Geophysics, Feb. 2001.

You’ll note that actual cooling noted is confined to altitudes of 45 and 50 kilometers. I see no cooling trend on the 22 kilometer graph.  This is exactly what is predicted by AGW caused by increased CO2, but not what would be predicted by warming due to ozone depletion.  It’s not ozone. Nova still says it’s ozone.

This Is Funny

So that’s my response.  I’m not going to respond on Nova’s blog – I’m simply not going to engage with someone who will edit in her replies to my comments weeks later to make it appear that my comment was refuted and I couldn’t respond. But here’s something funny.  I had signed up at Nova’s blog to receive email notification of comments made, so I would know if I needed to reply to anyone. Somehow, that meant that (unbeknownst to her) I had gotten onto one of Nova’s email lists where she sends out desperate appeals for help from her friends when she’s out of her depth.  I know this because I received (undoubtedly by accident) the following email that Nova sent to her group on March 3rd:

Help. Sceptico and Chris are taking over. I'm chopping. I've cut out half his post so far, because it's boring me rigid that I have to explain everything to him yet again.

This is the long long long stuff below.

I'm going away for a week - flying tomorrow night. I don't want to advertise that or chris and scepticet might think they have free run. But they will unless I ban them. They are scaring off other people.

Joanne
________________________
Joanne Nova - Director
http://www.goldnerds.com.au

(“Chris” is commenter Chris Noble, who was also attempting to educate Nova’s followers.)

I called Nova on that email, and she presumably thought better of “chopping” my post or banning me, although it didn’t stop her editing in her “rebuttals” once she realized I wasn’t reading the thread any more. It did result in an uptick in the number of lame responses to my comments, including the one I replied to as detailed above.

I will have a response to Nova’s “hotspot not found” posts at some time in the future.

Finally a sensible acupuncture write-up

Reader Wilson sent me a link to this acupuncture study write-up - No difference in pain intensity from penetrating acupuncture needles: study – suggesting I might actually like this one. Well, just look at the headline!  For once a sensible headline and write up of an acupuncture study:

The pain-relieving effects of acupuncture with penetrating and non-penetrating needles are largely the same, Japanese researchers say.

In Tuesday's issue of the online journal Open Medicine, researchers described the first double-blind study, the gold standard in clinical research, of acupuncture.

"Needle penetration did not confer a specific analgesic advantage over non-penetrating (placebo) needle application," Nobuari Takakura and Hiroyosi Yajima of Tokyo Ariake University of Medical and Health Sciences concluded in the journal.

So it doesn’t matter if the needles penetrate the skin or not. Well, we already know it doesn’t matter where you stick the needles.  Now we know it doesn’t matter if you stick them. And they didn’t even call for “more studies” to find out what is going on. I’m in shock.

They also commented on the study I wrote about last week:

Last week, a similar study also found no difference between real and simulated pricks for relieving lower back pain.

Snicker – they said "real and simulated pricks." And even then, they still made more sense than most other news articles about that study.

Skeptics' Circle

The Skeptics' Circle has been posted at Action Skeptics.  It's presented by some guy called Vince who seems to be selling some kind of cloth.  Or something.  Check it out anyway.

Acupuncture - Still Doesn't Work

Both Steven Novella and Orac posted today about the recent acupuncture study that supposedly shows acupuncture works better than real medicine. Both Orac and Novella’s posts examine the study and its weaknesses in some detail and so I won’t try to do the same. But I do have a couple of brief points I want to make about this study and acupuncture studies in general, and before I do that I’ll have to briefly summarize the main points of this study.

The Study

The researchers, amongst other things, wanted to compare the effectiveness of acupuncture on pain, compared with “groups receiving standard medical care.”  Remember that phrase. “Standard medical care” essentially means whatever their physicians had already prescribed for each patient – medical treatments or physical therapies. Remember that. The study divided the test patients into four groups, namely:”

1. “Standard medical care” plus individualized acupuncture.
2. “Standard medical care” plus standardized acupuncture
3. “Standard medical care” plus sham acupuncture (toothpicks that didn’t penetrate the skin)
4. “Standard medical care” only.

The reports of the study generally don’t describe the first three groups in quite that way, but the above is a correct description of what they actually did – all four groups continued with the standard treatment their doctors had prescribed before.

The result was that: there was no significant difference between groups 1, 2 and 3, but groups 1, 2 and 3 were each better than group 4. This is being reported as “both real and sham acupuncture better than conventional treatment”. But the study shows no such thing. There are (at least) three fundamental flaws with this conclusion, namely:

1. The study wasn’t blinded. This means there was no real control for placebo, and so any comparisons of acupuncture with the conventional treatment are worthless.
2. All three acupuncture groups had conventional treatment as well as acupuncture, so the study can not possibly show that acupuncture is better than conventional treatment. For that to be even possible, the acupuncture groups would have had to be acupuncture only – no conventional treatment. This is such an obvious “duh” point I don’t know whether to laugh or cry that apparently even the researchers didn’t think it was important.
3. Sham acupuncture was (again) just as good as the ‘real”stuff. But this does not mean that sham works as well as non-sham acupuncture, as has been reported. As Steven Novella wrote, when your real treatment is no better than your placebo (the “sham” acupuncture), you don’t get to conclude that, well, this means the placebo works too. No – you conclude the real treatment doesn’t work.

Worthless Acupuncture Studies

Yet again we have a worthless acupuncture study that is being falsely touted as showing acupuncture works. Again, this study is on supposed pain reduction. What about all the other things that acupuncture is supposed to fix? It releases blocked qi, yes? Shouldn’t it do more than reduce pain? Look at this list: Acupuncture: Conditions it Treats - Gastrointestinal Disorders, Urogenital Disorders, Gynecological Problems – the list goes on and on. So why are we always shown pain reduction only?

Second, why do acupuncture researchers always end saying something like this study “raises some new questions about how acupuncture works”? No it doesn’t. It shows it doesn’t work.

And third, why do they always call for more studies? Josephine P. Briggs, MD, director of NCCAM, is quoted saying:

Future research is needed to delve deeper into what is evoking these responses."

Why? There is enough research already for us to conclude that acupuncture is a placebo.

I’m going to make a prediction. Before this year is out, there will be at least one more study of acupuncture that shows “sham” acupuncture is as good as the “real” stuff, and / or that acupuncture is better than an (unblinded) non-acupuncture group. The researchers will say (1) this shows there is something going on with acupuncture, and (2) we need more studies to be done on acupuncture. More studies will be needed. I guarantee it.

Rinse and repeat next year, the year after…

Other links

Articles by Steven Novella:

Does Acupuncture Work or Not?

Acupuncture Does Not Work for Back Pain

Acupuncture and Back Pain - Part II

Orac’s Yawn...another overhyped acupuncture study

Several posts by me:

Placebo - pregnancy pain cure

Acupuncture does not cut blood pressure

Still no evidence acupuncture works

Acupuncture – it really really doesn't work

No point to acupuncture on animals

Equivocation on acupuncture

One More Time - Acupuncture Does NOT Work

Skeptics' Circle

The King Of Ferrets has just posted the Skeptics’ Circle.

Christians Justify Torture

Several bloggers have commented on the recent Pew Survey on whether or not different religious groups support torture. Interestingly, the question they asked was unequivocal – there were no euphemisms such as “enhanced interrogation” or yes it is / no it isn’t terms like “waterboarding”.  The question was unequivocally about torture:

Do you think the use of torture against suspected terrorists in order to gain important information can often be justified, sometimes be justified, rarely be justified, or never be justified?

The results by religious grouping below clearly shows that the more Christian you are, the more likely you are to think that torture was justified:

I’m not sure how statistically significant these results are. The numbers questioned in the attend religious services “weekly”, “monthly…” and “seldom or never” were 336, 225 and 168 respectively. That seems a little low to be used for drawing too many conclusions, although I could be wrong. If anyone has the statistical know-how to crunch the numbers and calculate statistical significance I’d be very interested. Also, the number supporting torture in the less religious groups is still fairly high in my view. Torture was justified at least “sometimes” by around 40% of the “unaffiliated” and “attend religious services seldom or never” groups. That compares with 54% to 62% of the religious groups.

Even so, significant or not, these results hardly support the view that religion (specifically Christianity) provides a moral compass, or that reading the Bible or going to church is necessary for one to be moral or good. And, really, should this surprise anyone? Consider what the “good book”, aka The Word Of God has to say about the use of torture. Just a few snippets:

If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a direct result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property. Exodus 21:20-21

Oh yeah, you say, but that was just for slaves. Slaves are property, right? But it wasn't just slaves. Look what David did (with God’s approval) to all the inhabitants of several cities:

And he brought forth the people that were therein, and put them under saws, and under harrows of iron, and under axes of iron, and made them pass through the brick-kiln: and thus did he unto all the cities of the children of Ammon. 2 Samuel 12:31

Hum, saws, harrows, axes, the brick-kiln - well at least they didn't waterboard.

Jesus approved of the practice:

The lord of that servant will come in a day when he looketh not for him, and at an hour when he is not aware, and will cut him in sunder, and will appoint him his portion with the unbelievers. And that servant, which knew his lord's will, and prepared not himself, neither did according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. Luke 12:46-48

Oh that Jesus - such a barrel of fun. But then, he got it from his dad:

And to them it was given that they should not kill them, but that they should be tormented five months: and their torment was as the torment of a scorpion, when he striketh a man. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. Revelation 9:5-6

Much more at the Skeptic’s Annotated Bible’s What the Bible says about Torture page.

This survey really shouldn’t surprise anyone. The Bible, Christianity, religion are not necessary for one to be moral or good.

Melanie Phillips Wrong Again

One of the most consistently stupid “journalists” writing on the subject of science and intelligent design has to be Melanie Phillips. I commented two years ago on another horrendous anti-science piece of hers: Idiot Journalist is the new enemy of reason.  Now she’s back again writing in the Spectator, with a piece entitled Creating An Insult To Intelligence – actually a highly accurate headline considering what she wrote under it.

Listening to the Today programme this morning, I was irritated once again by yet another misrepresentation of Intelligent Design as a form of Creationism. In an item on the growing popularity of Intelligent Design, John Humphrys interviewed Professor Ken Miller of Brown University in the US who spoke on the subject last evening at the Faraday Institute, Cambridge. Humphrys suggested that Intelligent Design might be considered a kind of middle ground between Darwinism and Creationism. Miller agreed but went further, saying that Intelligent Design was

nothing more than an attempt to repackage good old-fashioned Creationism and make it more palatable.

But this is totally untrue. Miller referred to a landmark US court case in 2005, Kitzmiller v Dover Area School District, which did indeed uphold the argument that Intelligent Design was a form of Creationism in its ruling that teaching Intelligent Design violated the constitutional ban against teaching religion in public schools. But the court was simply wrong, doubtless because it had heard muddled testimony from the likes of Prof Miller.

The court was”simply wrong”? What, because you say so? And why was Miller’s testimony “muddled”? Because you didn’t like it? Or because you didn’t understand it? In any case, the court was not “wrong”, simply or otherwise. The court was shown evidence (actually, virtual proof) of the link between creationism and ID. The transitional version - cdesign proponentsists – was discovered.

Put simply, the ID book Of Pandas and People that was discussed at the Dover trial was originally a unashamed creation book called Creation Biology. (You know it’s a creation book because it has the word “Creation” in the title. You’re welcome.) Just after the Supreme Court ruling against creation science in Edwards v. Aguillard, the Disco Tute decided to remake the book as an ID book, rewriting large parts of it to make it all “sciencey” and not creationism at all.  No, really. But unfortunately for them, they were in such a hurry to do so that in changing the wording in one place from “creationists” to (presumably) “intelligent design proponents”, they morphed the two phrases and the book actually included the words “cdesign proponentsists”. Apparently they believe in a designer but not in a spell checker. Hilarious. Click the NCSE’s Missing Link discovered! for a detailed explanation of what they did. Also, The Panda's Thumb's Missing link: “cdesign proponentsists”.

Whatever the ramifications of the specific school textbooks under scrutiny in the Kitzmiller/Dover case, the fact is that Intelligent Design not only does not come out of Creationism but stands against it. This is because Creationism comes out of religion while Intelligent Design comes out of science.

Which is funny, because cdesign proponentsists (excuse me) intelligent design proponents don’t do any science. Instead they write long whiney articles about why ID is too science.

Creationism, whose proponents are Bible literalists, is a specific doctrine which holds that the earth was literally created in six days. Intelligent Design, whose proponents are mainly scientists, holds that the complexity of science suggests that there must have been a governing intelligence behind the origin of matter, which could not have developed spontaneously from nothing.

So how did the existence of this “governing intelligence” result in there being matter? According to IDists, the designer designed stuff. Stuff that could not have evolved. So after he had designed it, surely he must have implemented his design? But how did he do this, if the “matter […] could not have developed spontaneously from nothing” as Phillips writes? Didn’t the designer have to “create” the matter? If not, where did it come from? And if the designer did create matter, how is this not “creationism”? Obviously it’s not literal six day creationism, but who said creationism had to be literal six day creationism as in Genesis? Regardless of whether ID has its roots in religious creation or not (it does, but even if it didn’t), it’s still creationism. Clearly it’s more than just “design” (intelligent or otherwise). Somewhere along the line, the designer had to create stuff too.

The confusion arises partly out of ignorance, with people lazily confusing belief in a Creator with Creationism.

A bit like how people lazily confuse the appearance of design with belief in a designer.

But belief in a Creator is common to all people of monotheistic faith – with many scientists amongst them -- the vast majority of whom would regard Creationism as totally ludicrous. In coming to the conclusion that a governing intelligence must have been responsible for the ultimate origin of matter, Intelligent Design proponents are essentially saying there must have been a creator.

There you are - “there must have been a creator”.  Told you.

The difference between them and people of religious faith is that ID proponents do not necessarily believe in a personalised Creator, or God.

Well, yes they do, but even if they didn’t, it’s still creationism. It’s still “magic man did it”.

As a result, both Creationists and many others of religious faith disdain Intelligent Design, just as ID proponents think Creationism is totally off the wall. Yet the two continue to be conflated. And ignorance is only partly responsible for the confusion, since militant evangelical atheists deliberately conflate Intelligent Design with Creationism in order to smear and discredit ID and its adherents.

No, we conflate them because they are the same. If they want it to be science they need to do some science. Then they need to write it up and present it for publication in a science journal. Then have it peer reviewed, and stuff like that. But that’s too hard. Instead they just want to whine about how mean scientists are for calling them creationists. Boo hoo.

Qi is a Human Construct

Qi is a Human Construct.  It’s also an assumption.  That is to say, it’s just made up.  Of course, we always knew that.  But now we’ve had it confirmed by Howard Choy, a Feng Shui practitioner, and practicing Feng Shui Architect.

Howard turned up in the comments to my last Feng Shui post - Feng Shui Hooey.  (Yes I know that doesn’t really rhyme.  It rhymes the way I pronounce Feng Shui.)  Howard joined the thread at comment #11.  His defense of FS consisted of the usual fallacies (not “western” science, been around for a long time, you need to do more research before you understand it, yada yada), and didn’t get any better throughout the remainder of his 54 comments in that thread. But at least he eventually did one thing very few woos actually ever get around to doing, namely he admitted that Qi (and therefore the basis of Feng Shui) is just an assumption and a human construct. 

By all means, read the whole comment thread.  I just want to highlight the end of the discussion, where we finally managed to pin Howard down.  It started with Howard making comment # 133 and the comment after it, #134:

FS is about how to take advantage of life enhancing forces (jue sheng qi) which science is a part. So it is part science by using it.

[…]

We use things that have evidence and we use things that don't have evidence, as long as it is useful, we use them.

[…]

Some parts of FS can be tested by science, like why the Chinese preferred a courtyard house, Some parts can't, like the assumption we make that everything has qi.

I asked him (comment #135) how he knew these things.  How did he know that life enhancing forces of jue sheng qi even existed or what effect they have?  How did he know they were useful if we don’t have evidence for them as he admitted?  How did he know (as he claimed) everything has qi if (as he said), they can’t be tested?

His response in comment 135 was (with my bold):

Qi is an assumption and even science uses assumptions and in mathematics as well. An assumption is a proposition that is taken for granted, that is, as if it were known to be true. 

“As if”?! 

There are quantifiable qi like tianqi(weather) and qixi (breath), etc. The there are also unquantifiable qi like gua qi which is a human construct but we still use them because it is a useful tool by experience, like art, philosophy and religion.

So there you have it.  Qi is just pretend.  It was made up by humans.  We just act "as if" it's real.

And remember, Howard is not just any new agey woo, angry that I don’t support his favorite piece of magic.  He has studied this extensively.  He is part of a team that designs buildings using Feng Shui, he teaches seminars and workshops in Feng Shui, he has a Feng Shui blog.  In short, he is an expert in Feng Shui:

Howard has written 4 books on Feng Shui and Qigong and numerous articles for various magazines and journals worldwide. He has worked as the principal consulting Feng Shui Architect on the capital upgrading of the Chinese Garden in Darling Harbour, after having successfully completed the Feng Shui urban renewal for Sydney’s Chinatown in 2001 for the Sydney Olympic Games.

And this is the best a real expert can do?  It’s all made up, a human construct, an assumption?

And then this evening, after two weeks of silence, Howard came back and left a final "goodbye" comment #163. Apparently “Feng Shui is not working here” and it’s all our fault for not just believing in Howard’s drivel. But real science doesn't care whether you believe in it or not - it works regardless.

As an expert in Feng Shui, Howard is like the expert on fairies at the bottom of the garden - in both cases, the expertise is worthless.

Easter and God the Victim

A little perspective on Easter (which is today).

Yesterday, PZ reported on the “debate” between Christopher Hitchens and radio host Todd Friel – a labored exercise in Pascal’s Wager. Freil basically says, if we assume the Christian story is true, don’t you agree that atheists will go to hell? It goes on for over ten minutes, but there really isn’t much more to it than that. Hitchens does an excellent job of demolishing the idiot. (Click the link above – PZ has the full interview embedded.)

There was one area where I felt I had something to add to Hitchens’ rebuttal.  It was with Freil’s suggestion that Jesus’s death on the cross was an act of generosity.  As best I can recall, this is what Freil said:

If Jesus took the punishment that you deserve… wouldn’t that be the single greatest act of kindness in the history of the world?

Hitchens replied no, because he (Hitchens) hadn’t been born then and hadn’t been consulted.  Which is true, but I could think of additional reasons why this wasn’t an act of kindness.

I wanted to ask, who made this rule?  Who decided that Jesus had to die a horrible death before my sins could be forgiven? Surely this rule was made up by god? But why does he have to follow it? He’s god. He could forgive any sins he wanted. What possible difference could it make that Jesus did or did not die on the cross? And then it struck me – god is just playing victim. (“Oh boo hoo, I died on the cross for you, the least you could do is love me and praise me your whole life.”) Jesus's dying on the cross wasn’t an act of generosity. On the contrary, it was totally self serving – nothing but a piece of passive aggressive manipulative bullying. God had simply set himself up so he could play victim for the rest of eternity. What a wimp.

And it’s actually worse than that. The reward god has for us if we believe in him and praise him our whole lives, is that he won’t send us to burn in the hell that he created for us. We’re supposed to be grateful that Jesus died so that god could give himself permission not to torture us for eternity. That would be like me setting up a torture chamber in my basement and expecting people to think I was generous for agreeing not to lock them up there and torture them for the rest of their lives (as long as they worship me). That wouldn’t be considered an act of kindness. I would rightly be considered a psychopath for even setting up the torture chamber in the first place.

So to recap on god’s generosity at Easter: to save us from an eternity of torture in hell that he (god) created and had decided to send us to, based on rules he (god) made up all by himself, he (god) suffered torture (that he planned) on the cross, so that now as long as you worship him, he won’t send you to the hell that he can freely choose not to send you to anyway. And this, we are expected to believe, is act of kindness.

What a moron.

Randi's Strange Pigasus Picks

Randi published his 2008 Pigasus Awards today, and I must say, some of them had me scratching my head a bit.  Here are the awards and the winners – see what you think:

1. To the Scientist who said or did the silliest thing relating to parapsychology in the preceding twelve months.

- Dr. Colin Ross, who can shoot electromagnetic radiation from his eyes

Hum, well OK, I guess he qualifies.  What he’s claiming is very silly. I’m not sure if it’s strictly “parapsychology”, but he apparently is a scientist and seems like a nut. 

I’m afraid the rest are not so good, though.

2. To the Funding Organization that supports the most useless parapsychological study during the year.

- The Producers of the movie "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Huh?  The movie Expelled could not any way be called a “study”.  It was a film pushing creationism.  Certainly not a study and nothing “parapsychological” about it either.  Plus, the producers of Expelled are not a “funding organization”.  It was certainly a piece of crap, but a “parapsychological study”?  No.  And yet there were several actual parapsychological studies he could have picked from 2008.  For example, this one.  So why didn’t he?

3. To the Media outlet that reported as fact the most outrageous paranormal claim.

- Late night cable TV stations

This seems a bit of a cop out to me.  If Randi wants to shame the makers of Enzyte then OK, but then he's criticizing phony advertising and not a media outlet per se.  They hardly even seem that outrageous either.  Unlike (for example) this. 

The next one makes no sense at all:

4. To the "Psychic" performer who fools the greatest number of people with the least effort in that twelve-month period.

- Jenny McCarthy; who has written books and appeared on countless TV shows promoting measles

Jenny McCarthy is certainly a bubble head anti-science moron who deserves to be shamed more than just about anyone else I can think of, but “psychic”?  When did she ever claim to be psychic?  And there are plenty of real (ie pretend) psychics out there who could have been named.  McCarthy could perhaps have been named in the next award - the most persistent refusal to face reality – that she certainly would qualify for.  But psychic?  It just makes no sense.  Couldn’t Randi think of one actual pretend psychic to shame?  Not one?  In the whole year?

5. For the most persistent refusal to face reality.

- Kevin Trudeau; who sold quack books even after the government fined him for it

Actually, I think Trudeau has a pretty good grip on reality.  He knows he’s selling crap, and he knows exactly how to keep making money at it despite numerous attempts to shut him down.  No, the people with the most persistent refusal to face reality are the ones who continue to buy Trudeau’s books and videos, despite the fact that they are complete crap.  But certainly not Trudeau himself.  Douchebag?  Yes.  Refusal to face reality?  Not really.

I hate to say this, but I think this years Pigasus’s are a fail.  The purpose if these awards, I imagine, is to ridicule these bozos and have a laugh at them ourselves.  But that only works if the things the awards are for, are for things the person actually did.  If they are about a straw man version (eg Jenny McCarthy – psychic), then they fall flat.  In fact, the recipient could easily laugh back at these rather absurd categorizations.  I’m afraid this list just looks like Randi picked five people who had done stupid things in the year, and then randomly assigned them to one of his five categories.  Which doesn’t seem to make much sense.

Read my Golden Woo awards from January – in my totally unbiased view, much better suited candidates.

April 2 - edited to add:

Well Randi edited some of the category descriptions - the main one being to remove the "psychic" label from the Jenny McCarthy award (see Phil Plait's comment below).  That's certainly an improvement.  But I still think it doesn't make any sense to call McCarthy a "performer", and I still think none of the awards (apart from #1) fit the category descriptions.  Admittedly it's not a major issue in the grand scheme of things, but if a thing's worth doing it's worth doing right. 

Distant From Science

Reader Kate sent me a link to the HuffPo article by Srinivasan Pillay, The Science of Distant Healing, that everyone’s talking about this week.  Apparently a study showed remote “intention” could act as a therapeutic intervention.  I originally wasn’t going to bother with this, as the article was in my view rather confused and poorly written, and several skeptics in the comments seemed to be doing a pretty good job of taking it apart already anyway.  And then on Friday both Orac and Steven Novella wrote posts critical of the article.  But then I got a hold of the full study, and a little light went off in my head that told me I had something to add even to what those two luminaries had written.

First, I’ll do what Pillay didn’t do, and link to the abstract.  I managed to click on the Elsevier link in the abstract and obtain a temporary log on ID to read the study.  It’s entitled “Compassionate Intention As a Therapeutic Intervention by Partners of Cancer Patients: Effects of Distant Intention on the Patients' Autonomic Nervous System”.  An odd title since the authors clearly state in the study, “we did not test for distant healing” (more on that below).

The study supposedly measured the effects of intention on the autonomic nervous system of a human "sender" and distant "receiver".  Well, not really.  What they actually measured were changes in skin conductance level, or as Pillay wrote, “a measure of the ability of sweat to conduct electricity”.  PAL called that “measurements from glorified Scientology E-meters”.  Ouch!  No illnesses being cured then (as they admitted – see above).  The paired senders and receivers were divided into three groups:

1. Trained in directing intention, one person in each pair had cancer
2. Untrained in directing intention, one person in each pair had cancer
3. Untrained in directing intention, neither person in each pair had cancer

In group 1 and 2, the healthy person directed intention at the sick person.  In group 3, a healthy person directed intention at another healthy person.  Members of group 3 were not randomly selected – they were (obviously) non-randomly allocated to the group with no cancer.  And yet, group 3 was claimed to be the “control group”.  However, all three groups were instructed to direct intention – ie, even the “control group” directed intention.  This is important when you consider the hypothesis being tested, which was:

The principal hypothesis was that the sender's DHI [distant healing intention] directed toward the distant, isolated receiver would cause the receiver's autonomic nervous system to become activated.  A secondary analysis explored whether the factors of motivation and training modulated the postulated effect.

To test the principal hypothesis you obviously need a control group which is not sending intention, to compare with the intention group.  Otherwise, how do you know if the intention had any effect?  But there was no group without directed intention, which means there was no  control group to test the actual principal hypothesis the authors of the study specifically said they were testing.  So what were the results?  Did the receiver's autonomic nervous systems become activated, and did training and motivation make a difference?  Take a look at Figure 6 from the study, and the note under it, and see what you think:

Figure 6   Comparison of sender and receiver effect sizes (per epoch) measured at stimulus offset (with ±2 standard error confidence intervals) for all sessions, motivated sessions (trained group and wait group combined), and trained, wait, and control groups separately. EDA, electrodermal activity.

You’ll note there is no significant difference between the receivers in the different groups.  (The senders differ, but then they knew they were sending.)  The receivers all register an effect, but since there is no control group to compare these results with, these data tell you nothing about the principal hypothesis.  Again I say, you need a control group to test this hypothesis, and they didn’t have one.  There was no significant difference between the trained / untrained groups or between the motivated (ie including sick people) / unmotivated groups.  So the secondary hypothesis failed.

So, end of story. Study failed, yes?  Write it off, study something new next time?  Well, no of course not.  Not with woo.  The study authors weren’t satisfied with that.  Here, Steven Novella noticed something I initially missed.  It was this, from the abstract:

Planned differences in skin conductance among the three groups were not significant, but a post hoc analysis showed that peak deviations were largest and most sustained in the trained group, followed by more moderate effects in the wait group, and still smaller effects in the control group

Translation: the study didn’t show what we wanted it to show (clearly – see Figure 6), so we data mined it to find something we could say was an effect.  So what did they find with this bit of ad hoc activity?  They produced several other graphs, of which (to keep it simple) I will reproduce just Figure 7:

Figure 7   Normalized comparison of receiver skin conductance levels in the three groups. EDA, electrodermal activity.

What they want you to look at is the difference between the three groups during the “intention” period.  Group 1 (the “trained” group), showed the largest increase during the ten second burst of “intention”.  (See the timescale on the bottom – seconds 0 to 10 is when the intention is being directed.)  OK, but what I want you to notice is the 5 seconds before the intention (-5 to 0 on the bottom axis).  The normalized EDA is actually higher for one group (group 2 – the “wait” group), when no intention is being directed at all!  So for those not trained, it appears distant healing effects are higher when the sender does nothing.  Even with group 1 (“trained”), the “doing nothing” period has a higher measurement than roughly 50% of the “sending intention” period.  Then it struck me what we are missing – we are missing readings from all the “doing  nothing” periods – since the intention sessions were all 10 seconds long, and the non-intention sessions were from five to 40 seconds long, we are talking about probably 60-75% of the total time.  Was the EDA measurement higher or lower during those periods?  Were there other peaks in EDA during those periods?  They don’t say.

And I’m pretty sure they didn’t even look.  Tucked away just before the “results” section of the report, they state this:

To avoid multiple testing problems, the preplanned hypothesis examined the normalized deviation only at stimulus offset.

I’ve read that section about ten times now, and the only sensible interpretation of that sentence is that they only looked at EDA changes during the intention sending sessions – they didn’t look at them during the non-intention sending periods (unintentional periods?).  This sounds like the sharpshooter fallacy – shooting a load of bullets at the side of a barn and then painting a target where most of the bullets landed.  But they ignored the larger clusters of bullets fired at different times.

Why This Is Significant

The study’s lead author is Dean Radin.  Radin has a history of fitting statistical anomalies to temporal events, while ignoring the same anomalies that occur at other times that he doesn’t want you to know about.  An example would be Radin’s interpretation of the now defunct (correction - it's still going) Global Consciousness Project’s (GCP) output from a series of random number generators – data that supposedly showed global consciousness spiked at certain major global events.  If you want to see how credulous Radin can be, and/or how determined he is to find a correlation whether one exists or not (you decide), read this account by Claus Larsen, who attended a talk by Dean Radin in 2002:

Radin gave several examples of how GCP had detected "global consciousness". One was the day O.J. Simpson was acquitted of double-murder. We were shown a graph where - no doubt about that - the data formed a nice ascending curve in the minutes after the pre-show started, with cameras basically waiting for the verdict to be read. And yes, there was a nice, ascending curve in the minutes after the verdict was read.

However, about half an hour before the verdict, there was a similar curve ascending for no apparent reason. Radin's quick explanation before moving on to the next slide?

"I don't know what happened there."

It was not to be the last time we heard that answer.

Does that remind you a little of figure 7 above, and does it make you ask what happened during the “no intention” periods?  It should. 

And then there was 9/11:

Another serious problem with the September 11 result was that during the days before the attacks, there were several instances of the [random number generators] picking up data that showed the same fluctuation as on September 11th. When I asked Radin what had happened on those days, the answer was:

"I don't know."

I then asked him - and I'll admit that I was a bit flabbergasted - why on earth he hadn't gone back to see if similar "global events" had happened there since he got the same fluctuations. He answered that it would be "shoe-horning" - fitting the data to the result.

Checking your hypothesis against seemingly contradictory data is "shoe-horning"?

For once, I was speechless.

Did Radin check to see if there were similar fluctuations in the data in the “down” periods of this recent study?  I don’t know, but we know for a fact from the above that Radin has selected data to fit his hypothesis in the past, and so I’m not going to trust him not to have done it this time.  We know he performed some additional manipulation on the data, as Orac also noticed from the study:

To reduce the potential biasing effects of movement artifacts, all data were visually inspected, and SCL epochs with artifacts were eliminated from further consideration (artifacts were identified by [Dean Radin], who was not blind to each epoch's underlying condition).

So Radin admits he un-blinded the study and eliminated data he didn’t like. 

Throughout this post I avoided any personal attacks on Radin’s (or Pillay’s) credibility, and concentrated instead on the actual study.  However, when considering a study that claims a statistical effect like this (and the study authors admit the size of the observed effects were very small), on such frankly dubious grounds, it is relevant to consider where the author has in the past ignored contradictory data when forming conclusions.  Clearly he has in the past, and he may well have done so here.  The most generous conclusion I can draw about this study would be that it would  need to be replicated by  independent experimenters before I would even consider that there might be some basis in what it  is claiming.  (Randi’s $1 million test, anyone?)  A more realistic interpretation is that Radin has been known to select data that fits his hypothesis and ignore that which doesn’t, and so there’s no reason to think that hasn’t happened here.  Radin even admits he un-blinded the study to eliminate some data he didn’t like.  Add the fact that there was no control group, the null hypotheses were not even rejected, and the only interesting thing they found required some (admitted by the authors) post hoc rationalization, and there really isn’t much left worth looking at.

The study ends with the words “This study is dedicated to Elisabeth Targ.”  That would be the Elizabeth Targ whose study of intercessory prayer was also fraudulently un-blinded so it could report a success when in reality it had failed.  And this study is dedicated to her?  I couldn’t have put it better myself.