Enquiring Minds Want to Know
I was recently involved in a long discussion with a good friend of mine, who is also an atheist and was a major factor in my transformation from religious apathy to atheism. The fruit of the discussion was strongly related to our differing reasons for deconversion: while my friend was disgusted by the indoctrination and brainwashing that religion inspires (especially Western monotheism) and was led to recognise it for what it was, I instead approached atheism from the road of science and reason. I simply identified religion as the most prominent example of an inherently flawed thought process entailing a breakdown of critical thinking and the hypocrisy of selective skepticism. The differences in our viewpoints throughout our recent discussion arose from those different paths. After leaving theism behind, my friend was attracted to the calming benevolence of more Eastern spiritual teachings and philosophies, whereas I continued my study of science and continued applying active skepticism and scientific enquiry to everything I encountered. Meeting after a year of these branched-off roads, the collision between our evolved viewpoints was inevitable, and inspired this post, which will clarify why the scientific method is the only legitimate means to establish the existence of any relationship in the observable universe. At the end, I will include examples from our discussion which highlight where that method breaks down.
First, I should state that my friend and I still share common ground on many matters. His ideas frequently display a fascination with the workings of the human brain, which I also possess; however, his ideas lie in the realm of philosophy, whereas I focus only on psychological phenomena that can be demonstrated scientifically. If an idea cannot be tested, then it can exist only as a philosophical question. I have often insisted that we must always apply skepticism to things we hear or observe – were we to believe anything, we would quickly suffer. Everyone knows this, and believes it to be true about most things. They just find it difficult to apply it retroactively, to their pre-existing beliefs.
Like skepticism, science is universal. If a relationship exists – for example, if being born in a certain month determines one’s personality – a scientific enquiry will find it. This is something that people often fail to understand. A correlational study would look at a wide range of randomly selected people, examining their personalities and comparing this to each person’s “star sign”. If there is a significant pattern – that is, if the probability of an actual effect is much larger than the probability of it occurring due to chance (something calculated statistically) – then the enquiry will inevitably detect it. In this case, there have been a plethora of studies investigating astrology and no relationship has been detected. Obviously, no one can spare the time to scientifically investigate every single claim, and this is where skepticism comes in. Considering that constellations are arbitrarily created by humans, that every astrologist will predict something different (and ludicrously vague) based on them, and that the idea conflicts with well-established physical laws, one’s threshold of skepticism does not need to be immensely high to toss the idea out on principle. It is only the disturbingly large number of its subscribers and its prevalence throughout ancient history that makes astrology worthy of a scientist’s time. Again, I reiterate: if there is a relationship – that is, if something is at play other than random chance – a proper scientific enquiry cannot fail to detect it.
If a proper scientific investigation does not detect a relationship, then there are only two possibilities. Either the relationship does not exist, or the investigation needs to be improved. While the latter occurence is rare, it is nevertheless claimed disproportionately often by subscribers to unjustified ideologies, usually in an attack on the experiment’s validity. Validity is how well-equipped the actual investigation is to detect the relationship it is attempting to detect. Since investigations use samples to extrapolate results to a population, it is important that this sample is representative – “investigations” carried out by pseudoscientists frequently fail at this first hurdle (for example, testing homeopathic remedies on fifty people who already strongly believe in homeopathy). Validity is also more obviously relevant in the choice of variables, if the investigation is an experiment rather than just a correlational study. If your hypothesis is “Prayer to the Christian God can influence an outcome”, your independent variable would be whether or not a group prayed, and the dependent variable you would go on to examine would be how often the prayed-for outcome occurred for each group. If no relationship was detected, a believer might claim that it didn’t work because the people praying were not clutching a crucifix. In that case, the variables were not valid – but one finds that believers do not point these things out until after the experiment, and only if it fails to support their already-held views. In any case, this constant adding of conditions can continue indefinitely until the supposed requirements for the prayer’s success are ludicrously specific – hence validity actually decreases, as the results of the investigation can no longer be applied across any reasonable population. Validity in experiments is also boosted by methods such as double-blind experiments (which rule out possible placebo effects) and randomized control trials (which assist in eliminating unwanted variables).
Other ways to improve an investigation are increasing reliability and power. Reliability, as I have already alluded to, is simply the probability that the effect was due to a causal relationship rather than chance. It is much easier to improve – simply repeat the experiment. If you get the same results, then those results are more reliable. If the results fluctuate every time the investigation is conducted, then they are not reliable. In a similar vein, power is the investigation’s actual ability to detect an effect, and usually refers to the size of the sample being investigated. Increasing power increases your chances of finding a real relationship. However, this is just as double-edged as it sounds, because if power is increased sufficiently, some sort of tiny relationship will always be found, though it may be irrelevant to the investigation. Essentially, if you look hard enough, you will find something, though it will be so miniscule that it is useless and completely irrelevant to any single individual. As a famous example, studies have detected a correlation between height and intelligence – but height is responsible for something on the order of 4% of the variation in intelligence. While validity can never be too high (within reasonable effort), power most certainly can. In the case of supernatural claims, this is rarely a problem as the relationships are usually completely non-existent, but let us imagine for a moment that the aforementioned astrology study was expanded to a sample size of 100,000 randomly selected people, and an extremely small correlation between being born in winter and having a quieter personality was found. “Star sign” is hardly the most rational explanation for this, and in any case, the relationship would be so small that you could not conclude anything about one particular person who was born in winter.
Once more, I will say it: a proper scientific enquiry cannot fail to detect a real relationship. I repeated it because we are going to move into the realm of phenomena that science cannot detect. Claims of phenomena that cannot be detected are commonly referred to by scientists as non-falsifiable. Supernatural phenomena that do not begin in this realm always end up being pushed back into it by believers who refuse to interpret an investigation’s failure to detect something as evidence of its non-existence. I use the image of a “realm” with caution, because it is also effectively the “realm” of things that do not exist. If science cannot detect something, then a human most definitely cannot, and we should not even bother considering its existence. Investigations into the existence of ghosts always fail because the ghosts eventually gain characteristics such as “invisible” and “immaterial” until they can’t interact with the physical world at all and are equivalent to something that does not exist within our senses or the detecting ability of any device in existence. Deistic non-interventional gods also fall into this category by default; numerous other things like “paranormal” abilities always end up there. The essence of the matter is: if science cannot detect it, then no one and nothing can distinguish it from something that does not exist.
I commonly hear responses to this such as “My god lies in a different, non-physical realm”, but this just shifts the problem, because this “non-physical realm” is just as non-falsifiable and undetectable as anything supposedly contained within it, and both it and its occupants may as well not exist. Even claims such as “My god used to intervene in the physical world, but has now retreated to his own realm” can never ultimately be falsified, though the evidence we do have about this supposed “age of intervening gods” can be examined (note that this is not a scientific procedure, merely the much more fundamental processes of skepticism and reason). Proponents of “non-overlapping magisteria”, who claim that the scientific method and faith are just different foundations for “different sorts of beliefs” also fail to recognise this. Reason leads to conclusions based on evidence, by its definition. Faith leads to conclusions not based on evidence, by its definition. We do not need to make sappy concessions that both are equally legitimate, because they very obviously are not. Faith cannot possibly help us decide which of the literally endless beliefs not based on evidence are correct – it is the fallacious double-standard of selective skepticism that allows this.
Faith does not necessarily relate to theism, and this was one of the major points of the discussion I shared with my friend, who went so far as to use the term “scientific faith”. My friend is very willing to believe things that “feel right”, like the holistic eastern teachings to which he subscribes, yet he accepts that the human brain is only as good at perceiving reality as was necessary for survival on Earth before higher brain functions such as self-awareness were naturally selected. I would be perfectly willing to accept that practices such as acupuncture, chi kung and chakra healing could improve health beyond the influence of a basic placebo or calming effect, but they must jump through the same scientific hoops as every other idea before I lower my skepticism gate, and this is an important point. There are no exceptions to skepticism, no absolute truths about the universe that every person is born with locked away in their heads. Most people believe they hold the absolute truth, and so this obviously cannot be considered a factor in deciding who to believe. My friend also leapt to many “natural” conclusions about the human brain and the entire universe, based on things that are “obvious to anyone”, many of which conflicted with the lifetimes of research conducted across numerous areas, including cosmology, biology and even mathematics.
To me, this idea that one person can simply gain a sudden understanding of the universe without taking much more than a glance at (and even in complete opposition of) the work of thousands of other sincere thinkers across hundreds of years, let alone conduct any serious scientific research of their own, approaches nothing short of arrogance. I see this depressingly often – rather than show a sense of genuine curiosity and compare their own ideas to the scientific enquiries of thinkers past, these steadfast subscribers instead go through life believing that through some sense of faith, or “higher sense of being”, they can uncover any truth that they wish with a few hours’ thought. This holds as true for Eastern practices as it does for anything else – subscribers limit their search of knowledge only to sources they know to agree with their pre-subscribed belief system. (And it’s just icing on the cake of irony when these people utter the words “You need to be more open-minded.”)
My studies of psychology have revealed wondrously fascinating facets of the human mind and the behaviours it entails – uncovered, debated, and tested by countless dedicated thinkers worldwide over the course of the last hundred years. We no longer need to ascribe to such broad, unsubstantiated vitalistic concepts as “energy”, or “karma”, or “divine intervention” in our efforts to explain what we see and why we see it. The scientific method assists in eliminating the flaws of the human brain as factors in deciding what is real and what is not; our need to attribute things to cause, our need to seek only confirmation of our beliefs and ignore conflicting evidence, our need to insist that our perception and memories are infallible.
Why seek out psychics and fortune-tellers to predict the future when psychology can predict human behaviour far more reliably (something “psychics” know perfectly well)? Why believe ancient Mayan calendars have predicted the apocalypse when physics can predict the motion of celestial objects thousands of times larger than our planet to within a fraction of a millimetre? Why resort to deliriously vague, impossible-to-fail concepts such as “natural balance” when mathematical game theory can actually predict patterns of behaviour in animals? Why believe mythical, dusty books’ accounts of creation when biology has demonstrated the incredible ability of evolution to explain life as we see it in our insignificant time on Earth? Why leave your life in the hands of useless homeopathic remedies and “energy healing techniques” when chemistry, biology and neurology have united to provide medicines that save millions upon millions of lives every year?
And this is the last thing I wish to discuss: health. Of all the human attitudes and behaviours that belief systems inspire, it is those relating to health and wellbeing that are of most significance, because this is where they do the most literal physical damage. I imagine that my readers will not need reminding of the horrors medical doctors go through every year when Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse treatment and – more disgustingly – refuse it for their children. Parents of children who have died from lack of treatment have been let off extremely light in the US, facing “criminal negligence” charges rather than the more substantiated murder charge, simply due to their fatal actions being religiously inspired. Here, I wish to talk about the “alternative medicine” practised by subscribers to “new age” and Eastern philosophies.
I should state that these divisions of “Western” and “Eastern”, “conventional” and “traditional”, etc. are blatantly meaningless, giving no indication of actual remedial ability. These terms reveal only the (very historical) geographical locations where the respective methods have practised, and how widely accepted the methods are. A much more fitting division would be “scientific” and “pre-scientific”, which clearly indicates which treatments have been rigorously and scientifically validated and which treatments were simply ancient guesswork refined into tradition through natural selection – two categories that are not equally legitimate. Treatments that were observed to work rather than scientifically proven were passed on, and those not observed to work were (eventually) disused – vague guesses at why these treatments appeared to work could then be postulated (“chakras”, “vital energy”, even “demons”) based on pre-scientific false understanding of nature and the human body. For the most part, these treatments appear to work only because they do nothing at all. For example, the body’s immune system is perfectly capable of fending off the common cold virus, and relaxation (which seems to be the major part of most “traditional Eastern treatments”) will naturally assist this. There is no need to invoke an explanation like “energy is allowed to flow” – this energy is as unreal and ultimately pointless as the alien souls (“thetan” is the proper term) of Scientology. When these practitioners learn of documented biological phenomena such as homeostasis, they are often quick to leap to claims that this is exactly what they meant by “energy” – apparently just with none of the predictive ability of homeostatic imbalance or roots in physical phenomena.
Obviously, these sorts of treatments are not actively harmful. Being relaxed and calm is a well-documented boon when recovering from illness, which is why doctors recommend bed rest and inactivity. If one feels that rituals such as meditation are a more effective method of relaxation, then so be it – but there is no need to create ethereal concepts or invoke mystical causes to explain this. Perfectly tangible, biological reasons already exist. If one wants to actually learn more about the human body, and perhaps even assist in hypothesising and testing new treatments, then “conventional Western medicine” is the place to do it. Granted, there are flaws in health systems and infrastructures, but this is true of anywhere, and needs to be addressed rather than avoided. To nurture contempt of these flaws into a misled opposition to scientific medicine to the point where one actively forgoes it is a dangerous and possibly fatal delirium. Repeating anecdotes and relentlessly professing “______ really works!” is not a convincing argument, nor is it legitimate at all in light of the unreliability of individual experience. Anyone who resorts to stories rather than research in their claim of truthfulness fails to understand the most basic rule of skepticism: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. For further reading, I suggest Science-Based Medicine, a wonderful scientific blog. Of particular interest is its response to a letter from a reader who criticises the “Eurocentricism” of scientific medicine.
Science is self-deprecating, self-improving and universal – a construct more reliable at discerning reality than any single human mind. It holds nothing sacred, gives no worth to the labels “tradition” and “convention”, and most important does not stray beyond its boundaries, which is less than can be said of human imagination. It is nonsensical to oppose it, and ludicrous to fear it, for it can only ever find the truth, and I for one will embrace that goal as long as I live.
