A Random World?

One of the most powerful components of the scientific method is to test hypotheses against a null hypothesis. Nearly everyone is capable of rational thought; but scientific thought is a discipline. Nearly everyone can reason from evidence to reach a conclusion; but in science, what we do is to contrast the evidence that we see for the hypothesis against the things that we would expect to see if the hypothesis is wrong. That is, against what we would expect to see at random.

And it is here that the scientific and the religious ways of thinking can perhaps most clearly be contrasted. For example, Herbert Benson and collaborators tested the hypothesis that God answers prayer. Actually, they tested the hypothesis that supplemental intercessory prayer would decrease the rate of relapsing back into heart disease.

In a scientific view of the world, you expect things to happen more or less randomly unless something is causing them to happen non-randomly. That is, absent some physical process, good and bad things will happen more or less equally. One of the things that this could mean in our everyday lives is that we should expect good and bad things to happen to us more or less randomly. As for the other humans with whom we interact every day, some are better and some are worse; and each person is a mixture of good and bad motivations. Therefore, in Benson’s study, one might expect patients suffering from heart disease to sometimes relapse and sometimes not. This does not necessarily mean that heart disease patients would relapse exactly 50 percent of the time; the actual rate will depend on the availability of good medical treatment as well as many other factors. But a scientific null hypothesis would state, in this case, that heart disease patients would relapse to the same extent whether they were being prayed for or not.

This is extremely different from the fundamentalist religious view. To a fundamentalist, the entire world is pervaded by evil, by the works of Satan, and that bad things will always happen all the time to everyone unless God specifically and miraculously prevents it. The fundamentalist null hypothesis is therefore 100 percent relapse.

Therefore, if you pray for someone to be healed from an injury or illness, and they recover, this constitutes evidence, or even proof, that God has intervened and blessed them miraculously, according to religious people.

Actually, there is no direct way to prove which null hypothesis—the approximately 50 percent relapse that scientists expect, or the 100 percent relapse that religious people expect—is correct. The only way to get around this problem is to have a control group. In Benson’s case, the experimental group of patients received intercessory prayer, and did not know it; and the control group of patients did not receive intercessory prayer, and did not know it. The percent relapse of the control group patients represents a measurement of the null hypothesis. It was in this manner that Benson and collaborators demonstrated that intercessory prayer had no measurable effect: one group had 52 percent relapse, the other had 51 percent, a statistically indistinguishable effect.

Fundamentalists have ignored this result and continue to insist that, unless you join their church and give them money, bad things will probably happen to you. God might allow them, or might prevent them. They insist that there is no such thing as God not doing anything; God either prevents bad things, or else bad things happen.

This is perhaps the most basic difference between a scientific and a fundamentalist view of the world: the scientific view that things happen at random unless they are caused, and the fundamentalist view that only bad things happen unless God prevents them. To a scientist, the world has a random background; to a fundamentalist, the world has a background permeated with evil.

The Bible and Medicine

I have noted before that fundamentalists get all worked up about evolution and how it contradicts their inerrant interpretation of the Bible, while they do not seem at all upset by medical science and psychology, which contradict their fundamentalist assumptions even more. I wish now to present some actual data to back up this claim.

The Gospels of the New Testament contain numerous accounts of Jesus healing the sick and casting out demons, sometimes simultaneously. In several places (Matthew 10:1; 10:8; 23:24; Mark 1:32; Luke 6:17; 8:2) the writers describe Jesus as healing diseases, pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics—demons are thrown right into the list of diseases. In many cases, but not all, demon possession is indicated as the cause of disease. This being the case, creationists should reject medical science which attributes contagious all diseases to germs and other diseases to things that have gone wrong inside the body, and none of them to demons. They have not, however, done so.

What I wish to do now is to provide a complete list of Jesus’ healings, and indicate which ones were and were not attributed to demon possession. In order to do so, I have tried to determine which of the parallel Gospel accounts refer to the same event, so as not to double-count them. And here they are (demonic events in bold).

	Event	Matthew	Mark	Luke	John
1	Healing a leper	8:1	1:40	5:12
2	Centurion’s servant	8:5		7:1
3	Peter’s mother-in-law	8:14	1:29	4:38
4	Same day as 3: demoniacs	8:16
5	Gadarene swine	8:28	5:1	8:26
6	Forgave the paralytic	9:2	2:1	5:17
7	Resurrected ruler’s daughter	9:18	5:21	8:40
8	Woman with hemorrhage	9:20	5:24	8:43
9	Two blind men	9:27
10	Dumb demoniac	9:32		11:14
11	Man with withered hand	12:10	3:1	6:6
12	Blind dumb demoniac	12:22
13	Canaanite woman with demon daughter	15:21	7:24
14	Epileptic boy falling into fire	17:14	9:14	9:37
15	Blind men near Jericho	20:30	10:46
16	Demoniac near Capernaum		1:21	4:31
17	Deaf dumb man, Decapolis			7:31
18	Blind man at Bethsaida		8:22		9:1
19	Young man in his funeral			7:11
20	Another woman with flux			13:10
21	Man with dropsy			14:1
22	Ten lepers			17:11
23	Official’s son				4:46
24	Lame man at Bethsaida				5:2

I cannot be sure of some of the classifications; item 23 might be the same as item 2, but I have erred on the side of caution in favor of fundamentalists; item 2 refers to a servant, item 23 to a son, which most of us believe could just be a garbled transmission of the account, but fundamentalists do not believe such a thing is possible in the Bible. I have omitted the famous account of Lazarus, since it was considered an example of a resurrection, not a healing.

The point here is that seven of the 24 healings were specifically described—in all the parallel accounts available—as the casting out of demons. This is 29 percent. If you count the stories separately, 14 out of 46 involve demons, which is 30 percent. That is, in roughly one-third of the healings, exorcism was involved. In one of them (14), clear symptoms of epilepsy are described.

And yet biology curricula at taxpayer-supported colleges and universities never include demonology. Never. Certainly not one-third of the courses, or one-third of any course, or even a single mention. Nor do medical schools. How can creationists put up with this? Why doesn’t the Oklahoma legislature pass bills that require OU Health Sciences Center to at least include demonology as one possibility to be mentioned in their courses about infectious disease and endocrinology and neurology? And psychology! Let’s not even get into psychology! All the things the Bible attributes to the spirit, psychologists attribute to the brain!

Lest you think that I looked through the Gospels just to find ammunition against creationists, let me assure you that I looked through them (I have read them several times) with great enjoyment. When I read about the life and sayings of Jesus, I am really uplifted. His words, even though processed by oral transmission for over two centuries before being written down, are astonishing and refreshing—in marked contrast to the grim negativity of the gun-toting modern fundamentalists, whom I believe would drive Jesus out of their churches. Maybe the fundamentalists should actually read Jesus’ words, which flatly contradict most of their political opinions.

You might want to read the Gospels. At least, how can you resist reading about the woman with the demon daughter?

It's A Miracle!

This essay is a follow-up to the previous one, about Occam’s razor. Here is an example of a complicated spiritual explanation for something that does not really exist—the ability of a piece of wood to influence the course of events in life. Even within the realm of spiritual assumptions, it is a convoluted piece of reasoning that defies Occam’s razor. It is something that, when the ancient pagans of the Middle East did it, the prophet Isaiah denounced it. Isaiah said, you take a piece of wood, make half of it into an idol and burn the other half in the fireplace—so how can the wood be a god? The reasoning is flawed but it is a commendable ancient attempt to test spiritual assertions by hypothesis testing.

“Occam’s razor” is a philosophical position, attributed to medieval theologian William of Occam (Ockham). It is that the simplest explanation that fits all of the facts is the one that should be accepted. He applied it to theology, but it works in all areas of study. It is one of the foundational assumptions of science.

Religious people have, for the past few centuries, abandoned William of Occam’s theological premise. The reason is that science has steadily put physical explanations of nature in place of spiritual ones. At first it was that the Earth goes around the Sun. Then it was the idea that gravity and momentum, not angels, propelled the planets in their orbits. A few simple Newtonian equations explained as much as a multitude of angels.

One of the biggest examples of a simple natural explanation replacing a complex theological story is, of course, evolution. At the time of William Paley, every species was seen as not only a special creation by God but as evidence that God was good. Even mosquitoes. Evolution replaced “natural theology” largely because one, single explanation—natural selection—replaced thousands of separate acts of design and creation. Why does each species exist? In Paley’s time, each species had its own reason. Ever since Darwin, there has been only one reason: evolution.

But evolution is far from being the only example. If I were a fundamentalist, I would be a lot more worried about psychology than about evolution. Scientists have now explained nearly everything that happens in our “minds” and “hearts” as a physical or chemical process that occurs within our brains. This applies even to the most intense religious experiences (see the earlier essay about the Near Death experience.) Now, we know that these processes, involving neurons, neurotransmitters, hormones, and genes occur. In order to believe that a person has a spirit that thinks and feels, you have to believe that this spirit exactly mirrors, in every detail, the functions of the brain. You have to create, without evidence, an imaginary shadow of the brain. Occam’s razor says that, if the brain explains everything, there is no need to invent a spirit that is just a duplicate of the brain.

Occam’s razor, a philosophical position invented by a theologian, has now turned against theology.

Well, here is my story.

I walked into a dark restroom and the lights suddenly came on. It must have been a miracle! Anyplace else and I would have assumed it was a motion detector. But I was in no ordinary place. I was at the Shrine of the Infant Jesus of Prague. This shrine is an example of how convoluted religious reasoning can become. I have to start at the beginning.

In the late middle ages, there was a wooden statue of a baby boy with royal garments, a crown, and holding a sceptre and globe of the world. To my knowledge, Jesus never did this, at least when he was a child. But this statue was reputed to have special powers if you made offerings to it. After various adventures, the statue ended up in Prague (now in the Czech Republic). Meanwhile, there was a Catholic priest from Prague, Oklahoma who somehow ended up with a replica (souvenir copy) of the original statue. He apparently thought that there was some significance in his town in Oklahoma having the same name as the European city, and before you knew it, the replica statue was reputed to have special powers if you made offerings to it.

So here is the line of causation that comes into play if you visit this Oklahoma shrine. 1. Stick some money in a hole at the shrine. 2. The souvenir copy statue projects spiritual energy across the Atlantic to the European statue. 3. The European statue has some influence on the Virgin Mary. 4. The Virgin Mary is obligated to tell her Son to answer your prayer. 5. Jesus is more likely to answer your prayer this way than if you just asked him directly.

Wow. All this was happening less than twenty miles from where I was born, and I knew nothing about it until I was 52.

I considered my options. Nobody was around except the woman in the office behind the gift shop. First, I considered telling her that I had walked all the way from California (on my knees? no; backward? no) just to venerate the statue. But it was obvious that I had not been outdoors that much. Second, I considered using my fake eastern European accent which I learned from Boris and Natasha and saying I was from the shrine of the original statue and wanted to inspect it. But I realized that I did not know the secret catatonic handshake (if I remember correctly, this is the Catholic version of the secret Masonic handshake that my Dad never taught me) and my imposture would be revealed. Third, I considered proposing a statistical study to determine whether offerings to the statue actually increased the chances of having a prayer answered, as in the Benson heart study. But I didn’t do any of these things. I just went home and wrote this.