Abstract

© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, March 07, 1999

Pseudoscience

Anyone is free to believe in voodoo, astrology, creationism, or extra-sensory perception, but few fail to call a modern scientifically trained doctor when they fall ill. What supernaturalists wish to practice and promote is not science, but pseudoscience. The physical chemist, Irving Langmuir, called it “pathological science.” Signs of pathological science is that the alleged effect is always at the limit of detectability, it is independent of distance, and the evidence for it never gets any stronger. Believers rely on what Sherman calls the “Texas sharpshooter’s effect” to get the best possible outcome from any “test:”

The sharpshooter empties his revolver into the side of a barn—then walks over and draws the bullseye round most of his hits.

Pseudoscience is false science. Often it is an ideology masquerading as science, either religious as is the case with Christian fundamentalism, or political, such as is the case with Lysenkoism. There is a very fine line between religious and political ideologies, and each adopts many of the characteristics of the other. Scientific creationism can easily be considered a political movement, seeking to gain intellectual respectability by holding conferences at respected secular universities and to gain access to public school textbooks and classrooms through legislative efforts and the courts.

The criterion of testability serves to correctly identify creationism and all forms of supernatural explanation in science as pseudoscience. There is no way for supernaturalists to establish the truth of an intelligent design hypothesis using the methods of science. It is impossible, in principle, for natural evidence and arguments to demonstrate the existence of anything supernatural, such as creation, intelligent design, or a god.

The criterion of testability or falsifiability eliminates all supernatural explanations, such as creationism and intelligent design, from legitimate science, because such explanations cannot be falsified. Pseudosciences cannot be falsified because they claim supernatural elements exist and that these interact with the natural world, and the existence of these elements and the Nature of their interactions with the natural world cannot be investigated and tested by the naturalistic methods of science.

To demonstrate the reality of such supernatural processes or entities, we have to know the Nature of the interactions between the natural and supernatural. If there is a supernatural, we do not know how it relates with anything natural. Furthermore, by the methods of science, we can’t know these relationships anymore than we can know the supernatural elements. If we did then the supernatural would be natural.

Some critics of testability say that many pseudosciences would be scientific under this criterion because they are, in principle, falsifiable, and their claims have been falsified. They put scientific creationism in this category. They are wrong. The boundary between legitimate science and pseudoscience is not clearly defined. When a phenomenon is rare, it might not attract enough interest to allow a scientist to study it. There will not be enough money in it to support the investigator.

Hobbyists who are interested might then pursue the subject themselves. Usually they are not scientifically trained and, because the phenomenon is rare they do not have many valid observations. Typically, though the phenomena are rare, vast amounts of "data" emerge, mainly anecdotal. It is almost entirely useless scientifically because the most elementary points have not been noted, like time, temperature, angles, position, ambient conditions, and so on, and when some of them have they are usually grossly wrong, like speeds, heights, dimensions. A pseudoscience has been born.

Nevertheless, this pseudoscience is potentially a science. It is simply a neglected science kidnapped by worthy but ignorant carers who want to protect it. What makes it a pseudoscience is that its "researchers" and "investigators" are not sceptical but are believers. This means that their empirical work is often poor and selective, their reasoning is often biased and their attempts to falsify their hypotheses are absent.

Typically, they blame their failure to make any progress in their investigations on to the "sceptics"—teachers, orthodox scientists, the military and government—who are conspiring against them. They cannot understand scepticism as part of science and see it as a conspiracy against themselves as "believers". Familiar?

There might be no reason except the practical difficulties why their interest should not be studied scientifically and falsifiable hypotheses proposed, but practical problems and lack of applicability preclude them. The fact that an objective observer can falsify the hypotheses of the anoraks does not make legitimate study of the phenomenon unscientific.

If the enthusiasts of such pseudosciences were scientific in their approach they could do useful work. Amateur naturalists, weather forecasters and astronomers often do valuable work. They usually confine it to careful observation but where they have to go further they stay within the realms of the scientific method.

Unless aliens are just in the heads of abductees, they must leave behind evidence. If alien abduction is as common as people today claim, there must be a lot of evidence. Enthusiasm for a pet idea does not make it true. To establish truth requires scientific parsimony. People who are abducted nightly have left video cameras running to catch their abductors in the act. They never do. What does it mean to the believer. The aliens knew and did not come that night! That looks to be a good cure for the abductees’ trouble whether it is night fears or real aliens! If, they still had their abduction experience while the video cameras were running and they still didn’t appear on the video, what then? Oh, the aliens are clever, they switched them off!

What is interesting here is the psychology of it. Ghosts, gods or greys, the psychology is the same. People’s imagination, especially in an altered state of awareness, is mighty powerful. It has given birth to religion. The dreamer thinks they have had a supernatural experience.

Clearly, it is hard for amateurs of conviction to restrict their hypotheses to the natural realm, use valid arguments, accept contrary evidence and agree to change their views in the face of conflicting evidence. If they had, most of these pseudosciences would have been falsified, while a few might have joined mainstream science. If scientific creationism only made pseudoscientific statements about the natural realm—such as a 6000 year old earth—they could easily be falsified. The reason pseudosciences from creationism to alien abduction survive is because their claims are really supernatural, and “these claims cannot be falsified”. So pseudosciences can persist.

Some of our sisters want a science that allows them to believe in souls. They require no evidence that souls exist and are reincarnated, and they suggest no hypotheses that might allow the presence of souls to be detected.

Yet, they tell us there are "Old souls" and "Baby souls". The "Old souls" have incarnated frequently on earth and know all there is to know about it and soon will take off to pastures new on distant planets where they will incarnate as some form of silicon life. They might as well stay here on earth and incarnate as a microchip.

"Old souls" help the "Baby souls" in their faltering first steps as incarnated souls on earth. The "Baby souls" are the common herd, too unwashed and ignorant to rise to positions of power and influence. The "Old souls" have the experience and wisdom to fit them for the roles of princes and priests. The original "Old souls" were women and the "Baby souls" were men whom the "Old souls" left when they departed to b-Regulus (or wherever). The males began to make mistakes without their "Old souls" to guide them and developed patriarchal society.

Are we really intent on replacing Christian mumbo-jumbo with something worse?

God of the Gaps

The concept of creation by God was using God to explain a gap in natural scientific knowledge. Originally, religion was the only science there was. It gave explanations for the questions people were asking. “How was the world and it creatures made?” was perhaps the most fundamental question and God provided the answer. At first, God provided all the answers but gradually experience showed that some answers did not need a god. God remained to fill the unanswered gaps. With the arrival of the scientific method the gaps closed astonishingly quickly and rational folk began to realise that perhaps God was an unneeded hypothesis. Every time natural scientists solve a natural mystery, a gap closes and the room for the intelligent designer gets smaller.

Believers saw all this and trembled. They determined not to let one gap go—the one in which God made us all. They tried to identify two different kinds of science, “operations science” and “origins science”. Their distinction is that of natural phenomena that occur “regularly” and those that occur “singularly.” Regularly occurring phenomena can be studied by operations science, essentially the normal, legitimate science we have today. But singular phenomena, such as the origin of species, of life, the Earth, the solar system, the galaxy, and the universe, can only be studied by origins science.

Furthermore, these authors maintain that there are also two different causes in operation in Nature, a primary cause and secondary causes. The primary cause is God. Using it in operations science is not permissible but in origins science it has to be considered to allow for God’s miracles.

Needless to say, this is wrong: Science is not split between singular and repeatable phenomena—all phenomena are singular and all are repeatable. Every phenomenon that repeats is a singular event and every singular event is one of a class of the similar events. A cup can fall from a table and break into many pieces. Once the event has happened, the cup cannot be put back to allow it to repeat because it is broken. Nevertheless, every piece of crockery falling from a table and breaking is in the same category. Even the singular origin of the universe is in a class of such happenings. If it is not a set of just one event, there are other universes or potentially other universes.

Naturalism versus Supernaturalism

Christians can only find victory in the polemics with science by misrepresenting scientific information, misunderstanding scientists, ignoring scientific refutations of creationism and promoting unreasoned contempt for evolution. The failure of education to teach science properly enables Christians to continue in their dishonest practices.

So, supernaturalist believers in God, some theologians and creationists want to promote supernaturalism within science or instead of science. They promote supernaturalistic explanations as preferable to some scientific naturalistic explanations, particularly concerning questions of creation, and demand that scientists can and should explain some natural phenomena by using supernaturalistic hypotheses within science.

For decades, creationists claimed that their doctrine was scientific and they tried to force it into schools as being as scientific as evolutionary science. Scientists repeatedly disagreed. Creationists failed to challenge theories of evolution and cosmology within legitimate science. Their solution is to move the goalposts. They want to force the definition of science to include supernatural explanations. In so doing, they are admitting that creationism was never part of science—in other words, it is not scientific!

The creationist lobbying to admit supernatural religious beliefs as scientific is prompted by science’s great intellectual legitimacy and prestige, brought about by its tremendous success. People will naturally be attracted to such a knowledge system and thus be exposed to its associated philosophy of practical naturalism and the metaphysical consequences.

We should be concerned if supernaturalism is made a part of science, for once it is, science will no longer be scientific. The creationists will then have won. Science is their mortal enemy and they want it destroyed. It proves they are spouters of nonsense.

So-called scientific creationism is a religio-political effort that tries to subvert science, to create a misunderstanding in people’s minds about the true Nature of science. Creationists accomplish this by confusing people about how science works, the scientific method, the nature of scientific evidence, reasoning and scepticism, and the overwhelming evidence for evolution. Assaults on science textbooks, debates with scientists, creationist seminars and presentations, and most spectacularly, the attempts to pass balanced treatment laws—all are aimed at reducing scientific literacy among the lay public by promoting pseudoscience.

"Scientific" creationists in particular and "scientific" supernaturalists in general claim, that the new supernaturalistic science they propose does make predictive supernatural explanations based on good evidence. They say these explanations are legitimate scientific hypotheses that can be tested and falsified, and therefore the conclusions they reach that invoke the supernatural can and should be considered legitimately scientific. It is all false. Scientific creationism is not merely "bad science," it is pseudoscience.

One might have thought that believers in a moral God might have hesitated over lying so blatantly, but one of the odd things of history is that believers will commit any crime to defend their god, even though the god is supposed to be all powerful. Militant believers are rarely intelligent enough to notice the incongruity of mortals defending a superbeing. If they “are” intelligent and still do it then they are dishonest—their true aim is not to defend a god who, if he exists, does not need defending, but to line their pockets or gain personal power and influence over credulous people. In a just society, it would be a crime.

It is frankly difficult for any rational person to understand why any Christian, looking at the historical record of Christianity and Christian countries, does not believe that Christianity, far from being the expression of God’s will, is the will of the Devil. As Goethe has Mephistopheles singing in Faust:

Let men their noblest works, Reason and Science, despise.
Let them admire illusion, magic and spirits’ lies.
Too late! They’re caught in my eternal grasp.

Mankind’s predilection for deception and self-deception never seems to change. Yet how certain the deluded are.

The Message of Evolution

Some critics of creationism want to protect the religious sensibilities of evolutionists who believe in God. Why? Because these people are the largest group of supporters of scientific evolution, and are valuable opponents of creationism.

They seek a "strategy" to defuse some of the opposition to evolution, so they do not want to force believers to choose between their faith and science by maintaining that naturalism is the philosophy of science. Since most Americans are believers who want to retain their faith and, because they confuse naturalism as a “philosophy” with the naturalism of scientific “practice”, scientists have to accept that practical naturalism must be cut off from the philosophical naturalism that science gave birth to as a philosophy of existence. Americans can then accept pragmatic naturalism while rejecting philosophical naturalism and learn science and evolution while retaining their commitment to the superstitions of their religious beliefs.

Protecting the religious sensibilities of evolutionists who also believe in God is a poor reason for us to accept the supernatural, for that is what this fudge amounts to. Nor should scientists, whose objective is truth, cynically seek to use a "strategy," as if they were soldiers or politicians. If scientists think painting red crosses on houses is not going to stop the plague, they should say so. If they think it is because no gods exist, why should they adopt the strategy of saying nothing because someone else is over emotional and under reasonable about their belief in God?

These creationist appeasers accuse some writers of unnecessarily stirring up trouble by presenting their philosophical beliefs as science by encouraging their colleagues to argue that Darwinism makes religion obsolete. They insist the message of evolution is that the world and its creatures could not have been designed and have no purpose. The appeasers say science “ignores” the supernatural for practical reasons and argues that saying "there is no purpose in life" is a not scientific but a philosophical statement.

No one knows whether there is a supernatural purpose or not, but it is perfectly valid to say that science has not revealed any purpose in Nature. Supernaturalists can believe there is purpose if that is what they want but, as a matter of scientific fact, the Goddess gives no evidence of purpose. It is not "philosophy" to say there is no purpose in Nature but scientific fact.

So, to suggest that scientists engage in self-censorship to protect the religious sensibilities of certain God-fearers because they are evolution’s most numerous supporters and creationism’s greatest enemy is not right. It is unprincipled and opportunist. Adelphiasophists are principled and could not accept such fudging.

Romantics, Speak!

Chris Mordaunt, Secretary of the Bristol (UK) Council of Churches, says that some people,

…mainly romantics and environmentalists, take a pantheistic view and believe that God is either the whole of nature or is immanent in everything.

”Romantic” is one of those words that are used pejoratively—romantics are unrealistic dreamers—and by associating environmentalists with romantics, he suggests that environmentalists also are unrealistic dreamers. Note that this man doing the polite name-calling is a Christian and Christians, who believe in the heavenly Godzilla who came to earth to see what it was like being one of the creatures he had made, are not dreamers?

Mordaunt has a reason for denigrating pantheists:

If you identify God with the universe it makes it difficult to see him as its creator, or as taking much of a personal interest in us.

Here is Christian reasoning at its very purest. Decide what you believe and declare anything that does not fit in as untrue, or at least “romantic.” Of course, Chris Mordaunt is not a traditional Christian and tries to avoid the traditional Christian image of God which he characterises as an immaterial, disembodied, supernatural being—a sort of large ghost, angel or demon, a bit like us but outside our range of perception. He thinks many people find this difficult to accept, these days.

Some, atheists, among whom we count ourselves as Adelphiasophists because we do not believe in Godzilla, Mordaunt tells us, refuse to talk about God because the concept is meaningless. But we do talk about God. We try to show to the fringe of people who are not deeply indoctrinated with Christian nonsense that God is far from meaningless. The absurd idea has led people to neglect and even subject the real world for 2000 years. God does not have the meaning that Christians like to think, but it is not a meaningless concept, if it is judged on its effect rather than its content.

Mordaunt, boring us with his analogy of faith being a sea, regards us as “out of the water” like A J Ayer with his Positivism or Freud rejecting religion as a harmful projection of our neuroses. A weaker atheism paddles in the shallow water taking God to be a way of expressing our finest hopes and aspirations. This is the God of Love, or rather Love is God.

Mordaunt recognizes that for many people the Church is just a habit, or a social club. They do not have any particular beliefs about God but simply like the church. They say their beliefs are traditional but they really have none. There are even more people who do not go to church but have broadly similar views carried over from childhood indoctrination. Among thses people are many who would jump at the chance of being NeoPagan once they realised what it was all about. The indifference of Pagans to evangelism has left the field to the Christians. It is time they joined the debate publicly.

Christian Pantheism?

Christians like to have the best of all worlds. Jesus was not pantheistic. For him and Jews of his time, God lived in heaven apart from the world, and would act in the world only when he wanted. The world was imperfect because the sin of Adam had corrupted it. One day God would destroy the world and replace it with a pure one, in which righteous Jews would be resurrected and restored as rulers.

Today, Christians hold both views simultaneously. God transcends the world, existing beyond the material universe and beyond our understanding, as before, but God is also present and active in this world, dwelling in each person if they accept the grace of the Holy Spirit, but not otherwise (though he supposedly has a desire to save everyone). Christians have adopted pantheism (everything is sacred) in the form of Panentheism—God exists in all things. Formerly, such an idea would have been absurd. The thought of God, the holiest of beings, living in a corrupt world was out of the reckoning.

Christian pantheism derives from the “New Testament.” St Paul’s statement to the Athenians, “For in him we live, and move, and have our being, as certain of your own poets have said,” is pantheistic. He is quoting the Greek poet, Aratus, who was influenced by the Stoic Cleanthes, a pantheist.

For those who follow Christ, God enters their mind and body and becomes one with them. Paul uses the expression “in Christ” often, almost always meaning that Christ is in some way inside Paul or the believer, or “vice versa.”

For as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have one function, so we, though many, are one in Christ, and individually members of one another (Romans 12:5).

This is really recognizing that we are all one in Nature’s kinunity, but has to be expressed in terms of the fictional “Christ.” If Christians recognized that Christ in this sense simply means Nature, and they dwelt upon that rather more deeply than they normally dwell upon anything, then they might begin to do some real good in the world rather than for themselves and their wealthy institutions.

Christian pantheism also stems from the Holy Spirit, which, in “Acts” (2:1-3), “fills” the apostles. So, the Holy Spirit will fill all Christian believers and guide them. Since the Holy Spirit is an aspect of God, when the Holy Spirit enters each believer, then God enters. The apostle John supposedly writes:

All who keep his commandments abide in him, and he in them. And by this we know that he abides in us, by the spirit which he has given us (1 John 3:24)

Yet, both Paul and John, regard this earth and the physical body as inferior. Paul takes the idea of the body as God’s temple, just as the Essenes did—it is a suitable receptacle for the Holy Spirit only if it is holy itself through righteousness, or repentance and baptism.

Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the spirit of God dwelleth within you? If any man defile the temple of God, him shall God destroy, for the temple of God is holy, which temple ye are (1 Cor 3:16-17).

The destroyer of the temple of God is not an external attacker, but the man himself indulging in unrighteous things. For Christians, the flesh is in conflict with the spirit, and has to be mortified.

To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace… those who are in the flesh cannot please God (Romans 8:6-8).

So, natural desires, especially sexual ones, have to be suppressed to achieve righteousness and purity.

Walk by the Spirit, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the spirit, and the desires of the spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other (Gal 5:16-17).

While we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord (2 Cor 5:6).

And they that are Christ’s have crucified the flesh with its passions and lusts. (Gal 5:24).

Thus Christian panentheism is not pantheism but is intended to fool those who sensibly see nothing unduly wicked about the world itself as opposed to the intentions of some people within it. Christians have forgotten the real meaning of their religion in favour of a belief in “Buddy Jesus,” an imaginary friend who will help you out when in trouble. They have forgotten that God would not enter a defiled and polluted space and that Paul was speaking of people who were really expected to live like saints to have God enter them. Indeed, saints meant the perfectly righteious people that the first Christians, following their Essene precursors, were meant to be.

If you live according to the flesh you will die, but if by the spirit you put to death the deeds of the body you will live (Romans 8:13),

referred to eternal life and eternal death. To get eternal life, the Christian had to “put to death the deeds of the body.” This is the utter rejection of pantheism.

Honesty or Cynicism

It is manifestly unhealthy to be one kind of person in the role of believer and another in other areas of life.

John Bowden, SCM

Creationists concur that scientists must adopt “naturalism in practice”, but in logic and honesty shouldn’t they wholeheartedly adopt “naturalism in theory” as a true description of reality? Isn’t it pure cynicism to accept the lesser without the greater? Can people who believe in both science and the supernatural, hold that evolution or any statement of science is firmly established by a naturalistic method in which they don’t really believe?

Do Godfearing scientists honestly think that naturalistic methods are true when they behave as scientists but false at all other times? If so they cannot ask science to include the supernatural as some of them want, for they are denying that the supernatural affects the observable natural world, or that it only affects the immaterial part of it. In other words, God is only in the mind.

If discoveries made at the bench are not universally true, why does the world behave as if they are? If the supernatural does not impinge on science but operates only elsewhere, why does God conspire to make science seem universally true? Is science an illusion? If so, they must think that God is responsible for it. For what reason? Why does their God of creation want to fool everybody into thinking that he did not do it? Is he too modest? Or does he feel guilty?

Can Christians honestly accept a philosophy that they actually oppose, because they cannot do without it in practice—because they want to have it both ways and thereby save appearances? If scientists accept naturalism in practice, logically and morally, they ought to believe in naturalism as a theory of being. Far from being cut off from each other, the two aspects of naturalism are logically united! Christian scientists pragmatically decoupled them for cynical reasons. Anyone can believe what they like, but a credible scientist ought to be logical and consistent. A credible scientist ought to be philosophically a naturalist as well as practically. They should be philosophical naturalists by conviction. This does not mean that science entails philosophical naturalism but that once established, the scientist can no longer deny it.

They ought to believe naturalism to adopt it practically in science, but they cannot logically belief in supernaturalism at the same time unless there is no connexion between the natural and supernatural worlds. This is something no supernaturalist maintains because it would mean God’s actions could not affect our natural world. Those who believe in miracles or the dogmas of Christianity cannot logically describe Nature naturalistically when miracles can occur as supernatural violations of natural law.

Like the larger group of non-scientists who believe in both God and evolution, they assume but cannot believe practical naturalism because they are supernaturalists. This moral necessity does not faze them but it implies insincerity or want of courage, for all that. They want what, to them, is the best of both worlds. They are deceiving themselves and might wish to examine their beliefs more closely.

Or is it their God they think they are deceiving? These God-fearers always seem ready to fool their Lord by being intellectually dishonest. Isn’t God omniscient? Isn’t lying sinful? Doesn’t he know they are being dishonest? Of course he does but he loves them for it, because they do it for Him.

If Christians reject naturalism, what is their rationale for accepting the laws of thermodynamics that form a part of it? They should in reasonableness reject it all. Of the hypotheses of science that have been examined, tested, and repeatedly confirmed over several centuries of testing, the main one is naturalism itself. It is ironic that supernaturalists feel that naturalism should only be temporarily adopted in its practical form, when it is now at least as reliable as everything else in science.

Skeptical Resources—Internet infidels | Jesus Never Existed | Steven Carr’s Website | Christianism | Early Christian Writings | God is Imaginary | “Religion Detoxification” | Our Judaio-Christian Heritage | Archaeoastronomy | No Deity | No Beliefs | Evil Bible | Bible God | ex-Christians | Jesus Police | Islamic Faith Freedom | Atheist Experience | American Atheists | Jovial Atheist | Askwhy! books
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