Category: Science and Religion

I like Richard Dawkins and think he has some great things to say. He challenges faith, and in my book that’s a healthy thing to do.

But here’s a Richard Dawkins joke I heard and I wanted to share it with you:

Richard Dawkins was having an argument with God, and said: “With the state of knowledge today, I can make man from dust too.”

“OK,” said God, “go ahead.”

So Dawkins starts.

God then says: “No, no, you don’t understand. Go get your own dust.”

🙂

From the “Report on the Perversion of Science to Support Mysticism” by Conrad Askland.

I have been taught that there are masters walking the earth that make tables of food appear before them. I have been taught that Sai Baba manifests Holy Ash and rings.

When I ask for proof of this I am told the Masters will not tempt God. When Jesus was in the desert the devil asked him to turn a rock into a loaf of bread, Jesus said, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone.’” Also alternatively, and incorrectly, I am quoted the same passage as Jesus saying “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.”

But then why manifest at all? Why manifest trinkets and rings. Why not manifest the cure for cancer? That would make more sense to me. The act of manifesting a ring with someone’s name on it is an old parlour trick using “palming”, a favorite vehicle of magicians and illusionists.

Every fraud seems to have one incident they can refer to where they have been scientifically observed and therefore proved to be real in their manifestation. But they won’t do it again, and there always seems to be questionable approaches to the observation.

Why won’t any of these people go on 60 Minutes to be observed and reported on? And if then they are still called a fake, why won’t they do it again? I would. That is, I would if I had a real divine message to deliver AND I wasn’t faking my manifestations.

But I guess I’m not a believer so the whole world of divining spirit is closed to me as punishment for my lack of belief. Interesting. God gave me a brain so I would imagine I’m supposed to use it to the best of my ability.

Can we manifest joy in our lives? Absolutely. Can we manifest pain? Sure. Can we manifest hate, beauty, intellectual capacity, the ability to serve, forms of healing, enlightenment. YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! And any of those can be easily documented. I would imagine there are very few
of us, if any, that have not experienced a part of this in our lives.

So if Sai Baba’s palming technique for manifesting cow dung has been exposed, how does knowledge of that fact diminish my spiritual capacity? How does it limit my ability to manifest peace in my corner of the world? It doesn’t. This knowledge actually empowers me to not waste my precious time trying to replicate lies.

Perspectives On Medical Research
Volume 2, 1990

Baby Fae: The Unlearned Lesson

Kenneth P. Stoller, MD.

On October 26, 1984, Dr. Leonard L Bailey placed the heart of a baboon into the chest of Baby Fae, an infant born with a severe heart defect known as left hypoplastic heart. Baby Fae seemed to do well for a few days; then her body mounted a massive immunological attack on the foreign tissue and rejected the graft. Baby Fae’s death came as no surprise to scientists and physicians familiar with the human immune system and with the scientific realities that preclude successful cross-species transplants.

Before the Baby Fae incident, Bailey, a surgeon at Loma Linda University Medical Center, spent almost a decade vainly pursuing research grants. His work in xenografts, largely unknown and unrcviewed by other professionals, had not appeared in journals and was funded by Bailey himself and his colleagues.1,2 During the seven years preceding the Baby Fae baboon transplant, he performed some 160 cross-species transplants, mostly on sheep and goats, none of whom survived more than 6 months. Although warned by a colleague at a medical conference that his research was too incomplete to risk using human subjects,3 Bailey went ahead.

Baby Fae was not the first human to receive a primate xenograft. In a review of xenografts,4 the Council of Scientific Affairs of the American Medical Association noted a rapid rejection of all baboon transplants to humans. Nevertheless, Bailey claimed that the problems of rejection could be overcome by the “immature” state of an infant’s immune system. After the operation, immunologists from around the world pointed out that the part of the immune system that rejects unmatched transplants is fully mature at birth, Furthermore, there is no way to match baboon hearts to human recipients, because baboons have no antigens in common with human tissue.5 Bailey has always maintained that Baby Fae’s death was unrelated to the species of the organ “donor.” An editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association called Bailey’s claim “wishful thinking.”5

Bailey’s use of baboons was somewhat surprising, given their relatively distant evolutionary relationship to humans compared to other primates. The reason came to light when the Times of London published an interview between Bailey and an Australian radio crew. The reporters had been forbidden to ask direct questions about the operation, so they queried Bailey on the issue of why he had chosen a baboon in view of the baboon’s evolutionary distance from humans. Bailey replied, “Er, I find that difficult to answer. You see, I don’t believe in evolution.”6 It is shocking that Bailey ignored basic biological concepts in formulating a life-threatening human experiment.

Often, ambitious surgeons wish to perform new, perhaps dangerous, experimental operations. In an effort to safeguard patients, institutional review boards must first give permission for any human experiment. In an unconscionable lapse of ethics, the review board of Loma Linda Medical Center failed to live up to its obligations — they gave Bailey permission for five baboon-to-human transplant experiments, having no reports documenting that even heart allotransplantation in infancy is successful.5 Furthermore, highly experimental procedures on children, such as a xenograft, require special permission from the Secretary of Health and Human Services.7

In addition to these institutional and federal safeguards that should have protected Baby Fae, California’s Protection of Human Subjects in Medical Experimentation Act (PHSMEA) requires that if informed consent is given in behalf of another person, the experimental procedure must meet certain criteria. California’s Health and Safety Code ~24175, subsection (e) states, “Informed consent given by a person other than the human subject shall only be for medical experiments related to maintaining or improving the health of the human subject or related to obtaining information about a pathological condition of the human subject.”

Because Bailey did not look for a human heart donor and did not refer Baby Fae elsewhere for attempted surgical repair, the highly experimental transplant was both unethical and unlawful. Dr. William Norwood at the Children’s Hospital in Boston has been repairing left hypoplastic hearts since 1979. The survival rate of the Norwood procedure is now as high as 75 percent Nevertheless, Baby Fae’s consent form read, “Temporizing operation to extend the lives of babies like yours by a few months have generally been unsuccessful. We believe heart transplantation may offer hope of life for your baby. Laboratory research at Loma Linda University over the past seven years, including over 150 heart transplants in newborn animals, suggest that long term survival with appropriate growth and development may be possible following heart transplantation during the first week of life.”

Following considerable controversy over the Baby Fae transplant, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) appointed a special committee charged with reviewing the procedures used by the university to assure that Baby Fae’s relatives gave proper informed consent. The committee did not deal with the scientific basis for transplanting a baboon heart into a human. The committee found several weaknesses in the consent procedure. Specifically, the committee concluded that possibility of “long term survival” had been overstated and the protocol did not include searching for or transplanting a human heart. The committee’s report did not address why Loma Linda had not sought permission for this unprecedented experiment from the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Furthermore, it did not address the California law that should have prevented the experiment. (Perhaps the NIH committee was unaware of PHSMEA.)

Why hasn’t Bailey been prosecuted? The San Bernandino District Attorney’s office has officially stated that there are insufficient facts to support a felony prosecution. Unofficially, I was told that the highly technical nature of the case would likely overwhelm the court with conflicting medical opinions and therefore make a conviction unlikely. Furthermore, Bailey is considered a local hero. The office of the California State Attorney General, John K. Van de Kamp, has also maintained that Sufficient facts are available to establish that a crime occurred.

The facts, however, suggest that Baby Fae was sacrificed to Leonard Bailey’s career. Given the state of current medical knowledge, there was no doubt that Baby Fae would reject the baboon heart. Rules and laws designed to protect her were violated by those entrusted to uphold them. Professional ethics were considered to be of less importance than widespread publicity. The institutional review boards and law enforcement agencies responsible for protecting human subjects have virtually no accountability to the public, much less to the experimental subjects themselves.

References

1. Anon: Next please. PCRM Update, July-August, 1985.

2. Roe BR, Glaser RH: The lessons of the Baby Fae Case (letter). The Wall Street Journal Dec 24, 1984.

3. Mathews J: Colleague warned doctor before Baby Fae implant. Washington Post, 1984.

4. American Medical Association Council on Scientific Affairs: Xenografts: Review of the literature and curreut status. JAMA l985;254:3353-3357,

5. Jonasson O, Hardy MA: The case of Baby Fae (letter). JAMA 1985;254:3358-3359.

6. Gould SJ: The heart of erminology What has an abstruse debate over evolutionary logic got to do with Baby Fat? Natural History 1988;97:24.

7. Department of Health and Human Services: Final regulations amending basic HIHS policy for the protection of human research subject. Federal Register 1981;465:8366-8392.

From Michael Shermer’s “Why People Believe Weird Things”.

Five Pre-Points
1. They concentrate on their opponents’ weak points, while rarely saying anything definitive about their own position.
2. They exploit errors made by scholars who are making opposing arguments, implying that because a few of their opponents’ conclusions were wrong, all of their opponents’ conclusions must be wrong.
3. They use quotations, usually taken out of context to buttress their own position.
4. They mistake genuine, honest debates between scholars about certain points within a field for a dispute about the existence of the entire field.
5. They focus on what is not known and ignore what is known, emphasize data that fit and discount data that do not fit.

25 Reasons People Believe Weird Things

(1) Theory influences observation. Heisenberg wrote, “What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Our perception of reality is influenced by the theories framing our examination of it.

(2) The observer changes the observed. The act of studying an event can change it, an effect particularly profound in the social sciences, which is why psychologists use blind and double-blind controls.

(3) Equipment constructs results. How we make and understand measurements is highly influenced by the equipment we use.

(4) Anecdotes do not make science. Stories recounted in support of a claim are not scientific without corroborative evidence from other sources or physical proof of some sort.

(5) Scientific language does not make a science. Dressing up a belief in jargon, often with no precise or operational definitions, means nothing without evidence, experimental testing, and corroboration.

(6) Bold statements do not make claims true. The more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinarily well-tested the evidence must be.

(7) Heresy does not equal correctness. Being laughed at by the mainstream does not mean one is right. The scientific community cannot be expected to test every fantastic claim that comes along, especially when so many are logically inconsistent. If you want to do science, you have to learn to play the game of science. This involves exchanging data and ideas with colleagues informally, and formally presenting results in conference papers, peer-reviewed journals, books, and the like.

(8.) Burden of proof. It is the person who makes the extraordinary claim who has the burden of proving the validity of the evidence.

(9) Rumors do not equal reality. Repeated tales are not of necessity true.

(10) Unexplained is not inexplicable. Many people think that if they themselves cannot explain something that it must be inexplicable and therefore a true mystery of the paranormal.

(11) Failures are rationalized. In science, the value of negative findings is high, and honest scientists will readily admit their mistakes. Pseudoscientists ignore or rationalize failures.

(12) After-the-fact reasoning. Also known as “post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” literally “after this, therefore because of this.” At its basest level, this is a form of superstition. As Hume taught us, the fact that two events follow each other in sequence does not mean they are connected causally. Correlation does not mean causation.

(13) Coincidence. In the paranormal world, coincidences are often seen as deeply significant. As the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present.

(14) Representiveness. As Aristotle said, “The sum of the coincidences equals certainty.” We forget most of the insignificant coincidences and remember the meaningful ones. We must always remember the larger context in which a seemingly unusual event occurs, and we must always analyze unusual events for their representiveness of their class of phenomena.

(15) Emotive words and false analogies. Emotive words are used to provoke emotion and sometimes to obscure rationality. Likewise, metaphors and analogies can cloud thinking with emotion and steer us onto a side path. Like anecdotes, analogies and metaphors do not constitute proof. They are merely tools of rhetoric.

(16) Ad ignoratum. This is an appeal to ignorance or lack of knowledge, where someone claims that if you cannot disprove a claim it must be true. In science, belief should come from positive evidence, not a lack of evidence for or against a claim.

(17) Ad hominem and tu quoque. Literally “to the man” and “you also,” these fallacies redirect the focus from thinking about the idea to thinking about the person holding the idea. The goal of an ad hominem attack is to discredit the claimant in hopes that it will discredit the claim. Similarly for tu quoque. As a defense, the critic is accused of making the same mistakes attributed to the criticized, and nothing is proved one way or the other.

(18.) Hasty generalization. In logic, the hasty generalization is a form of improper induction. In life it is called prejudice. In either case, conclusions are drawn before the facts warrant it.

(19) Overreliance on authorities. We tend to rely heavily on authorities in our culture, especially if the authority is considered to be highly intelligent. Authorities, by virtue of their expertise in a field, may have a better chance of being right in that field, but correctness is certainly not guaranteed, and their expertise does not necessarily qualify them to draw conclusions in other areas.

(20) Either-or. Also known as the fallacy of negation or the false dilemma, this is the tendency to dichotomize the world so that if you discredit one position, the observed is forced to accept the other. A new theory needs evidence in favor of it, not just against the opposition.

(21) Circular reasoning. Also known as fallacy of redundancy, begging the question, or tautology, this occurs when the conclusion or claim is merely a restatement of one of the premises.

(22) Reductio ad absurdum and the slippery slope. Reductio ad absurdum is the refutation of an argument by carrying the argument to its logical end and so reducing it to an absurd conclusion. Surely, if an argument’s consequences are absurd, it must be false. This is not necessarily so, though sometimes pushing an argument to its limits is a useful exercise in critical thinking; often this is a way to discover whether a claim has validity, especially when an experiment testing the actual reduction can be run. Similarly, the slippery slope fallacy involves constructing a scenario in which one thing leads ultimately to an end so extreme that the first step should never be taken.

(23) Effort inadequacies and the need for certainty, control, and simplicity. Most of us, most of the time, want certainty, want to control our environment, and want nice, neat, simple explanations. Scientific and critical thinking does not come naturally. it takes training, experience, and effort. We must always work to suppress our need to be absolutely certain and in total control ands our tendency to seek the simple and effortless solution to a problem.

(24) Problem-solving inadequacies. All critical and scientific thinking is, in a fashion, problem solving. There are numerous psychological disruptions that cause inadequacies in problem solving. We must all make the effort to overcome them.

(25) Ideological immunity, or the Planck Problem. In day-to-day life, as in science, we all resist fundamental paradigm change. Social scientist Jay Stuart Snelson calls this resistance an ideological immune system: “educated, intelligent, and successful adults rarely change their most fundamental presuppositions.” As individuals accumulate more knowledge, theories become more well-founded, and confidence in ideologies is strengthened. The consequence of this, however, is that we build up an “immunity” against new ideas that do not corroborate previous ones. Historians of science call this the Planck Problem, after physicist Max Planck, who made this observation on what must happen for innovation to occur in science: “An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning.”