Category: woo

What has Deepak Chopra been up to?

April 1, 2023 • 11:45 am

I know everyone’s been asking, “Where has Deepak Chopra gone?”  I haven’t seen any shenanigans from him in a while—at least not since he was deplatformed by the College of Emergency Physicians 2½ years ago, with the group realizing too late that they’d invited a Woomeister to give a keynote speech. (They disinvited him.) But reader Pyers (and some others) called my attention to this piece in the Times of London updating us on Deepakity.

Pyers couldn’t resist adding this acerbic remark: “I had hope that the man had disappeared up his own woo-full fundament but no, like the proverbial bad penny, he is back plugging a new book.”

If you click on the link below, you’ll probably find the article paywalled, but a reader found it archived here, and so you can read five pages of rather anodyne interviews with Deepakity. Surprisingly, it describes one decent thing he did, and for which he does deserve credit, but the rest is his usual palaver, including bringing up epigenetics, quantum woo, and making an unconscionable dig at Richard Dawkins.

I’ll mostly give indented quotes from the article. One thing I deplore is Chopra’s repeated claims that, after he’d been emphasizing it for years, science and medicine now recognize that he was right: there’s a mind-body connection—what you are thinking and how you’re behaving affects the health of your body. I am sad to report that we’ve known that for years, from other data, but of course Deepakity takes credit for it.

Some quotes from the article/interview:

His latest and 93rd book, Living in the Light, is about the deeper philosophy behind yoga, and feels of a piece with someone who has guest-appeared on Meghan Markle’s podcast. But his last book was on brain health, co-authored with a professor of neurology from Harvard. While he was accused by some of pseudo-science for a book entitled Quantum Healing, it is also true that research has recently come to support parts of his thinking about the mind-body connection in disease. The medical establishment and he once abandoned each other; now he is a part-time professor at the medical school at the University of California, San Diego. Deepak’s back, and in conversation he doesn’t soften previous claims but doubles down.

“Every experience epigenetically modifies your body’s metabolism, second by second,” he says at one point in defence of his “quantum healing” theory. “And I don’t care what mainstream medicine thinks about that, they’re wrong.”

That last paragraph, about every experience you have epigenetically modifying your body’s metabolism, must make the claim that each experience changes the nucleotides in your DNA, and that change (which has nothing to do with quantum theory) changes your metabolism. That’s bullpucky, of course, and it’s Deepak who’s wrong, not “mainstream medicine,” It is simply dead, flat WRONG that every experience you have epigenetically modifies your DNA and hence your metabolism. It may modify the neurons in your brain, but that’s just called “experience” or “learning” and has nothing to do with epigenetics.

However, Chopra appears to have done at lease one good thing, and should be lauded for it: publicizing a documentary about Tibet, a country that’s fallen on hard times:

His flying visit to London is a favour to lend his starpower to the cause of Tibet: on Wednesday he introduced the premiere of the new documentary Never Forget Tibet: The Dalai Lama’s Untold Story. Chopra first met the Dalai Lama when he appeared at the Royal Albert Hall in London more than 30 years ago. Are they private friends? “He’s too much of a transpersonal identity to have a private relationship. But he makes you feel that way.” Watching the documentary about the Dalai Lama’s dramatic escape from Chinese imprisonment in Tibet in 1959 now feels like a very relevant cautionary tale.

“It could happen in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Ukraine. What’s happening in India and Pakistan isn’t comfortable either, if you look at the news right now.”

Here’s Deepak promoting the film a year ago. He seems to have lost a lot of weight but still has his diamond-studded spectacles:

Chopra talks about nearing the end of his life (he’s 76 so he’s got some years to go if he’s healthy, which he says he is):

According to some ancient Indian teaching, he says, the first quarter of life is for education, the next “for family, fame, fortune all of that”, the third “you give back”. And the last, “you realise it’s all been a dream and you prepare for death. At that stage you don’t care what people think of you.”

“I’m in my fourth stage. I turned 76 last year. I’m physically very healthy. But I spend at least two, three hours a day or sometimes more in meditation, yoga practice and looking at my final chapters.”

Then he touts his prescience once again, claiming credit for something known long before his time:

“My training is in neuroendocrinology. I was looking at the ‘molecules of emotion’…serotonin, opiates, oxytocin, dopamine. And there are many others.

And they all happen to be immunomodulators. So if you have anger . . . or anxiety, all that leads to a depressed immune system.”

“I’ve been talking about this for 40 years. When I started, I was vilified. Now what we were saying in the 70s is part of medical school training. There are literally thousands of articles in peer-reviewed journals. I have a faculty position at the University of San Diego Medical School . . . And there’s a waiting list for people to take training in integrative medicine.”

If that sounds defensive to you, I don’t think you’re far wrong.

But of course Chopra’s given tons of bogus medical advice, and has been vilified for that, too. This includes his bizarre speculations about epigenetics and his constant emphasis on quantum mechanics, which he now says is “only a metaphor” (but for what?). The quantum stuff, however, was only there to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing regimen. It was amply on display in the book discussed below, which I think I went after at the time, as did others:

Millions buy into his message but some scientists remain sceptical. One scientific study used words randomly harvested from Chopra’s Twitter feed (three million followers), re-ordered by an algorithm to create a test for people’s tolerance for “pseudo-profound bullshit”.

. . . Did his book Quantum Healing (1989) get him in a little trouble?

“Not a little, a lot of trouble. I had to actually leave Boston [where he had been working at a hospital] because I thought my colleagues were going to fire me.”

However, he says his friend, Rudolph Tanzi, Harvard professor of neurology, persuaded Chopra to reissue the book in 2015 with Tanzi writing a foreword.

“That book has been a perennial bestseller. And I’m now doing a book with a physicist [Jack Tuszynski at the University of Alberta] called Quantum Body. Because I’m 100 per cent sure now that your body at a very fundamental level operates as a quantum mechanical object.”

The article repeats some criticism, which Deepak ignores, but there are some smart people who go after him:

Some physicists argue that Chopra misconstrues quantum theory. Cox said on Twitter of a challenge Chopra offered his critics: “I claim your million dollars Deepak Chopra, for showing that your understanding of quantum theory is flawed. Is there a form to fill in?”.

Dawkins has repeatedly tried to pin Chopra down, including during an interview in Dawkins’s 2007 television series Enemies of Reason, in which when pressed Chopra says his use of “quantum” is “just a metaphor”. Chopra says to me that he means “quantum theory” in a scientific and not just symbolic way, pointing to YouTube conversations with physicists in his support.

That, then, is some equivocation about quantum woo. But the fact is that nothing that Chopra has to say about quantum mechanics is worth hearing.

Then he can’t resist an uncivil slam at Richard Dawkins:

Later Chopra returns to this point. “The very critics that have been so hostile, including the luminary from England, Richard Dawkins. They’re inflamed. Look at their bodies. They have strokes.”

I pause at this mention of Dawkins’s minor stroke in 2016, then reply: “Your revenge is living well.”

“No, it’s not revenge, it’s just validation. But even that’s not important. Things evolve, as I said, it takes one generation or two for things to shift.”

So first he implies that Richard had a stroke because he’s inflamed, probably because he ignored Chopra’s advice and was “hostile.” The stroke, it’s implied, is “validation”—validation for not only criticizing Chopra’s advice, but not taking it themselves.  But which other critics besides Richard have been inflamed and had strokes?  I find this attempt to justify his woo by pointing to Richard’s stroke (from which he’s clearly recovered almost 100%) an odious act.

I’m not jealous of Chopra or the $180 million fortune the article says he’s accumulated. In fact, I despise him for fleecing the gullible by peddling pseudoscience. I’d rather be right than rich.

NYT op-ed touts the power of dreams to help you make decisions

March 27, 2023 • 9:20 am

The link to this NYT came from reader Mike, who said, “I guess I won’t be the only subscriber sending you this article. [He was.] Serious Deepak Chopra vibes. I think it’s arguably worse than the Tish Harrison Warren opinion pieces because those are obviously religious. This one is stealthily religious, and comes with a “I’m a practical salt-of-the-earth science person” disclaimer. Disingenuous at best.”

Well, the piece does tout the useful power of woo, or rather of dreams, but I have to feel sorry for the author. Farris was diagnosed with breast cancer that had spread to the lymph nodes, and had radiation and a single mastectomy. Now she says she’s “NED” (“no evident disease”), but the waiting and waiting in cases like this must be awful, and could last a lifetime. Plus her radiation treatments apparently brought on heart disease, so she’s had a rough time. I want to avoid criticizing her, but do want to take issue with her view that her dreams were useful aids to making medical decisions.

Farris describes how she was was guided by her dreams when facing treatment options that, according to the doctors, were about equally efficacious. Because she’s still alive, she gives credit to her dreams as factors that helped her survive. That is the “woo” bit, and I don’t think the NYT should give people the idea that their medical decisions should be guided by their dreams—especially because dreams are often either bizarre or ambiguous.

Click to read:

Throughout her cancer treatment (including its first detection, revealed in a dream about two helicopters crashing on a highway), Farris responded to what she saw was the message of her dreams.  Here’s the way she decided to get chemotherapy when it was a judgement call:

Because my cancer is hard to see, often invisible on scans, the doctor told me it was likely to be even more advanced than my other doctors thought, but we wouldn’t be sure until after my surgery. “There are nearly equally good arguments for and against doing chemo,” he said. “What do you want?”

That night I had a dream of soaring above a garden full of light. I woke laughing with delight, but then my laughter turned ironic — who has ecstasy dreams about chemo? Still, I took what felt to me to be the dream’s advice. I started chemotherapy.

Note that there’s no clear message in this dream—a clue to what was might really have been going on (see below).

When faced with the option of having a single or double mastectomy, she opted for the single based on this dream:

This appointment was about my “choice” between a single and a double mastectomy, and between reconstruction and no reconstruction. Double mastectomy, she said, would mean a much lower chance of developing a new breast cancer.

But not zero. “My sibling had a double mastectomy and then had a recurrence,” I told her, “and since the doctors don’t regularly scan double mastectomies, the recurrence was nearly missed.”

She made a quietly compassionate face. I’ve learned to pay attention to doctors’ silences. However, I’d already made my choice, based on the first dream I’d had in months.

In my apartment, flames were creeping up the blinds and down the back of the couch. I had two jugs in my hands, though only one was full of water, which I threw on the fire. I went to refill both jugs, but when I returned, the fire was already out. And so, with some relief and a laugh at the strange ways dreams communicate, I decided on a single mastectomy. One jug was enough. I didn’t tell my doctor about the dream, but I did tell her about my decision.

When doctors found a suspicious sign later on, she was faced with the decision of whether to opt for more radiation. She did, based on a dream:

That weekend, while I struggled, I had my last and strangest breast cancer dream. I saw nothing, as if I was in a dark room. A man’s voice, inflectionless, American-sounding, said, “You must continue with radiation.” It was as if my subconscious was drained of all the symbols, the stories, the irrational desires and impossibilities. The only straightforward dream of my life.

I did the extra radiation.

At the end of the piece, Farris weighs science (which offered no clear-cut choice in her treatments) versus her dreams, and more or less sees them as coequal:

It doesn’t matter whether you “believe” in science — the earth is still round. But we are creatures who need something to believe in — stories and symbols to make meaning from a chaotic universe. Are dreams the flotsam of our waking lives, washed up on the shores of consciousness? Or are dreams, like pain, meaningful messages from our bodies?

Imagine my open, uncertain, freckled hands. There’s no conclusive evidence supporting either hypothesis. But when I felt betrayed by my own body, dreams gave me a feeling of meaningful connection to, and faith in, myself. I’m as grateful for that connection as I am for highly advanced medicines, and for the doctors who spend every day reckoning with the mystery that is cancer.

Well, I’m not sure I’d choose dreams or something numinous to believe in. Neither did Christopher Hitchens when he got throat cancer. As he wrote in his book Mortality,

“To the dumb question “Why me?” the cosmos barely bothers to return the reply: why not?”

His answer was that cancers happen, and he happened to be an unlucky victim. Yes, he had hope, but I don’t see that as “something to believe in” or a “symbol to make meaning from a chaotic universe.”  The idea that you need to confect something numinous or metaphysical to guide you is one that Farris made, but I can’t help but think that the NYT is somehow printing this article to tout the effectiveness of the spiritual—something it does quite a bit.

Now I wouldn’t tell Farris that I think her explanation was bunk. But I want to advance an alternative explanation for Farris’s using dreams as guidance for her treatment—one that doesn’t depend on thinking that dreams are somehow prescient or useful. You might have thought of this explanation as you read her piece. And it’s this: while she was sleeping, and perhaps dreaming as well, her mind kept turning over her alternatives and working away on making a decision, even if she wasn’t conscious of it.

We’ve all had the experience when we’ve forgotten something like a name, and, after trying to remember it, you just give up.  Then, suddenly, hours later, the name pops into your mind. What that says to me is that though you were not consciously trying to remember it in the interim, the neurons in your brain kept working away on the problem. 

That working may or may not be reflected in the contents of your dreams, since we don’t know how dreams work, but what is making the decision is the program in your brain. You wake up and that program has spit out a decision: get the radiation. Or have a single mastectomy.  Your choice may have had nothing to do with the dream, or it may have been reflected in the dream. For all we know, the dream content may be correlated with your unconscious musing, or it may not (some of her dreams weren’t obviously connected to her medical decisions). The dream, then, might be the correlate of a decision made without conscious reflection, not the “thing” that arose to help you make the decision.

Thus, I think Farris’s alternative takes on dreams, below, is insufficient.

Are dreams the flotsam of our waking lives, washed up on the shores of consciousness? Or are dreams, like pain, meaningful messages from our bodies?

Rather, the answer may be “neither.” The content of dreams often reflects what’s going on in our lives, but rather than see them as “meaningful messages from our bodies,” I’d say that Farris’s decisions were based on unconscious reflections in her brain. This, I think, is a more sensible interpretation of what she experienced than her thinking, as she seems to do, that dreams were interacting with the doctors’ indecisions to help her settle on a course of treatment. And of course, despite the title of her headline, there’s no guarantee that the dreams gave her the best advice—advice better than the doctors could give.  In other words, it’s not the dreams telling her anything, but her brain producing the dreams as a byproduct of its unconscious work.

The New York Times touts religious miracles as proof of God

December 26, 2022 • 12:00 pm

UPDATE:  Here’s what my primary-care physician, Dr. Alex Lickerman, says about the diagnosis of “glioma” below:

Glioma is a broad term used to delineate all types of primary brain tumors. The prognosis varies tremendously from type to type, with glioblastoma multiforme being the worst. You need a biopsy to determine which kind it is. Not being a radiologist, I don’t know how confident you can be in diagnosing tumor type purely on the basis of an MRI. If he truly does have only scar left, that suggests the original lesion was more inflammatory than anything. Again, without a biopsy, who the hell knows what this really was?

The New York Times applies stringent reportorial scrutiny to many claims: the value of vaccinations and mask mandates, the bogus argument that there’s no anthropogenic climate change, and so on, but there’s one thing it rarely scrutinizes—or at least applies a minimal level of scrutiny: the truth claims of religions. (As a matter of fact, the NYT loves all kinds of woo—especially channelers and dowsers.)

In a big “guest essay” by historian Molly Worthen, a piece which must have passed the editors, the paper claims to document lots of medical miracles as evidence for God. Against this hokum, she offers only one real skeptic, Michael Shermer, to contest miracle claims. Now I don’t know if Worthen, who writes a lot for the paper, is herself religious, but for all the passes she gives faith in this article, she might as well be.

It’s a very long “guest essay”, but I want to quote bits that support the view that there are real miracles of a religious nature, as well as the much smaller bits that question this.

Click below to read, or find it archived.

Worthen’s title question mentions two important issues. First is that of “proof”, which is really irrelevant to a scientist since we don’t think of empirical “proof” of God—or of anything.  We speak of the strength of evidence, which, to me, is strong for the formula of a water molecule having two hydrogens and one oxygen, and far, far weaker for an omniscient and omnipotent being who cares for each one of us.

Nevertheless, we can in principle get empirical evidence for gods. In Faith Versus Fact (pp. 118-119), I consider (as did Darwin and Carl Sagan before me) what evidence would convince me that there was a God. Indeed, I lay out a scenario that would convince me that this God would be the God of Christianity, i.e., the father of/part of Jesus.  Now this would be “provisional” convincing, for “absolute proof” is beyond the realm of science. But it would make me a believer.  The scenario involves restoring the limbs of amputees and so on, and of course we don’t see that (see below).

Second, the question remains that if there are inexplicable cures, Worthen wants proof that those cures were effected by God. I presume she doesn’t mean Vishnu or John Frum, as she mentions only Abrahamic conceptions of God.  There are of course medical remissions for which doctors have no clear explanation, but that still leaves us with either a naturalistic explanation we don’t understand, or God. Given the absence of evidence for God (see below again), and the prevalance of evidence that things once imputed to God (lightning, disease, evolution, etc. ) are now understood as naturalistic, I think the priors rest with naturalism.

On to the article. The centerpiece is the personal testimony of Josh Brown, director of neuroscience at Indiana University, and of his wife Candy, regarding Josh’s miracle “cure” of glioma, a form of brain cancer. It turns out, of course, that although the disease is almost invariably fatal, Brown got no official diagnosis or biopsy of glioma. (I should mention that the Browns are Christians.) Here is their story recounted by Worthen:

Candy Brown was nine months pregnant when her husband had a seizure in the middle of the night. “I went to bed, and when I woke up the next morning, I was in an ambulance,” he said. Two and a half weeks later, newborn in tow, they got his diagnosis: an apparent brain tumor called a glioma. (He provided The New York Times with medical records to support this account.) He was 30 years old. “Chemo, radiation and surgery don’t statistically prolong the life span with what I had. There was nothing to do but get ready to die, basically.” Doctors prescribed no treatment other than anticonvulsant medication to manage symptoms.

The Browns grew up in Christian families but not the sort that expected God to intervene ostentatiously in modern life. Still, he was desperate. He started traveling the country seeking out Christian healing revivals, dragging along his wife and baby daughter. “I needed to find out what was going on,” he said. “If there was any reality to it, I wanted a miracle.”

Candy Brown recalled more disturbing details: the morning after her husband’s diagnosis, they began to pray together, but mentioning the name of Jesus seemed to trigger a frightening physical response. “Josh shoots out of bed, starts turning somersaults,” she said. “I’d say, try worshiping Jesus, and he couldn’t say the name Jesus. I was thinking of the herd of pigs,” she said, recalling the unlucky swine run off a cliff by demon possession in the Gospels. “He was hoarse and exhausted. For that 45 minutes, there was such a palpably evil presence in that room that hated the name of Jesus. If I ever had doubted whether Jesus was real, I couldn’t now.”

Well, there’s your proof: not only God, but demons!  I’m amazed he didn’t vomit pea soup. But Josh got better!

Josh Brown began traveling with healing missionaries. He told me he saw things he couldn’t explain — like a blind man on a street in Cuba who appeared to instantly regain his sight after missionaries prayed for him. Months later, after many sessions of prayer for healing and deliverance, an M.R.I. revealed that his tumor had turned into scar tissue.

He quickly volunteered to me that he never had a biopsy, but doctors often diagnose this type of tumor on the basis of M.R.I.s and the patient’s symptoms. “One way or another, the tumor went away,” he said. “I’ve been symptom-free for 19 years. The doctors said very little.” The Browns felt grateful — and perplexed. “At that point I wondered why, when I had seen so many things that seemed miraculous and difficult to explain, why was there so little careful investigation of these things?” he said.

I’ve asked my doctor to assess this claim about glioma, so either return in a few hours or check the comments.

Convinced that God and Jesus had healed him against the power of Satan, Josh got a Templeton Grant (of course) to travel the world “investigating healing claims” (he found many, of course), and he later founded the Global Medicine Research Institute, which publishes studies of cures for which there’s supposedly no naturalistic explanation.

Below I’ll show some of Worthen’s piece suggesting (with a few caveats that Worthen quickly knocks down) that miracles are real, God-given events. First, the events witnessed, with a bit of a caveat:

In 2009, on a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the Browns flew to Mozambique to investigate the healing claims of Global Awakening and Iris Global, two ministries focused on healing and revival. They brought audiometry equipment and eye charts to test people who requested prayer for deafness and blindness. The sample size was small — they tested 24 people — but they found statistically significant improvement beyond placebo effects and hypnosis.

“I was standing right there next to this woman who could not tell how many fingers were held up when you were a foot in front of her,” Candy Brown told me. “Then five minutes later, she’s reading an eye chart with a smile on her face.” She and her colleagues published the results in The Southern Medical Journal — not a prestigious publication but a respectable one with peer review — and she drew on the research for her 2012 book, “Testing Prayer.”

This is the kind of stuff that healing evangelists do all the time in the U.S., and of course it’s hokum.

Skeptics complained about the Browns’ methods and field conditions. They pointed out that the hearing tests were in a noisy setting, there was no control group and test subjects would naturally want to please those who prayed for them by showing results. “That simple trick explains why both hearing and sight appears to have dramatically improved among these poor, superstitious villagers,” one critic declared. (The study explained in detail how the researchers did their best to weed out false data.)

If you want to evaluate people’s experiences at a revival in rural Africa, you probably need to give up on double-blind studies in a perfectly controlled environment. But let’s imagine for a moment that researchers could meet such standards (and that an all-powerful deity humors us and submits to this scrutiny). They might persuade skeptics that something strange happened. But is there any evidence that would persuade a nonbeliever that God was behind it — that we do not live in a closed system in which all causation is a matter of natural laws?

And indeed there is such evidence! Medical histories! (My bolding):

Christians have sought to scientifically evaluate miracle claims at least since the 16th century, when the Council of Trent tightened up the verification process for canonizing saints. But the Christian God does not work in randomized, repeatable trials. He works in history. So maybe medical histories are a more appropriate approach. “Medical case reports rely on a different epistemology, which is more of a historical epistemology,” Josh Brown said. “It’s not something you can necessarily recreate, whatever the time course of a disease.”

In 2011 the Browns helped found the Global Medical Research Institute, which publishes case studies on the small number of inexplicable events that its staff members can scrupulously document — like a blind woman who, while praying one night with her husband, regained her sight and a teenage boy who depended on a feeding tube until his stomach suddenly healed itself during an encounter with a Pentecostal minister. “When we write these case reports, we’re not claiming these must have been a miracle of God, but these are the facts of the case,” Josh Brown told me.

The fact that you can’t use random repeatable trials to test God’s healing power is flat wrong. Of course you can, and it has been done—in another study, funded by Templeton, on the power of intercessory prayer in aiding recovery from heart surgery. Unfortunately, prayer didn’t work; in fact, those prayed for were marginally worse off than those who were not. No, medical histories themselves, unless the condition is NEVER known to show spontaneous remission, like amputated limbs, are insufficient. There are certainly ways to test religious healing, just as there are way to test antibiotics and other forms of naturalistic healing.

Next Worthen uses the large number of miracle-healing claims as evidence that it works (all bolding henceforth is mine):

But the Browns’ experiences and research — not to mention the abundance of healing testimony from other witnesses, especially outside the West — deserve serious consideration. Watertight proof of divine causation may be an impossible goal, but the search for it forces us to confront the assumptions that prop up our own worldviews — whether one is a devout believer or a committed skeptic.

. . .The Browns’ experiences are striking because they operate in one of the most antisupernaturalist subcultures in the modern world: secular academia. But in a global context — and we are in the midst of a worldwide Christian revival — stories of unexplained healing in response to prayer are common. (Although healing is central to Christianity, other religions claim their share. One Christian response is that God shows himself to non-Christians in partial ways, and some Christians I interviewed described non-Christian healings that, they claimed, later proved false.)

Scholars estimate that 80 percent of new Christians in Nepal come to the faith through an experience with healing or deliverance from demonic spirits. Perhaps as many as 90 percent of new converts who join a house church in China credit their conversion to faith healing. In Kenya, 71 percent of Christians say they have witnessed a divine healing, according to a 2006 Pew study. Even in the relatively skeptical United States, 29 percent of survey respondents claim they have seen one.

You can quarrel with the exact figures, but we are talking about millions of people who say something otherworldly happened to them. Yet most secular people — and even many religious believers — are oblivious to this or shrug off miracle stories on principle as motivated reasoning, hallucination or fraud.

If millions say it, well then it MUST be right!

But as Hume noted, the priors for “motivated reasoning, hallucination, or fraud” are higher than for the working of God, especially given that God hasn’t been able to regrow limbs or eyes or even make himself manifest in more obvious ways (Sagan mentions several, including God spelling out messages in the stars), and also that we know from investigations of American “miracle cure” preachers that they were simply committing fraud.

Worthen treats doubters as unreasonable skeptics, as if the evidence is so strong that she deems skepticism about religious miracle cures as a form of faith, dogmatism, and yes, even racist colonialism!

Western skeptics have disregarded witness testimony from places like Nigeria at least since David Hume complained in his 1748 essay on miracles that “they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations.” Such dismissal is more awkward for 21st-century secular liberals, who often say that Westerners should listen to people in the Global South and acknowledge the blindnesses of colonialism. “Some people claim that the best thing to do is to listen to people’s experiences and learn from them,” Dr. Chinedozi said. “Yet these people will be the first to find a way to disprove experiences in other cultures and contexts.”

Witness testimony in general has come in for a drubbing lately. Courts have overturned convictions when DNA proved that witnesses who sounded sure of themselves on the stand turned out to be horribly mistaken. Yet we rely on it all the time in the course of ordinary life. “If your epistemology is that eyewitness evidence doesn’t count, then there goes most historiography, journalism, even anthropology and sociology,” Craig Keener, a professor of biblical studies at Asbury Theological Seminary, told me. (He included Dr. Chinedozi’s and Dr. Adewuya’s stories in his book “Miracles Today.”)

Among those who deny miracles, “the presuppositions are so strong,” Dr. Keener said. “There’s a dogmatism there, just like a religious dogmatism. It looks to me like it’s so ideologically driven — if you’re starting from the standpoint that a miracle claim is not true if we could possibly come up with another explanation and one of the explanations can be, ‘We don’t have an explanation now, but maybe someday we will.’” When I asked Dr. Shermer what he thought about this analogy, he objected. Belief in future scientific discovery “is not faith,” he said. “It’s confidence that the system works pretty well from experience.”

Yep, there we have it. What are you going to believe: science or “lived experience”? Especially when that lived experience comes from the “oppressed” people of the “Global South” whose oppressors are of course us “colonialists”. But Worthen is completely ignoring Hitchens’s Razor: “what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” Claims of miracle healing by God is a strong assertion, and “lived experience” does not suffice.  And, of course, the reason we need science is because a lot of our assumptions based on everyday experience are simply wrong.

Worthen’s piece goes on, ending with a bump as Bill Dembski, the doyen of Intellgent Design, is dragged onstage to say that he, too, believes in miracles, but that they “require scrutiny”.

What about the critics? Well, nearly all the tepid criticism offered by Worthen has already appeared in this post, but Michael Shermer is enlisted as the single Token Skeptic, only to be pulled offstage quickly:

Most professional scientists won’t go for this. “Case methods are fine as a way to start,” Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and a historian of science, told me. “But how do you shift from case studies to more experimental protocols that are the gold standard?”

Dr. Shermer sometimes asks believers about all the times prayer fails to heal. “Their answer is, ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ It’s just hand-waving,” he said. Divine mystery is central to Christian faith, but it creates problems for a scientific method premised on the assumption that the laws of cause and effect are uniform — and will yield up their mysterious ways if you test and measure again and again.

Earth to Ms. Worthen: there is no “laws of cause and effect” in science. But we’ll let that be and move on to the several questions I’d like to ask Worthen, questions that she really doesn’t answer.

1).  How do you know it’s the Christian God (aka father of Jesus) who did the healing? Yes, it’s often done by Christian preachers, but is there a control for religious healing by Muslims or Hindus? I doubt it. Therefore, you have no strong evidence that your God is the best God, or whether there are multiple gods. (This is the least important question I’d pose.)

2). If God wanted to make himself known, why does he do it through a few paltry miracles instead of making Himself manifest in undeniable ways, ways that Sagan discusses in The Varieties of Scientific Experience (a book I heartily recommend)? Can’t he spell out “I AM WHAT I AM” in the stars?

3). As Shermer notes, why does God pick and choose whom He heals instead of healing everyone? Worthen attempts an answer, but it’s not convincing. She brings in Candy Brown, who just punts, arguing that those who aren’t cured aren’t sufficiently vulnerable or hopeful.

If God can heal, why does he do it so rarely? The world is full of suffering people who pray with no relief. “Even people who believe in miracles often don’t pray for them because they’re afraid of disappointment,” Candy Brown said. “I’ve had people die on my watch. It’s incredibly painful. You ask, ‘Is it my fault?’” She speculated that many Christians’ belief that miraculous healing ceased after New Testament times springs from “protection against pain, protection against feeling ill will toward God or other people. It takes hope and vulnerability to be open to healing.”

For Christians, it also takes spiritual maturity to remember that miracles are not the point. Miracles are signs meant to help humans see the greatest miracle of all, the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ— God’s ultimate intrusion into ordinary life, by which he eventually “shall wipe away all tears,” according to the Book of Revelation.

Well, maybe miracles aren’t the point, but they’re sure touted by Christians as proof of God’s existence. Absent evidence for God’s existence, there’s no reason at all to buy the stories of the New Testament.

4.) We saw a few days ago that one of the latest “miracle healings” at Lourdes was unconvincing, for, as my doctor said, the diagnosis was not believable.  I think the same may be true of Josh’s glioma. But one thing would be convincing to many: the regrowing of lost limbs or missing eyes—things not known to happen naturally. So why doesn’t God prove His power by growing back an arm or a leg, or restoring a missing eye? It’s telling that only those maladies not known known to spontaneously disappear are the very ones that we don’t see at Lourdes or other Places of Miracles. That, to me, is telling. In fact, there’s a whole website devoted to this vital question, “Why won’t God heal amputees?” The answer, of course, is that God doesn’t heal anyone, because God doesn’t exist.  (The faithful do have answers to the amputee question, but they’re laughable.)

In the end, Worthen comes off as just about as credulous as the Browns. Her vetting of the healing claims is laughable. Did she interview any skeptical doctors? And the New York Times comes off as even more credulous, because they actually published this stuff and offer no rebuttal save a few words from Shermer.

Why is the NYT engaged in so much faith-pushing? Could it be that it’s decided not to “follow the science” because the woke paper, like many woke people, believe in “other ways of knowing” or that “lived experience trumps data”? I would find that hard to buy, but if the New Yorker has gone down this route, so can the New York Times.

Shamanism makes comeback in New Zealand

November 9, 2022 • 1:15 pm

Yes, there are some sensible advocates of Māori knowledge, which of course becomes part of scientific knowledge in general. Here’s a quote from an article by three Māori who are able to separate the wheat of truth from the chaff of superstition ideology, undocumented tradition, morality, and religion:

“In short, uncritical acceptance of Māori knowledge is arguably just as patronising as its earlier blanket rejection.”

—Nā Dr Michael Stevens, Emeritus Professor Atholl Anderson and Professor Te Maire Tau

Sadly, too many Māori as well as sympathetic descendants of Europeans can’t seem to grasp this simple distinction, which explains why in NZ, more than in any other country, “indigenous ways of knowing” are valorized.  In that country, there appears to be no stopping Mātauranga Māori—the gemisch of trial-and-error empirical fact, woo, and rules of conduct that constitutes the indigenous “way of knowing”—from snuggling in beside science, the only real way of knowing we have.

Now we have news of the convening of a conclave of tohunga, the Māori equivalent of the “medicine men” of indigenous North American tribal groups—or “priests” of religious groups:

It was the role of tohunga to ensure tikanga (customs) were observed. Tohunga guided the people and protected them from spiritual forces. They were healers of both physical and spiritual ailments, and they guided the appropriate rituals for horticulture, fishing, fowling and warfare. They lifted the tapu on newly built houses and waka (canoes), and lifted or placed tapu in death ceremonies.

I refer in this piece mainly to the role of tohunga in curing physical ailments, which, before science-based medicine arrived, was based largely on herbal medicine. Some may have even worked, but we don’t know as they were never tested, and they are powerless against ailments that can be cured by scientific innovations like antibiotics or antivirals.

But this traditional “way of healing” may be coming back.

Click to read this article from the NZ site, 1News:

The gist:

Some of the country’s top experts in mātauranga Māori, known as tohunga, have gathered in Whakatāne for a symposium on the present and future of its role.

Held at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi, the event is being led by Tā Hirini Moko Mead and Tā Pou Temara, two leading mātauranga experts.

Sir Hirini said: “Tohunga were the experts who helped the people maintain a balance between the human world and the spiritual world.”

Sir Pou said: “[The tohunga] was not able to cure everything, but because they were the educated person of the tribe he or she knew where to send a person to get satisfaction for the affliction.”

The role of the tohunga was almost completely stamped out by laws like the 1907 Tohunga Suppression Act, which was intended to stop traditional Māori practices.

Sir Pou said it was an attempt to wipe out an entire knowledge system. He said that in some areas it was driven underground, but in others, it ceased to exist entirely.

The penultimate line is a gross distortion bordering on a lie. First, the 1907 Tohunga Suppression Act wasn’t designed to “stop traditional traditional Māori practices”, but rather to replace dangerous and ineffective Māori ways of healing (and unfounded prognostications) with scientific (called “Western” medicine). Here’s the Wikipedia description of the Act (which, by the way, was wholly repealed in 1962, so that now Māori can subject themselves at will to the dangerous ministrations of tohunga)

The Act contained only four clauses, the first of which simply gave the short title. The second clause stated that “Every person who gathers Maoris around him by practising on their superstition or credulity, or who misleads or attempts to mislead any Maori by professing or pretending to possess supernatural powers in the treatment or cure of any disease, or in the foretelling of future events, or otherwise” was liable for prosecution. The first offence could be subject to a fine of up to 25 pounds or up to six months imprisonment. Subsequent offences could lead to a prison term of up to a year. However, no prosecution under the Act could be commenced without the consent of the Minister of Native Affairs.

The third section enabled the Governor of New Zealand to gazette regulations to enable the intention of the Act to be carried out. The fourth section repealed subsection 5 of section 16 of the Maori Councils Act 1900, which allowed Maori Councils to license tohunga.

See also this paper recounting the history and intent of the Act, which was concentrated on healing.

More important, the Act was promoted not just by one Westerner, but by a whole passel of Māori advocates who wanted the benefits of modern medicine for their people (my emphasis):

It was introduced by James Carroll who expressed impatience with what he considered regressive Maori attitudes.  Officials had been concerned for years about the sometimes dangerous practices of tohunga. The Act was introduced in part to target Māori prophet, faith healer and land rights activist Rua Kenana, but it was never used against him.

It was praised by many influential Maori at the time, including Māui Pōmare and all four Maori MPs (Āpirana Ngata, Hōne Heke Ngāpua, Tame Parata and Henare Kaihau). According to Willie Jackson, the prevailing concern raised by Ngata was the harm arising from improper medical practices, rather than the destruction of Matauranga Maori.

Particularly important here was Sir Māui Wiremu Pita Naera Pōmare, trained as a physician in the U.S. and then returning to NZ to improve Māori health and to serve as a member of Parliament and as Minister of Health.

For this article to imply that Westerners suppressed native culture when in fact this was largely a Māori initiative and was aimed at health and superstitious prognostication, not an entire culture, is the kind of distortion we’re used to in NZ reporting.

As I said, this Act is no longer in force, so healing can proceed on the basis of MM or other superstitions.

At any rate, the tohunga are making a comeback. From the article above:

[In] 1984, when Sir Pou credits Sir Hirini Moko Mead with beginning the revival of tohunga, when he arranged for tohunga to take part in the Te Māori exhibition.

. . . . Forty years on from those discussions, Sir Pou said Māori knowledge systems had come a long way.

“The tohunga who are now leading out and teaching their own cohorts of tohunga, these tohunga are beyond colonisation.”

“They’ve gone through that and they’re now reclaiming what is rightfully their heritage and their right to practice,” he said.

Right to practice woo, that is—and the right to deprive credulous people from the benefits of scientific medicine.

Now there’s one sentence implying that maybe the tohunga might learn something about modern medicine, but it’s misleading:

As well as upholding Māori knowledge systems, they now have access to the knowledge systems of the entire world, Sir Pou said.

Does that mean scientifically based medical knowledge? Not a chance. It means religion and philosophy. 

“They can draw upon Confucius, they can draw upon Buddha, they can draw upon the great philosophers of the world, of Greece.

“And then relocate it back into Aotearoa [the Māori word for “New Zealand”] into their Māori world, they marry that up with the mātauranga Māori that must be the bedrock of their tohunga knowledge,” he said.

Sir Pou Temara said he was pleased to see the students that he taught now teaching students of their own, a web of reclamation that continues to spread.

Yes, a spreading web of ignorance and credulity that will doom some Māori to illness or death. Applauding the spread of the tohunga is like applauding the spread of faith healing. Indeed, that’s much of what the tohunga do!

Freddie deBoer disses New Atheism while attacking psychic phenomena and “hooey”

July 21, 2022 • 10:00 am

Well, let me clarify my title above.  In the article below on his Substack site, deBoer claims that he started his career attacking New Atheism, and he still sees issues with it, but now thinks he went too far, especially in light of the Vice article he cites. That article notes a rise of Internet scams dealing with supernatural phenomenon like clairvoyance and tarot cards, and he sees that the doubt about faith promoted by New Atheism could be used now to quash these other issues that victimize the credulous. But the so-called demise of New Atheism has deprived people of those tools.

Unfortunately, deBoer, whose writing I admire (but seems to be writing too much these days), still feels he to get in a few licks at Dawkins and Co., and I think those licks are gratuitous and unfair. Still, his call for a revival of skepticism and demands for evidence is absolutely the mark. Faith is faith, whether it involves pastors or psychics.

Click the screenshot to see deBoer’s piece:

There are, I think, six main reasons for the “backlash” against New Atheism, which I see as the reinvigoration of faithlessness by Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens (Pinker was a player as well):

1.) People bridle at criticism of religion, especially when it is passionate and vigorous. Religion is sacrosanct, and seen by many as off limits to criticism.

2.) People accused the New Atheists of being strident and trying to wrest religion from believers.

3.) People were jealous of the success of New Atheist writings

4.) Because Muslims are considered “people of color,” opponents of New Atheism were especially critical of its perceived “Islamophobia.”

5.) The perception, often without evidence, that New Atheists were sexists or even sexual assaulters.

6.) The claim that New Atheists ignored social justice because they concentrated too much on addressing, analyzing, and attacking religion. These critics see “progressive social justice” as inextricable from New Atheism, and thus New Atheists were fighting a battle but ignoring a wider war.

In this article, deBoer seems to sign on to reasons 1,2, and 4, though he’s walked back his criticisms a bit: he says that by criticizing New Atheism’s concentration on the need for evidence, people have become susceptible to new forms of woo. That sounds good, though I don’t know if it’s true, and too much of his piece still engages in atheist-bashing.

(Regarding #4, New Atheists often concentrated on Islam because it was in their view (and mine) the most dangerous species of faith in today’s world, as Catholicism was in medieval Europe. I don’t see that as “Islamophobia”, if you conceive of that word as meaning “bigotry against Muslims”. But a “fear of Islam” could also mean “a worry about how that religion is sometimes used to oppress and kill people.)

First, deBoer cites the article below in Vice, which describes the “fake” psychics (they’re all fakes, of course, but there are some who pretend to be other people)—fakers who are now being attacked on social media. (All deBoer’s words are indented).

An actual story from Vice:

I’ll say no more about the Vice article as you can read it for yourself. I was more interested—and distressed—by deBoer’s criticisms of New Atheism, which wasn’t really a “movement” but a term invented to describe the rise of unbelief largely prompted by the authors named above.  Granted, deBoer has backed off some, but not far enough for me. The bolding is mine:

The first thing I ever wrote that got more than a couple dozen views, the piece that made the rounds in the blogosphere and in so doing kickstarted my writing career, was a piece of the type “I’m an atheist who can’t stand New Atheism.” Pieces in that vein became quite common over the years, but in 2008 it was still novel enough to attract all of that attention. This was an era in which the New Atheists still enjoyed a degree of cultural cachet, before the pomposity and shrill tone of so many in the movement curdled its public reputation, to say nothing of the accusations of Islamophobia. It was a different time. The basic contours of the piece still seem correct to me – atheism is almost certain factually true, and I am an atheist, but I have no interest in browbeating believers. I have no interest in converting believers into atheists, and atheism is not a movement. But not only would I not write that piece today, it’s one of very few pieces that I sometimes genuinely wish I had never published at all. Because the ground changed underneath us to such an extent that, well, millions of functioning adults proudly endorse astrology and other hooey in public.

Note first the attacks on New Atheism, but also his assertion that he wish he wouldn’t have written the piece not because he misunderstood or unfairly attacked New Atheism, but because his attack on the movement may have enabled people’s increased belief in woo. Also note, as I claim below, that deBoer is engaging in a form of virtue signaling here: not addressing the arguments of New Atheists but simply calling them names in a way that would appeal to atheist liberals soft on faith (“faithiests”).

Yes, the last sentence is true, though I’m not sure how much criticism on New Atheism enabled the rise of “hooey”. But I also think that deBoer is unfair by attacking New Atheists, especially the prominent ones, for being “pompous and shrill.”  In what way, for example, were Dawkins and Company “pompous and shrill”? Perhaps some of their followers were (actually, some surely were given their numbers). But both of those words could be replaced by “passionate.”

Notice that when New Atheists are accused of stuff like this, no examples are ever given. What is called “shrillness” as a pejorative term strikes me as a nasty word for “writing passionately and strongly,” which doesn’t sound so bad, does it? Were Hitchens or Harris—or any of the five people named above—”shrill”? I don’t think so.

Moreover, I doubt that deBoer would call anyone writing about politics with that same passion as “shrill”. “Shrill and strident” are usually reserved for those who criticize religion, not politics. And these are ad hominem terms, for what was really important about “New Atheism” was its arguments, not the tone of its adherents.

At least, though, deBoer recognizes that what New Atheism—as “antitheism”—was mainly about: demands for empirical evidence for what one believes. It was largely an attack on faith, and on faith that is of the most damaging kind. But deBoer can’t resist saying that some atheists are “annoying,” and again I don’t think he’d say that about politicians with whom he agreed.

He continues and begins to walk back his earlier opinions:

At some point in the 2010s, the backlash to New Atheism became so commonplace, particularly on the political left, that it seemed clear to me that we had communally missed the forest for the trees. That is to say, no matter how annoying some atheists must be, the most important question when it comes to atheism remains (and must remain) whether or not God is real. If God is real, that is the single most important fact in the universe. Issues of comity and messaging take a backseat to the existence of a divine creator, and there’s something strange about being more concerned with how we express our skepticism about such a divine creator than about its actual existence. And while many people who disdain New Atheists will admit to a casual atheism themselves, they’re far less animated and passionate about that atheism than about their hatred of the New Atheists. On a really basic level this seems to be a failure of priority.

He’s correct in the last sentence, but he’s hasn’t retracted his claims about “Islamophobia” or New atheist “browbeating believers” or “converting believers into atheists.” But, after all, if you are arguing logically and rationally against the existence of God, and are arguing with the faithful, what else are you doing but “browbeating believers” (I’d use the term “arguing with believers”; for “browbeating” is a pejorative word). And if you are making empirical arguments against a divine creator, then of course you are also, even if unintentionally, “converting believers into atheists.” Every argument for a moral, political, or ideological stance is an attempt at conversion—to change people’s minds. deBoer spends his time “browbeating Republicans” in a “shrill way”, and trying to convert those with whom he disagrees. How does he differ from New Atheists in these respects.

There are other zingers against New Atheism, too. deBoer, while saying (admirably) that he probably went too far, still goes too far, saying that the demise of New Atheism was “self inflicted”.  His inability to stop dissing New Atheism, although he recognizes its central merit—demand for evidence—is seen in his last paragraph (my bolding).

Ultimately, I think we should work to restore attention to the supernatural claims themselves rather than to the social ephemera that surround them. Of course we should want atheists to be circumspect and friendly and to avoid empty provocation. The question is when this concern about manners overwhelms our fixation on the central questions at hand; the fact that Reddit atheists are annoying can’t make God real. And for the record I think there’s a way to live life that avoids a cloying scientism and witless literalism while still not permitting any lazy mysticism to find its way into your day-to-day practices. There’s also a lot of low-hanging fruit when it comes to people believing things for no reason. I’m perfectly happy to say that I think we should restore a little stigma towards entertaining the idea that the date that you’re born (based on a largely arbitrary and human-made calendar system) dictates your mood, your love life, and your professional success. Maybe sometimes a little stigma is the healthiest option available to us.

So yes, here he admits that there’s too much woo, and the analysis of religion by New Atheists can also be extended to psychic phenomena, taro cards, and so on. But what is this “empty provocation” that deBoer speaks of? And the comment about “cloying scientism and witless literalism”—who, exactly, does that refer to? As most of us know, “scientism” is only used pejoratively, to criticize those who you think rely too much on science and evidence.  It would have been nice if deBoer gave us some examples of “cloying scientism” from some of the well known New Atheists.

Don’t get me wrong: I think the point of deBoer article is a good one: faith applies not just to religion, but to wooish hooey—to all “supernatural” psychic phenomena. But he devalues this point by his inability to resist getting in some unwarranted licks at New Atheism.

In the end, deBoer is doing with New Atheism precisely what he criticizes with ideology: he is trying to tarnish ideas he agrees with by using pejorative words and ad hominem arguments—all because he doesn’t like the way those arguments are expressed. That is what the Woke do! And he’s appealing to popular ideology by bringing up “Islamophobia”, “scientism”, and “shrillness” in attacks on religion. In other words, I think he’s engaged in signaling his virtue.

deBoer should be remorseful for his own athiest-dissing not just because it enabled the Rise of Hooey (actually, I doubt that it did), but also because it was unfair and misguided.

Is New York mayor Eric Adams a woo-meister?

July 11, 2022 • 12:45 pm

After I read Maureen Dowd’s pretty positive assessment of Mayor Eric Adams of NYC in the NYT—someone touted on this site as a potential Democratic Presidential candidate in 2024)—I was surprised to find this in last Thursday’s Guardian.  Yes, Adams would be wrong if he thought his city got “special energy” from crystals, but does he think that? Maybe. Does it matter? Nope.

Click to read:

 

Well, the Guardian is exaggerating a bit. Here’s how its article starts:

Healing crystals have long been a fixture in the spiritual and celebrity worlds – with Adele using them to ward off stage fright and Nicole Richie wearing a clear quartz around her neck for protection.

But the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, believes that they have even more power than that: he professed in a recent interview that he believes there is a “special energy” that comes from the city he presides over, citing its location on a store of rare gems and stones.

As the New York area news website Hell Gate has deftly pointed out, Adams may be the first “crystal guy” of politics. He regularly wears “energy stone bracelets” featuring an array of powerful crystals. And when he proclaimed a “vibe shift” is upon New York City, he wasn’t just talking about the return of low-rise jeans.

I didn’t see any mention of Adams in the New York Magazine piece, but it became paywalled before I finished reading it.

And yes, the bedrock that allows Manhattan to have so many skyscrapers does have a lot of minerals in it. But crystals? The article isn’t sure:

The mayor is right about one thing, says Andrew Pacholyk, a New York-based crystal expert: the city, indeed, is seated on unique bedrock that has been known to produce more than 100 varieties of mineral. Called the Manhattan schist, it was formed about 450m years ago in a collision between what is now the east coast of North America and the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

So what effect might crystals be having on the lives of New Yorkers? Pacholyk is vague on specifics but believes that certain areas in Manhattan do have a “special energy” owing to the unique mix of minerals found there – including quartz, kyanite, and dumortierite. He says it can be felt more strongly in natural areas with exposed rock, like Central Park.

Adams, who shockingly declined to comment for this piece, appears to wear several varieties of quartz himself. Pacholyk analyzed a photo of Adams at a December 2021 event and found the bracelets the mayor wears feature at least a dozen varieties of crystals including amethyst, rose quartz, lapis lazuli, citrine, and aventurine.

Big deal! The loon here isn’t Adams but Pacholyk, who admits above and below that crystals have supernatural properties on humans.

Not of those minerals mentioned (save quartz) is in NYC bedrock, and even if the mayor thinks that the minerals give the city a special energy when we know they can’t, I can’t be too worried about that. After all, we admire public figures for being religious, and being, say, a Christian requires far more suspension of disbelief and far more belief in woo than does being a guy who wears a crystal bracelet and thinks it has some effect on him.

And “shockingly declined to comment for this piece”? Why is that so shocking? It’s like someone asking Mike Pence, “Mike, do you really believe all that crap about the Crucifixion and Resurrection?” I doubt that Pence would comment on that, too, and he’s far more public about his religion.

As for the “recent interview” mentioned above, it was in Politico, and says this, with additional tarring of Adams because they he’s an adhereian to the Deepak-ian form of quantum woo:

[Adams] learned that New York sits on a store of rare gems and stones, and believes that as a result, “there’s a special energy that comes from here.” On his right wrist he wears a pair of multi-colored energy stone bracelets. He has read several books by Joe Dispenza, a neuroscientist and faculty member at Honolulu’s Quantum University whose bestseller, Becoming Supernatural, teaches that we can transform our physical and emotional state through the teachings of quantum physics.

The rest of the Guardian article talks about the booming crystal industry and a claim that crystals don’t do squat, which happens to be true. But even for that they must rely on Michael Shermer; they can’t bring themselves to proclaim that there is no fricking evidence that crystals have healing properties. Fortunately Shermer gives a sensible response:

Michael Brant Shermer, an author and executive director of the Skeptics Society, says there is not a shred of scientific evidence to show crystals have a measurable effect on humans or cities like New York. Still, he says, while Adams may be the first high-profile candidate to publicly declare a love of crystals, the metaphysical has found its way into politics in the past.

As in religion! You can barely get elected to dogcatcher in America if you are an open atheist. Shermer goes on:

. . . Shermer says as long as Adams does not let his personal beliefs color his policies, the interest in crystals is harmless.

“Adams shouldn’t think, ‘What should we do about gun violence? Let me consult my crystals,’” he says. “That is a hard enough problem as it is using all the best science we have. Let’s not compound it with crystals. But I think of it the same way that I think of it in other areas of life: if it’s for entertainment purposes only, it’s fine.”

Good response, Michael. But the Guardian then lists three minerals found under NYC (quartz, dumorierite, and black and blue kyanite, and quotes crystal maven Pacholyk on the genuine magical properties of these stones. Here are two examples:

Quartz

“Quartz is known as the ‘master healer’ of stones,” Pacholyk says. “Our own body has quartz in it as a mineral, so it is believed we resonate to its properties vibrationally and magnetically. If you are open to it, you can feel it.”

Dumortierite

Dumortierite is the stone of “tolerance and tranquility”,” Pacholyk says, promoting “self-discipline, cleanliness, courage, trust, accomplishment, harmony, positive attitude, patience and tolerance”.

And so ends the article. So what’s the Guardian’s answer to its title question? It doesn’t give one, but does leave the reader thinking, “Hey, maybe there’s something to this crystal stuff after all!”

Below photo from the Guardian showing Adams wearing a bracelet, but is it a crystal one?

Photo by Getty Images in the Guardian

Indigenous psychiatry: how valuable is it?

July 5, 2022 • 12:30 pm

I’ve written a lot about how New Zealand is valorizing indigenous knowledge, and the educational system is on the path to teaching Mātauranga Māori (“MM”)—a mixture of myth, legend, practical knowledge acquired by trial and error, and spirituality—as “science”, coequal to science in science classes.  There is some science in MM, but as a whole it is certainly not the same thing as modern science, and many of its claims are either dubious or palpably false. To teach MM in science classes is to deprive the children of New Zealand of an understanding of science.

Many New Zealanders seems to regard everything about its indigenous people as not only valid, but admirable. A lot of it is, but many Kiwis are too cowed to stand up to some of the more  questionable claims of the Māori, including the claim that their Polynesian ancestors discovered Antarctica centuries ago. I know about this fear because Kiwis who do stand up against nonsense get persecuted, and I get emails from lots of them who agree with me but say that they dare not speak up because they’ll lose their jobs.

The latest effort to “indigenize” knowledge is the bestowing of a huge pot of money on Māori organizations to use “ancestral knowledge” to help cure mental health issues among the indigenous people. This is described in the Newshub article below, which you can click to read:

The article notes that “The new Māori Health Authority has a budget of half a billion dollars and CEO Riana Manuel has allocated $100 million of that to support centuries-old treatments.”

And there is a need for treatment, for the article also notes this:

Māori have the highest suicide rates of all ethnic groups in New Zealand. Mental distress among Māori is almost 50 percent higher than non-Māori and 30 percent are more likely to be left undiagnosed.

Now of course we can’t attribute this to problems that are unique to Māori, as I doubt there was a control for levels of income and other stressors that differ among ethnic groups. But there is a push to use Māori-centered therapy to cure mental illness in that ethnicgroup, and 100 million dollars for using “centuries-old treatments” is a lot of money.

What are these treatments? It’s not clear, but they’re based on lunar cycles and what can only be called psychoastrology. It’s confusing because the article is, as so often happens in Kiwi news, larded with Māori terms that even non-Māori can’t understand. See if you can suss it out:

Not so well known to non-Māori is their tradition of using the moon and stars to help treat mental health issues.

It’s called maramataka and will be incorporated into treatment by the new Māori Health Authority.

Rereata Makiha is on a mission to share ancestral knowledge with the next generation.

He’s an expert on maramataka Māori, or the Māori lunar calendar, and forecasting based on the moon cycles, star systems, tides, and the environment.

“The maramataka helps you, helps us to predict when things are going to happen, to tell us when the fish are going to run, when the eels are going to run – all those sorts of things,” he said.

“When you understand it a lot it’s a brilliant guide on when you should be doing certain things.”

Rikki Solomon teaches at-risk rangatahi and whānau how to use maramataka for improving mental health and knowing when to spend time doing certain activities in nature or around whanau.

“If we find that a whanau has had a low time or they may feel low, what we use is the maramataka to identify their cycles, their highs, and their lows,” Solomon said.

“What we observe in those low areas is what are some rituals at that time. And what I mean about rituals is what is the environment that they can connect to, because our environment is our biggest healer.”

That doesn’t really clear things up, but here’s more on the practice, with quotes from Riana Manuel, CEO of the Māori Health Authority:

“Connecting people back to those spaces and places that have been long forgotten is certainly something that will be investing in,” Manuel said.

Just like they do with Matariki, Māori use maramataka as a way of reading the cosmos to prepare for what’s coming.

“It’s a way of rebuilding the body, your wairua, and rebuilding your energy and getting prepared for the high energy days ahead,” Makiha said.

“So it goes in waves like that and if people understand it and go back to that rather than rush, rush, rush every day, I think that’s what drives a lot of the ill-health.”

If you can figure out what they’re doing from this, you’re a better person than I am.

Now there may indeed be a benefit to using Māori practitioners and ancient Māori practices to treat mental illness. After all, people often feel that therapists who have a background similar to their own are more desirable.  Women, for example, often feel that a woman therapist will treat their problems better, and the same goes for ethnic minorities.  So there may be something to shared experience and background that is therapeutic (there’s also, of course, a placebo effect).

My criticism here is simply that these practices are being adopted in the absence of clinical trials, and so there is only a “traditional” basis for the therapy. Might Māori be helped more with other practices, like cognitive behavioral therapy, practices that have been tested and shown to be efficacious? Or even medication, which has a significant effect on things like depression. (A combination of talk and drug therapy seems to be the most curative).

As a colleague wrote me, this absence of scientific testing of a method that will absorb $100 million is the same issue raised with MM: what is claimed (or assumed) to be “scientific” has not been vetted using the scientific method. To quote the colleague:

This is exactly the problem that led me to raise concerns about MM versus science in the first place. We now have two alternate sets of “facts.” One is based on scientific evidence, and the other may be supported by some evidence but has never been tested in a way that would be considered acceptable for medical science.

Mental health is a form of health, and this is like treating diseases using astrology and “traditional methods” that have never been subject to genuine scientific tests. Doesn’t it seem wise, before investing $100 million in mental-health treatment, that the government of New Zealand be sure that those treatments actually work? 

Sadly, that’s not the way the New Zealand government rolls.