No there wasn’t. I don’t think you know what “statistically significant” means. There was a difference but the difference was not greater than what could be expected by random chance. That’s what “statistically significant” means. It doesn’t mean just any difference at all.
The study itself used claimed the difference was not statistically significant, so you’re full of shit when you say that he misrepresented the study. He stated their exact conclusion. He was actually more gentle than he could have been. He could have made a big deal about the statistically insignificant fact that in terms of raw numbers, those who knew they were prayed for did worse (as many religionists would have certainly done if the numbers were inverted…as you are trying to do yourself, for that matter) but Schermer chose to be fair and objective instead. The study yielded no statistically significant difference. That is a fact.
Compared to what our bodies are capable of surviving unassisted, yes. Consider we need to augment our bodies or climates to even survive a temperature change of 20-30 degrees F. “Substantial differences” are relative to our fragility, which is significant.
No, I’m not. The article was awful. Has anyone here yet stated s/he thought it was good?
To repeat, I don’t disagree with everything Shermer is saying (or rather, trying to say). I believe in evolution. I don’t believe in ID. I think the scientific method is the way to go. But Shermer’s tone, his skeptic agitprop, and his self-satisfied stylings are disgusting. SciAm should be ashamed to have such sklurge in its pages.
[quote]
The distinction between knowledge before the modern scientific method and what we have today is decent enough to draw a telling distinction. Sure, our scientific understanding today vs. that of 1930 (including our sophistication in implementing the scientific method) is enough to draw a telling distinction. But that has everything to do with scientific progress and nothing to do with escaping an evolutionary tendency to err systematically.
I agree that a mismatch between our evolved biology and modern living can cause problems (e.g., abundant food makes us fat), but Shermer never demonstrates a connection between our evolved biology and false belief.
No doubt, but it’s been an evolution of thought. And that evolution has had nothing to do with biological evolution.
Some ideas certainly did spread; by the Middle Ages, most people in literate societies understood the earth is round. And the problem you cite seems to be one more of resources and technology than the scientific method per se. Until printing was invented, books were expensive, etc.
“All testable truth claims should be tested”–is that what you meant to write?
To your point, yeah, there are beliefs various people have held now for a long time that are false. Shermer provides no adequate examples that such beliefs come from a mismatch of evolved biology and the modern world.
My personal view is that we evolved, eventually became conscious, and just started making up a bunch of shit to fill in the blanks. Some of those beliefs clashed wildly with Reality and were soon enough eliminated, some were correct and helped us along, and others may have been stupid but provided some type of benefit (religions aiding in social cohesion).
No, they sucked, as previously noted.
Cite? The Wikipedia sources say otherwise.
The ancient philosophers valued the principle of Reason, and this got them quite far sometimes. The modern scientific method is much more than a system of reasoning; it’s also a sociological system for scientists around the world to say, “Yes, we believe this,” to prevent fraud and accomplish other purposes not strictly related to reason and experiment.
Again, it wasn’t just trial and error; it was also Reason.
Are you seriously suggesting that the people doing the study might have told the patients that people were praying for them to do worse? Or am I misundnerstanding your use of the phrase “twisted the intentionality of the prayers”?
Well, clearly the patients did have an increased stress level; they had higher levels of adrenaline in their blood. One suggestion I heard was that the stress came from the pressure they felt to recover, knowing people are praying for them. I don’t know about that, but it’s clear that they were stressed for some reason.
One other possible explanation I saw was that those who were told they were being prayed for might have had an increased level of anxiety about how serious their condition was. “They’re praying for me? I must be in bad shape.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t the difference only in whether they were told about it? In other words, those who prayed for without knowing it did not fare any worse than those who weren’t prayed for at all? If that’s the case than even the marginal difference which was found says nothing about prayer per se, but only how people respond to being told about it.
I gather it’s generally agreed that this article of Shermer’s is simplified and not original or groundbreaking. It’s also vague enough that the OP feels this (among others) is a valid interpretation:
The impression I get is Shermer invoked a belief of the ancients, talking about it in the past tense. The OP then cites the first time the matter was addressed with inductive reasoning and assuming Shermer believes the ancient belief was still common over 1700 years later. I admit, it’s possible to interpret the essay in this manner, simply because Shermer mentions flat-earth beliefs but didn’t go into extensive detail about exactly who held them and exactly when they were held. And since it is possible (which should not be confused with reasonable), there isn’t really much of a debate here.
Valid criticisms of the essay can be made; how these lead to personal attacks on Shermer is less clear. I suggest the OP try another deconstruction and pretend he’d never heard of Shermer before, analyzing the essay solely on its own merits.
Aeschines, I don’t really see that you’re saying much of anything. You concede nearly everything of substance, and whine that the article was oversimplified and not very good. Well, okay. It was a short article, and not everything everyone writes has to be the most exciting piece of literature ever. But the basic thrust is all pretty much dead on correct: there is a unified system of checking beliefs that is widely recognized in human societies today that didn’t really exist before. It’s radically changed how we understand facts about the world around us: the degree to which they are certain, the degree to which we are simply willing to accept people’s word about things.
Wikipedia doesn’t “say otherwise.” Some people and some socities knew the world was round and eventually it became mostly common knowledge. And yet, quite a lot of people still didn’t know much about anything because they couldn’t read and didn’t go to school and if they could read or be educated about anything, it was the Bible, which plainly implies that the world is flat. THOSE pre-Greek societies most certainly thought it was flat, and that’s sort of the point.
Virtually all of your argument is based on trying to call suprious attention to the straw man that there was no moment when we went from societies that recieved wisdom from authorities to societies that test and are highly critical of claims. But that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t a transition, and that it wasn’t important and revolutionary.
Well, for the record I’ll say it, because I mean it. It was a good article. My only literary criticism would be that the line about living in small groups with no understanding of a free market, etc. should have appeared elsewhere in the piece.
While I think the column rises a little above mere glurge, there are valid criticisms that can be made of it. Specifically,
This way overstates the case. It, and the column as a whole, smacks of the old “The ancients were so ignorant and deluded, and we know so much more than they did, thanks to Science” attitude of Aeschines’ “knowitallism of the kneejerk skeptic.” “Before the rise of modern science we had only our folk intuitions to guide us”? Galileo and Newton were the first ever to use logic, mathematics, or observation? As the OP points out, not everyone back then was as ignorant or accepting of “folk intuition” as the picture Shermer paints: it’s an established fact that there were people who did know that the world is round.
Maybe this has something to do with it, but I would have said that the reason folk science gets so much wrong is simply because it’s just the way things are that not everything is obvious, and what looks like the obvious explanation isn’t always the correct one. If this weren’t the case, the mystery novel would be a dead genre. I don’t think we necessarily need to drag evolution or different environments into it.
The OP is right to criticize the “case closed” wording! Shermer makes it look like he believes that, if a particular experiment finds no statistically significant effect, this proves that there is no effect. If he really believes that, his grasp of statistics is awfully shaky.
Well, maybe, if we take Shermer’s flippancy as seriously as the OP. It’s a convenient avenue of attack and I’ve seen clearly sarcastic or ironic remarks misinterpreted (willfully on occasion, I expect) a lot around here.
It gets to the point where any use of idioms risks gives someone already determined to be hostile more ammunition. And, no, I don’t literally mean bullets or artillery shells or ordnance of any kind. Can’t be too careful.
Greek atomic theory was philosophical, not scientific. It was one of several proposed explanations for the structure of matter. What is telling is that the Greeks had no way of distinguishing which of the explanations was correct except through philosophical argument. Greek atomic theory had no impact at all on modern atomic theory. When we look back, we notice that someone more or less got it right, and remark upon this, but they got it right for the wrong reasons. It is actually a great example of how a pre-scientific society operates, and why progress was slow.
The measurment of the size of the earth, by the way, was as much a geometry problem as a scientific experiment. While the Greeks well knew the earth was round, it’s not clear that the writers of the NT knew. By the middle ages, though, everyone knew - the world is clearly round in Dante’s cosmology, for example, with the mountain of purgatory directly opposite from Jerusalem.
Finally - unless you’ve ever written a monthly column, I’d advise you not to be so quick to criticize. They can’t all be gems.
If I may hazard a guess, a serious deconstruction of Shermer’s essay will simply reveal some oversimplifications and perhaps inelegant turns of phrase. I’ve read it carefully and I don’t see any glaringly huge factual errors, so all that’s left are nitpicking and personal attacks.
Let’s look at this in detail. When Shermer says “Case closed”, by all appearances he’s claiming that all possibility of prayer has been debunked. Yet the study was not a broad survey of all types of prayer, or at least I see no evidence that it was. From the Harvard Gazette articl, we know only that a group of strangers (unrelated to the patients) was praying for the patients. That’s a very vague descriptions, and the flawed methodology leaves open a number of questions.
We don’t know which deity they prayed to. Most deities worshiped by humans are somehwat self-centered, and thus wouldn’t listen to prayers directed at rival deities. Thus, if the praying strangers in the study prayed only to Jesus, it proves nothing about the prayer-granting capacities of Allah, Zeus, the Hindu pantheon, Inca monkey-gods, etc… etc… If they were offering a generic prayers, a jealous God might have ignored it on the grounds that it wasn’t specific enough. Imagine if researchers gave tylenol to one group of cancer patients and a placebo to another group. After some months, they observe no difference in recovery rates, and conclude that all drgus are useless against cancer. That’s analagous to what’s going on with this study.
The study neglects the emotional aspects of prayers. From the Harvard Gazette:
[quote]
HARVARD GAZETTE ARCHIVES
Benson
Herbert Benson led a study to determine if prayers by congregations who did not know heart bypass patients would reduce the complications of surgery. They didn’t. In fact, some prayed-for patients fared worse than those who did not receive prayers. (Staff file photo Jon Chase/Harvard News Office)
Prayers don’t help heart surgery patients
Some fare worse when prayed for
By William J. Cromie
Harvard News Office
Many - if not most - people believe that prayer will help you through a medical crisis such as heart bypass surgery. If a large group of people outside yourself, your family, and your friends add their prayers, that should be even more helpful, or so such reasoning goes.
I didn’t intend to make that last post without the following discussion:
The attitude expressed in that final paragraph shows a serious misunderstanding of prayer. Most believers do not intend a one-for-one exchange of prayers for units of healing. Rather, they’re asking for a favor. Most religious folks presumably believe that prayers work only if the praying party genuinely believes in the deity in question, has a legitimate reason for making the request, and has a genuine and deep emotional attachment. Thus, prayers from family members would be expected greatly outweigh prayers from total strangers. Indeed, prayers from strangers might prove totally worthless even while prayers from family members completely changed the course of the recovery for the better.
When I first read Why People Believe Weird Things, I though Shermer was a very intelligent man, but I was already sopmewhat put off by his sneering tone. Since then, I’ve come to realize that Shermer and his ilk are as much wrapped up in dogmatism as the folks they criticize, and this article is a fine example. Shermer clearly supports capitalism, a system based on this-for-that exchanges. That idea is so deeply ingrained in his head that he assumes prayers must also be based on such direct exchanges. Yet most people easily see that prayer wouldn’t work that way. Likewise since he’s convinced himself that reasoning based on emotions is bad, he fails to see how the emotions can affect issues such as prayer. Reasoning without emotions works fine in cases such as drug testing, because drugs are just bundles of chemical without feelings or desires. There’s no such thing as a jealous aspirin. But the issue of prayer involves the possibility of conscious actors making decisions, so you can’t assume that it will proceed by pure logic.
If you mean by emotional power of prayer someone praying to recover and thus having a better chance of recovering, yes, the study did not consider this - but there is nothing particulary controversial about it either, and even I, as an atheist, would not be suprised if such a study showed that prayer in this context helped.
I suspect the study was attempting to determine if knowledge that others were praying for you had an impact. It did, but not in the expected way. Shermer is correct that this result says nothing about the supernatural aspects of prayer, but could explain some of the effects of prayer as seen in the world.
As for your first point, perhaps similar studies could be used for deity detection experiments - though it might be rather tricky rounding up enough believers in Odin. However the particular hypothesis was that prayer to God is efficacious, as claimed by believers. I doubt your average believer would get much solace in finding that prayer might work after all, but that their God doesn’t actually exist.
As for the case being closed here, that is the claim that scientific study shows that prayer works. That study was dubious in itself, but now it has not been reproduced and in fact evidence against collected. Yeah, this is hyperbole, but this is a column, not a scientific paper. The case is closed in the sense that there is no point in doing another experiment unless someone who believes prayer works comes up with some solid evidence.
The actions of the religious people I have observed don’t bear this out. Certainly many think that any prayers help. The study supposedly showing the power of prayer used strangers also. I believe those praying in this study were believers, right? I’d assume that an Episcopelian could pray for a Methodist without reaching the wrong god number.
I also don’t understand why a stranger praying for someone in good faith wouldn’t count as much as a family member. The stranger is spending time and effort selflessly - the family member would get the loved one back if things went well. Is there any theological justification for your opinion, or is it just an excuse?
Since Shermer did not set up the experiment, you can hardly criticize its design because of his beliefs. Why prayer could possibly affect anything is itself confusing (I’m not talking about support demonstrated by prayer which is purely natural.) If god has a plan, praying won’t affect it, right? But that’s a problem for theists who claim prayer has some effect.
I don’t understand your point about emotion. Emotion obviously has an impact in itself, but if you want to see if prayer has an impact, you must separate the results of prayer from this. The study was not to determine if a person surrounded by caring friends and family would get better than one not so surrounded. The person probably would - no surprise there. I don’t think it is feasible to try to forbid a loving family from praying - few if any families are 100% atheist.
BTW, I’d expect recovery rates in different countries can be fully explained by the state of medicine in those countries. If Moslems, Hindus, Buddhists, Chinese, and Americans all get well at about the same rate when praying to different gods (if praying at all) this either shows God doesn’t care about your religion, or prayer has no supernatural impact. This would seem to roughly control for your concerns about emotion and family.