|
Related pages on this site:
- The Bible;
- Is God real?;
- Islam's threat to freedom and a rational society;
- Rationality: not a strong trait in humans.
- Science denial;
- Science, religion and delusion;
- Why accept climate science?
- The delusions relating to religion, wind turbines and health, and
divination have a
number of aspects
in common;
- My 'religion'.
Belief without evidence and belief against the evidence
Belief without evidence
The belief in a God or gods is unsupported by any evidence. I cannot point to any evidence that there are no gods; there could be a god who takes no part in things that happen in our Universe. Bertrand Russell compared the belief in god to a hypothetical belief that there is a teapot in orbit around the Sun out beyond Jupiter. We have no evidence for or against either.Belief against the evidence
The belief that climate change is not happening or that it may be happening but not largely caused by Mankind is a belief opposed to the evidence. There is a huge amount of evidence that anthropogenic climate change is a fact.A few people believe that wind turbines cause illness. There is a great deal of evidence indicating that they do not and can not. I have argued that it makes just as much sense to believe that street trees cause illness.
Many people believe that underground water can be found by walking around with a forked stick or a couple of bent wires. There is ample evidence showing that water divining (or water witching) is nonsense.
There are no absolute proofs in science (outside of mathematics)
However, it is not possible to absolutely prove anything in science, 'science proves nothing', but it can show very good reason for accepting or rejecting many beliefs.Duration of delusions
Religions have been with us for unknown thousands of years, evolving and changing over that time. Divination for water and precious metals and stones has too; at least since Roman times, but perhaps not changing greatly over the years.On the other hand technological delusions, such as those around electromagnetic fields, mobile phones and wind turbine syndrome (WTS) come and largely go in a few years following the introduction of the relevant technologies. 'Wind Turbine Syndrome' was invented in 2009 and had pretty much run its course by 2014.
|
|
Delusion and faith
Faith has been defined as "strong belief in the doctrines of a religion, based on spiritual conviction rather than proof" and "firm belief in something for which there is no proof". Religious faith is only a specific form of delusion.
|
Alternative medicine
The Oxford online dictionary defines 'alternative medicine' as "Any of a range of medical therapies that are not regarded as orthodox by the medical profession, such as herbalism, naturopathy, and crystal healing."Modern orthodox medicine is based on science, alternative medicine is not.
Much of alternative medicine is simply ineffectual, but some is harmful. One of the great problems associated with alternative medical practice is that people using it often postpone seeking legitimate medical help until the problem condition becomes much more serious.
Perhaps the best point of alternative medical practice is that the practitioners often give much more time to the sufferer than do general practitioners. This give the patients a feeling that they are being listened to and sympathised with. This has placebo value.
Wikipedia (2019/04/01) was less kind in its summarising of alternative medicine than the dictionary definition. It provided the following:
"Alternative medicine, fringe medicine, pseudomedicine or simply questionable medicine is the promotion or use of practices which are unproven, disproven, impossible to prove, or excessively harmful in relation to their effect – in an attempt to achieve the healing effects of medicine. It differs from experimental medicine in that the latter employs responsible and ethical investigation. Practitioners of science-based medicine also discard practices and treatments when they are shown ineffective, while alternative practitioners do not. The scientific consensus is that alternative therapies either do not, or cannot, work. In some cases laws of nature are violated by the basic claims of alternative medicine's practitioners; in other cases the alternative treatment can be so much more detrimental to the patient that its use is unethical."According to the author of ScienceBasedMedicine, 2019/04/01, an alternative medicine group produced a petition asking Wikipedia’s founder Jimmy Wales to create and enforce new policies that “allow for true scientific discourse about holistic approaches to healing." Mr Wales' reply included the following:
"Wikipedia’s policies around this kind of thing are exactly spot-on and correct. If you can get your work published in respectable scientific journals – that is to say, if you can produce evidence through replicable scientific experiments, then Wikipedia will cover it appropriately. What we won’t do is pretend that the work of lunatic charlatans is the equivalent of “true scientific discourse”. It isn’t."While I probably wouldn't call most practitioners of naturopathy 'lunatic charlatans' the important point is that naturopathy is not science-based or evidence-based (which is much the same thing).
