BOGUS EXPERIMENTS ??
15th December 2004
In this current issue I shall attempt to expose two recent experiments that I claim to be bogus experiments but, before doing so, a brief reference may be made to an omission from AT 101. In it I made only oblique reference to moral philosophy.
In passing, Christian moral theory seems to be pretty unsatisfactory. To actually 'Do the Will of God' depends upon two very dubious assumptions - 1) that God, as ordinarily understood, actually exists and 2) that we have, given that He does exist, indisputable means whereby to identify His Will.
Given such an unsatisfactory theoretical basis for their morality we might expect Christians to be somewhat immoral people but experience shows that many Christians (including regular worshipers) are good wise people. Why is this, why is there such relatively sound ethical practice associated with such limp moral theory? The answer seems to be that church members are now, mostly, rather secularised. When they were heavily committed to their faith they tended to be intolerant, corrupt and often cruelly murderous.
The mainstream churches in the UK are now essentially benign social clubs which can be a valuable means of bringing together a wide variety of people who would, otherwise, probably not meet one another. The members simply use religious language to express their, in practice, secularised goodness and wisdom and, for that reason, the sane decent mainstream believer is despised by evangelical nutters - as the devil is reputed to hate Holy Water. Just look at the ever quarrelling wings of the Anglican Communion!
Secular morality is less dubious in theory and often ethically productive in practice.. Clearly we are social beings - as surely as we are mammals, vertebrates, whatever - and these facts about us are indisputable. It is also indisputable that we have drives that do not quite match the imperatives of social flourishing. We are in a state of discipline deficit. We need to be more honest, more kindly, less mutually intrusive, less environmentally destructive and the means whereby we seek to address this discipline deficit is to try to formulate moral values and hence to learn ethical practice. The secularist position, as I see it, is that morals come from the human condition - not from any cosmic supervisor.
Populist Christian morality is based, foremost, on an appeal to self-interest - the carrot of promised heaven and the stick of threatened hell. Then there is the well known thought that God is ready to countenance the suffering of the innocent as part of His Larger Plan For The Good. ('It's all for the best" as my mother's simply piety told her). This is tantamount to envisaging a God who thinks that the ends justify the means - not everyone's idea of morality!
Perhaps the worst bit is the story of Job. God, who is supposedly in never ending need of praise and for our concomitant faith in Him, subjects the good Job to a series of terrible torments simply to test Job's faith in Him. A god who is narcissistic, and sadistic with it, is a poor moral exemplar indeed. If we believe that God is omniscient then He would know about Job's faith anyway thus making the test truly a bogus experiment on God's part, at Job's expence, to boot.
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But it is upon two recent bogus experiments that I wish to dwell at greater length because to learn to see through such experiments is part of the love of wisdom.
There is a well known way of testing the efficacy of new medication - called the 'double blind trial'. The procedure is to take a large number of people (say 500) suffering from the malady in question, divide them into two equal groups. The members of one group of 250 are treated with the medication being tested while the other group of 250 (the control group) is treated with a neutral 'placebo'. No patients know which group they are in (single blind). None of the doctors, nurses and others administering the medication (or the placebo as the case may be) knows which patients are which (double blind). Only the very few people running the test know which patient is in which group - the treated group (medicated) or the control group (placeboed). The efficacy of the medication under test can be inferred from a careful analysis of the results
Now there have been attempts to use this double blind technique to test the efficacy of prayer as a healing procedure but, as is perfectly obvious, this so-called double blind test of prayer is fallacious. Let us unearth the concealed assumptions.
Clearly, a medication does not know that it is being tested but God (we are asked to believe) knows everything and so would know that He is being tested. God will have His own ideas as to who will recover and who will not - be they prayed for or not.
The double blind testing of prayer is a shallow con trick; the people doing it, and those financing it, should know this.
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Another, apparently, bogus experiment has been conducted through TIME magazine. This is a test of 'spirituality'. and it invites readers to fill in a questionnaire To get a high score is to demonstrate one's deep spirituality.
The major reason for suspecting that this test is bogus is the omission of any definition of spirituality and hence the authors seem to be going round in a circle. 'Spirituality' seems to be defined, implicitly, as the package of traits in the tested person being such that his/her answers will be mostly TRUE. It is then held to follow that a high scorer can be deemed to be highly spiritual. Herein may lie the bogus circularity of the whole exercise.
Moreover, some of the questions are themselves questionable. For example what is a "sixth sense" other than the occasional good guess as to what is happening or is going to happen? Is the sixth sense any more than experience plus intelligence plus a lucky 'hit'?
There is no satisfactory definition given of that overworked weasel word 'spirituality'; indeed there is no useful definition of the term in TIME but there is a useful distinction to be made in this regard. That distinction - which seems to be a clear version of what the spirituality people are driving at - is very simple. What things can be bought (or sold) and what things cannot be bought (or sold) ?
We can buy works of art but we cannot buy artistic appreciation or artistic talent. We can buy health care but we cannot buy a sense of well being. We can buy publicity but we cannot buy genuine public approval. We can buy companionship (rich old ladies often have paid companions) but we cannot buy friendship. We can buy sexual services but we cannot buy affection. We can buy a house but we cannot buy the feeling of being truly at home in it.
What is tradable, and what is not, seems to me to be definite enough while what is 'spiritual' and what is 'material' seems to be a very slippery distinction indeed.
The TIME questionnaire seems to be based on poor definition and upon circularity. The test in TIME seem to be an exercise in fuzzy spin rather than in investigating reality. It is, I claim, a philosophically unsound exercise - a bogus experiment.
Here is a scan of the TIME page with my replies.
E.S..
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