What people really believe really does matter

A bullet hole at the offices of French satirical newspaper, Charlie Hebdo, January 7, 2015

In the wake of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo in Paris last week, the notion that bad people will do bad things and use religion merely as an excuse to justify them has been echoing around. The idea is that the evil is within the evil-doers and the cause of that evil does not - no, cannot - include religious beliefs. I cannot disagree more strongly. To be sure, there are other causes for evil behaviour, but religious beliefs are among the causative mix along with rage and other emotions, psychopathy, political beliefs, beliefs about honour, revenge, etc. To illustrate the specific power of religious beliefs to motivate people to do the otherwise unthinkable, allow me to tell you a story.

Herbert and Catherine Schaible were a couple living a quiet life in northeast Pennsylvania. They quit school after 9th grade and, eventually became teachers at the First Century Gospel Church where they were third generation observant members. They had 9 children. I know of nobody with more faith than them.

In 2009, their 2 year old son, Kent, developed trouble breathing, fever, and a cough. Trial evidence including testimony from the Schaibles indicated that he'd been suffering for about two weeks before he ultimately died from bacterial pneumonia. When his condition worsened, they called their pastor. The next call they made was to a funeral home.

The Schaibles did not seek medical attention for Kent's condition at any time though they did pray for him and seek the prayer and support of their pastor and their community. They were ultimately found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and endangering the welfare of a child. Their sentencing included 10 years probation and a promise from them: that they would seek medical care if one of their remaining 8 children became ill.

"We tried to fight the devil, but in the end, the devil won" said Herbert at that time.

Fast forward to last year, when their 7-month old son, Brandon, developed similar symptoms. The Schaibles broke their promise to the state, but held true to their faith, and Brandon succumbed to dehydration and bacterial pneumonia, just like the brother that he never knew.

In both instances, medical experts testified that the children would probably have lived had routine treatments like fluids and antibiotics been administered. By all accounts, the Schaibles were loving parents who were both deeply concerned about their childrens' well-being and saddened by their deaths. So how do we explain their behaviour?

Perhaps we should ask the Schaibles how they explain what they did, twice? Here's what Detective Brian Peters of the Philadelphia Homocide Unit reported that Herbert Schaible explained when he asked him just that: "Healing occurs through God's will. Only God's will could have saved his son. He said this several times, and would repeat it in his statement when he was asked if he regretted not taking Brandon to a doctor. “No, I don’t regret it,” Herbie said, “because we believe that the only way is the right way and that is through God. I would change places with either of my sons. But it’s God’s will. He is the healer of our bodies.”"

Cathy Schaible echoed her husband's comments: “We pray and ask God to heal … the way Jesus did when He was on Earth.”

As devout members of their church, the Schaibles believe that faith in Jesus and prayer to God are the right and only path; they don't wear glasses or seatbelts, avoid vaccinations, and, of course, medical care. Schooling ends at grade 10. They also avoid owning and accumulating wealth, making sure to tithe and give to charity while renting their living accommodations.

Their pastor, Nelson Clark, has said the Schaibles lost their sons because of a "spiritual lack" in their lives and insisted they would not seek medical care even if another child appeared near death.

Earlier this year, they were sentenced to up-to 7 years in prison plus additional probation.

Is there any lens through which to view this tragedy other than the one of their faith? Is there any way to explain their behaviour that doesn't appeal to their beliefs about the healing powers of Jesus?

Well, other parents without those particular beliefs avoid life-saving medical care that threatens or kills their beloved. It's even thought that Steve Jobs rejected best medical advice and put off more aggressive treatments in favour of holistic ones, ultimately contributing to his own premature and perhaps unnecessary death. So while this particular brand of Christianity isn't necessary for these types of poor health decisions, it sure seems sufficient. In fact, the sufficient common denominator seems to be an epistemic failure to reason and weigh evidence properly. As soon as faith enters into the mix as a reasonable justification for belief, anything goes, even behaviour that causes parents to kill their children. If deeply held religious beliefs can motivate people to do that, then they can motivate people to do anything. And they do.

A few months ago, President Obama said that ISIS is "not Islamic" because "no religion condones the killing of innocents". I wonder if he'd also say that the faithful followers of the First Century Gospel Church are similarly "not Christian" because "no religion condones the suffering and death of innocent children." He'd be obviously wrong on both accounts.

Would anybody say that the Schaibles are child killers who use their particular religious beliefs as an excuse to watch their children suffer?

If you think that religion can motivate people to do good things, then you better not employ a double standard and proclaim that it can't motivate people to do bad things. What people believe really does matter. Religious beliefs really do matter. Anything believed on faith really shouldn't.

Let's stop exalting faith and protecting it from the criticism it deserves.

Are there more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio?

Is the supernatural beyond reason and evidence, safely protected from human investigation? And is God, a supernatural entity, therefore, off limits for "empiric and rationalist" considerations?

I'm going to begin by answering the first question as it might relate to the alleged healing powers of acupuncture. Then, I'll draw those threads together and show how the same considerations actually apply to God, too.

The idea behind acupuncture is that the pathophysiology of the disorder being treated includes an unhealthy bodily flow of Qi ('Chi') - said to be a type of living or vital energy.   The placement of subcutaneous needles in specific locations is supposed to restore the normal flow of Qi, helping to heal the disorder in a biologically active way.

Qi is an ancient and intuitively appealing concept. There must be some important difference between living organisms and dead ones (or inanimate objects), after all, so why wouldn't it be a mysterious quantity and why not call it a type of energy since, in other circumstances, energy is invisible except for the things it makes happen? But we now know better. Vitalism has been thoroughly and completely discredited by science. Life is driven by the usual types of energy that are all well described - the same kinds of energy that drive all chemical reactions, only in the case of life, those reactions maintain homeostasis for at least enough time for a given species to reproduce. No additional or special type of energy is required to explain life, and no reputable or serious biologist thinks otherwise, anymore.

Nevertheless, millions of people still believe in Qi and acupuncture. "Science just hasn't discovered a way to detect or measure Qi, yet," they tell us. But that is a big, smelly, red herring.

It actually doesn't matter whether we can detect or measure Qi itself, for we are told that Qi and its manipulation has effects in this world that are measurable. We are told that acupuncture has the measurable effect of healing people. Accordingly, we can conduct randomized controlled trials where people are randomly assigned to real or sham acupuncture treatments (where the needles don't actually penetrate the skin and are placed at random locations by non-acupuncture practitioners). If acupuncture works, we can make a prediction: the people getting real acupuncture treatments should improve more quickly and/or more thoroughly than the people getting sham acupuncture treatments. It doesn't matter one iota that we can't measure Qi or it's flow patterns directly. All that matters is that we can predict and measure the alleged effects of Qi here and now, in the natural world.

Well, studies of this kind have been done over and over and I'm afraid that it doesn't look good for acupuncture. The outcomes in the 2 groups are largely indistinguishable. One clearly shouldn't think of acupuncture as doing anything biologically active beyond the power of suggestion. While this doesn't disprove the existence of Qi, it certainly proves that acupuncture as a way of beneficially manipulating Qi is useless. Maybe there are other ways of doing so, but until those are discovered, the idea of Qi adds nothing to our understanding of illness and health, and there's absolutely no reason to believe that it does exist.

It's possible that Qi has nothing to do with anything in the natural world. Perhaps it's purely supernatural. But, if it is, then it's of no consequence here, and should be of no concern to anybody; the whole idea is without meaning. If it does have consequences in the natural world, then those consequences should be measurable or detectable.

And so it is with all supernatural claims, including the existence of the Christian God. Maybe we can't directly detect the Christian God, but we can reason from God's alleged qualities to predictions about the way the world ought to be, and then look for evidence of whether the world is as we'd expect, or not. We would expect a universe where the Christian God exists and is omnipotent, morally perfect, perfectly loving, desirous of a personal relationship with us, etc. to look quite different from a world where no such God exists. For example, if the Christian God exists, we wouldn't expect any gratuitous natural suffering, yet we see a world that appears to be overflowing with it. We wouldn't expect there to be billions of non-believers clustered within borders explained by natural and haphazard factors like politics and conquest. If evidence gathered in the world is better explained by the non-existence of God, then the existence of God should seem much less likely to us. At the very least, it should cause us to become very skeptical of the alleged qualities that those failed predictions are based upon. There are very many predictions made by Christian theism that can be tested here on Earth, and I'm afraid that, like acupuncture, the situation doesn't look good at all.

Perhaps the Christian God doesn't exist, but a different God who lives entirely in a theoretical supernatural world does. Perhaps we know nothing about the qualities and capabilities of such a God and he never interferes in this world in any way. This pretty much describes what deists believe. This type of God really is beyond investigation by reason and evidence, but what a useless belief! A universe where this God exists is no different in any way than one where such a God doesn't exist.  It might as well not exist at all.

This reminds me of the parable of the invisible gardener, by John Wisdom:

"Two people return to their long neglected garden and find, among the weeds, that a few of the old plants are surprisingly vigorous. One says to the other, 'It must be that a gardener has been coming and doing something about these weeds.' The other disagrees and an argument ensues. They pitch their tents and set a watch. No gardener is ever seen. The believer wonders if there is an invisible gardener, so they patrol with bloodhounds but the bloodhounds never give a cry. Yet the believer remains unconvinced, and insists that the gardener is invisible, has no scent and gives no sound. The skeptic doesn't agree, and asks how a so-called invisible, intangible, elusive gardener differs from an imaginary gardener, or even no gardener at all."

I'm afraid that existential questions seem to always and only boil down to reason and evidence. When there is reason and evidence, a conversation can be had about their merits and meanings.  When reason and evidence are unavailable in either principle or practice, we have a meaningless claim that terminates the conversation.

Believing despite insufficient reason and evidence - believing on faith - is propped up as being incredibly valuable, but why? What's so great about faith? It seems to me that in every domain of human discourse other than religion, believing on faith is rightly frowned upon. Would you cross a street on faith without looking to see if a bus is coming? Look at what believing in the existence of God on faith gets us: thousands of Gods and traditions most of which are mutually exclusive, and balkanized  doxastic communities with a horrible and ongoing history of intolerance, discrimination, and slaughter in the name of those beliefs. This is supposed to be the Zenith of human understanding and the path to the most important 'truths' in the universe? What could the word 'truth' possibly mean in that sentence without reason and evidence?

There may well be plenty more in Heaven and Earth than is dreamt of by reason and evidence, but without them, I'm afraid it's all just "Words, words, words." (Shakespeare - Hamlet).

There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio...

Keanu Reeves as the Prince of Denmark during Winnipeg's MTC production in 1995. Check out that passion.

I recently had a nice discussion with some friends about the challenges of identifying as Catholic given numerous problems that flow from standard Catholic doctrine combined with the hypocrisy and scandal within the organization. Along the way, I received this comment:

“You seem to operate out of a rationalist-empiricist framework. And there is of course nothing wrong with that when one is considering matters subject to the analytical benefits of this sort of world-view. But I suggest that there is plenty of human endeavor and human interest in matters not well suited to this sort of analysis. I mean, would you really mock John Keats because figures on an urn are not really “frozen” there? Or would your smirk at Bob Dylan because the times don’t really change? Would one do a cost/benefit analysis of caring for one’s child?

… since God and belief in God are human preoccupations based upon faith, they are not subject to rationalist/empiricist argumentation. You may call it “irrational” but I might propose calling it “hyper-rational.””

The idea here is that there are matters that are not subject to reason and evidence and that the question of God's existence is one of those matters.

If true, then one's belief in God simply cannot be questioned or challenged. This is a big & bold claim that serves to insulate one's belief from criticism.

Sweet.

But imagine the defendant in a murder trial asserting that there are matters not subject to reason and evidence and that the question of his guilt is one of those matters. The incoming tide of further accusations he would face from judge, jury, and the wider court of public opinion would surely include arrogance, stupidity, & foolishness. I mean, it'd be a great move if one could pull it, but can one really ever pull it? What exactly are these matters that are not subject to reason and evidence, and is the question of God's existence really one of them?

Consider a couple of questions. Do reason and evidence explain why we fall in love with whom we do? Can reason and evidence explain why I don't like anchovies? Emotional matters and personal tastes cannot (yet!) be satisfactorily explained by reason and evidence, but it would be absurd to suggest that questions about the existence or nonexistence of certain entities (or the guilt or innocence of those charged) can be answered using emotions and personal preferences, wouldn't it? Would you believe in the existence of Bigfoot on the basis of emotions or personal preferences?

What I think is lurking behind the comments I quoted is that God is supernatural. That's relevant because it is widely believed that the supernatural is a matter that, perhaps forever (but at least for the moment), lies beyond (and is therefore not subject to) reason and evidence. The supernatural is "hyper-rational". Not surprisingly, I have heard similar claims made by people defending alternative medical treatments. Here's what a friend of mine had to say about the paucity of high quality evidence supporting acupuncture and the wealth of evidence indicating that it's nothing more than the power of suggestion :

" in the chaos of nature, there is more that we don't understand than do, and it is arrogant to think that controlled experiments in hermetically sealed labs can in any way replicate the chaos and uncertainty that occurs in nature."

Ahh, yes. I've heard that first part before, somewhere ...

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." - Shakespeare, Hamlet

My advice to you? Beware when you encounter this quote. The person using it is probably feeling that their belief is under some significant pressure and the best way to relieve it is to suggest that it's beyond Earth, Heaven, and even reason itself. You can be sure that if reason and evidence were available to establish their belief, you'd be hearing all about it (this is known as apologetics), but when the belief persists in the face of insufficient reason and evidence (the definition of faith?), then this old canard may make an appearance in the conversation. And notice that it is a conversation stopper:

"I'm talking about something that's beyond you, beyond everything, and neither you nor anybody can touch it."

This attitude - that one is in possession of information that transcends reason and empirical evidence - can be harmless, but it can also lead people to accept ineffective treatments when effective ones exist (see here and here), and it lies behind religiously motivated discrimination and slaughter of infidels and perpetrators of imaginary crimes- the most horrible and tragic aspects of faith-based beliefs.

So this important question still stands: Is the supernatural off-limits for reason and evidence? Chime in and let me know what you think. I'll be responding in a few days.