Junk Science and Quack Medicine

[Marcus]

[Tinker]

[Marcus]

[Colonel Sun]

I've got the facts; you've only got faith.

[Marcus]

[~]

I don't think Marcus realizes that every time he stretches and equivocates the context and meaning of the word "Faith" in an attempt to expand its meaning, he detracts, diminishes, and reduces it to irrelevance.

[Colonel Sun]

[Tinker]

[Caskhades]

I have taken Marcus' advice, and spent some time on the Spengler fora this evening, reading both my (old) arguments with him, as well as the more eloquent disputes by ST and Col Sun there.

It would appear that Marcus, at the end of a long life of blindly accepting quack science and the dying faith known as mainline protestant christianity, is looking back to his life, and comparing it to the lives of people who have dedicated theirs to rational inquiry and the furtherance of mankind. Something inside him, a little nagging voice, whispers to him that the "other guys" might just have it right. The implications of this - the approaching death is really the end - are endlessly troubling and downright frightening. Some boring work, a wife, some children, retirement, fishing, disease and increasing disability -- it's all well and good, but in the long Alaskan winters, one often wonders, with Peggy Lee: "Is that all there is?" No, heaven must exist, and he, Marcus, must be heaven-bound. The little voice needs to die.

To silence this inner voice, Marcus has delved into writers who argued against "positivism" - an ultra-reductionist pseudo-philosophy on the 1950s, long since confined to dusty bookshelves. He has found 3 or 4 writers, plus a host of individual articles in very dubious internet sites, that he has arranged in a defensive fortification against this doubt. Marcus has never understood science: he has never gotten the mathematical training, and has been vaguely intimidated by it since he was a child: severe, ridiculously smart men in white labcoats scribbling unintelligible signs on blackboards, or running substances through complicated systems of glass vials and tubes. The scribblings of Polanyi, Feuerbach, and others, when read in a particularly broad and over-generalizing way, are taken by Marcus to be comforting. Scientists too "must have faith" so they ain't no better than him. Besides, their lives are surely shallow, just as his would be were he to suddenly cast away his network of life-time friends and acquaintances he made by spending so much time in church. He doesn't stop to consider that perhaps church is not the only way to find friendship and fulfillment, that love and dedication can be expressed in perfectly secular ways. Moreover, to Marcus all faiths are epistemologically equivalent (a dangerous moral relativism - bordering on gnostic nihilism, if you stop and think about it). Yet at the same time, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution are both merely parasitic outgrowths on the Body of Christianity, and will surely perish when they will have strayed away sufficiently and are no longer nourished by its living body.

But the little voice just won't die, and Marcus finds himself late in the afternoon, touring his intellectual fortifications, trying to persuade himself of its impregnability. He does so by playing definitional games and by taking every chance he gets to persuade himself that "scientists" and their apologists - a host of people he dismissively addresses on the internet - are nothing but close-minded bigots with nothing of value to teach him. He does so week after week after week, with the same fortifications, and the same arguments and the same dismissals -- many of my debates with him from 2008 are virtually identical to some of his arguments with ST in 2006 and in 2010, except ST makes his points somewhat more clearly than I do - to no discernible effect on Marcus, other than the dismissive "to each his own" (Marcus' Maginot line -if all else fails) appears sooner.

[Colonel Sun]

I think Marcus may have misread Milton;

""

as

"They also serve who only post and hate."

[I am ST]

[Sparky]

[Colonel Sun]

[Colonel Sun]

[~]

Marcus -

Could you perhaps quote some double blind clinical trials that have shown homeopathic techniques to have statistically significant efficacy?

Then, could you show some double blind studies that indicate an efficacy that is better than conventional medicine?

[Marcus]

[~]

Didn't think so.

[Tinker]

[Marcus]

[~]

"Rigor: it's a trap!"

[Colonel Sun]

[Tinker]

[Colonel Sun]

[Marcus]

[Colonel Sun]