Method of Madness: post-hoc reasoning and confirmation bias.

In the "True Christian" thread, schrafinator, articulated two concepts: post-hoc reasoning and confirmation bias.IMO, all theists use these techniques to maintain amd justify belief in a personal God who purportedly interacts in their life. Theists vehemently deny the charge. Nevertheless their attempts to deny that they utilise post-hoc reasoning and confirmation bias, IMO they merely demonstrate that these techniques and their acceptance are institutionalised within religious belief itself.It can be reduced to the following simple equation:All good stuff = God's influence.
All bad stuff = Lack of faith/sin/evil/or a test by God.
Nothing ever = evidence that God doesn't interact/exist at all.And, most definitely, God can never be subjected to a controlled test. Even the Bible prohibits this.This classic post-hoc reasoning and confirmation bias is used in relation to claims about prayer, miracles and faith healing.Theists attempts to justify the success of prayer, miracles and faith healing very much sounds like post-hoc reasosning and confirmation bias.I have studied faith healing at length within Australian fundamentalist churches. I am going to use the subject of faith healing to demonstrate confirmation bias.I invite input from both theists, atheists and agnostics alike in relation to the following testimony:

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I have a friend named Domenic, who is a born again Christian. Dom believes in faith healing.I can personally verify the following has happened:Dom was involved in a serious motorbike accident and suffered numerous injuries, including multiple broken bones in his shoulder. The doctors stated that Dom would not be able to even perform a single push-up for over six months.I personally spotted Dom in a gym, benching the heaviest weight in his life, six months to the day after the accident.Dom has also been twice diagnosed as suffering from cardiac arrest. Both times he was admitted into casualty, but within hours chose to leave the hospital and chose to never seek further medical attention for the condition.He suffered no ill effects and he currently competes in triathlons.

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I have many other testimonials like this. Is this undeniable proof of faith healing?Your analysis is invited!

Perhaps the theists sense the danger.Let me help your case by adding more detail to the anecdote above.Remember that I can personally vouche for the validty of the facts in this story because I WAS PRESENT at each event.

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I saw the x-rays of Dom's shoulder clearly showing shattered bone fragments. I was also present when doctors worked on his ghastly back wound. And, of course I was present 6 months later when his shoulder demonstrated phenomenal recovery.Dom's symptons for his first cardiac event were pains in the chest and down the left arm, as well as breathing difficulties. He nevertheless discharged himself from casualty in a matter of hours with no further treatment.The second cardiac event had similar syptoms, confirmed with a blood test that indicated heart muscle damage (the blood enzyme reading associated with a dying heart due to blodd flow restriction: it was because of this blood test Dom was admitted immediatly to emergency casualty at hospital). Dom also left the hospital within an hour and sought no further medical attention.

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As a sceptic, I admit that these events, which I personally witnessed, establish compelling evidence for the efficacy of prayer and faith healing. Certainly much more compelling evidence than the Christians like Hangdawg13 (Message 23 of 31 Paradox of Prayer vs. Free Will) put forth in support of prayer.No comments?No explainations from the atheist/agnostic camp?This message has been edited by Gilgamesh, 06-07-2004 08:45 PM

Hello sfs. Sorry sfs: my written expression is and always has been atrocious. It is the bane of my professional life.Your right: that is three equations. My beef is with any claim of God's influence. The method used by theists to demonstrate such influence excludes any explaination that might suggest that there is no such influence.If you do not claim any material influence by God in your life, then I have no beef with you. I don't find this comparison illustrative of any point you might be trying to make. I do find it surprising that when you design a scenario to test the validity of prayer/faith healing claims, negating the effect of confirmation bias, Christians have a specific prohibition against entertaining the idea.Cardiac arrest? Like most perpertuators of faith healing myths, I am no doctor. Is cardiac trauma a more applicable term?Such stories as I recounted about Domenic, are the stuff that religious faith healing myths are made of. I'll list some more below.

Hello Hangdawg13. Practically bursting at the seems I am. But I can't resist bursting a little longer.What about these faith healing anecdotes I have personally investigated:- Teenage girl with severe liver failure. After faith healing is alive and well today 10 years on.- Elderly man diagnosed with metastasized stomach cancer: life expectancy 3 months. Still alive after 6 months.- Papua New Guinean tribesman brought back from the dead.These anecdotes are the basis for establishing faith healing claims in some Australian fundamentalist churches. Ok, I understand the context of your example in the other thread. I sure that you understand that the fact that you had an oppportune chance to talk to your departing friends twice about God, does not strike the non-believer as anything particularly miraculous.My story about Dom, is, prima facie, mighty miraculous.

Willow wrote: When you investigate religion, you hear claims like this all of the time. Just skimming through this forum reveals a plethora of anecdotes about faith healing, miraculous occurances and answered prayer. And as you would note, Willow, these claims often come from "Christians" that you'd probably serverely disagree with on doctrinal issues or from Christains that you might claim were not spirit filled.And they also come from people of non-Christian faiths.How does one respond to such claims?On the face of it, as an atheist, I presume such anecdotes a flawed in some way or another. Confirmation bias and post-hoc reasoning explains most.In the case of faith healing, there are a myriad of reasons as to why the stories are likely to not evidence the miraculous.I nevertheless take such stories on face value until I have further knowledge. The above scenario about Dom is very compelling and would play a significant role in establishing faith healing claims within a given church.This message has been edited by Gilgamesh, 06-07-2004 11:56 PM

Hangdawg13 wrote:

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Most of the time however God works through the power of his Word and Holy Spirit in the lives of believers.If God exists outside our dimensional reality, why do atheists insist on subjecting him to the bounds of our dimensional reality?
Like sfs said: can the characters of a novel test the author who wrote the novel?

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Many non-believers have no issue with claims about a God that merely resides outside of our dimensional reality and doesn't influence or interact with it. But this is not what many Christians claim, is it? The Christian God is a personal God, who, as you stated "works through the power of his Word and Holy Spirit in the lives of believers".It is here where the claims enter the bounds of our dimensional reality. If you you make these claims, then you may be called to back them up.

Hangdawg13 wrote But the claims about the lives of the individual believer and claims about miracles we can scientifically observe. Obviously, I'm not interested in anything else.I have observed or been involved personally with Christian churches for many years. I acknowledge that there is a degree of generally elevated happiness (particularly immediately after conversion and in churches where the congregation hasn't started to implode over doctinal issues) with the attendees of Christian churches. A lot of this is due to having an optimistic philosophy and the support gained from the strong church social structure. Some of it is an artificial facade.But otherwise Christians lead normal lives. They experience suffering and joy in about the same ratio as the rest of us. What they claim as miraculous, is merely good fortune that we can all experience. What they claim is God's reward is often just plain hard work on their behalf. Waht they see as a test of God, or punishment for sin, is just bad luck for the rest of us.They apply the equations I detailed above to ensure that whatever happens in their lives accords with their perception of a God interacting with it.One of my colleagues is a devout born again Christian and this is her story: After working very long hours and coming into the office on weekends for four weeks, she finally had a chance to rest on the Saturday of a long weekend. She was relaxing at home, and in her words, was praising God for this well earned opportunity to relax and praying that she would be able to relax more. Half way through her prayer her phone rang and she was informed that a water main has burst on the 14th floor of our office and was flooding the floors below it. She is our office services manager and it is her job to deal with such emergencies.The rest of her long weekend, that had only really just started, was spent dealing with water damage to 6 floors of an office building.This story tells me: shit happens. It also demonstrates the most phenomenal and poignant example of a prayer unanswered.To my colleague it was interpreted as a challenge from God, not an unanswered prayer.If Christians are going to claim that God interacts with their lives (in order to convert others) then thay have to provide evidence that isn't merely examples of confirmation bias and post-hoc reasoning. We stopped worshipping weather Gods hundreds of years ago. Believing that God controls the weather has no explanatory power whatsoever. Thankfully we disregarded that thesis and have developed meteorology to the level where we can predict the weather quite well using internationally linked databases and super computers.Sure, we cannot 100% accurately predict the weather due to (someone help me out here) what I think it chaos theory and complexity. Are you suggesting that God resides there?We used to believe that Lightning came directly from God. Now we know what causes lightning. Are you suggesting that God still causes lightning by manipulating the sub atomic particles that inclines the butterfly to flap it's wings in the Amazonian rainforest?Sounds like the God of the gaps. Sounds indistinguishable from random chance that governs all of our lives.

sfs wrote: I understand. Your claiming that some untestable entity influences the world. In your case, it is the Christian God, on someone elses case it could be invisible pink pixies.This influence is indistinguishable from the natural laws that govern the universe.I have no beef with you. My apologies for using the generic word theist and therefore including you. I probably have no great beef with this either. So in this context, God to you is food, oxygen, shelter and water? Ok. But this is not really the God and the role palyed by God proposed by many Christians is it?This message has been edited by Gilgamesh, 06-08-2004 08:02 PM

The point I was trying to make is that the evidence provided by many Christians to support the claim that God influences their lives through answered prayer, miracles and faith healing, is merely a Christian interpretation of the the same events that are capable of happening to all of us.In relation to faith healing: Christians suffer the same rate of illness and recovery as do all of us, according to their genetic predisposition, lifestyle choices and exposure to pathogens.Christians support the concept of faith healing by fixating on fortuitous recoveries, and de-empphasisng or rationalising away failed recoveries.From my experience, the Dom story above would make a phenomenal foundation for faith healing claims within a church. It actually doesn't provide such a foundation, and I'll explain why in a moment.These, however, are anecdotes underpinning the faith healing claims of several Australian Christian churches that I have studied (I have now provided further explanatory detail):- Teenage girl with severe liver failure. After faith healing is alive and well today 10 years on..... The girl was given a liver transplant by modern medical science.- Elderly man diagnosed with metastasized stomach cancer: life expectancy 3 months. Still alive after 6 months.... this unfortunate individual passed away after 7 months. This story was still seen as a faith healing success: it was just that, according to God, his time was now up.- Papua New Guinean tribesman brought back from the dead.... I have never been able to track this story down to it's origins: it remains an unverifiable anecdote, probably originating from tribal myths.Dom's story? I do have a Christian friend called Dom, but this is not actually his story. The individual in the story is myself. Had I been a Christian at the time that these events occured I have no doubt that this tale would have been spread wide. I myself would have accredited it to God in compliance with a Christian mindset. On it's face, it is better than many faith healing anecdotes that I have heard. It is certainly better than one of my personal favourites: the Christian man who was regularly cured of the common cold within as little as seven days....Instead, as Loudmouth, and sfs have pointed out, it is quite easy to rationalise. The first scenario is an example of the bodies normal re-cooperative capabilities, especially when combined with a progressive recovery exercise regime. The prognosis was pessimistic: probably appropriate for a sedentary individual. The cardiac events were 1) A misdiagnosed torn chest muscle, 2) Misdiagnosed food poisoning (with heartburn). The blood test was misinterpreted: for an elderly inactive man showing symptons of a heart attack, a blood reading showing muscular damage/breakdown is supportive of the diagnosis. For a young individual who regular exercises and resistance trains, the blood reading was normal where you have regular muscle (non-heart muscle) trauma and regeneration. The blood test, as incorrectly interpreted by the doctor, did not distinguish between heart muscle and other muscles.One of the best articles I have ever read on this topic can be found here: Page not found | Skeptical Inquirer. It identfies at least ten errors and bias that can lead honest and intelligent people to accredit success to a "cure", when such credit is not due. The ten errors and bias are equally applicable to faith healing and all other bogus therapies, many which Christians themselves do not subscribe to: Reiki healing, homeopathy, crystals, magnetic therapy, naturopathy etc.The ten are:
1 The disease may have run its natural course.
2 Many diseases are cyclical.
3 Spontaneous remission.
4 The placebo effect.
5 Some allegedly cured symptoms are psychosomatic to begin with.
6 Symptomatic relief versus cure.
7 Many consumers of alternative therapies hedge their bets.
8 Misdiagnosis (by self or by a physician).
9 Derivative benefits.
10 Psychological distortion of reality.This message has been edited by Gilgamesh, 06-08-2004 08:40 PM

Hello Willow, I'm glad you anticipated the obvious. Now why don't you subscribe to the obvious? There are greater contortions required to establish the claim of a miracle. Look at the examples above: the girl was either cured by God, or perhaps, just maybe, the new liver saved her life.The Dom scenario I concocted above demonstrates that the sort of scenarios that happen to us non-Christians are the very same types of scenarios that Christians credit to miracles.Christians and non-Christians alike recover from illness for the same reasons. Read the linked article to find out where you guys go wrong.Do you believe in Homeopathy? Reiki healing?
The same errors of reasoning that incline people to attest to the validity of those methods apply to Christians and faith healing.Read the article. It isn't long. Some of the claims are just plain made up. Like the myth about the New Guniea tribesman. The others are simply natural phenomenon. It would have happened whether beleif in God entered the picture or not. I'd say this story falls into the fortunately rare faith healing category category of just plain deliberately made up crap. Dr Scott has a vested interest in making up such claims.If this story was actually true, and it was properly and independently corroborated, then Dr Scott would be able to convert thousands to Christianity. Accordingly I challenge him to contact James Randi (who has investigated in detail and written a book about faith healing in the US) to conduct this assessment of the claim.If the claim is crap, Dr Scott would not allow such independent investigation into the facts and medical records, and he and his cohorts would merely produce some Christian literature not independently verfiying the validity of his medical records and history.I'll wager he'll chose the latter.I'll wager you'll fail to see the importance of the distinction.

Willow wrote: Thanks for your metered response to my post which was likely to provoke.I did miss that quote. There are many more reasons for someone being mistaken about the success of a treatment, for say, cancer, than misdiagnosis or spontaneous remission. I refered you to a source that detailed 10:1 The disease may have run its natural course.
2 Many diseases are cyclical.
3 Spontaneous remission.
4 The placebo effect.
5 Some allegedly cured symptoms are psychosomatic to begin with.
6 Symptomatic relief versus cure.
7 Many consumers of alternative therapies hedge their bets.
8 Misdiagnosis (by self or by a physician).
9 Derivative benefits.
10 Psychological distortion of reality.If there is an underlying element of truth to Dr Scott's story, any number of these explainations could go a long way to demonstrating where this faith healing myth originated.Page not found | Skeptical InquirerMind you, these explainations explain why honest, intelligent people might be fooled into thinking that bogus therapies works for themselves. They may explain why Dr Scott is personally mistaken about his own faith healing. They don't, however, address exagerated or fraudulent claims by third parties.Please detail (and document) to me a faith healing miracle that might not easily be classified into one of the above categories or my additonal category of deliberate exageration or fraud.My personal worldview does not exclude miracles. I would like to be shown an unequivocal miracle as it would certainly rapidly resolve my personal quest for God. Yes it was a dismissal. Dr Scott's stereotypical portfolio as a self proclaimed prophet would not be complete without a personal faith healing miracle. He has been shown to be a poor source of accurate information in many of the threads on this forum and this miraculous claim sounds like another.So is Dr Scott prepared to put his money where your mouth is?Is he prepared to permit and independent investigation of this faith healing claim?He'd need to authorise access to the relevant personal medical records and test data, testimony from GPs who aren't personal friends of his from the church, in order to even begin to establish the claim that he had the condition in the first place (granted, it is very likely for a male of his age).He'd have to be able to verify that he did not have any sort of medical treatment for the condition (and there are various).Then he'd need to document such a remission that was not within the expected parameters of such a condition. And, as we would all hope, the cancer should not return.Have I missed anything? (Loudmouth, you seem to know a bit about this stuff).What could Dr Scott possibly have to lose by allowing independent verification of his faith healing claim. Nothing, unless certain or all elements of the claim are false.This message has been edited by Gilgamesh, 06-09-2004 12:46 AM

Lam wrote: I don't see any reason why Dr Scott wouldn't subject his claim of faith healing to independent verification.Well, actually I do.

Willow wrote: You will be hard pressed to convince me that my "world view" is not the most effective method for attaining knowledge about the world. I start with minimal starting assumptions, a very sceptical approach and I am constantly prepared to revise in light of new data. I test my world view everytime I climb aboard an aircraft and trust in science. Contrast this to the typical (dare I use the word again) theistic approach, of established starting assumptions that have to be taken as true and cannot be revised. This method shuns testing and fails everytime it is exposed to it.Sure, based on general scepticism I am inclined not to believe claims of miracles and faith healing without substantiation, but I cannot exclude the possibility of their occurance. I admit though, it is somewhat hard to define miracle: history has shown us that miracles tend to initially just be misunderstood phenomenon. We could both identify what we agree is a miracle, only to both be mistaken about the actual cause (advanced alien technology, for instance).Let's try to define your world view then, in relation to healing.How do you distinguish the difference between normal healing events and healing events cause by God, or naughty deceptive Satan?How do you indentify the difference between accelerated healing in an atheist, a Haitian (supposedly invoking demon spirits) and a Christian invoking God?Spontaneous remission does occur in rare cases. The article I quoted above aboves refers to it. How do you identify the difference between spontaneous remission in an atheist, a Haitian (supposedly invoking demon spirits) and a Christian invoking God?Can any healing, even spontaneous remission, occur WITHOUT the input of God?

Willow wrote: Sorry, I'm getting swamped at work. What did I miss? Didn't you merely accuse me of holding a world view that excludes acknowledging the existence of miracles? I thought I tried to explain this. The guys above have articulated how science responds to such claims, and as I told you, I don't have any personal issue with a miracle claim as such.If I witness an unambiguous miracle, I will take that as prima facie evidence of the God purportedly responsible for it. In turn I will respond to that God appropriately and my incentive is that with a small lifestyle change, I score eternal life (where applicable). Easy.I have issue with cranks going around making false or deceptive miracle claims in order to increase their money and power, while increasing the misery and ignorance of others. You read me wrong. I may come across as having a dismissal manner in response to miracle claims but this is based on very lengthy personal investigation and the knowledge we have no convincingly documented case of a miracle ever ocurring in history. That makes me reasonably confident that miracles are really, really unlikely.I am and have always been ready to be knocked off my feet by some, any demonstration of a higher power. If you knew me personally you'd know this to be true. I bore my friends senseless with my endless pursuit of the supernatural. Ok, it's your claim of existence of the 1% that I am interested in. In light of your stats, I believe we can both agree that most miracle claims are bollocks. Let's drill down into this 1%Dr Scott's claim is in this 1%?Provide us with what we need to believe in this claim. I'm sure we could put together a group of individuals with a cross section of philosophies to objectively analyse a miracle claim. As stated above, scientific inquiry can proceed independently of the personal philosophical beliefs of those involved. That's why evolutionary biologists can be Christians, Muslims and atheists alike.I've got a sneaking suspicion that you'll stack the jury to exclude atheists, agnostics, any Christians that have biblical interpretations contrary to your own until we get down to Dr Scott and his buddies, who will undoubtably be the persons responsible for produce the report on his faith healing claim anyway.That's certainly not independent verification.

Jar, I enjoy reading your posts and I like the personality that comes across in your posts. I think that you have the extraordinarily rare combination of a very knowledgeable and open mindset combined with very admirable religious beliefs.I have no beef with you!But I will play ball a bit, because I expect that you can help me learn.Jar wrote: The issue is causation.The article I referenced above helps someone determine whether the healing has been incorrectly attributed to a healing method.How does the above scenario differ from: Someone is sick. Someone doesn't (or never) prays. Person gets well?Willow avoided this question.In this thread, I haven't yet brought up the issue of UNSUCCESSFUL faith healing. For every alledged account of faith healing there is another 5 scenarios arguably demonstrating the failure of faith healing. These scenarios are swept under the carpet.What would constitute evidence for that fact that faith healing doesn't work? (not just a scenario where faith healing didn't operate, due to lack of faith, God moving in mysterious ways etc)