A Religious Parallel

The Mormon Church offers us another example of this refusal to know. Faced with exceedingly uncomfortable facts that cannot be reconciled with their dogma, the Mormon elders have stonewalled investigations and research into their claims concerning the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, the text upon which most of the philosophy of that church is founded. Skeptics believe that the book simply was invented by Mormon founder Joseph Smith, who certainly had the wit to do so. But modern historians have questioned how, for example, the Book of Mormon can mention the Book of Revelation, when the latter was not supposed to have been written until more than 700 years later. Steel, not in existence at the time the book is claimed to have been written, is spoken of in its pages, and it has Jesus Christ being born in Jerusalem, not Bethlehem. Back in 1911, Brigham Roberts, a prominent Mormon historian, loudly challenged skeptics to thoroughly examine the Book of Mormon. They did, and to Roberts’s dismay, they found it contradictory and loaded with errors. The Mormon elders are putting an end to such inquiries, telling young Mormon historians to ignore scholarly standards and to defer to church dogma rather than scientific methods when doing research. Ernest Taves, in Trouble Enough, a book on the Mormon Church, denounces this stance:What [Mormon elders] want, then, is Accommodation History, a primitive kind of spoon-feeding of goodies ... that will not bring doubt to those of insecure or uncertain faith; history, that is, by platitude, half-truth, omission, and denial.

The Mormons need not concern themselves with such problems. In the words of the Mormon Church dogmatists, “When the leaders speak, the thinking has been done.”

The Art of Rationalization

The glaring and uncomfortable fact is that the vast majority of those who go to be healed by faith-healers are not healed except for, at best, temporary symptomatic relief. Certainly there is no proof that any of those suffering from actual organic problems are healed, and it seems obvious that those who believe that they have been healed are simply wrong in that delusion. The April 1986 issue of the magazine U.S. Catholic offered a startling rationalization of this obvious fact while maintaining the unproved claim that “some are healed.” It offered thatredemptiveness is a way of explaining why some are healed and others not. It injects purpose into the equation. Once, a blind friend and fellow priest asked [two Catholic healers] if they thought his sight could be restored. Will being able to see make you able to love more? they asked him. No, he replied. Then the healing was unnecessary and counterproductive, they concluded.

It appears that a quick shuffle is possible even in a cassock.

The Overlap of Magic and Science

There is an interesting similarity between religious faith-healing and modern psychoanalysis. Writing on the concepts and mechanics of perception in his book The Body Human, Jonathan Miller says:Psychoanalysis has had an influence which is quite out of proportion to its scientific credibility ... In Freud’s case the discrepancy between social influence and scientific reality has led some psychologists to despair at the gullibility of the general public, and there are many more who resent the money that can be made out of something which they regard as a seductive fraudulence. It’s difficult, however, to believe that the success of psychoanalysis can be explained in terms of public credulity and the extent to which Freudian ideas have penetrated and replaced some of the more traditional views of human nature implies that they have a recognizable truthfulness which cannot, and perhaps ought not to, be weighed by the standards which are applied to laboratory science.... Some of the more uncharitable skeptics ... conclude that the Freudian enterprise should be classified as a religious dogma and not as a scientific theory.

Miller’s observations on psychotherapy apply equally well to faith-healing, and I can share the resentment that so much money is made by those who promote highly questionable or obviously fraudulent theories and claims. But, much more, I resent that those fortunes are earned from innocent victims who often surrender their health, their emotional stability, and even their lives along with their money. While I can easily believe that psychotherapists believe in their professional efforts, I cannot think the same of faith-healers. In common with many philosophers of science, Miller seems to find it difficult to believe that nonsense can become accepted by the public—and by a significant percentage of scientists—simply because it is attractive, satisfying, and exciting, and because it offers a great amount of evidence, though admittedly of poor quality. As a non-scientist, I have no difficulty accepting this. The additional fact that it is often endorsed by people recognized as authority figures—whether or not their expertise derives from an actual study of the phenomena in question—seems to fix it in history as proved, established knowledge, when it never deserved recognition as anything more than mythology, a joke, or a novel notion.