Talk:Faith healing

Classification of Faith Healing

The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

Dromidaon has proposed what seems likely to be an acceptable form of words, with no dissent in a bit over a week. Guy (Help!) 13:39, 26 May 2015 (UTC)

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Should the classification of Faith Healing remain as "paranormal magical thinking" or should it be expanded to clarify other views of classification? Dromidaon (talk) 01:14, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

We are having trouble coming to a compromise to describe the classification of Faith Healing. We have one editor who believes it is fine the way that it is, and two who believe that it needs to be changed. However we seem to be unable to reach an acceptable consensus on our own. We are hoping to get some additional editors input on the matter to see if we can find an acceptable compromise.

The discussion is mostly found in the above section, with some of it originating in the section above that. Any input would be appreciated. Thanks! Dromidaon (talk) 01:14, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Text proposed "Faith healing can be classified as a paranormal event, and, in some cases, as magical thinking." I have copied the text proposed from the above section. After some discussion I find it close to acceptable. My objection remains it appears we are saying in WP's voice that faith healing is an event, whereas it is a belief or practice. I don't think the mainstream academic position reflects that the event or phenomenon of healing through the practice occurs. How can it be clarified that we are talking about a belief/practice not an outcome? - - MrBill3 (talk) 04:05, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

Thanks MrBill3 for explaining your thoughts. That actually helps me understand where you are coming from. What if we change the statement to something like this: "Faith healing can be classified as a belief in a paranormal event, and, in some cases, that belief can be classified as magical thinking." That seems long to me, but really helps to clarify that we are discussing the belief and not an event. Dromidaon (talk) 18:33, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

On second thought, I almost want to make the sentence longer to prevent changes by editors who would take issue with categorizing it as paranormal. Something like this: "Faith healing can be classified as a belief in a spiritual or paranormal event, and, in some cases, that belief can be classified as magical thinking." Then we could remove the last sentence in the first paragraph as it would be redundant. This might prevent editors from changing the sentence in the future. Just a thought. Dromidaon (talk) 18:53, 23 April 2015 (UTC)

That sounds good. Faith itself is a form of belief; you could define faith healing as a process initiated on the basis of this belief. Bblandford (talk) 15:31, 24 April 2015 (UTC)

• Comment Came here via an an automated discussion notification on my talk page. Here's my immediate thought: why not use "supernatural" as opposed to "paranormal", as faith healing is usually ascribed to a divine higher power, as opposed to "ghosts" or other types of spirit concepts suggested by the use of the word paranormal... Roberticus talk 13:06, 26 April 2015 (UTC)

• Comment Technically, successful Faith Healing should be classified as the Placebo effect and mistakenly successful would be the post hoc fallacy. This source, Great Expectations: The Evolutionary Psychology of Faith-Healing and the Placebo Effect should probably be part of this article (edit: added). Supernatural, paranormal, spiritual, and magical thinking all seem to be synonyms for how delusional people view faith healing. Of course I could just be unaware of the unique details of each term. Perhaps a clear definition of terms will help. Sources ought to help with the definitions of terms and, by extension, the classification of faith healing. Hope this helped. OnlyInYourMind^(talk) 06:12, 28 April 2015 (UTC)

Am I all right to change the line as purposed? I could find a reference for the supernatural as Roberticus proposed, however I can update the line leaving paranormal with the existing reference for the time being. OnlyInYourMind already added their suggestion. MrBill3, do you have anything else you would like to see changed with the line? Dromidaon (talk) 17:26, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Support my previous implied definition of paranormal was pretty poor ("very strange and not able to be explained by what scientists know about nature and the world" not ghosts) while my concept of supernatural was better ("unable to be explained by science or the laws of nature : of, relating to, or seeming to come from magic, a god, etc."). It seems that the belief itself is supernatural by definition (faith healing) but the actual effect is a paranormal one (could potentially be explained as placebo effect or similar phenomenon), as stated by adjacent reference. So I think the change is a good one in context, as the supernatural belief aspect is already mentioned earlier in the lead --— Preceding unsigned comment added by Roberticus (talk • contribs)

Support (with "supernatural" or "spiritual" phrasing) The phrasing explains what people who believe in Faith Healing believe it to be, that is, a supernatural event. I think including "supernatural" and "paranormal" leads to the least disputable version, and I also think it's a very good WP:NPOV summary of the belief. All that said, I think the lead, as is, bends over backward way too far to encompass every possible variation of faith healing. The proposed phrasing (including supernatural) captures the majority of that information much more concisely. Arathald (talk) 00:34, 5 May 2015 (UTC)

I take this back. Per Adamfinmo, below, we need to be looking at what the sources say, not on what we think is the most accurate description of faith healing. Arathald (talk) 19:19, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Comment I don't see much discussion about what the reliable sources say. While I personally have an ideological opinion on the subject I would like to see those involve in the discussion throw around some more citations instead of gut feeling about what "editors who would take issue with categorizing it as paranormal" might say. The only views that matter are those in the sources. --Adam in MO Talk 03:12, 7 May 2015 (UTC)

Agreed Very good point. It seems a lot of editors are making an ideological or gut decision on what they view faith healing as. How do the (neutral) sources describe it? We've gone way too far down the rabbit hole of WP:OR or possibly WP:SYNTH, and we should probably stop that. Arathald (talk) 19:15, 12 May 2015 (UTC)

Comment. The opening paragraph uses "supernatural," which seems appropriate and uncontroversial. The sentence about magical thinking seems misplaced. Rather than the lead, I suggest that it be placed under "Scientific investigation" insofar as it reflect a technical term by scholars of religion (and culture). The rest of that paragraph also seems too detailed and almost tendentious for the lead, why isn't it under Criticism? It does not read as a summary of the Criticism section, which would be suitable for the lede IMO. In addition, "paranormal" may be a suitable term, assuming it's found in reliable sources. But paranormal refers to the reported / purported events, I gather, and not to the magical thinking. So the phrase "paranormal magical thinking" doesn't work. "Magical thinking" does not need a qualifier like paranormal or supernatural, afaik. Thanks! ProfGray (talk) 16:32, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

• Yes, that is correct When it comes to classifying the belief in "faith healing," you may accurately describe the belief as "paranormal magical thinking" yes. What you are describing is a belief, not a real phenomena which actually works, so yes, the proposed text is acceptable, legitimate, and accurate. If "faith healing" actually worked, then the text would not be appropriate. Obviously it's a delusional occult belief, ergo the proposed text is suitable for Wikpedia, yes. BiologistBabe (talk) 18:31, 8 May 2015 (UTC)

BiologistBabe, will you clarify for me, are you agreeing with the proposed change, or are you agreeing with the existing wording?

So currently, the proposed text with sources would be "Faith healing can be classified as a belief in a spiritual or paranormal event, and, in some cases, that belief can be classified as magical thinking.

I will try and dedicate some time this weekend to research sources that categorize faith healing. I have been pressed for time recently, so this has not taken priority. If we are going to include the wording with "spiritual" or "supernatural", then I would like to find reliable resources that categorize it as such. Dromidaon (talk) 16:26, 13 May 2015 (UTC)

References

Thanks for everyones input on this. Here is what I have found that may help clarify the definition of faith healing. The book "Out of the Ordinary: Folklore and the supernatural" published by the Utah State University Press classifies faith healing as both supernatural and spiritual and could be used to match both conditions. It’s probably the most straight forward reference that I have found other than the ones referenced.

So I would propose the text as such: "Faith healing can be classified as a belief in a spiritual, supernatural, or paranormal event, and, in some cases, that belief can be classified as magical thinking."

References

Let me know what your thoughts are so that we can clear this thing off the list. Dromidaon (talk) 05:47, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

Dromidaon, I think your proposal looks pretty good, and it seems to cover all of the concepts that were discussed.

Also, I want to add that I thought the distinction above between "event" and "practice" (which I took to mean something like "My leg was broken and suddenly it's not" vs "I prayed about healing, and my prayer really happened even though my leg is still broken") was an interesting one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 06:59, 20 May 2015 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

New Testament healings

What would other editors think of restoring the New Testament healings, deleted en bloc a few weeks ago?

A previous editor called this "The most slanted article I have ever seen on Wikipedia," with some justification, and some corrections have since been made. But many would agree there is a lot more that needs to be done before we can claim that the article truly has a WP:NPOV.

In any commercial encyclopaedia, any article is written by an expert in that field. In Wikipedia, however, there is nothing to prevent an editor from composing or editing an article on a subject to which he is vehemently opposed, and using it as a kind of coathook on which to hang all sorts of references to opposing views. This is surely contrary to the spirit and ethics of Wikipedia. This, sadly, is what has happened in this case. But Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, and a source of information, not a soap-box! WP:SOAP.

Of course faith healing has, throughout history, been controversial; we needn't expect it to be any less controversial now. Faith healing cannot be explained within the confines of conventional materially scientific wisdom. But that doesn't mean it didn't and doesn't happen! We editors have much work to do improving this article, to be fair to the readers, and to allow faith healing to be presented in a light which leaves them to make up their own minds as to whether to go down this path or not.

In the case of the section on Christian faith healing, the discussion on Jesus' work was insightful and helpful, well written and well referenced. Any Christian would accept the validity of those healings, not only as historical fact, and as an explanation of the phenomenal spread of Christianity, but also as a model for his or her own healing practice today.

The section should be restored. Bblandford (talk) 11:30, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

1. Numbered list item

Pseudoscience inclusion

Why User:Bblandford continues to remove any mention of pseudoscience? It is has been backed by the reliable sources, and since it is alternative medicine of such category, it is pseudoscience. None of the above discussion was about pseudoscience. Raymond3023 (talk) 09:10, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

it seems your correct (per WP RS)--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 09:40, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Agree, that should be re-added.--McSly (talk) 14:30, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Yes belongs Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 21:03, 27 August 2015 (UTC)

Faith healing does not appear in the list of pseudo-sciences in the WP entry, for the good reason that no-one has yet proposed it to be one. If someone disagrees, there is a paragraph entitled Criticism which is the appropriate place for it.

Also the bald statement "Faith healing is a pseudoscience" (small p!) is at best an unhelpful besmirching of a serious article. On the other hand if someone adds (under Criticism): "XYZ believes faith healing to be a pseudo-science because ... (+ a reference)", that is something that adds intelligent content to an article, and it will not be reverted by me. Bblandford (talk) 22:51, 28 August 2015 (UTC)

The 2 sources you removed here look perfectly fine to me to back up the pseudo-science claim. Do you mind sharing why you deleted them?--McSly (talk) 01:58, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

McSly, I'm guessing that you didn't do more than glance at those sources. They might be okay (not great) if they really backed up the claim. The first says that faith healing is "on the border between paranormal and quackery", and the second says that faith healing is an example of paranormal activities. It's not enough to merely get the words "pseudoscience" and "faith healing" on the same page of a book. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:42, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

I actually looked at the sources (although clearly I could have missed things). The first source ("Critical Thinking: Step by Step") says "Faith healing is probably the most dangerous pseudoscience" (first line of the second paragraph), so there is that. --McSly

Yes, but that source also contradicts itself by saying that it's paranormal and quackery instead just five sentences earlier. That source additionally says that pseudoscience is "'pretend' or 'fake' science" (p 205) and then says that paranormal ideas is a sub-type of pseudoscience—even though paranormal is not any kind of science at all. The same page additionally names two religions (satanism and witchcraft) and theological ideas (e.g., Millenarianism) as pseudoscience. If we don't reject it as confused, then we have to reject it as WP:UNDUE for its unusual claims that religions are fake science and its tiny-minority POV that a reasonable definition of pseudoscience is any "unjustified statements" (the title of Chapter 14). In short, this is not a good source for making claims about whether prayer is science (fake or real) rather than religion. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:07, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

Well, I'm not sure this is a real contradiction. After all, our own article on paranormal says that "The paranormal can best be thought of as a subset of pseudoscience." And the "Supernatural healing" category is a sub-category of pseudo-science. So, It's not like we are breaking new ground here. But fair enough, I'm ok with not having it spelled out in the article. --McSly (talk) 19:35, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

Sure... in a quotation from a member of Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. That's not the same thing as his view being the mainstream viewpoint. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:36, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

It's not pseudoscience according to this source, rather it belongs to both the quackery and religion categories. Count Iblis (talk) 03:20, 29 August 2015 (UTC)

I'm with Count Iblis, only with better sources than a blog.  :-)

I find these conversations a bit frustrating, because it seems that some editors have a memory impairment when it comes to these words. So once again, in the hope that someone is actually paying attention, rather than trying to spam their favorite insulting word into every possible article: Pseudoscience means that something purports to use the scientific method, but does not. If you don't purport to use science, then your method cannot be pseudoscientific. Pseudoscience is not a fancy way to spell ineffective. Instead, that word means that you're telling lies about your methodology. There is absolutely nothing about "faith healing" that purports to use the scientific method. Therefore, it cannot be pseudoscientific. This is a religious practice, not a telling-lies-about-science practice.

As for the sources cited, the first says that faith healing actually works in a few instances, and the second clearly and repeatedly says that faith healing is paranormal.

There are many sources that classify this as paranormal, including some that explicitly say that "paranormal" is the typical classification. We should not include material that is stated to be wrong by expert sources merely because our favorite word is used by a small minority of sloppy writers. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:54, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

References

Point is with the pseudoscience label, there is some explanation that it is not pseudoscience but we are forgetting that even Traditional Chinese medicine is also categorized as pseudoscience on here, thus I don't see how Faith Healing should be kept out from label. Consensus above is to save the previous version, who is going to revert? Raymond3023 (talk) 08:45, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

It can be a judgement call, but it is a judgement call based in the criterion explained by WhatamIdoing that false scientific claims are made. And that judgement must be published in multiple reliable sources preferably written by different authors from different research groups (so that we can be confident that it is a widely held scientifically based opinion, but in some cases there may be a lack of interest in the field, we then have to base it on fewer good sources than we would ideally want to have), it cannot be done here by us. Chinese medicine may well have morphed into pseudoscience as judged by reliable sources, or it may be that Wikipedians editing there have made an improper judgement. Count Iblis (talk) 15:23, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

• Not pseudoscience per WhatamIdoing and the definition in the article. This reminds me of the attempt to label Exorcism as pseudoscience a while back. The bottom line is that if no claim to employ the scientific method is made then it's not pseudoscience. There are some people who broadly view religious belief in almost any form as pseudoscience but the community has consistently rejected that proposition. This is reflected by the fact that Creationism, i.e. the belief that God created the world in six 24hr days, is not in itself considered pseudoscience. On the other hand Creation science also sometimes called "Young Earth science" is, because it attempts to advance that belief by claiming scientific proof. It appears that what we have here is an attempt to redefine the term pseudoscience to include most forms of religious belief that run contrary to what currently accepted science holds. We have been down this road before and the community has consistently rejected such attempts. All of which said, there might be specific instances when faith healing could be considered pseudo-scientific. But this would only occur in the event that a practitioner or apologist was makeing specific claims that the act or its results was backed by science. -Ad Orientem (talk) 18:44, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
• not pseudoscience I have to agree with AO on this one. I just don't see how "God will (sometimes) perform miracles for those who pray for them" is even vaguely like a claim to be scientific. Mangoe (talk) 23:07, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
  • Intercessory prayer is not the same thing as faith healing. jps (talk) 12:10, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
• Some faith healing is pseudoscience. There is too much binary thinking in these discussions. I think this is because either something is in the category or it is out. But it is clear that there are examples of faith healing which are properly pseudoscience in the sense that they claim scientific backing for their claims. In particular, many faith healers will claim verification of their craft through scientific or medical authorities. It is also true that simply as defined, it is clear that one could use faith healing techniques without appealing to pseudoscience, but categorization does not need to be all-or-nothing. Since there are examples of faith healers who promote pseudoscience, the category is relevant enough to the topic for inclusion. Note that simply categorizing an article in Category:Pseudoscience is not the same thing as writing a sentence, "This article is about pseudoscience." jps (talk) 03:25, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
• Pseudoscience. Faith healing itself is merely bullshit, but the study of faith healing by believers (e.g. the Jan 2015 paper in Explore, [1]) are canonical pseudoscience. Guy (Help!) 11:08, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
• Not pseudoscience any more than any other religious/spiritual/philosophical topic that professes certain beliefs. Pseudoscience is a claim, belief or practice which is incorrectly presented as scientific. Some faith healing claims may be pseudoscientific, but this subject as a whole is not. - MrX 13:55, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
• Not Pseudoscience - I think there is WP guidance saying (a) not say 'is' in the voice of Wikipedia, and (b) not show this vague pejorative unless the cite explicitly says it. Mainly I think just follow the cites and the predominant or prominent uses isn't usually this one. Bblandford had a decent neutral phrasing above, one that might also handle the international and wider forms too -- Christian Science, Buddhism, tribal cures, new age beliefs, magic (i.e. wiccan), etcetera. It might bin with Alternative and Supportive practices rather than medicine too. Markbassett (talk) 23:41, 2 September 2015 (UTC)

We are having the time again when editor opinions are being taken over the reliable sources. Easily I find long commentaries without presenting sources to be nothing interesting compared to a short comment by User:JzG. So what we are going to do now? Are there any sources rejecting the notion of it being pseudoscience? Raymond3023 (talk) 17:19, 3 September 2015 (UTC)

Raymond3023 - Mm not sure what your first line says, but I'm OK with being taken over by reliable sources ;-). JzG seemed to be mentioning that a minority subset exists, which I think we can expect with almost any topic ;-) again. However, the article is not about the subset or theories behind it, it's about what is faith healing and the major items within it. So instead of googling for topic + odd word to find the oddballs, just google the topic to find the overall main points and events, or google topic + some typical responsible site and get some good tips. Most seem to say it's a spiritual or cultural practice, and after that is a lot of sidenotes and subsets which we can hope to mention in due weight. Markbassett (talk) 19:24, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

"::::::That means it is unscientific too and it can be mentioned as well. But again.. what about pseudoscience generalization? Raymond3023 (talk) 10:38, 8 September 2015 (UTC)"

RfC: Is faith healing a form of pseudoscience and should it be labeled as such either in the article or by assignment of category pseudoscience?

Request for comment: Is faith healing a form of pseudoscience and should it be labeled as such either in the article or by assignment of category pseudoscience? -Ad Orientem (talk) 18:42, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

• Not Pseudoscience makes no scientific claims, therefore can't be pseudoscience. From what I can see in the above discussion there is no strong sourcing claiming labeling it as pseudoscience.Brustopher (talk) 19:02, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• Comment Could be omniscience with the right sources. Zulu Papa 5 * (talk) 19:18, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• Not Pseudoscience Still fake, but it's not pseudoscience. Also, I am likely the only person who came from Wikiproject Christianity and Wikiproject Skepticism >_<. I think it'd fall under paranormal claims like psychics. Jerod Lycett (talk) 19:58, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• comment was this topic not discussed already in the text prior to this request?--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 20:04, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

It was. I added the RfC to get a broader range of opinions. I also notified some of the wiki projects that might have an interest in the subject. -Ad Orientem (talk) 20:36, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

• The academic study of faith healing is largely pseudoscience. That justifies the category. Guy (Help!) 22:34, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
  • I don't have access to the ATLA Religion Database, which would probably be the best way to find out what religious scholars make of this. However, I checked a few that I do have access to, and here are the results:
    • At ProjectMUSE, 4% of sources containing "faith healing" also contain "pseudoscience", and 2.5% of those containing "pseudoscience" also mention "faith healing". Even if we unrealistically assume that every single source mentioning both words is saying that faith healing is pseudoscience, then it's still true that sources discussing faith healing almost never mention pseudoscience, and that sources talking about pseudoscience rarely even mention faith healing.
    • Ebscohost, Gale Virtual Reference Library, Gale Science in Context, and Britannica Library each have somewhere between a dozen to a couple hundred sources on each of the two subjects, but zero that contain both. Gale General OneFile has one source mentioning both, and it's a book review that doesn't directly equate them.
  • Most of the sources about faith healing are about cultural or religious issues. My conclusion: There is a significant academic study of faith healing, and that academic study is almost entirely uninterested in pseudoscience. (Perhaps Guy meant to write "The medical study of faith healing, as seen in some remarkably low-quality journals" rather than "the academic study". Academia is bigger than the science division.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:30, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
• Comment - so far no comments have addressed the questions that are specific to this article, and a distinction should be made between them. I will answer them separately below. RockMagnetist(talk) 22:36, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• Not Pseudoscience per sources mentioned above. I seem to recall there was some pseudoscientific faith healing research done once (we'll pray for people in one ward, but not in the other ward, etc.) but that would be excessively fringe, even for faith healing. StAnselm (talk) 10:21, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
• Not Pseudoscience in the general case. Some specific practices combine faith healing with pseudoscience or attempt to turn faith healing into a pseudoscience but in the general case it isn't as is borne out within the sources. SPACKlick (talk) 10:58, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
• Still Not Pseudoscience Follow the cites or logic - unsurprisingly faith healing generally uses faith to heal, by some ritual or calling on Jesus or a saint or some higher power. Bblandford had a decent definition lead "Faith healing is the generic term used for prayer, meditation, incantations or rituals for therapeutic purposes, either as a substitute for, or in conjunction with, conventional medical treatment." It might bin with Alternative and Supportive practices but in general it's expressly not science and not medicine. Markbassett (talk) 01:37, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
• Not Pseudoscience Per the argument given above by Whatamidoing. Immortal Horrors or Everlasting Splendors 14:22, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
• Yes. Citing Pseudoscience and the paranormal by Terence Hines, de wrote that "Despite the lack of generally accepted demarcation criteria, we find remarkable agreement among virtually all philosophers and scientists that fields like astrology, creationism, homeopathy, dowsing, psychokinesis, faith healing, clairvoyance, or ufology are either pseudosciences or at least lack the epistemic warrant to be taken seriously" (here). Raimo Tuomela thought that "examples of pseudoscience as the theory of biorhythms, astrology, dianetics, creationism, faith healing may seem too obvious examples of pseudoscience for academic readers" (here and a few pages later here). One remedy, passed 3 December 2006, found in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience is "The term 'pseudoscience' shall be interpreted broadly; it is intended to include but not be limited to all article in Category:Pseudoscience and its subcategories" – faith healing is already included in the List of esoteric healing articles which is a subcategory of Category:Pseudoscience. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 21:55, 16 September 2015 (UTC)

Should faith healing be labeled a pseudoscience in the article?

• Qualified yes. There are plenty of reliable sources supporting this classification. For example, in this book search it gets its own article in two encyclopedias of pseudoscience and full chapters in some of the other books. I find this quote particularly useful:

Despite the lack of generally accepted demarcation criteria, we find remarkable agreement among virtually all philosophers and scientists that fields like astrology, creationism, homeopathy, dowsing, psychokinesis, faith healing, clairvoyance or ufology are either pseudosciences or at least lack the epistemic warrant to be taken seriously. As Hansson (2008, 2009) observes, we are thus faced with the paradoxical situation that most of us seem to recognize a pseudoscience when we encounter one, yet when it comes to formulating criteria for the characterization of science and pseudoscience, respectively, we are told that no such demarcation is possible.

— Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem, pages 30-31

However, I agree with Bblandford that if it is just stated baldly, then it is a mere perjorative. The statement should be coupled with an account of scientific investigation of faith healing. RockMagnetist(talk) 22:36, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

• You cannot use a source that says it is "either pseudoscience or...[not] to be taken seriously" to say "it's pseudoscience". "It's either red or blue" does not permit us to claim that something is red. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:43, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• Not labeled pseudoscience as a whole, but specific claims can be labeled pseudoscience iff scientific claims are made in sources that are not backed by actual science in reliable sources. Some faith healing claims may be pseudoscientific, but this subject as a whole is not. - MrX 13:42, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
• Not pseudoscience but the existence of the demarcation problem, and the fact that a minority of sources include it as either pseudoscience or as things similar to pseudosciences, would be fine. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:43, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• @WhatamIdoing: Right - basically I support a nuanced statement that sticks close to what the sources say. RockMagnetist(talk) 22:33, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• No, and I see the article currently says "It is non-scientific", complete with redlink. Is Non-science a thing? StAnselm (talk) 10:21, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
• 'Not pseudoscience - again, follow the links and the dominant and bulk of them go elsewhere. If you have to hunt for a cite that has both words and aren't finging many, then it's just a random word hit or vague pejorative and should not be given undue weight. Markbassett (talk) 01:40, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
• Yes. Citing Pseudoscience and the paranormal by Terence Hines, de wrote that "Despite the lack of generally accepted demarcation criteria, we find remarkable agreement among virtually all philosophers and scientists that fields like astrology, creationism, homeopathy, dowsing, psychokinesis, faith healing, clairvoyance, or ufology are either pseudosciences or at least lack the epistemic warrant to be taken seriously" (here). Raimo Tuomela thought that "examples of pseudoscience as the theory of biorhythms, astrology, dianetics, creationism, faith healing may seem too obvious examples of pseudoscience for academic readers" (here and a few pages later here). One remedy, passed 3 December 2006, found in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience is "The term 'pseudoscience' shall be interpreted broadly; it is intended to include but not be limited to all article in Category:Pseudoscience and its subcategories" – faith healing is already included in the List of esoteric healing articles which is a subcategory of Category:Pseudoscience. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 21:55, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
  • Perhaps you should take a moment to think about the logical disjunction in the sentence you quote from the first source, which gives a long list of things that are "either pseudosciences or [not] to be taken seriously". "The cars are either red or blue" does not mean that all the cars are red. Some cars might be red, some might be blue, and some might be both—but Wikipedia absolutely cannot use a source that says "red or blue" to say "this source says it's definitely red, red, red, RED, RED!" Exactly like the sentence about the cars, "it's pseudoscience or nonsense" does not permit us to say that "it's definitely pseudoscience". WhatamIdoing (talk) 02:30, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: the sentence is disjunctive but it is logical. The sentence (and the article it is taken from) makes clear that the simple demarcation criteria that Popper proposed in the early 20th century are inadequate. The second phrase of the sentence both "does not permit us to say that 'it's definitely pseudoscience'" and it does not permit us to say the opposite, i.e. that it's definitely not pseudoscience. From this podcast (by coincidence posted last week) in which Massimo Pigliucci (Mahner's chapter that I quote is in Pigliucci's book) and Nigel Warburton discuss the the demarcation problem, we know that in philosophy there is are cluster concepts or family resemblance concepts, for example Ludwig Wittgenstein used the analogy of the definition of a game based on a target image, i.e. you look at and say "that is a game", "that is a game", "that is not a game", etc.; and then you come up with situations that you are not sure of, because it has some characteristics of a game but not enough to fully qualify it as a game. Pigliucci gives evolutionary psychology's status as a science as an application of family resemblance. In a cluster framework, the sentence can be read that faith healing has a family resemblance to both pseudoscience concepts and concepts that "lack of epistemic warrant to be taken seriously". –BoBoMisiu (talk) 17:38, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

I think you need to make up your mind. Your !vote says that "Yes", we can use this particular source to label faith healing as pseudoscience. Your statement here says that we can not use this particular source to label faith healing as pseudoscience. It is not possible for both of these sentences to be true.

I don't believe that anyone is interested in having a sentence that says that faith healing is never pseudoscience; the question here is all about whether it (usually) is, or whether we should be (relatively) silent on the point. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:35, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

• Limited yes. We tend to give some berth to description of religious topics with regards to WP:FRINGE. If there's content describing the validity of it in it's own section with appropriate sources calling it pseudoscience (maybe discussing placebo effect, etc.), I'd be fine with that. Not throughout in other sections discussing general beliefs though. I'd be more interested in what scientific sources say in describing it though rather than the pseudoscience label, so I don't see a strong need to go with that term. Kingofaces43 (talk) 00:39, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Should it be placed in the pseudoscience category?

• Depends on how "commonly and consistently" sources have to use a definition for it to be a defining characteristic. There are a lot of sources that refer to faith healing as pseudoscience, but far more that don't, as these searches indicate:

• Google Scholar: faith healing pseudoscience (about 7,340 results), faith healing -pseudoscience (about 360,000 results)
• Google Books: faith healing pseudoscience (about 1,150 results), faith healing -pseudoscience (about 31,900 results).

But that's still a lot of reliable sources calling it a pseudoscience, so maybe that qualifies. Another approach would be to see how much material on faith healing as a pseudoscience is justified in the article body, then decide whether it is enough to justify summarizing it in the lead. If not, by NON-DEFINING it probably shouldn't be in that category. RockMagnetist(talk) 22:36, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

• For those who don't "do" math, or at least not in their heads, that's about 98% of Google Scholar hits that don't use "faith healing" and "pseudoscience" together, and the remaining 2% includes some sources that directly say that faith healing is not pseudoscience. Among Google Books, that 96.5% of books that don't use the two words together, and 3.5% that do—again, including a non-trivial number that mention both words to say that they're not the same thing. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:54, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• @WhatamIdoing: It might help to provide a few links to the latter kind of source. RockMagnetist(talk) 22:53, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• Comment The question and topic both have too many aspects for a simplistic categorisation to suffice.v There are aspects of faith without significant scientific associations and too much invocation with quackery for it to escape the pseudoscientific label. I agree pretty well in detail with RockMagnetist's summary and reckon that is the way to look at it and proceed. JonRichfield (talk) 04:54, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
• Marginally Pseudoscience.  If you're talking purely about the belief that (presumably religious) faith can bring about physical healing, then it's probably not pseudoscience. But inevitably people perpetuate stories of cases where people were supposedly healed by "faith healers" and/or the "power of prayer." When such anecdotal "evidence" is presented as "proof," then it definitely becomes pseudoscience.
  Richard27182 (talk) 05:27, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

  If that is the standard then there are not going to be many subjects that could not have a pseudoscience label thrown on them, including probably every article dealing with religion or religious faith. -Ad Orientem (talk) 08:51, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

  Yes, but most of those do not have a faux-scientific literature around them. That is what characterises actual pseudoscience. Faith healing has a cottage industry of ideologically motivated "researchers" publishing a steady trickle of papers in the literature. Guy (Help!) 12:55, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

  I see very few such articles in my trip to PubMed, and most on the subject say that it doesn't work for organic diseases—hardly what I'd expect an industry of ideologically motivated authors to publish. (Even skeptics believe it could occasionally "work" for purely psychological conditions.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:54, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• Not pseudoscience for purposes of categorization any more than any other religious/spiritual/philosophical topic that professes certain beliefs. Pseudoscience is a claim, belief or practice which is incorrectly presented as scientific. Some faith healing claims may be pseudoscientific, but this subject as a whole is not. - MrX 13:37, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
• Yes Faith healing is already included in the List of esoteric healing articles which is a subcategory of Category:Pseudoscience – one remedy, passed 3 December 2006, found in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience is "The term 'pseudoscience' shall be interpreted broadly; it is intended to include but not be limited to all article in Category:Pseudoscience and its subcategories". Citing Pseudoscience and the paranormal by Terence Hines, de wrote that "Despite the lack of generally accepted demarcation criteria, we find remarkable agreement among virtually all philosophers and scientists that fields like astrology, creationism, homeopathy, dowsing, psychokinesis, faith healing, clairvoyance, or ufology are either pseudosciences or at least lack the epistemic warrant to be taken seriously" (here). Raimo Tuomela thought that "examples of pseudoscience as the theory of biorhythms, astrology, dianetics, creationism, faith healing may seem too obvious examples of pseudoscience for academic readers" (here and a few pages later here). Faith healing is pseudoscience and should be included in Category:Pseudoscience. It is based on pre-scientific ideas and follows procedures. Faith healing is dangerous when it used as a substitute for science based medicine and benign when it used as a supplement for science based medicine. Non-fraudulent faith healing employs a pre-scientific method analogous to a scientific method: there are presuppositions, that something supernatural exists, that the supernatural affects the natural, etc.; there is observation that something is perceived as not normal; there is a protocol followed, i.e. some type of ritual, prayer, etc.; there is observation for perceived change; there is a followup protocol, i.e. some type of ritual, prayer, etc.; there are hypotheses for negative results, e.g. lack of faith. Fraudulent faith healing (of the type by some televangelists like Peter Popoff in the article) employs active deception and intentional psychological manipulation in addition to some type of ritual, prayer, etc. The term paranormal is less than a century old and, from what I have read in the past, was used to reframe the spiritualists activities in a more positive way after over a half-century of exposed fraud. Nevertheless, if faith healing is defined in a paranormal sense it is still pseudoscience by definition. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 14:29, 9 September 2015 (UTC) modified 21:55, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
• Omit category. With very rare (=notorious) exceptions, religious activities should not be included in any science or pseudoscience category. People looking for information about pseudoscience will not be looking for prayer (or for fraud: I should check the cat page to see whether there's a pointer to a cat for fraud). As noted in the stats above, only a very small minority of sources even discuss the two ideas in the same article or book. "Follow the sources" and "give DUE weight to the mainstream position" means that this should not be categorized as pseudoscience (and certainly not as a defining characteristic). WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:54, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
• Weak possible support of category - I am the first to acknowledge that most faith healing isn't called pseudoscience, but, honestly, that is I think primarily because it is a hugely significant factor in religious studies, and that is a much broader field than pseudoscience. The topic is however included in the (apparently not highly regarded) Williams Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience as a separate article, although I don't see it in the Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience and don't have a copy of Brian Regal's Pseudoscience: A Critical Encyclopedia readily available to see if it is there. If it is a separate entry, or significant subsectionn of a larger entry, in that last book, I would think that there would be cause to add a category. If anyone has access to that book, that would help a lot. With or without it, though, I think pseudoscience is probably a defining characteristic of some forms of faith healing, most of which probably don't have separate articles, so the inclusion of the category might be reasonable on that basis. John Carter (talk) 23:03, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience has the topic Prayer and Healing (pages 190-194); Pseudoscience: A Critical Encyclopedia has a chapter on Miracles and miracle cures (pages 107-109). RockMagnetist(talk) 23:12, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• Yeah, I actually have the Skeptic Encyclopedia in front of me, That article is specifically regarding prayer, of the rather non-showy, private individual or group, variety, as opposed to the more showy variety I at least associate the term "faith healing" with, which is the Oral Roberts-kind. It is basically a review of the comparatively few studies to date, many of which have been funded by the Christian Templeton Foundation, which is reasonable cause for their being questioned. I myself like I said think of the Oral Roberts variety of faith healing, which isn't specifically mentioned in the Skeptic Encyclopedia, as being non-pseudoscientific, because so far as I can tell they don't make any specifically "scientific" claims, which is why I said above that some aspects are pseudoscientific, but others, like the showy stage version, might not be. John Carter (talk) 23:32, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• Definitely not, even if we could quote people saying that it is pseudoscience, because we can also quote people saying it's not. StAnselm (talk) 10:21, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
• No - this is still not pseudoscience, so it's no no and no. Markbassett (talk) 01:42, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
• Weak yes. Here from bot invite. In terms of religious beliefs in general, the category wouldn't apply. However, one could argue the legitimacy of the category for people pushing faith healing as opposed to medical treatment or just plain quacks and scam artists. The category wouldn't mean it applies to the whole article, just that there can be noteworthy subjects within that would fall under the category. Kingofaces43 (talk) 00:43, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Comments

• Comment - I'm not sure this RfC is going to achieve its intended goal - deciding how to handle references to pseudoscience in this article. Most people are simply offering opinions without any reference to sources or the article. It might be better to close it and start a more carefully worded RfC. RockMagnetist(talk) 14:50, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• Comment: I tend to agree with RockMagnetist above. The question is as phrase too broad to be useful. Falun Gong, for instance, could be (rightly or wrongly) said to have claims to a scientific nature, and there have been some reported instances of "faith healing" involving its founder. So, as that movement makes claims which could be theoretically scientifically tested, aspects of it could be, conceivably, characterized as pseudoscientific. Oral Roberts, however, has never made any claims of a scientific nature to any of his alleged healings, so there would be reasonable difficulty in characterizing his healings as pseudoscientific. There are too many variations within the broad "faith healing" area for any single definition to be able to be reasonably applied in any and all instances. It could reasonably be said that at least some, maybe several, instances of faith healing contain pseudoscientific elements, and I wouldn't have any objection to that, or to more clearly itemized discussion of those variations which do clearly contain claims of a scientific nature, but I would be very hesitant to paint all the variations within this broad field with the broad brush of such labelling. John Carter (talk) 15:46, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

@Brustopher, StAnselm, SPACKlick, and MrX: I don't think the term pseudoscience is pejorative since there is a scientific claim of physical causality in all faith healing. I think it is WP:BLUE that faith healing is pseudoscience. It is common knowledge that believers in many types of faith healing claim that these processes have physical affects and that is a scientific claim of physical causality, i.e. if you do X, Y, Z then X, Y, Z will cause physical change. For example, the article about "therapeutic touch" in Shermer 2002, p. 243, which is titled The skeptic encyclopedia of pseudoscience, states that "[...] healing, practitioners claimed to treat illness and relieve symptoms [...]" It also states in the article about "prayer and healing" that it "teaches that illness is an illusion and that prayer, by invoking natural spiritual laws, can dispel illness. Thus, Christian Scientists avoid medical doctors when they are ill and choose prayer instead, either by themselves or with a Christian Science "practitioner" — someone who has a minimum of two weeks of instruction in the use of prayer to conquer disease" (Shermer 2002, p. 190). "Healing magic is used either as a replacement for or a supplement to [...] medicines when an illness has a strong psychological or spiritual cause. Similar to faith healing, it is meant to work without directly affecting the biological or chemical attributes of the subject" (Shermer 2002, p. 278 279). I have not found any Google Books snippets about faith healing by faith healing folks that claim not to cause a physical change – they claim to cause a change in the person who the target of the faith healing. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 16:44, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I think the statistics of sources that contain both "faith healing" and "pseudoscience" is a participation bias, or as you wrote "that academic study is almost entirely uninterested in pseudoscience". There is a demarcation problem because of this participation bias; it is clear to me that there is a scientific claim of physical causality in all faith healing. I think the claim of physical causality is WP:defining. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 16:44, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@JonRichfield and John Carter: is there any faith healing that claims not to cause an effect? In other words, is there any faith healing that claims to do nothing. Did Oral Roberts say that faith healing had no physical effect? –BoBoMisiu (talk) 16:44, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@Richard27182: a belief in faith healing is not faith healing itself. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 16:44, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@Ad Orientem: I disagree that categorizing faith healing as pseudoscience will result in other religious articles being categorized as pseudoscience, it is sweeping assumption since few articles dealing with religion or religious faith claim any physical causality for either a cause or an effect. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 16:44, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@RockMagnetist: how would you reword the RfC? It may be better to start another one. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 16:44, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Actually, I think it would be better just close this RfC as no consensus and not start a new one, at least for now. Instead, someone should look at the sources above and see if there is anything worth adding to the article; maybe a discussion of demarcation could be part of it. If a significant amount of material is added, we can go back to thinking about the lead and categorization. RockMagnetist(talk) 17:14, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

BoBoMisiu, I believe that you have confused "scientific" with "real". "A scientific claim" is a claim that is backed up by the scientific method. It is not a claim that is objectively true. Claims like "I'm wearing a green shirt" or "My car started when I turned the key in the ignition" or even "Drosophila is the genus name for fruit flies" can be objectively true, but they are not scientific claims. These are claims backed up by personal perception (the color of the shirt, the belief that decision to classify the garment as a shirt and not some other type of clothing), anecdote (I say that the car started), and linguistics (scientists could have chosen another name), not claims that are backed up by the scientific method. There are no claims of experiments, hypotheses, testing, refinement, or progress towards agreed-upon facts in those claims. Therefore, they are non-scientific claims. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:50, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

More simply: There is a major difference between "Something happened" and "The scientific method proved that something happened". WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:53, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Also, "pejorative" means that the word is perceived as saying something bad or negative about the subject. Pseudoscience is pejorative. It communicates a negative, belittling POV about the subject. Note the definitely of pejorative says nothing at all about accuracy or efficacy. The sole function of a pejorative is to communicate your negative or belittling POV about the subject. "This is pseudoscience" means "This is something that pretends to use the scientific method, but which actually does not, and which I want you to think is bad". English has other words to say, "This doesn't work", like ineffective and useless, and other words to say, "This claims to affect reality through magic", like supernatural and fraud. WhatamIdoing (talk) 20:13, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree with the contention that the use of the word pseudoscience is more or less often inherently pejorative, and taht it should be used only sparingly as a prominent description of many things, but, unfortunately, others disagree here, and existing policies and guidelines seem to support them, for whatever reason, and you will find that the word is used even in the first sentence of articles like intelligent design. The old arbitration ruling regarding pseudoscience is part of the problem here, because I think it has made people less willing to argue against the term itself, although I myself tend to think that the word should be used much more sparingly and less obviously than it at least sometimes is. John Carter (talk) 20:19, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@BoBoMisiu: I disagree that it's WP:BLUE (I also tend to subscribe to WP:NOTBLUE). I'm not even looking at perjorative or not. Pseudoscience is a subset of bullshit. Faith healing is bullshit. For bullshit to be pseudoscience it needs to explain its effects in scientific terms adding a veneer of credible bullshit to the incredible bullshit. Faith healing doesn't do that. It explains its bullshit with God/The supernatural. That's not pseudoscientific. Pseudoscience is

1. a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method.- Oxford Dictionary
2. a system of theories, assumptions, and methods erroneously regarded as scientific- Merriam Webster
3. Pseudoscience includes beliefs, theories, or practices that have been or are considered scientific, but have no basis in scientific fact.- Your Dictionary
4. a discipline or approach that pretends to be or has a close resemblance to science - Collins Complete
5. A pseudoscience is a belief or process which masquerades as science in an attempt to claim a legitimacy which it would not otherwise be able to achieve on its own terms- Chem1.com
6. A pseudoscience is a set of ideas put forth as scientific when they are not scientific.- Skeptic's Dictionary

That additional criteria of masquerading in the clothes of science is important because otherwise pseudoscience just deflates in meaning to "Bullshit that isn't true" SPACKlick (talk) 20:55, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing and SPACKlick: no, I don't think I'm confusing the two. The claim of faith healing is a claim of physical change; for example, if you have polio and if you are the target of faith healing and from that you do not have polio. That sequence from you have polio to you do not have polio is a claim of measurable physical change. Science uses techniques that measure physical change which though the scientific method vets whether the claim is objectively true. The scrutiny of the scientific method either verifies or falsifies that claim. This is not a theoretical cycle of the scientific method where you start with a theoretical model and develop experiments from that. Faith healing starts with a claim of physical fact, i.e. that faith healing caused physical change. From what I have read, the scientific claim of causing a measurable physical change is never verified by applying the scientific method; the claims fail scrutiny. I am not saying that faith healing claims are objectively true; I am also not saying that faith healing claims are "personal perception [...], anecdote [...], and linguistics [...] but that the claims are about measurable physical change. I agree that they are "not claims that are backed up by the scientific method" as you wrote. But, faith healing is not just claiming that "something happened" but that something happened (i.e. ritual, prayer, etc.) that caused something else to happen (e.g. you do not have polio). They make a scientific claim of causality, i.e. a link between events where one event causes the other event. They are not claims of correlation but cause. While it is very reasonable to assume that the scientific claim of causality will objectively fail the scrutiny of of the scientific method, the claim and the falsification of the claim are separate types of events. There is no progress in faith healing, there is no repeatability, there is no real design of experiments, there is no refinement of measurement techniques, there is generally no testing at all, there is only blatant claims of causality and claims of produced physical change and hypotheses about lack of faith; from that, faith healing is pseudoscience and not science but faith healing makes a scientific claim of causality and a resultant claim of physical change. I agree that it is bullshit. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 21:52, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Actually, I think only some of the claims of faith healing are physical, as some also seem to be healings of what might be described as psychological problems. Psychological problems are harder to scientifically verify. Also, there is the somewhat problematic nature of spontaneous recoveries, which might be seen in at least a few of these cases, as well as the medical examination of those medical miracles approved as miracles by the doctors associated with the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Again, just to be clear, I am in no way saying that I believe no faith healings are pseudoscientific, but some may well, and, in the case of the Congregation-approved miracles, probably do in some cases to some extent qualify as if not proven, at least not scentifically discredited. John Carter (talk) 22:08, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

It doesn't matter if it's physical or not. The color of my shirt can be measured using "scientific" instruments. Science does not "use techniques that measure physical change"; science is a way of thinking. Don't confuse the toys in the physics lab with the scientific method. You are not "doing science" if you take your temperature in the morning and take it again in the evening, even though you have "measured physical change" (namely, the physical property of heat). You are not "doing science" if you measure the color of my shirt, splash paint on it, and measure the color again. That's not science. Science is when you use the scientific method.

• Science is what you do when you honestly engage in all of that repeatability, design of experiments, refinement of measurement techniques, and other types of testing and trying to falsify it. (You might not be any good at any of this, in which case you get "bad science", or you might do a good job, in which case you get "good science".)
• Pseudoscience is what you do when you tell lies about whether you are engaging in all of that scientific method, by saying that you are trying to work on that repeatability, design of experiments, refinement of measurement techniques, and other types of testing and trying to falsify your hypothesis, but actually you're not doing anything of the sort.
• Non-science is what you do when you neither actually follow the scientific method nor claim that you're using the scientific method.

Faith healers are not making a scientific claim of causality. They are making a nonscientific claim that one action caused the other.

Maybe this will make more sense. Instead of "I asked God to give you a gift of health, and my request made you have more health", imagine that the claim is "I asked my mother to give you a bowl of ice cream, and my request made you have more ice cream". Even if I can produce scientific instruments to verify that I asked, that she's my mother, and that the contents of the bowl meet the U.S. government regulations for it to be described as ice cream, does that sound like "a scientific claim of causality"? Or does that sound like a non-scientific claim of causality? WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:35, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@John Carter: thank you for the hint about Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience. From that I see faith healing is already included in the List of esoteric healing articles which is a subcategory of Category:Pseudoscience. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 01:51, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: I understand the concepts of measurement and that you don't need to follow the scientific method to measure something. The claim of faith healing is a claim of physical change in a person (and psychological as John Carter reminds). That claim of physical change is a claim of something measurable. Things that are claimed to be measurable can be verified or falsified by actual measurement. Your ice cream example is not the same type of claim – it is about an external event while faith healing is about an internal event. You have introduced doing science which is far broader than the practical use of measurement in science to test a claim – science is "a way of thinking" it is also the application of that thinking. I think every field of science "use[s] techniques that measure physical change" and those techniques involve instruments. If it is physical it is measurable, if it is measurable it can be tested using the scientific method, if it fails scrutiny using the scientific method it is not science. Could you explain how using my example of you have polio and if you are the target of faith healing and from that you do not have polio could be an observable and measurable claim but not a scientific claim. You sound like you know the routine – can you label events as non-scientific, if the events claim to be observable and measurable, without testing them. Rhetorically, is there way to describe that an event claimed to be observable and measurable is not within the set of all observable and measurable science – I don't think so, until that claim is tested. Over time more and more of these statements are rightly refuted and build the belief based on that evidence that predicts future faith healing claims will likely not pass the scrutiny of the scientific method. There are cases that do have observable and measurable physical change but the claim of causality is a tested false cause, i.e. something other than ritual, prayer, etc. caused that physical change. Would you label the claim of causality as non-scientific if the cause was tested to be the placebo effect or a more nebulous social conditioning? –BoBoMisiu (talk) 01:51, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Oh, yes, absolutely: I call things non-scientific even if there are things that can be measured scientifically. You can measure the color of my shirt scientifically, but when I tell you that it's green, I'm not making a scientific claim. You can measure the ingredients in the ice cream scientifically, and you can even use the scientific method to test a hypothesis about whether it is ice cream, but when I tell you that it is, I'm not making a scientific claim. You can contrast Jackson Pollock's splatter paintings with that of any amateur and measure the differences based on mathematical models, but when I tell you that this one is a Pollock and that one is not, I'm not making either a mathematical or scientific claim. You can measure the length of your sidewalk—it is readily "observable and measurable" and your answer is even fully "falsifiable"–but if you say that it's X meters long, then you are still not making a scientific claim. You simply aren't using the scientific method. The fact that something could be measured, or even that it was measured, is not proof that your method is scientific. This extraordinarily broad idea that everything that is measurable or observable is "science" leads to nonsense statements, like "driving a car at a scientific speed" (all you need is a speedometer!) or "taking a test for a scientific amount of time" (ever take a timed test?) or "shirts of a scientific color". WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:15, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Way to ignore my comment entirely. Let's break down the argument 1) Does faith healing make claims? Yes. 2) Does it make claims about changes in the real world? Yes. 3) Can those claims, in theory or practice be disproved/contraindicated by science? Yes. 4) Does faith healing explain how it works using bad/fake/lying science? No. I argue that you need 4 to be pseudoscience. You then ignore that point and point to 1 to 3. By definition faith healing is not pseudoscience. It's just bullshit. If faith healing made the claim that energons in the brain were emitted during the ritual of a faith healing service and that by focussing on the injured part of the patient the energons accumulated and that accumulated energons healed damage at a cellular level. We'd have pseudoscience. Faith healing makes the claim there is a powerful, willful entity who has the power to heal and we ask them to heal people and they do. What do they do that is explained in a masquerade of science? Nothing. These are non scientific claims not pseudoscientific claims. It's not a hard definition to understand. The distinctions between science and pseudoscience and pseudoscience and non science do have slightly fuzzy boundaries but this is well into the non-science segment of the graph. SPACKlick (talk) 08:28, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

• BoBoMisiu Thanks for pinging me, but your arguments have not convinced me to change my !vote. For something to be called pseudoscience, it has to have had scientific claims made about its mechanism of operation. I don't see that that's the case here, anymore than it would be for God, prayer, or love. The obvious WP:BLUE clue is the word "faith" in the subject name.- MrX 04:29, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
  • The mechanism of operation. Count Iblis (talk) 04:52, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@Count Iblis: I watched the hour long BBC documentary about the placebo effect, thank you. The Parkinson's section was interesting. The description about physical characteristics of the the placebo dose (starting around 37:00) was shocking for me. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 15:29, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@SPACKlick and MrX: the claimed mechanism of operation is faith – that is self evident, it is even part of the term faith healing. The actual mechanism of operation is likely something else and in that case the claim of causality is a false cause. SPACKlick, I am not ignoring your point but don't consider agency, e.g. supernatural or natural, because there is a wide variety of agency attributed and those types of agency are outside the scope of science. There are examples in science that are described like "we don't yet know why X happens but since X does happen X is used this way functionally". For example the early 19th century Avogadro's number was not determined experimentally until the early 20th century – yet it was useful for chemists in the interim. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 15:29, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: your examples are categorically different:

• Your color example is not the same type of claim – it describes observation of a static state and does not include events that claim any change.
• Your new ice cream example is also not the same type of claim – it also describes observation of a static state, e.g. the ice is not claimed to start as cookies and cream that undergoes a physical change of the removal of the cookies pieces. — BoBoMisiu 15:29, 11 September 2015 — continues after insertion below
  • [insert] No, it's exactly the same type of claim: you claimed not to have any, I asked someone to give you some, and now you do have some (or you don't, as the case may be). What I'm claiming about what I did is exactly the same in both instances, regardless of whether the thing you wanted was "health" or "ice cream". It should be obvious that what I'm claiming about what I did has nothing at all to do with science, and therefore what I did cannot be pseudoscience, even if the net result was that you didn't get any ice cream. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:03, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

[insert] @WhatamIdoing: your example of measuring the ingredients in the ice cream is just a process or test. You do not include any claim of physical change. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 16:06, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

• Your Pollock example is also not the same type of claim – I can see the difference too but it is a comparison of one painting to a different painting and not the same painting that undergoes a physical change of the removal of the white paint.
• Your sidewalk example is also not the same type of claim – like your new ice cream example, it also describes observation of a static state, e.g. the concrete is not claimed to undergo a physical change of the removal of the large aggregate. — BoBoMisiu 15:29, 11 September 2015 — continues after insertion below
  • [insert] You're going to have to take your pick here: either "all measurable and observable" things are scientific or the measurable and observable (if hopefully more or less static) length of the sidewalk is not scientific. You cannot claim that the measurable and observable length of the sidewalk is non-scientific while still claiming that all measurable and observable things (except, apparently, the measurable and observable length of that sidewalk) are scientific. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:03, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

[insert] @WhatamIdoing: no, you misunderstand the distinction, of a claim of change in composition within something vs claim of change in external dimension of something vs no claim of change. Yes the physical dimensions of the sidewalk are measurable and observable, but a physical change, such as the removal of the large aggregate from a piece of hardened concrete, is categorically different than either a dimensional change of a piece of concrete or no change. Your example does not include any change at all, it is a straw man that you then attack with "but if you say that it's X meters long, then you are still not making a scientific claim". –BoBoMisiu (talk) 15:30, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Do you now agree that it is possible to make a statement of fact that is "measurable and observable" and is still not a scientific claim? WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:37, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: there is more than one sense of "make a statement of fact", are you talking about the legal concept? For Wittgenstein, terms like fact and game lack essential meaning. Can you give an example that involves a claim of physical change that is not scientific? –BoBoMisiu (talk) 16:06, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

• Your examples of speed, time, and color are also not the same type of claims – they are measurable characteristics of the things that you describe and they can change, but the thing does not that undergoes a physical change of same type, e.g. if you have polio and if you are the target of faith healing then you do not have polio.

Although they are not systematized, all the mundane physical events if they are measurable or observable can be translated into data which is either useful for a purpose or not. For example, I watched on PBS that the overwhelming majority of collision data collected at CERN is simply dropped because it shows uninteresting collisions – only the filtered data is used. Each of those dropped measurements was in a scientific context yet not useful for the purpose of the experiment – those dropped measurements are scientific. Measurable commonplace events can be scientific in one context but not scientific in another; most are generally not useful and just banal. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 15:29, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

No, "faith" is not a "mechanism of operation", it's a convenient catch-all word for "belief, "divine intervention", or "Jesus magic". Show me that faith healing adherents widely claim that faith triggers great disturbances in the aether due to the actions of midichlorians and we'll talk. - MrX 16:50, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@MrX: ridicule has no effect on me, I am not writing about the veracity of the claim only about the claim itself. I wrote that the "claimed mechanism of operation is faith" not that the mechanism is faith. The claim of faith healing is a claim of physical change on Earth to real people and not a claim on a fantasy planet to fantasy characters in a science fiction movie. Defining what the claims of faith healing are is encyclopedic but knocking down a straw man of pre-science aether or a straw man of fantasy-science midichlorians is not – talking about either straw man in a 21st century context that we live in would be nonsensical. Listing what you believe are synonymous terms for faith neither detracts from nor adds to the term faith. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 17:35, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@BoBoMisiu: That was not ridicule, just a bit of levity with a sprinkling or irony. The underlying point was, without a single, coherent description of how adherents claim the mechanism works, it really comes down to belief. As a baseline for pseudoscience, I look to homeopathy where there are proposed mechanisms that are based, for example, on quantum entanglement or transmission of effect. Similar examples can be found in oil pulling and magnetic water treatment. Conversely, faith healing is much closer to prayer, yoga, and reincarnation. DGG's point below pretty much nails it.- MrX 18:33, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@BoBoMisiu: You seem to be assuming the disagreement is over what faith healing is or what claims it makes. It isn't. It's about what pseudoscience is and you still haven't said how Faith healing fits the definition of pseudoscience. Yes, it makes claims about the real world but it doesn't masquerade as, pretend to be or cover itself in the language of Science . See the definitions from above

Pseudoscience is

a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method.- Oxford Dictionary a system of theories, assumptions, and methods erroneously regarded as scientific- Merriam Webster Pseudoscience includes beliefs, theories, or practices that have been or are considered scientific, but have no basis in scientific fact.- Your Dictionary a discipline or approach that pretends to be or has a close resemblance to science - Collins Complete A pseudoscience is a belief or process which masquerades as science in an attempt to claim a legitimacy which it would not otherwise be able to achieve on its own terms- Chem1.com A pseudoscience is a set of ideas put forth as scientific when they are not scientific.- Skeptic's Dictionary

Either make reference to these definitions and show how faith healing fits them or give alternate definitions with support as to why we should use them. Without one of those two you're blustering past the point of disagreement. SPACKlick (talk) 10:13, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@SPACKlick: as I wrote above on 11 September to User:John Carter: {{tq|I see faith healing is already included in the List of esoteric healing articles which is a subcategory of Category:Pseudoscience. One of the remedies, passed 3 December 2006, found in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience is "The term 'pseudoscience' shall be interpreted broadly; it is intended to include but not be limited to all article in Category:Pseudoscience and its subcategories." I don't think you or anyone on this talk page is claiming that faith healing is not an type of esoteric healing. Separating faith healing from alternative medicine and in turn pseudoscience, in my opinion, would be pushing some kind of woo. The conversation on this page is frozen by uninformed sceptic fear of giving something credibility – that is not what is happening by providing a broad interpretation. It is a logical fallacy to push the beliefs that either faith healing is not alternative medicine or that alternative medicine is not pseudoscience. Your use of definitions does not connect to the discussion on this page. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 13:32, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Template:Ping BoBoMisiu I'm not separating Faith healing from alternative medicine or alternative medicine from pseudoscience. I'm saying, as do most reliable sources, that AM is not a true subset of pseudoscience. There is bullshit in AM that isn't pseudo-scientific. The presentation of the two ideas makes them very easily distinguishable in broad categories.

The definition of the term Pseudoscience is ENTIRELY the crux of the discussion on this page. In order to call x pseudoscience x must fit the definition as used on wikipedia of the term pseudoscience. In order to categorise x as pseudoscience x must fit the criteria of the category pseudoscience as determined there. A broad interpretation of the term is one thing, ignoring the meaning of the word altogether is another.

The conversation on this page is frozen by uninformed sceptic fear of giving something credibility 1) way to WP:AGF and 2) The fear of giving something credibility would incentivise the application the label not its removal. You seem to be wanting to use pseudoscience as a label and a category to simply mean Wrong, False, Fringe or BS. However that's not how words or categories work. They have meanings and define things, this word has a meaning as shown above, that does not comport with faith healing. Faith healing doesn't lie about how scientific it is, it doesn't pretend to be science so it's not pseudoscience it's just BS. SPACKlick (talk) 14:13, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@SPACKlick: I am assuming good faith and sharing what I think. If the assertion is that alternative medicine does not belong in Category:Pseudoscience then the discussion should take place there. I see that archives at Talk:Alternative medicine have had several such discussions.

I am not ignoring definitions, as I explained on 9 September:

faith healing employs a pre-scientific method analogous to a scientific method:
there are presuppositions, that something supernatural exists, that the supernatural affects the natural, etc.;
there is observation that something is perceived as not normal;
there is a protocol followed, i.e. some type of ritual, prayer, etc.;
there is observation for perceived change;
there is a followup protocol, i.e. some type of ritual, prayer, etc.;
there are hypotheses for negative results, e.g. lack of faith.

There clearly is an identifiable process and a claim of physical causality. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 15:19, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Your first claim is false. The method of faith healing isn't analogous to the scientific method. You then never tie any of your claims back to pseudoscience. There is no argument presented there to discuss. SPACKlick (talk) 15:26, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@SPACKlick: I did tie it back here. Karl Popper wrote that "notion of the scientific method can be viewed simply as 'systematiz[ing] the pre-scientific method of learning from our mistakes'" (here). For the last several centuries the scrutiny of the scientific method either verifies or falsifies claims. "Faith healing starts with a claim of physical fact, i.e. that faith healing caused physical change," "a scientific claim of causality, i.e. a link between events where one event causes the other event." "While it is very reasonable to assume that the scientific claim of causality will objectively fail the scrutiny of of the scientific method, the claim and the falsification of the claim are separate types of events." Long before the scientific method was used people explained the physical world the best way they knew how. They had other methods that today are well understood as erroneous interpretation of their observation and seen by many today as nonsense. Some of those pre-scientific methods were useful for understanding their environment and their bodies. search for:"faith cure" pseudoscience shows that a century ago the terms were used to even describe psychotherapy (in a letter here). I wonder if a debate about the categorization of psychotherapy will exist in the 22nd century or if progress will make it a moot point. Mario Bunge wrote that "There are many fields of knowledge but they can be grouped into ten genera: ordinary knowledge, prescientific technics, pseudoscience, basic science, applied science, technology, the humanities, the sociopolitical ideologies, the arts, and religion" (here). Some of these frameworks are incompatible, i.e. Bunge wrote that faith healing is incompatible with medicine (here), and that "Mutability is an essential mark of mathematics, science and technology, just as stasis is one of ideology and pseudoscience" (here). Bunge classifies research fields by twelve conditions into nonscientific, semiscience or protoscience, emerging or developing science, and pseudoscientific – "The difference between science and protoscience is a matter of degree, that between science and pseudoscience is one of kind. The difference between protoscience and pseudoscience parallels that between error and deception" (here) and he gave examples in a later book. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 18:03, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

[insert] For the record, I also agree with SPACKlick about your ({{dubious}} and unverifiable) assertion that faith healing uses any process similar to the scientific method. In fact, it's not clear that there is any "process" or "method" at all. You claimed that faith healers allege that they can produce a physical change by asking a divine being or magical force to make such a change upon request. You did not claim that faith healing uses experiments, tests hypotheses, or does anything else that would actually be similar to the scientific method. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:04, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

[insert] @WhatamIdoing: you need to separate two discussions on this talk page that involve me:

• contrasting my unverified opinions with other contributors unverified opinions: My main point is that "the claim of faith healing is a claim of physical change; for example, if you have polio and if you are the target of faith healing and from that you do not have polio. That sequence from you have polio to you do not have polio is a claim of measurable physical change." I do not discuss faith healers or any agency. I never "claimed that faith healers allege that they can produce a physical change by asking a divine being or magical force to make such a change upon request", as you wrote.
• contrasting the reliable and verifiable opinions of experts that I included with other contributors unverified opinions: For example, it is not up to me to "claim that faith healing uses experiments, tests hypotheses, or does anything else that would actually be similar to the scientific method". I have provided the salient statements that can be included in the article itself. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 16:47, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

@BoBoMisiu: Psychotherapy was attempting to look like a science, over time it became science. As Karl popper said in the "Demarcation Problem" it's hard to distinguish science and pseudoscience. What you've described above and what faith healing is is non-science. Faith healing is an ideology and a religion, it doesn't attempt to explain the world it is a precept of beliefs. It's not prescience or protoscience it's non-science. You keep failing to make a case which should be trivial It would form two parts "A pseudoscience is something that has properties A, B, C ... as shown in sources [a] [b] [c]...". "Faith healing has properties A, B, C as shown in sources [d] [e] [f] ...". Therefore faith healing is pseudoscience and is described as such commonly as can be seen from these sets of sources [g] [h] [i].

However the reason you're skirting the topic is you're trying to make an unjustified inference along the lines of Faith healing makes a claim about the world, That claim is unscientific and false, Pseudosciences are unscientific and false therefore Faith healing is a pseudoscience.

Faith healing makes no offer of scientific explanations for how any of it works, pseudoscience offers false explanations. Faith healing doesn't attempt to show proof of mechanism, pseudoscience offers bad science as proof of mechanism. Faith healing is regarded by believers as spiritual, pseudoscience is regarded by believers as scientific. Faith healing lacks all the critical properties of pseudoscience as the term is used and nothing you've said so far indicates otherwise. We agree it's non-science. We agree it makes claimswhcih can be tested with science and have so far found no support. The only disagreement is over the definition of pseudoscience and whether it fits this term. If you won't talk about what pseudoscience is I find it hard to believe you are being genuine in your attempts to argue it is pseudoscience, because that is the only point of disagreement. So I'll ask some basic questions. Do you accept the above definitions of psuedoscience as accurate or mostly accurate? Do you accept that faith healing is presented and accepted by adherents as religious/spiritual/faith based rather than presented as a result of scientific inquiry? Do you agree that religious/spiritual/faith based beliefs don't fit or nearly fit the above definitions of pseudoscience.SPACKlick (talk) 21:09, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@SPACKlick: no, I'm skirting the topic.

"Do you accept the above definitions of psuedoscience as accurate or mostly accurate?"

My opinion does not matter. Citing Pseudoscience and the paranormal by Terence Hines, de wrote that "Despite the lack of generally accepted demarcation criteria, we find remarkable agreement among virtually all philosophers and scientists that fields like astrology, creationism, homeopathy, dowsing, psychokinesis, faith healing, clairvoyance, or ufology are either pseudosciences or at least lack the epistemic warrant to be taken seriously" (here). Raimo Tuomela thought that "examples of pseudoscience as the theory of biorhythms, astrology, dianetics, creationism, faith healing may seem too obvious examples of pseudoscience for academic readers" (here and a few pages later here).

I am talking about what pseudoscience is. I am not making a novel inference that faith healing is a pseudoscience.

"Do you accept that faith healing is presented and accepted by adherents as religious/spiritual/faith based rather than presented as a result of scientific inquiry?"

Yes, I agree that it is presented as religious and yet Mahner, an academic source, presents it as "either pseudosciences or at least lack the epistemic warrant to be taken seriously" and other academic sources such as Tuomela call it pseudoscience.

"Do you agree that religious/spiritual/faith based beliefs don't fit or nearly fit the above definitions of pseudoscience."

No, I disagree. The academic sources show that there seems to be little consensus. The disagreement is not over the definition of pseudoscience but over both the claim of causality and the claim of physical change and whether that is a scientific claim. Claiming that something physically changes is not a metaphysical religious claim that is unrefutable but is a physical scientific claim that can be measured, tested, and refuted. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 22:39, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Should astronomy be labeled as a pseudoscience for believing that the Milky Way is not the center of the universe since all bodies evenly red-shift from it? There is no proof that it isn't and "logical" to believe that it is. Astronomers choose to "believe" that it isn't.

Or for believing that the universe is finite or infinite since the size of the universe cannot be measured nor computed to everyone's satisfaction.

Nearly everyone subsists on "beliefs" that they choose.

"Guaranteed" faith healing might be another problem. Student7 (talk) 16:06, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

@Student7: astronomy is an empirical science and should not be labeled as a pseudoscience. While an astronomer may hold beliefs about the body of empirical concepts contained in astronomy, those beliefs are useful mental representations of external reality, e.g. things, based on reason and are mutable since empirical science is mutable. So, the belief that a particular galaxy is the center of the universe may have been useful in the past but over time, just as the the belief that a particular planetary system is the center of the universe, may become meaningless and no longer useful. Bunge wrote that science is not free of error but characteristically self corrects through research (here). Those astronomer's beliefs, i.e. useful mental representations, are different than concepts in the sense of the term faith healing like trust or confidence or expectation or faith. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 21:52, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Well argued!

The problem with "faith" is there seems to be no point of contact between the logical (or empirical, I suppose) realms and spiritual realms. I cannot run a test to compare faith healing with modern medical treatment. I "believe" in what cannot be logically proved. If I could "prove" it, presumably there would be no atheists!

But we all share a common "belief" system for which there is no immediate proof. I believe the sun will rise in the morning despite the fact that it might have gone nova during the night, or stretched out a tendril... The world is round, but I have never perceived it's roundness from the pov of the moon. I belive the word of those who have.

"Logical proof" automatically removes something from any belief system.

I may have a problem with some people who insist that "faith healing" always works or performs "better than" medical methods. I believe that my prayers are answered. But I don't believe that God is a short order cook!

If faith healing breaches this wall, it is perhaps pseudo-science. If healers pray, guaranteeing nothing, but hoping, they are no worse than any religion, IMO. Student7 (talk) 15:31, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

@Student7: No, you "cannot run a test to compare faith healing with modern medical treatment", Bunge wrote that faith healing is incompatible with medicine. The comparison "that 'faith healing' always works or performs 'better than' medical methods" would most likely show the opposite. But the argument is an improper disjunctive syllogism, a kind of logical fallacy. Also, you are assigning an external spiritual agency to the term faith, that assumption restricts faith to some metaphysical, in other words purely speculative, type of understanding. I read that faith is internal, i.e. a person has faith about something. Nevertheless, faith healing claims not only a metaphysical change but a physical change. Spontaneous remission is documented. The placebo effect is a physical response of a person. A century ago psychotherapy was described as "faith cure" but today it is not. An atheist a century ago or today in my opinion would not assign any spiritual agency to either spontaneous remission, the placebo effect or to psychotherapy for example. The example that a person's lack of experience of the "roundness from the pov of the moon" doesn't take into account that the roundness is demonstrated by empirical data, e.g. see the Earthrise photo. A conspiracy prone individual might decide to reject the authenticity of that photo but it is almost universally accepted as empirical knowledge that Earth is basically round. I think you are wrong when you say that "'logical proof' automatically removes something from any belief system" since it is not reasonable to think that a belief system would reject a constituant belief if that constituant belief is logically verified. As far as breaching a wall, I have cited reputable scientists and philosophers that do identify faith healing as pseudoscience. Most of the other reasoning I see on this talk page is either anecdotal or the bad company fallacy (charlatans are claiming faith healing, therefore, faith healing must be wrong). –BoBoMisiu (talk) 20:01, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

You have cited one source that says it is pseudoscience or that it is not pseudoscience (hardly a basis for claiming that it definitely is), and one that says that it is (but which sadly gives no evidence in support of his belief that proponents of faith healing believe that it is truly a branch of that self-correcting, experiment-based, non-belief-oriented thing that we call science [which is his definition]). There are other sources that say the opposite (i.e., that it is a non-scientific religious activity), and an enormous number of sources that consider the subject too trivial to even mention. The idea that prayer uses the scientific method, or even that it claims to, is, at best, a minority POV that could perhaps be mentioned but should not be considered a defining characteristic. — WhatamIdoing 04:04, 21 September 2015 (UTC) — continues after insertion below

[insert] @WhatamIdoing: I have cited two academic experts on the subject on the subject of pseudoscience. Bunge's categories are: nonscience, semiscience or protoscience, emerging or developing science, and pseudoscience; his 12 carecteristics for classification into those categories are not restricted to the beliefs of proponents, i.e. the beliefs of proponents are not exclusive criteria for classification. You misunderstand what I writing, it is not "that prayer uses the scientific method", that is a straw man. What I am saying is that faith healing is pseudoscience as do academic experts on the subject. As I have written previously, the defining characteristic of faith healing is the claim that faith healing causes physical change in a person. As I written previously, a "claim of physical change is a claim of something measurable. Things that are claimed to be measurable can be verified or falsified by actual measurement." Faith healing claims may be explainable by science just as the placebo effect is explainable. For many, faith healing is a religious practise – found in shamanism, spiritism, wicca, hinduism, islam, christianity, and probably most other religions – which claims to cause physical change. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 14:49, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Also, let us quote Bunge (1983) more fully, rather than a brief snippet:

"To be sure, some conceptual frameworks are mutually compatible with one another. For example, the conceptual frameworks of the plumber and the engineer, of the realist novelist and the sociologist, and of the scientific philosopher and the basic scientist are mutually complementary and even partially overlapping. But others are not. For instance, magic is incompatible with technology, faith healing with medicine, existentialism with logic, psychoanalysis with experimental psychology, and science with ideological or religious dogma. Not only do certain fields compete with others, but some of them are superior to their rivals. For example, magic, religion and pseudoscience are inferior to science and technology as modes of knowledge and guides to action because they do not involve research and do not possess error-correction mechanisms such as analysis and experiment"

.

Bunge is discussing the philosophical underpinnings, rather than actual practice: a patient may well choose to engage in both conventional medicine and faith healing (or even with evidence-based medicine and faith healing), just like a stage magician may use technology and a pro-science environmental activist may also push ideological dogmas (e.g., about whether GMOs will destroy the planet or save the world, or about whether it is morally incumbent on wealthy societies to change their lifestyles to slow climate change). He's also thinking about guides to practical action, as science is not a good guide to issues of values, like whether a patient should choose to live through a single DALY as one reasonably healthy year or two mostly disabled years. Once you've used non-scientific values (religion is a common source for said values) to decide which you prefer, then science can guide you to medical actions that will produce the desired outcome, but it can't tell you which one you should choose. — WhatamIdoing 04:04, 21 September 2015 (UTC) — continues after insertion below

[insert] @WhatamIdoing: yes, exactly, "Bunge is discussing the philosophical underpinnings" of classification and categorization of knowledge. He writes faith healing is incompatible with medicine. The rest of what you write is a red herring because there is variety in faith healing praxis in various cultures around the world, while I agree with you that "a patient may well choose to engage in both conventional medicine and faith healing [...] just like a stage magician may use technology", they are just the methods and techniques. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 14:49, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Given: at least one omnipotent, omniscient divine being that is inclined to grant requests for healing made by some humans on behalf of some other humans. — WhatamIdoing 04:04, 21 September 2015 (UTC) — continues after insertion below

[insert] @WhatamIdoing and OnlyInYourMind: you are assigning a supernatural agency to faith healing. User:OnlyInYourMind cited a paper (Google Scholar) by Nicholas Humphrey that it is a placebo effect. I previously noted that a century ago Catholic Encyclopedia printed that "It is often said that the cures at shrines and during pilgrimages are mainly due to psychotherapy — partly to confident trust in Providence, and partly to the strong expectancy of cure that comes over suggestible persons at these times and places". There is a broader understanding of faith healing than the one that you portray. Also, the label true believer is loaded language, that for skeptics is a code word that implies error and uncritical rejection of contradicting evidence. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 14:49, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Trial design assumption #1: Said divine being will only pay attention to the pleas from registered participants and not from the patients themselves, or their family, friends, neighbors, etc., or at least will pay significantly more attention to requests from faith healers registered in the trial than to others.

Trial design assumption #2: Said omnipotent being is either unable or unwilling to screw with the computer that is randomizing patients in the trial to produce whatever outcome it wants, especially including the scenario in which patients most in need of help get the help they need, but the results look statistically insignificant at the end.

Result: I could go on, but if this were a plot point in a fantasy novel, then my suspension of disbelief just collapsed in a swamp of plot holes. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:04, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Suspension of disbelief is not even required for the placebo effect, as implausible as it seems, people can be told about the placebo and it still has effect. What you are describing in the cases above is a version of the traditional argument from evil, but not the veracity of the claim that faith healing causes physical change in a person or whether faith healing is a pseudoscience. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 14:49, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Too much focus on USA in lead

The lead should be a world view not US centric. Matthew Ferguson (talk) 22:40, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

It's a fair point: this fraud is rampant in some parts of Africa and there have been prominent UK advocates as well. Guy (Help!) 12:53, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

I'll repeat that Blandford had a better lead : "Faith healing is the generic term used for prayer, meditation, incantations or rituals for therapeutic purposes, either as a substitute for, or in conjunction with, conventional medical treatment." I think that would also cover other countries, New Age, Wiccan, and Tribal practices. Markbassett (talk) 01:46, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

But what is it?

The first sentence says "Faith healing refers to notably overt and ritualistic practices" (and right away we have a problem with WP:REFER) while the last paragraph of the lede says "Faith healing can be classified as a belief in a spiritual, supernatural, or paranormal event, and, in some cases, that belief can be classified as magical thinking". So, which is it? A set of practices, or a belief, or both? StAnselm (talk) 19:12, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

This is a good point, as, for that matter, is Guy's comment above, in which he seems to be referring at least somewhat to that discussed in the Eliade/Jones Encyclopedia of Religion article "African cults of affliction." His comment also raised the issue between such cults and faith healing in those faiths. I have really come to loathe saying this anywhere around here, although, unfortunately, I seem to wind up saying it more times than I really would like. I have a definite feeling, and it is only a feeling at this point, that a lot of the content in this article might be best handled spunout into offshoot articles of some sort. And, although I haven't checked other pages Wikipedia:WikiProject Charismatic Christianity/Articles indicates that there are lengthy articles in an encyclopedia on CC about both the "Gift of healing" and "Healing in the Christian Church," leading me to think that there may well be sufficient sourcing and notability for at least a few spinout articles. But it would help a lot to try to figure out how many, what they should be, and al the other stuff like that. John Carter (talk) 19:30, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

African faith "healers" are basically just an case of the age-old issue of new religions suborning traditional practices. African faith healers are to shamanism as Easter is to Eostre. In an area where there is often little or no actual medical care, it's inevitable that this particular form of delusion will proliferate. In the West, faith healing pretty much divides into the sincerely deluded, and the blatantly fraudulent (e.g. Peter Popoff). The pseudoscience comes when the True Believers try to prove their claims. For an illuminating parallel, see n-rays. Guy (Help!) 22:47, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

More precisely, pseudoscience would enter into it if said True Believers claimed that they used science to prove that faith healing happens, regardless of whether they actually did try to prove their claims scientifically. If they try to "prove" them through some other method, e.g., via anecdote, appeal to authority, etc., then it's not pseudoscience. "I used a team of scientists running experiments to prove that magic exists", when you didn't, is pseudoscience. "Open your mind to the healing power of God, because if you are pure and believe, then it will happen" is not. WhatamIdoing (talk) 05:19, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

I choose the falsifiability criteria to determine if something is or is not a scientific claim. Are they making falsifiable claims? Are they claiming actual, measurable effects? If so, then they have crossed the line into scientific territory and, if they have not used the scientific method, or have seriously violated it, then they might be guilty of making pseudoscientific claims. Does that make any sense to you? -- BullRangifer (talk) 05:47, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

I tend to agree with Bull here. Granted the somewhat sensationalist usage of the word "pseudoscience" recently, the word itself does clearly seem to indicate that it is something which purports to be science, or perhaps avoids using that specific word conducts itself in a manner which mimics science, and thus, effectively, "pretending" to be science. So, for instance, the various medics and others who examine and approve miracles for the causes of saints would be seen as doing "science," because they try to in some way "scientifically" examine the purported miracle and see if the event is remarkably unusual or "miraculous". Granted, in recent days, the development of science to include such things as spontaneous remission of cancer and the like makes it harder to determine what may or may not be "miraculous," which brings in issues of probability and such. Also, I guess I should note that not all peoples of the earth even today necessarily completely accept the scientific model of the body, world, and health, and, on that basis, those who don't would not necessarily be meaningfully called "science" of any sort if they do not in their own culture accept what we call "science" as what we in the basically Western world think of it as being. This includes some of the indigenous religious practices of Ethiopia and elsewhere. I know that this might be seen as just making the matter harder, and I'm sorry about that. But it does seem to me to be the best and most neutral way to proceed. John Carter (talk) 17:21, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

 I respectfully disagree with WhatamIdoing.  I do not believe that claiming to use science is a necessary condition for someone to be practicing pseudoscience.  Asking someone to believe something through faith alone is not pseudoscience.  But presenting what one believes to be irrefutable evidence of something, and expecting people to be convinced of whatever they're trying to prove can indeed be pseudoscience.  Some good examples are the cases of Bridey Murphy and Colton Burpo. At no time did/do they claim to be practicing science; but they do expect people to accept their "evidence" as absolute proof. When you're presenting evidence and expecting it to be accepted as proof of a claim you're making, then you're practicing either science or pseudoscience (depending on the validity of your data and methods).
Richard27182 (talk) 07:29, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Richard27182, if I tell you that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii, and I present you with evidence of this claim in the form of birth certificates, am I really "practicing either science or pseudoscience"? Is it possible that one could practice something that truly is neither science nor pseudoscience (e.g., historical document research  ;-), but that still results in a claim that I might expect most people to accept?

I believe that there are many ways to "claim to use science", but that making such a claim (whether explicitly or implicitly) is an absolutely necessary condition for engaging in pseudoscience. WhatamIdoing (talk) 04:15, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Hi WhatamIdoing.
 OK, maybe I should have added a few qualifying words to my statement.  But I'm sure you get the point I was making.  (And in a sense, if you tell me that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii and you present me with evidence of this claim in the form of birth certificates, you're at least proving your claim in a scientific way by producing valid evidence.). My point is that when someone is presenting evidence on an important topic not limited to one or a small number of specific cases (a topic such as how old the Earth is, or whether astrology really works, or whether a certain drug is effective in curing a disease, or whether prayer is effective in curing diseases); and if they're claiming that the evidence constitutes proof of their claim; then they are practicing science (if their methods are valid) or they're practicing pseudoscience (if their methods are invalid).  It's really the behavior and methods and nature of the evidence that determine whether the person is practicing science (or pseudoscience); for something to qualify as science (or pseudoscience), I don't believe that it's necessary that the person make an explicit declaration to that effect; sometimes a person's behavior and approach implicitly make that claim.
 In the case of "faith healing," I don't believe it's always pseudoscience.  If it's presented as a matter of faith, then it's outside the realm of (pseudo)science.  But when "proof" is offered as evidence, then it crosses the line into pseudoscience.
 All editors reading this, please note; this posting is a direct response to the previous posting, but is not related to the posting that follows.  That posting was already there, and relates to something else.
Richard27182 (talk) 09:01, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

No, "presenting evidence" does not make something scientific, even sort of. History and law are not branches of science, even though both care a great deal about evidence. Your expansive definition is going to lead you to a "scientific" reading of poetry, because I can "produce valid evidence" about the rhyming scheme, and I don't think you want to end up there.

I think you should re-consider your working definitions. You have defined innocent mistakes as "pseudoscience": anyone can screw up a lab protocol, or pick the wrong protocol, and thereby use "invalid" methods. That's not pseudoscience; that's bad science. At a minimum, your list of critical terms needs to include good science (hooray!), bad science (oops), pseudoscience (yuck), and non-science (e.g., art, history, law, and religion).

I agree with you that faith healing could be packaged as a pseudoscience. However, "I prayed for X and now he's not depressed, and I personally believe that my request for him not be depressed was the cause of his healing (aka 'it worked')" isn't pseudoscience. Getting into the pseudoscience range would require something like these kinds of claims:

• "Faith healing follows the scientific method. Faith healing has been proven to work in multiple scientific studies". (Straight claim)
• "Faith healer Fred Fraud intentionally formulates questions about faith-healing methods and seeks to determine which ones work best. He has dropped methods that have not been proven to work to his satisfaction and is constantly seeking to refine his techniques. He trains other people in exclusive seminars and encourages them to use his techniques and to report their level of success, so he can see which methods work best for other people." (Simple description of part of the scientific method)
• "Faith healing is ultimately based on string theory. There are invisible strings between humans that can be affected by intentional release of quantum energy. A trained person can use those string to transfer healing energy to enhance the immune system's response and change the microelectrical currents of the neurological system." (Science-y sounding nonsense)

Any of those would warrant such a charge, but "it works" alone isn't enough to be a scientific claim. I agree with you that it's the behavior and methods and nature of the evidence that determine whether the person is practicing science. For example: I take a green shirt. I pour bleach on it. It's not green any longer. Result: "It works!" But I didn't practice science when I changed the color of the shirt. My behavior and methods show no evidence of me doing science. Instead, I used 18th century technology in the form of a bottled chemical solution. There's probably some chemist working on Clorox bleach who could tell me what chemical reaction was involved, but I am neither doing science nor claiming to. Similarly, I take some eggs, cream and sugar. I run them through a pair of electrical machines. It now meets the definition of custard-based ice cream. Result: "It works!" But that's called "cooking", not science. A food chemist could use scientific-sounding words to describe what I did, but I'm not doing that. If I overcook the eggs and end up with a mess instead of ice cream—if it "doesn't work"—then I've not engaged in either pseudoscience or in bad science. I've just made a mistake in the kitchen.

And when we go back to faith healing, "the behavior and methods and nature of the evidence" indicate that they are not practicing science. The behavior seems to be religious, the method seems to be asking for divine intervention, and the nature of the evidence is personal belief (apparently in defiance of readily observable facts, in at least some cases) and anecdote. That's not any kind of science. WhatamIdoing (talk) 12:42, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

[insert] @Richard27182 and WhatamIdoing: a document could be fictitious or could contain fictitious or imprecise information, a field of knowledge that tests a document is forensic science. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 17:15, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

@WhatamIdoing: "Getting into the pseudoscience range would require something like these kinds of claims" is presenting your own opinions as the standard and that standard contradicts the sources I mentioned. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 17:15, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

[insert] @WhatamIdoing: @BoBoMisiu:

WhatamIdoing, you certainly have a lot to say on the subject! I think we could probably discuss it ad infinitum and still not reach complete agreement. I believe that we do agree that faith healing in some circumstances is pseudoscience, and in other circumstances is not pseudoscience. Our area of disagreement is where and how to draw the line (and what terminology to use). Can we simply agree to disagree on those points?

Richard27182 (talk) 08:48, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Yes. And we can see that in Studies on intercessory prayer. Guy (Help!) 08:13, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

• Pseudoscience is something that pretends to be a science, either explicitly or by the way it is organized & promulgated. Faith healing is just the opposite. It is based on the concept that science is irrelevant. Presenting what one believes to have irrefutable evidence of something is not science, but faith, or otherwise all religion is science or pseudoscience. Faith is something one is certain of not on evidence at all, necessarily, but on an inner conviction, which one can in most bases believe is confirmed by all the available evidence. . Science is the claim to knowledge based on at least theoretically refutable evidence. DGG ( talk ) 17:09, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

• "Faith healing is the generic term used for prayer, meditation, incantations or rituals for therapeutic purposes, either as a substitute for, or in conjunction with, conventional medical treatment." Markbassett (talk) 01:50, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

Not really, no. Faith healing is an alternative to medicine, not a complement to it. Those who adopt prayer in addition to medical treatment are engaging in intercessor prayer, not faith healing. Guy (Help!) 22:14, 13 September 2015 (UTC)

@JzG: faith healing is a substitute for science-based medicine for only some groups. For example, Catholics do not see it as an alternative but a complement. Intercessory prayer, at least for Catholics, is related but something different. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 14:36, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@DGG: no faith healing is not "based on the concept that science is irrelevant" and not all faith healing is represented as providing "irrefutable evidence" of anything (see Talk:Faith healing#Poor explanation of Catholic understanding). Your conclusion "otherwise all religion is science or pseudoscience" is a sweeping generalization since only a fraction of religious topics make a claim of causing a physical change in an person – the usual claim of religion is about metaphysical change or conversion. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 14:36, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

{{citation needed}}. Guy (Help!) 14:46, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@JzG: citations included (see Talk:Faith healing#Poor explanation of Catholic understanding) for not a substitute. Intercessory prayer here for description and here for distinction: "Both scholars of religion and Pentecostal theologians agree that faith healing of physical and psychological distresses, mostly carried out through intercessory prayer," here for distinction: "The psychiatrist Daniel Benor, a leading authority on faith healing, located more than two hundred studies on spiritual healing. Spiritual healing is an umbrella term for a range of unorthodox healing practices, including intercessory prayer, focused meditation [...]" more on search for: "intercessory prayer" "faith healing" catholic. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 16:06, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@JzG: I said only "as a substitute for, or in conjunction with". Whether that is a complement would imply it completes where medicine is lacking and that medicine feels the same, which is obviously not being tried in cases where it is substituted, and it just doesn't seem like it generally talks of itself as partner in a medical-faith combo. Markbassett (talk) 19:22, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

May I say that I think one of the core problems here is the lack of articles related to this content here? This page shows the most recent Encyclopedia of Religion has three separate articles relating to the intersection of religion and medicine, one for the eastern tradition, one for the western tradition, and one for tribal cultures. So far as I can tell, we don't even have one dealing directly with the topic. I have a feeling a lot of the discussion here would fit better into one of those articles, and maybe others, if anyone were interested in developing them. John Carter (talk) 19:32, 20 September 2015 (UTC)

Poor explanation of Catholic understanding

The following failed verification. It looks like it suffered through edit warring.

Among the best-known accounts by Catholics of faith healings are those attributed to the miraculous intercession of the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary known as Our Lady of Lourdes at the grotto of Lourdes in France and the remissions of life-threatening disease claimed by those who have applied for aid to Saint Jude, who is known as the "patron saint of lost causes".

The cite references are articles in Catholic Encyclopedia. The article about Psychotherapy is dated from 1911 and should be replaced with a contemporary source to show possible development. Nevertheless, it states in a "Faith cures" section that

Science, or the supposed application of scientific principles, has probably been the responsible cause of more faith cures than anything else. [...] Each new development of chemistry and of physics led to new applications to therapeutics, though after a time most of them have proved to be nugatory. The faith in the scientific discovery had acted through the mind of the patient so as to bring about an amelioration of symptoms, if not a cure of the disease. The patients who are cured are usually sufferers from chronic diseases, who either have only a persuasion that they are ill or, having some physical ailment, inhibit through solicitude and worry the natural forces that would bring about a cure. This inhibition cannot be lifted until the mind is relieved by confidence in some wonderful remedy or scientific discovery that gives them a conviction of cure.

and in a "Faith cures and miracles" section

It is often said that the cures at shrines and during pilgrimages are mainly due to psychotherapy — partly to confident trust in Providence, and partly to the strong expectancy of cure that comes over suggestible persons at these times and places. [...] An analysis of the records of cures carefully kept — as, for instance, at Lourdes — shows, however, that the majority of accepted cures have been in patients suffering [...] but from [...] affections as tuberculosis, [...] ulcers [...], broken bones that [...] failed to heal, and other readily demonstrable organic affections. When cures are worked in such cases, some force beyond that of nature [...] must be at work. [...] A visit to a shrine like Lourdes is sufficient to convince any physician that there is something more than psychotherapy, though he can see also abundant evidence of psychotherapy at work.

The other cited article about Notre-Dame de Lourdes furnishes some very general statistics from 1910, e.g. that "nervous disorders [...] do not furnish even the fourteenth part of the whole; 278 have been counted, out of a total of 3962."

Neither article mentions Jude. I am not competent to say that the term psychotherapy in 1911 is used the same way in 2015 so I didn't add the probably dated material. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 16:23, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Newsweek Poll

@Bblandford: the content you added in this edit has a problem with the source. The cited webpage on cmf.org.uk includes incorrectly cited content.

You wrote

According to a [2005] Newsweek Poll, 72 percent of Americans say they believe that praying to God can cure someone, even if science says the person doesn't stand a chance.

Unfortunately the cmf.org.uk page contains incorrect information, it says: "According to a Newsweek Poll, 72 percent of Americans say they would welcome a conversation with their physician about faith; the same number say they believe that praying to God can cure someone, even if science says the person doesn't stand a chance." The citation for that paragraph is "Newsweek 2005; 10 November, http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3339654/". The 2005 year is incorrect.

The linked msnbc.msn.com page was Template:Wayback so it could not be a 2005 poll. Nevertheless, the msnbc.msn.com page has the same quote but with more information. That page seems to be a secondary source about the poll. There is not enough information given to date that poll. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 01:09, 12 September 2015 (UTC)

CMF is a fringe source anyway (they have a very obvious dog in the fight). We should not use it if there is a source closer to the original. The MSNBC piece actually undermines the claims to effect, noting that the increased longevity of regular churchgoers is attributable to entirely non-supernatural causes. This is quite an old claim and per WP:MEDRS we should look for newer material and, if it doesn't exist, question whether it's actually significant at all. Guy (Help!) 14:49, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Are you sure about that? The MSNBC piece says, "People who regularly attend church have a 25 percent reduction in mortality—that is, they live longer—than people who are not churchgoers. This is true even after controlling for variables intrinsically linked to Sundays in the pew, like social support and healthy lifestyle." Saying that the effect persists after controlling for variables doesn't sound like saying that it is attributable to entirely non-supernatural causes. Perhaps you were thinking of some what other source says about this particular study? WhatamIdoing (talk) 11:59, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree with WhatamIdoing. Moreover, not seeing the actual survey or knowing the conditions under which the questions were asked is a critical facet. For example, I think you would get a different response if the respondent is sitting in a living room and asked over the phone with everything in a normal state in contrast with standing in a hospital emergency room with their child being treated for something traumatic. Saying people believe in something is kind of irrelevant, e.g. a poll of History Channel watchers who are conditioned by years of exposure to sensational UFO etc. episodes will be more prone to believe in ancient astronauts etc. –BoBoMisiu (talk) 17:36, 21 September 2015 (UTC)