The Power of Prayer

In light of Kevin Friery's and Hayley Stevens' joint appearance on last Sunday's The Big Questions on BBC1, I'd like to draw attention to the final episode of the second series of BBC Radio 4's Out of the Ordinary, in which Jolyon Jenkins (no relation) investigates "The Power of Prayer". It's available on iPlayer until (almost) the end of the century:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03xd3hl/Out_of_the_Ordinary_Series_2_The_Power_of_Prayer/

Jolyon Jenkins

This sober and essentially skeptical investigation of the phenomena is hampered by the lack of hard evidence — a lack that in my view indicates the true nature of miracle healing.

Relevant also is a recent Unbelievable? episode from Premier Radio featuring Robby Dawkins and David Beebee:

http://www.premierradio.org.uk/listen/ondemand.aspx?mediaid={FE862DAB-D422-40C6-B684-E98EC81DD15F}

The title of the above programme is "Do healing miracles happen?" Given that I think the supernatural claims of religion are untrue, you can guess my answer to that question.

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EDIT: David Beebee blogs about his appearance on Unbelievable? here:
http://www.manofcarbonnanotubes.com/blog/2014/3/14/reflections-on-my-unbelievable-debate-with-faith-healer-robby-dawkins

My QED 2012 experience — part 1

For me the stand-out features of QED this year were the range of speakers and the socialising. Unlike last year I didn't stay at the conference hotel so I had to carry everything for the day with me — which turned out to be a raincoat and a fairly large camera bag. These, I'm happy to report, didn't impede me much.

Like last year I arrived on Friday, catching an earlier train than I'd expected from Euston, and took my time ambling from my lodging to the Mercure Piccadilly Hotel for a relaxed meal before the Mixer, which was scheduled for 8 but seemed to be in full swing some time before that. By 8, however, wandering through the packed bar area was like swimming through a sea of skeptic celebrities. It's not called the Mixer for nothing and is one of the things that makes QED special. Whether or not they had read Hayley Stevens' blog, many people seemed to be taking her advice about talking to 'strangers'.

As for the event itself, I shall blog about it in short bursts, with photographs:



On Saturday, after Andy Wilson's official opening — not much more than a welcome and some housekeeping, Deborah Hyde kicked off with the historical context of the werewolf myth. Being the first speaker at an international conference can be, I imagine, a bit daunting, but Deborah displayed no sign of nerves even as her microphone was replaced or adjusted only seconds into her talk. Last year's first speaker was Bruce Hood, and I seem to remember he did take a few minutes (though not many) to get into his stride.

Deborah's talk was a new one, though she had given us a sneak preview at Portsmouth Skeptics in the Pub about a month earlier. In her QED talk she outlined the popular myths, and how it might have been reasonable, given the context and specific examples, to believe that werewolves were real. Bringing the myth down to earth, she included some real wolves.



Next was Steve Jones, explaining what is meant by natural selection — immediately illustrating the diversity of speakers and topics at this year's QED: from an investigation into the historical basis of popular myths we had moved on to why evolution, as understood by Charles Darwin (though he never used the word in his Origin of Species), is an undirected process. The example Steve used was the generation of effective shapes for nozzles used in the industrial manufacture of powder, by applying random but small variations to successively more effective shapes, thus refining the efficiency and durability of the nozzles without knowing precisely why they work. It's apparently an engineering technique still in use today.



The last speaker before lunch was David Aaronovitch. I was particularly keen to hear what he had to say as I attended the CFI Conspiracy Theories day at Conway Hall, at which David was scheduled to speak, but he had to withdraw due to ill health. So I was not entirely pleased when he began by announcing that his talk would be completely new and unike any of his previous talks. Nevertheless it was lively and off the cuff — conspiracy theories are everywhere so it's not as if there's a dearth of material — and well worth hearing. He spoke mostly about the conspiracy theory that's grown up around the affair of Dominique Strauss-Kahn — that the allegations against him of attempted rape are part of a sting organised by the French government (or more particularly by factions loyal to Nicolas Sarkozy).

After an equally lively Q&A session it was time for lunch. Topics had already ranged far and wide. More next time.

(Click here for part 2.)

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This is my 600th blogpost. I thought you'd like to know.

The claims of religious faith are not exempt

The HOTS Bath advertising nonsense seems to have shaken out those wedded to religious privilege. Hayley Stevens has done us all a favour in highlighting it with her ASA complaint.

Brendan O'Neill at the Telegraph seems to be one of the more belligerent fulminators against the ASA's ruling:

This is an outrageous attack on freedom of religion, on the basic right of people to express central tenets of their faith.

Central tenets such as, for instance, homosexuality is an abomination? Or those who don't believe in Jesus/God are destined for "eternal conscious torment"? Or that contraception is an evil worse than AIDS? Granted, these aren't exactly touted around as attractive propositions you might want to try out on the streets around Bath Abbey, but they are as without factual basis as anything promoted by snake-oil salesmen.

You have a recently deceased relative? A central tenet of some religious faith is that God can bring a dead person back to life. Should we allow a religious group to make such a specific claim on the streets of Bath, or anywhere else for that matter? We should not. But by law we must. The ASA covers published advertising only, so any oral claims of resurrection made on the streets are beyond its remit. But apparently HOTS Bath did claim, in their leaflets and on their website, that serious illness can be alleviated by prayer. This is a medical claim, and they provide no acceptable evidence to support it. The ASA was right, therefore, to put a stop to it.

O'Neill is simply illustrating the undeserved privilege religious faith has enjoyed for so long — a privilege built into UK political culture — and which religion in general will try to hang on to for as long as it can.

Elsewhere in the Telegraph Tom Chivers gives the side of sanity:

This isn't an outrageous attack on religion. People are still allowed to believe, and state that they believe, in obvious nonsense like faith healing. But advertising laws can't be redrawn just because someone decides their product is religious; if they make actual empirical medical claims, then they need to be able to provide actual empirical medical evidence.

Personally I'd like to see some actual empirical evidence for religious faith's other claims too.

(Via HumanistLife.)

ASA rules against faith-healing claims

First it was the BBC:

Bath Christian group's 'God can heal' adverts banned

A Christian group has been banned from claiming that God can heal illnesses on its website and in leaflets.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said it had concluded that the adverts by Healing on the Streets (HOTS) - Bath, were misleading. It said a leaflet available to download from the group's website said: "Need Healing? God can heal today!" The group, based in Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, said it was disappointed with the decision and would appeal. HOTS Bath said its vision was to promote Christian healing "as a daily lifestyle for every believer".

But the BBC was cagey about the origin of the complaint:

The ASA said it had been alerted to the adverts by a complainant, and concluded that they could encourage false hope and were irresponsible. HOTS Bath said: "It seems very odd to us that the ASA wants to prevent us from stating on our website the basic Christian belief that God can heal illness.

It's not odd, it's the law. HOTS Bath may consider it a "basic Christian belief that God can heal illness" but unless they can substantiate that claim they have no business putting it in an ad on a website, and therefore the ASA ruling is correct.

The ASA didn't reveal the identity of the complainant. Said complainant, however, was understandably aggrieved at the statement subsequently placed on the HOTS website:

It appears that the complaint to the ASA was made by a group generally opposed to Christianity, and it seems strange to us that on the basis of a purely ideological objection to what we say on our website, the ASA has decided it is appropriate to insist that we cannot talk about a common and widely held belief that is an important aspect of conventional Christian faith.

Hayley Stevens, well-known skeptic and paranormal investigator — and the complainant in this case — decided to put the record straight on her blog, Hayley is a Ghost, despite the adverse publicity likely to result. This was then taken up by the Bath Chronicle, which quotes Hayley on her reasons for making the complaint to the ASA. Still HOTS Bath fail to understand the issue at hand, illustrating the de facto privileged position religious faith continues to enjoy — and expect — in the UK. They maintain the ASA (and by extension Hayley Stevens herself, as complainant) are objecting to their ideology, when in fact it's a simple matter of evidence for claims made.

The story then appeared on the Daily Mail website, together with an invitation for reader comments. The article itself is reasonably (and unusually) dispassionate — but the comments, as might be expected, are something else.

Hayley Stevens is to be applauded for not only making the complaint in the first place, but also for standing up to be counted despite the unwelcome attention she must have known it would bring.

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A short interview with Hayley Stevens, conducted after the recent Beyond the Veil one-day conference at Conway Hall at which she spoke (and before the ASA ruling discussed above), will be featured in the next episode of the Skepticule Extra podcast.