[helene_t]

I have no personal opinion about the placebo effect, but several experts I have talked to about it believe it is widely over-estimated and in fact has only been proved to work for pain control.

Very few randomized studies compare a group on placebo to a group who knows not to be treated. It is certainly true that the placebo group will often improve relative to their state before the trial, or relative to a non-randomized control group. But that doesn't prove that the placebo effect is real, there are plausible alternative explanations.

[mikeh]

Codo, on Jan 30 2009, 03:29 AM, said:

mikeh, on Jan 30 2009, 08:51 AM, said:

The irony is that theists DON'T react this way. Theists hear of well-researched, solid facts and go into denial. I, and I suspect Richard and Josh and Helene, etc, would simply want to know more and to seek to understand the phenonemum, yet the theists, whose entire thought processes operate under the constraints of cognitive dissonance, think that we are like them! That we are wedded to our 'belief' as they are. Weird.. but just more proof, if any were needed, that rationality is a rationed trait.

If you really believe what you writes here, there is no need to comment.
It is enough just to highlight this scientifical and openminded view of the good and the evil. Thanks for clearing this up.

LOL

You merely prove that my generalization is accurate as far as you are concerned, and the irony is that, I suspect, you don't even see it.

[Al_U_Card]

Mike, the problem may lie in their confusion of the meanings of belief and understanding...

[mikeh]

Al_U_Card, on Jan 30 2009, 10:30 AM, said:

Mike, the problem may lie in their confusion of the meanings of belief and understanding...

I agree... as i have written before, I once cross-examined a witness, who had published some incorrect and defamatory beliefs about my client, based on speculation and prejudice, as to whether she understood that there was a difference between believing something and knowing it: she answered that 'I am beginning to'. Had she understood that even a couple of weeks before trial, she could have settled for an apology and a modest sum and not eventually lost everything she owned. But even tho we had shown, beyond rational doubt, that her beliefs were unfounded, she had been unable to accept this until far, far too late. So I know, from real life, that some believers truly don't understand that the difference even exists. Which is why, as far as I can see, Codo and Lukewarm and others appear to feel that materialism is merely another revealed truth belief structure. It's both sad and funny.

[jdonn]

Mike as much as I agree with the main parts of what you said, I think at times you are your own worst enemy in this debate, at least if your goal is to convince anyone who believes oppositely. Then again that tends to prove impossible no matter which side you are on, so if your goal is just having an interesting discussion or expressing your beliefs then go for it. I just thought lawyers like winning, especially when they believe they are right (or maybe I should say especially when they believe they are wrong.)

[mikeh]

jdonn, on Jan 30 2009, 11:05 AM, said:

Mike as much as I agree with the main parts of what you said, I think at times you are your own worst enemy in this debate, at least if your goal is to convince anyone who believes oppositely. Then again that tends to prove impossible no matter which side you are on, so if your goal is just having an interesting discussion or expressing your beliefs then go for it. I just thought lawyers like winning, especially when they believe they are right (or maybe I should say especially when they believe they are wrong.)

I accept your observations... and maybe I should tone it down a bit It is tough, tho.. both sides use the same words but speak an entirely different language, so I sometimes feel like one of those tourists who, unable to communicate with the locals, start speaking louder and louder, as if the volume of their speech will somehow pierce the veil of incomprehension.

It never does, of course... and the tourist comes across as an idiot

[Al_U_Card]

jdonn, on Jan 30 2009, 11:05 AM, said:

if your goal is to convince anyone who believes oppositely.

Far be it from me to come to Mike's defense (he hardly needs the help) but there is a way big diff between a belief and a verifiable fact.

If Mike were proposing his belief that all lawyers were without blame or fault or error.....but he is just stating the obvious. It boggles the mind that such is the state of our situation.

[mikeh]

I just re-read the entire thread. I see that I wrote (repetitively) that if the facts changed... if the facts contradicted the theory that I currently accept, I would be delighted... because I would be learning something new. Not one of those who criticize me for being a 'believer' equivalent to be a religious believer appear to have read these passages, or to understand them. More to the point, not one of them has so much as hinted that they share the same attitude toward their beliefs.

Why not? If you are one of the believers, ask yourself, in a quiet moment, whether this difference says anything about our approaches to knowledge and understanding.

I truly have tried to understand religious belief.. I have spoken at length with people whose integrity I trust, and I have done some reading in the area.. not just from the atheist point of view. I could do more, I suppose, but the arguments rarely seem to change.. unlike the materialist texts, which are constantly changing as new information surfaces, is tested, and either modifies or in some cases sweeps away previous theories.

[gwnn]

Mike, I'm curious here, have you read Mere Christianity by CS Lewis? What did you think of it?

[mikeh]

gwnn, on Jan 30 2009, 12:39 PM, said:

Mike, I'm curious here, have you read Mere Christianity by CS Lewis? What did you think of it?

no.. but I will consider doing so..

Edit: I googled it, and must confess that the criticisms of it seem, if based on an accurate representation of its contents, to be troubling.. but I will defer further comment until I actually read the book.. because I have often read summaries of lengthy material only to find that key passages from the original read, to me at least, differently than was suggested in the summary.

I am not going to buy it retail, but I will see if the local library has a copy... or if my favourite used bookstore has a cheap copy. The least I can do, after my postings, is to be open to references from the believing faction... if I want to be able to continue to claim to have an open mind... and I promise that I am NOT going to read the book from the p.o.v. of finding reasons to disagree with it... but I will from the point of view of trying to assess if the arguments make sense.

[hrothgar]

mikeh, on Jan 30 2009, 08:45 PM, said:

gwnn, on Jan 30 2009, 12:39 PM, said:

Mike, I'm curious here, have you read Mere Christianity by CS Lewis? What did you think of it?

no.. but I will consider doing so..

Edit: I googled it, and must confess that the criticisms of it seem, if based on an accurate representation of its contents, to be troubling.. but I will defer further comment until I actually read the book.. because I have often read summaries of lengthy material only to find that key passages from the original read, to me at least, differently than was suggested in the summary.

I am not going to buy it retail, but I will see if the local library has a copy... or if my favourite used bookstore has a cheap copy. The least I can do, after my postings, is to be open to references from the believing faction... if I want to be able to continue to claim to have an open mind... and I promise that I am NOT going to read the book from the p.o.v. of finding reasons to disagree with it... but I will from the point of view of trying to assess if the arguments make sense.

Complete text is available online at

http://lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt

[gwnn]

I'm not mentioning because I think it is the ultimate proof of God's existence. I just thought you'd be interested in it because of its rather confident and pleasant tone. And I read lots of bad reviews by atheists and lots of good ones by Christians along with a couple of good reviews by atheists and partly bad reviews by Christians. I was basically wondering what you'd think of it whilst listening to its recordings on Youtube (they start here).

[HeavyDluxe]

If anyone's planning on reading _Mere Christianity_, may I also suggest Tim Keller's _Reason for God_. Keller's a very thoughtful guy, who writes with a very respectful tone. As an admirer of Lewis, his book was intended (in some small way) to be an update to _Mere Christianity_.

Both are philosophical works, rather than scientific ones, obv.

Couple related resources... Keller presented some summary material from the book at Google and UCal:

http://www.youtube.c...h?v=Kxup3OS5ZhQ
http://www.youtube.c...h?v=C9fmKSwuoDE

[mikeh]

I have now read Books I and II and skimmed Book III of the lectures later produced as mere Christianity... I thank Richard for the link.

Sorry, but I am not convinced.

1. It seems that Lewis felt that a Moral Law of Nature was fundamental to his reasoning about the existence of a Being behind the universe... a precursor to his analysis of why that Being was the christian God.

'The only way in which we could expect [a Creator] to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find...'

This is merely one quote from Book I... it is replete with similar arguments, and what 'we do find' is a moral sense.

But Lewis wrote before developments that have come to be known as evolutionary psychology came about.. he wrote in an era of relative ignorance.

He also wrote that no non-human examiner could ever detect the existence of this inner law by mere observation of what humans do.. but this is (it seems to me) a facile statement unsupported by argument, logic or evidence. In The God Delusion, Dawkins makes reference to thought experiments conducted by psychologists amongst various cultures... they are fascinating, and could, in theory, be carried out by outsiders who would have no need to ask what the subjects felt inside.. they could, if sufficiently callous, set up the scenarios and observe. Some of them involve decisions such as: you can see that a train will kill a group of people... or you can divert the train onto a track where it will kill one person.. you have no alternatives, such as warning anyone. Or, rather than divert the train, you can stop it by pushing one person in front of it, killing him.

Most people, in the differing cultures, react in the same way as others.

It seems to me that there have been some very persuasive arguments and theories that indicate that this Moral Law is the result of evolutionary pressures over time.. and that we thus do not need to invoke the supernatural.

If that is a fair statement, then Lewis's argument that there has to be a Being evaporates, and his conclusion becomes unnecessary.

Turning to Book II: he engages in sophomoric argument in terms of why he believes that Jesus was the Son of God, as jesus had proclaimed himself to be.

He recognizes that many of the claims that Jesus made were either grandiose and absurd or real. But he entertains only two possible explanations for Jesus making the statements. Either he was a lunatic or a fiend or he was the Son Of God.

He rejected the lunatic/fiend possibility, apparently because none of the disciples viewed him as such. This left him with only the one other possibility he had considered... as if he were Sherlock Holmes... eliminate the impossible (read: the unacceptable) and whatever is left, no matter how improbable has to be real.

But: surely an understanding of the culture in which Jesus lived might inform him as to other possibilities? Surely there ought to have been a recognition that the attribution and accuracy of the words attributed to Jesus were dependent on multiple translations of edited and selected (from many competing and contradictory versions) made hundreds of years after the death of Jesus, with zero contemporaneous evidence that he even said any of the things attributed to him?

So: Lewis accepts, without question, the literal accuracy of (to be generous) oral history first put in writing, as best as we know, by people who were, at best, several generations removed from actual witness... and which writings were then copied, translated, edited, collated, selected and so on by those with a vested interest in having Jesus recorded as saying certain things.

And, even if ALL of this were accurate... Jesus lived, so I understand, at a time and in a place rife with cults, messiahs, miracles, sedition, dissent, anger at the occupying Romans, and so on. He needn't have been a lunatic nor a fiend... he may have been entirely sincere.. but that doesn't lead us to the logical conclusion that he was 'right' in calling himself the Son of God.

So, I tried... I read the book and, frankly, I was expecting more. Lewis was very articulate, but he seems to have been, as we all are, a product of his times. I also found it interesting, altho not germane to my objections, that he saw christianity as a religion born in dismay.... at the risk of reading far too much into that line, my immediate reaction was that such a sentiment might explain why someone who fought in the WWI as an infantryman, and I suspect, therefore, saw horrific events, sought refuge in religion.

He characterizes atheism as 'simple'.. but in doing so, I think he was saying more about his professed atheism, before finding religion, than he was about the reasons why people like me find non-belief so compelling. BTW, I think that what is often lost in the discussion is precisely that: it is not that I 'believe' in atheism.. it is that I do NOT believe in the god of any religion of which I have heard. So, it is not that I find non-belief compelling, but that I find belief so irrational. Show me the evidence.. or the logic, and I will look again..

[jtfanclub]

Going all the way back to the original thread on this (if it even was the original thread), the question was asked in a poll "Do you believe in modern evolution". My answer was no: I don't believe what we're being taught now is correct. It was asked that I provide some alternative non-religious theories, and I did so. It's not that I think people are lying to me, it's just that I think that we're trying to figure out an entire image with only a few pieces of the puzzle.

Suppose in 1909 somebody had been asked if they believed in Newtonian Physics, and they said no- it might be good for rough estimates, but it doesn't explain everything. Modern science would have proved them correct. But suppose somebody asks me in 2009 if I believe in Modern Evolution, and I say no- that it might be good for rough estimates but it doesn't explain everything. A hundred years from now, how would you show whether I was right or wrong? What anchors does Modern Evolution have?

Quote

I just re-read the entire thread. I see that I wrote (repetitively) that if the facts changed... if the facts contradicted the theory that I currently accept, I would be delighted... because I would be learning something new.

Well, sure. That's how religion works. When faced with a fact that can't explain await in spite of their skepticism, it gets subsumed into their religion. Christianity didn't topple when the earth was shown to revolve around the sun. To me, the very definition of a religion is one where no new fact can alter the underlying the belief. Not that a new facts aren't accepted. Religions accept new facts constantly. Is there any fact short of aliens showing up on our doorstep and admitting that they created new species for entertainment going to make you disbelieve in Modern Evolutionary Theory the way that Newtonian Physics has been disproven?

Quote

Not one of those who criticize me for being a 'believer' equivalent to be a religious believer appear to have read these passages, or to understand them. More to the point, not one of them has so much as hinted that they share the same attitude toward their beliefs.

Lord knows creationists write enough books. They make all sorts of new arguments based on new evidence. The fact that no amount of evidence is going to prove them wrong doesn't mean that they ignore new evidence.

Quote

I could do more, I suppose, but the arguments rarely seem to change.. unlike the materialist texts, which are constantly changing as new information surfaces, is tested, and either modifies or in some cases sweeps away previous theories.

The underlying argument hasn't changed, much as how the underlying argument for Modern Evolution hasn't changed since the 50s. You can still buy T-shirts that show the fish with legs on one end as the most primative and humans as the pinnacle on the other. Do you think to a creationist it looks like Modern Evolutionary Theory has changed at all?

[jtfanclub]

I'm actually kind of surprised that the placebo effect was even debatable. Otherwise, Phase II trials are a sick joke- if it makes no difference to a person whether they're getting a placebo or getting nothing at all, why not let them know? This is especially true when the illness is almost certainly fatal to those getting the placebo.

Some of the placebo effect is obvious- if having low blood pressure makes it more likely for cancer to go into remission, and a placebo helps you remain calm, then the placebo's going to make it more likely that you'll survive cancer. There's lots of indisputable cases of fake diet pills helping people lose weight and fake metabolism pills helping people get stronger. It's simply a case where a person concentrating on something tends to work on it more.

But then there's other placebo effects that are less obvious.

http://skepdic.com/placebo.html

Quote

Doctors in one study successfully eliminated warts by painting them with a brightly colored, inert dye and promising patients the warts would be gone when the color wore off. In a study of asthmatics, researchers found that they could produce dilation of the airways by simply telling people they were inhaling a bronchodilator, even when they weren't. Patients suffering pain after wisdom-tooth extraction got just as much relief from a fake application of ultrasound as from a real one, so long as both patient and therapist thought the machine was on. Fifty-two percent of the colitis patients treated with placebo in 11 different trials reported feeling better -- and 50 percent of the inflamed intestines actually looked better when assessed with a sigmoidoscope ("The Placebo Prescription" by Margaret Talbot, New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2000).

It's probably mostly a conditioned response- there's a number of obvious effects from your emotional state, but a lot less obvious ones too.

[luke warm]

mikeh, on Jan 30 2009, 11:15 AM, said:

jdonn, on Jan 30 2009, 11:05 AM, said:

Mike as much as I agree with the main parts of what you said, I think at times you are your own worst enemy in this debate, at least if your goal is to convince anyone who believes oppositely. Then again that tends to prove impossible no matter which side you are on, so if your goal is just having an interesting discussion or expressing your beliefs then go for it. I just thought lawyers like winning, especially when they believe they are right (or maybe I should say especially when they believe they are wrong.)

I accept your observations... and maybe I should tone it down a bit It is tough, tho.. both sides use the same words ~~

this is completely false... i've yet to see anyone on the other side of this argument use the terms and tactics (and fallacies) you use... you constantly appeal to ridicule and assert opinion as if it's fact... rarely do you deign to put an 'imo' in a post.. we all argue circularly to a degree, because we all start from our own presuppositions... the difference is, you don't admit it... you prefer to say that, because of your superior intellect, which allows you to understand more of what you read than those who disagree with you, you are right and others are wrong

on a point from an earlier post concerning metaphysical laws, there are many... law of identity, laws of logic, law of entrophy (einstein: “premier law of all of science” - eddington: “supreme metaphysical law of the entire universe"), etc.

i do have a question (not to argue, but for edification) concerning the theory of evolution... if my understanding is faulty here, i'm sure someone will correct me... am i correct that for this theory to be true inorganic atoms and molecules combined, more or less spontaneously, to form protein (and other even more complex molecules) and from these (adding a measure of time) even more complex beings were formed? and that this order from chaos all came together from its natural state? that dna formed in this manner?

i can find many quotes from evolutionists who find this to be - well, let's just say unlikely (since you don't seem to like the idea of odds)... one that expresses what many have said is George Stravropoulos, from the American Scientist:

"Yet, under ordinary conditions, no complex organic molecule can ever form spontaneously but will rather disintegrate, in agreement with the second law [of thermodynamics]. Indeed, the more complex it is, the more unstable it is, and the more assured, sooner or later, is its disintegration. Photosynthesis and all life processes, and life itself, despite confused or deliberately confusing language, cannot yet be understood in terms of thermodynamics or any other exact science. "

now one might argue about his "... under ordinary conditions ..." but i don't know what the argument would look like

as for your critique of 'mere christianity', i'll just point out to one omission you made concerning lewis' description of Jesus... he said he'd be crazy, the son of God, or a liar... you left off (or i missed it) 'liar'

[Lobowolf]

jtfanclub, on Jan 30 2009, 05:58 PM, said:

I'm actually kind of surprised that the placebo effect was even debatable.

Got to admit, I was, too. I thought it was more of a given than evolution, among scientists. Don't all contemporary studies reflect its existence, by either attempting to explain it (e.g. neurochemical effects of the brain), or by controlling for it?

The placebo sidebar in this topic, appearing immediately on the heels of Mike's comments about theists vs. scientists, has been my favorite part of this thread.

[Winstonm]

Quote

I'm actually kind of surprised that the placebo effect was even debatable.

This is so weird. I keep saying the same thing over and over and am ignored and rebutted for something I didn't say.

One more time - the placebo effect is not in question. What has been questioned is your statements that placebos cure and that faith cures.

Quote

People are cured by placebos. People are being cured by their own faith. And yet, that's simply accepted and taken into account by Modern Medicine

I do not know of any modern medical practioner that accepts the claims of placebo cures and curing by faith as valid.

[luke warm]

Winstonm, on Jan 30 2009, 06:52 PM, said:

Quote

I'm actually kind of surprised that the placebo effect was even debatable.

This is so weird. I keep saying the same thing over and over and am ignored and rebutted for something I didn't say.

One more time - the placebo effect is not in question. What has been questioned is your statements that placebos cure and that faith cures.

winston, have there been instances of a cure when only a placebo was used? if so, what did the curing? the placebo itself?