Few rise to this challenge as energetically as James “The Amazing’ Randi, accurately self-described as an angry man. He is angry not so much about the survival into our day of antediluvian mysticism and superstition, but about how uncritical acceptance of mysticism and superstition works to defraud, to humiliate, and sometimes even to kill. Like all of us, he is imperfect: sometimes Randi is intolerant and condescending, lacking in empathy for the human frailties that underlie credulity. He is routinely paid for his speeches and performances, but nothing compared to what he could receive if he declared that his tricks.derived from psychic powers or divine or extraterrestrial influences. (Most professional conjurors, worldwide, seem to believe in the reality of psychic phenomena, according to polls of their views.) As a conjuror, he has done much to expose remote viewers, ‘telepaths’, and faith-healers who have bilked the public. He demonstrated the simple deceptions and misdirections by which some psychic spoonbend-ers had conned prominent theoretical physicists into deducing new physical phenomena. He has received wide recognition among scientists and is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation (so-called ‘genius’) Prize Fellowship. One critic castigated him for being ‘obsessed with reality’. I wish the same could be said of our nation and our species.
Randi has done more than anyone else in recent times to expose pretension and fraud in the lucrative business of faith-healing. He sifts refuse. He reports gossip. He listens in on the stream of ‘miraculous’ information coming to the itinerant healer – not by spiritual inspiration from God, but at the radio frequency of 39.17 megahertz, transmitted by his wife backstage.*
[* Whose minions had interviewed the gullible patients only an hour or two earlier. How, except through God, could the preacher know their symptoms and street addresses? This scam by the Christian fundamentalist faith-healer Peter Popoff, and exposed by Randi, was thinly fictionalized in the 1993 film Leap of Faith.]
He discovers that those who rise from their wheelchairs and are declared healed had never before been confined to wheelchairs -they were invited by an usher to sit in them. He challenges the faith-healers to provide serious medical evidence for the validity of their claims. He invites local and federal government agencies to enforce the laws against fraud and medical malpractice. He chastises the news media for their studied avoidance of the issue. He exposes the profound contempt of these faith-healers for their patients and parishioners. Many are conscious charlatans, using Christian evangelical or New Age language and symbols to prey on human frailty. Perhaps there are some with motives that are not venal.
Or am I being too harsh? How is the occasional charlatan in faith-healing different from the occasional fraud in science? Is it fair to be suspicious of an entire profession because of a few bad apples? There are at least two important differences, it seems to me. First, no one doubts that science actually works, whatever mistaken and fraudulent claim may from time to time be offered. But whether there are any ‘miraculous’ cures from faith-healing, beyond the body’s own ability to cure itself, is very much at issue. Secondly, the expose of fraud and error in science is made almost exclusively by science. The discipline polices itself, meaning that scientists are aware of the potential for charlatanry and mistakes. But the exposure of fraud and error in faith-healing is almost never done by other faith-healers. Indeed, it is striking how reluctant the churches and synagogues are in condemning demonstrable deception in their midst.
When conventional medicine fails, when we must confront pain and death, of course we are open to other prospects for hope.
And, after all, some illnesses are psychogenic. Many can be at least ameliorated by a positive cast of mind. Placebos are dummy drugs, often sugar pills. Drug companies routinely compare the effectiveness of their drugs against placebos given to patients with the same disease who had no way to tell the difference between the drug and the placebo. Placebos can be astonishingly effective, especially for colds, anxiety, depression, pain, and symptoms that are plausibly generated by the mind. Conceivably, endorphins -the small brain proteins with morphine-like effects – can be elicited by belief. A placebo works only if the patient believes it’s an effective medicine. Within strict limits, hope, it seems, can be transformed into biochemistry.
As a typical example, consider the nausea and vomiting that frequently accompany the chemotherapy given to cancer and AIDS patients. Nausea and vomiting can also be caused psycho-genically, for instance by fear. The drug ondansetron hydrochlo-ride greatly reduces the incidence of these symptoms; but is it actually the drug or the expectation of relief? In a double-blind study 96 per cent of patients rated the drug effective. So did ten per cent of the patients taking an identical-looking placebo.
In an application of the fallacy of observational selection, unanswered prayers may be forgotten or dismissed. There is a real toll, though: some patients who are not cured by faith reproach themselves – perhaps it’s their own fault, perhaps they didn’t believe hard enough. Scepticism, they are rightly told, is an impediment both to faith and to (placebo) healing.
Nearly half of all Americans believe there is such a thing as psychic or spiritual healing. Miraculous cures have been associated with a wide variety of healers, real and imagined, throughout human history. Scrofula, a kind of tuberculosis, was in England called the ‘King’s evil’, and was supposedly curable only by the King’s touch. Victims patiently lined up to be touched; the monarch briefly submitted to another burdensome obligation of high office, and, despite no one, it seems, actually being cured, the practice continued for centuries.
A famous Irish faith-healer of the seventeenth century was Valentine Greatraks. He found, somewhat to his surprise, that he had the power to cure disease, including colds, ulcers, ‘soreness’ and epilepsy. The demand for his services became so great that he had no time for anything else. He was forced to become a healer, he complained. His method was to cast out the demons responsible for disease. All diseases, he asserted, were caused by evil spirits, many of whom he recognized and called by name. A contemporary chronicler, cited by Mackay, noted that
he boasted of being much better acquainted with the intrigues of demons than he was with the affairs of men … So great was the confidence in him, that the blind fancied they saw the light which they did not see – the deaf imagined that they heard – the lame that they walked straight, and the paralytic that they had recovered the use of their limbs. An idea of health made the sick forget for awhile their maladies; and imagination, which was not less active in those merely drawn by curiosity than in the sick, gave a false view to the one class, from the desire of seeing, as it operated a false cure on the other from the strong desire of being healed.
There are countless reports in the world literature of exploration and anthropology not only of sicknesses being cured by faith in the healer, but also of people wasting away and dying when cursed by a sorcerer. A more or less typical example is told by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, who with a few companions and under conditions of terrible privation wandered on land and sea, from Florida to Texas to Mexico in 1528-36. The many different communities of Native Americans he met longed to believe in the supernatural healing powers of the strange light-skinned, black-bearded foreigners and their black-skinned companion from Morocco, Este-banico. Eventually whole villages came out to meet them, depositing all their wealth at the feet of the Spaniards and humbly imploring cures. It began modestly enough:
[T]hey tried to make us into medicine men, without examining us or asking for credentials, for they cure illnesses by blowing on the sick person . . . and they ordered us to do the same and be of some use . . . The way in which we cured was by making the sign of the cross over them and blowing on them and reciting a Pater Noster and an Ave Maria . . . [A]s soon as we made the sign of the cross over them, all those for whom we prayed told the others that they were well and healthy . . .
Soon they were curing cripples. Cabeza de Vaca reports he raised a man from the dead. After that,
we were very much hampered by the large number of people who were following us … their eagerness to come and touch us was very great and their importunity so extreme that three hours would pass without our being able to persuade them to leave us alone.
When a tribe begged the Spaniards not to leave them, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions became angry. Then,
a strange thing happened . . . [M]any of them fell ill, and eight men died the next day. All over the land, in the places where this became known, they were so afraid of us that it seemed that the very sight of us made them almost die of fear. They implored us not to be angry, nor to wish for any more of them to die; and they were altogether convinced that we killed them simply by wishing to.