Terence Hines - Pseudoscience and the Paranormal

From start to finish, Velikovsky’s ideas are the work of an erudite crackpot with a great ability to convince the scientifically untrained (himself included) that there was a great deal of validity in his ideas that establishment scientists were trying to suppress. As noted above, the initial response of the scientific community to Velikovsky was undisguised contempt and scorn. In the 1970s, as scientists began to see the importance of examining even very unusual theories and communicating the results of these investigations to the public, considerable effort has been directed toward a careful examination of Velikovsky’s ideas. A symposium on the topic was held at the 1974 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. This conference is the major annual meeting for American scientists from all disciplines. A symposium at such a conference certainly belies the charge of closed-mindedness so frequently made by Velikovsky and his followers. The proceedings of the symposium were later published (Goldsmith 1977).

In chapter 1 it was noted that one characteristic of a pseudoscience is an unwillingness to change the theory to take into account new knowledge. In a 1972 speech at Harvard University Velikovsky correctly stated that science textbooks from the 1950s were now “antiquated.” He went on to say that his theories were just as valid in 1972 as in 1950. In other words, the vast advances in knowledge of astronomy, astrophysics, planetary geology, and related fields that had occurred in that twenty-two-year span were irrelevant to the validity of his theories. Velikovsky’s attitude can be contrasted with those of establishment scientists faced with revolutionary advances in knowledge.

In the past few years a major change has taken place in astronomers’ views of how the moon was formed. The view now widely held is that the Moon was formed 4.5 billion years ago by a collision between the then-cooling Earth and another, smaller planet about the size of Mars (Gleick 1986; Taylor 1987). A typical response to the theory is that of Dr. H. J. Melosh of the University of Arizona, who was a “typical skeptic” regarding the theory. Quoted in Gleick, he said:

I was sort of an expert on impact cratering, and people hadn’t really looked at what happens during impact. So I decided to do it and get rid of this insane idea [that the Moon resulted from planetary impact] once and for all. Instead, what I found within weeks is that the physics of what happened during an impact event agrees extremely well [with the impact theory]. The more I looked the more I thought that the giant impact theory was the only one that could explain what we saw. (p. C3)

Here is a typical example of a scientist who completely changes his mind in the space of a few weeks because he is confronted with evidence that his previous ideas were wrong. Gleick (1986) and Taylor (1987) describe in some detail the other evidence that has convinced so many astronomers that the impact theory is correct.

Why was this impact theory accepted, while those of Velikovsky were rejected? Velikovsky presented no evidence to support his ideas. He merely surrounded them with a forest of abstruse citations, many of which were inaccurate. Even more important, the impact theory of lunar formation makes predictions that are found to be correct when tested. Whenever a testable hypothesis could be wrung from Velikovsky’s theory, it was found to be wrong.

You are at a “Miracle Service” given by famed faith healer Kathryn Kuhlman. There are thousands of people in the audience. You have seen several seemingly amazing cures, but the most dramatic is about to occur. Kuhiman shouts out, “Someone here is being cured of cancer!” Then you see a fifty-year-old woman, a Mrs. Helen Sullivan (not her real name), arise from a wheelchair and hobble painfully up onto the stage. She has stomach cancer that has metastasized to her liver and the bones of her spinal column, making walking extremely painful. She can walk, but only with the aid of a back brace. William A. Nolen, M.D., in his book Healing: A Doctor in Search of a Miracle (1974) describes what happened next:

Mrs. Sullivan had, at Kathryn Kuhlman’s suggestion, taken off her back brace and run back and forth across the stage several times. Finally, she walked back down the aisle to her wheelchair, waving her brace as she went, while the audience applauded and Kathryn Kuhlman gave thanks to the Lord. (p. 87)

The effect of this miracle cure on the audience must have been immense. How could anyone, no matter how skeptical, doubt what they had seen with their own eyes: a woman devoured by cancer (and she really did have cancer—she was not a shill or a plant) had been cured by God. Now she could not only walk but run without assistance of any sort.

The above example is just one of tens of thousands of miracle cures claimed by faith healers worldwide. Faith healers, whether called that, or witch doctors or shamans, have been around since earliest times. In the twentieth century, at least among Western cultures, belief in faith healing rapidly declined until the last few decades. With the rise of religious fundamentalism in the 1980s, faith healing has again become extremely popular. It is practiced not only by traveling healers, who move from town to town, but also by many “prime-time preachers” such as W. V. Grant, Peter Popoff, Oral Roberts, Ernest Angley, and Pat Robertson, to name but a few.

Several factors are extremely powerful in convincing people that faith healers are actually able to cure the sick. One is actually witnessing a “cure” such as the one described above, or seeing it on television, or hearing about it from someone who saw it.

How can one explain a cure such as that described above? In fact, no cure took place. Nolen followed up the case and interviewed Mrs. Sullivan two months after her miracle cure. She had gone to the “Miracle Service” expecting a cure, she said.

At the service, as soon as she [Kathryn Kuhiman] said, “Someone with cancer is being cured,” I knew she meant me. I could just feel this burning sensation all over my body and I was convinced the Holy Spirit was at work. I went right up on the stage and when she asked me about the brace I just took it right off, though I hadn’t had it off for over four months, I had so much back pain. I was sure I was cured. That night I said a prayer of thanksgiving to the Lord and Kathryn Kuhlman and went to bed, happier than I’d been in a long time. At four o’clock the next morning I woke up with a horrible pain in my back. It was so bad I broke out in a cold sweat. I didn’t dare move. (Nolen 1974, pp. 98–99)

X rays revealed that one of the bones in her spinal column, a vertebra already weakened by the cancer, had collapsed. It had collapsed due to the strain that had been put on it when she had run back and forth across the stage. She died two months later, of the cancer that Kathryn Kuhlman had “cured” her of before an audience of thousands.

Skeptics still must explain Mrs. Sullivan’s surprising freedom from pain during and immediately after the service. It has been recognized in the past decade that the body has its own physiological and biochemical systems for dealing with pain (Watkins and Mayer 1986). Several of these systems control pain by causing the release of endogenous substances that are naturally occurring analogues of drugs like morphine and its stronger biochemical relative, heroin. These endogenous substances, called endorphins, are now known to be released at times of stress (Henry 1982; Kelly 1986). A high level of excitement, such as that clearly felt by Mrs. Sullivan, is a stressful event, in the physiological sense. Thus, her pain was temporarily eliminated, not because of any miracle cure, but because the excitement brought on by the environment caused a release of endorphins. A few hours later, when these endorphins were no longer present, her pain returned, much magnified by the new damage to her spinal column.