Doctor vs Hagerty´s Fingerprints of God and Philosophers

W cheung amazon I regret buying the book (B B Hagerty´s Fingerprints of God). It starts out pretty promising. The author sets out the plan of visiting people who have "spiritual experiences" (e.g. mystics, near-death experiencers, etc.) and interviewing various scientists. Ostensibly she is being objective, attempting to see whether there is any "evidence" that prayers work, that "near-death experience" proves that we have a soul, etc. It was initially quite harmless, but she keeps screening out data that she does not like. I am a medical specialist and I am also a Christian who also believes in prayers. However, there is just no scientific data to "prove" that prayers work. The author just refuses to give up in spite of being given the results of the experiments on prayers (pg 55-61). There are also obvious factual errors as well. E.g. pain from shingles is NOT due to viral replication (pg 113). This may seem trivial, but this error leads her to suspect some religious/spiritual healing works on a physical level (pg 106-113). Towards the end of the book (from pg 246), it just becomes too painful to read. She brings up "quantum entanglement", "non-local mind", even "dark matter" to explain how prayers and premonition work. This demonstrate a complete lack of understanding of basic knowledge in physics. While it is always good to have an open mind, misuse of science and disregard of disagreeable data are not the way to find out the truth, they just obstruct the path to enlightenment.

*** Just to address the prejudicial, extremist, and unquestioning nature of your comment. Being a professional scientist isn´t always an advantage if you don´t understand your own limitations, especially if you are a "doctrinal" Christian. In terms of "proving" prayer, I believe from the selection I have access to, she cites a number of experiments that do demonstrate some phenomena, in addition to referring to the negative study findings. You don´t seem to understand that Science itself never represents any Absolute Truth, but paradigm models. It is one FORM of Philosophy. Human-related studies are fraught with the issues that were observed since DesCartes was questioned by Pascal and applied Cartesian Rationalism by G Vico. After that terms like anti-positivism met logical positivism, and more. Thomas Kuhn´s paradigms and their shifts honors those efforts in effect. Here, you DENY her citations without qualification, in fact disqualifying your comment as unscholarly and ideological. No doctor is immune to second opinions, and this is not your job here, where your limitations are as human and on display as anyone else. You thus seem to confuse your medical qualifications with your scholarly ability and human identity. Sorry, my friend, my Harvard degree in Bio Anthro, masters in IR-Sustainable Dev in NYC, etc mean I`m another kind of reputable scholar capable and alert to the philosophical and psychological issues, and more. As such, to complete, that Benson et al study, frames its conclusions unwisely and with untenable overstatement as it ignores the longstanding complexity challenge of reducing human psychosocial and cultural context to lab conditions. Besides the studies Hagerty does cite that you ignore, there are medically associated testimonies of prayer-related healing that capture very well those complexities. "Spontaneous remissions" is a term that reflects a medical conceptual barrier to adequate evaluation. Marlene Klepees´ vision-prayer-church/prayer sequence that was sandwiched by and independently experienced of her time at the Mayo Clinic, online, would be a powerful challenge to medical models if they could handle it. Scientists and doctors in Psychosomatic Medicine are taking up their roles at various levels. Bill Owen´s testimony of liver failure and recovery after prayer at an Orlando, FL hospital is told in the It´s a Miracle ep The Healing Ritual online. Among others, there is C Crandall MD´s testimony of resurrecting Jeff Arkin after 40+ min in an ER also online. These "anecdotes" are not invalid. They are PHENOMENA that real science grapples with. DENIAL of possibility isn´t science, it is the misuse of science as ideological Scientism. As for Physics, it seems you can´t seem to disentangle your psychological overidentification of Science as Inviolable, Non-transferable Truth instead of a form of Philosophy that has supplemented Moral Philosophy to create the modern disciplines in the Social Sciences and Humanities, with critical problems in economics and elsewhere. As in Ecological and Social Economics, it is the academic grounding and "soil" of Philosophy that has allowed the limitations of mechanistic Physics to be overcome. Hagerty´s attempts deserve being contextualized more broadly with Physicist-Philosophers like Fritjof Capra´s work and David Bohm´s so that her philosophical efforts can be flexibly and knowledgably be evaluated on their merits. Capra´s work in General Systems Theory and emergence and Bohm´s ideas like the Implicate order are far more intriguing and conducive to adequate appreciation of Hagerty´s efforts. It is your own unacknowledged psychological and mechanistic attitudes that you twist into intolerance and mistaken judgment.