The following discussion is an archived record of a request for comment. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this discussion. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.

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Request for comment: Is faith healing a form of pseudoscience and should it be labeled as such either in the article or by assignment of category pseudoscience? - Ad Orientem ( talk) 18:42, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

• Not Pseudoscience makes no scientific claims, therefore can't be pseudoscience. From what I can see in the above discussion there is no strong sourcing claiming labeling it as pseudoscience. Brustopher ( talk) 19:02, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• Comment Could be omniscience with the right sources. Zulu Papa 5 * ( talk) 19:18, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• Not Pseudoscience Still fake, but it's not pseudoscience. Also, I am likely the only person who came from Wikiproject Christianity and Wikiproject Skepticism >_<. I think it'd fall under paranormal claims like psychics. Jerod Lycett ( talk) 19:58, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• comment was this topic not discussed already in the text prior to this request?-- Ozzie10aaaa ( talk) 20:04, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

It was. I added the RfC to get a broader range of opinions. I also notified some of the wiki projects that might have an interest in the subject. - Ad Orientem ( talk) 20:36, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

• The academic study of faith healing is largely pseudoscience. That justifies the category. Guy ( Help!) 22:34, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
  • I don't have access to the ATLA Religion Database, which would probably be the best way to find out what religious scholars make of this. However, I checked a few that I do have access to, and here are the results:
    • At ProjectMUSE, 4% of sources containing "faith healing" also contain "pseudoscience", and 2.5% of those containing "pseudoscience" also mention "faith healing". Even if we unrealistically assume that every single source mentioning both words is saying that faith healing is pseudoscience, then it's still true that sources discussing faith healing almost never mention pseudoscience, and that sources talking about pseudoscience rarely even mention faith healing.
    • Ebscohost, Gale Virtual Reference Library, Gale Science in Context, and Britannica Library each have somewhere between a dozen to a couple hundred sources on each of the two subjects, but zero that contain both. Gale General OneFile has one source mentioning both, and it's a book review that doesn't directly equate them.
  • Most of the sources about faith healing are about cultural or religious issues. My conclusion: There is a significant academic study of faith healing, and that academic study is almost entirely uninterested in pseudoscience. (Perhaps Guy meant to write "The medical study of faith healing, as seen in some remarkably low-quality journals" rather than "the academic study". Academia is bigger than the science division.) WhatamIdoing ( talk) 22:30, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
• Comment - so far no comments have addressed the questions that are specific to this article, and a distinction should be made between them. I will answer them separately below. RockMagnetist( talk) 22:36, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
• Not Pseudoscience per sources mentioned above. I seem to recall there was some pseudoscientific faith healing research done once (we'll pray for people in one ward, but not in the other ward, etc.) but that would be excessively fringe, even for faith healing. St Anselm ( talk) 10:21, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
• Not Pseudoscience in the general case. Some specific practices combine faith healing with pseudoscience or attempt to turn faith healing into a pseudoscience but in the general case it isn't as is borne out within the sources. SPACKlick ( talk) 10:58, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
• Still Not Pseudoscience Follow the cites or logic - unsurprisingly faith healing generally uses faith to heal, by some ritual or calling on Jesus or a saint or some higher power. Bblandford had a decent definition lead "Faith healing is the generic term used for prayer, meditation, incantations or rituals for therapeutic purposes, either as a substitute for, or in conjunction with, conventional medical treatment." It might bin with Alternative and Supportive practices but in general it's expressly not science and not medicine. Markbassett ( talk) 01:37, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
• Not Pseudoscience Per the argument given above by Whatamidoing. Immortal Horrors or Everlasting Splendors 14:22, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
• Yes. Citing Pseudoscience and the paranormal by Terence Hines, Martin Mahner [ de wrote that "Despite the lack of generally accepted demarcation criteria, we find remarkable agreement among virtually all philosophers and scientists that fields like astrology, creationism, homeopathy, dowsing, psychokinesis, faith healing, clairvoyance, or ufology are either pseudosciences or at least lack the epistemic warrant to be taken seriously" ( here). Raimo Tuomela thought that "examples of pseudoscience as the theory of biorhythms, astrology, dianetics, creationism, faith healing may seem too obvious examples of pseudoscience for academic readers" ( here and a few pages later here). One remedy, passed 3 December 2006, found in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience is "The term 'pseudoscience' shall be interpreted broadly; it is intended to include but not be limited to all article in Category:Pseudoscience and its subcategories" – faith healing is already included in the List of esoteric healing articles which is a subcategory of Category:Pseudoscience. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 21:55, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
• No. Proponents of faith healing do not make bogus scientific claims on its behalf. A few writers may mistake it for pseudoscience, or regard it as pseudoscience under their own definition. But it is not "presented as scientific" (see pseudoscience), so does not fall within Wikipedia's definition. Maproom ( talk) 04:29, 29 September 2015 (UTC)
• No On the purely technical ground that it makes no scientific claims. Better to call it a confidence trick or a scam. Of course, as about 1/3 of the benefit of all medicine comes from the Placebo effect it does, along with many other tricks, cons, and scams, acually work to some degree. Martin Hogbin ( talk) 15:09, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

Should faith healing be labeled a pseudoscience in the article?

• Qualified yes. There are plenty of reliable sources supporting this classification. For example, in this book search it gets its own article in two encyclopedias of pseudoscience and full chapters in some of the other books. I find this quote particularly useful:

Despite the lack of generally accepted demarcation criteria, we find remarkable agreement among virtually all philosophers and scientists that fields like astrology, creationism, homeopathy, dowsing, psychokinesis, faith healing, clairvoyance or ufology are either pseudosciences or at least lack the epistemic warrant to be taken seriously. As Hansson (2008, 2009) observes, we are thus faced with the paradoxical situation that most of us seem to recognize a pseudoscience when we encounter one, yet when it comes to formulating criteria for the characterization of science and pseudoscience, respectively, we are told that no such demarcation is possible.

—  Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem, pages 30-31

However, I agree with Bblandford that if it is just stated baldly, then it is a mere perjorative. The statement should be coupled with an account of scientific investigation of faith healing. RockMagnetist( talk) 22:36, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

• You cannot use a source that says it is "either pseudoscience or...[not] to be taken seriously" to say "it's pseudoscience". "It's either red or blue" does not permit us to claim that something is red. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 21:43, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• Not labeled pseudoscience as a whole, but specific claims can be labeled pseudoscience iff scientific claims are made in sources that are not backed by actual science in reliable sources. Some faith healing claims may be pseudoscientific, but this subject as a whole is not. - Mr X 13:42, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
• Not pseudoscience but the existence of the demarcation problem, and the fact that a minority of sources include it as either pseudoscience or as things similar to pseudosciences, would be fine. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 21:43, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• @ WhatamIdoing: Right - basically I support a nuanced statement that sticks close to what the sources say. RockMagnetist( talk) 22:33, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• No, and I see the article currently says "It is non-scientific", complete with redlink. Is Non-science a thing? St Anselm ( talk) 10:21, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
• 'Not pseudoscience - again, follow the links and the dominant and bulk of them go elsewhere. If you have to hunt for a cite that has both words and aren't finging many, then it's just a random word hit or vague pejorative and should not be given undue weight. Markbassett ( talk) 01:40, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
• Yes. Citing Pseudoscience and the paranormal by Terence Hines, Martin Mahner [ de wrote that "Despite the lack of generally accepted demarcation criteria, we find remarkable agreement among virtually all philosophers and scientists that fields like astrology, creationism, homeopathy, dowsing, psychokinesis, faith healing, clairvoyance, or ufology are either pseudosciences or at least lack the epistemic warrant to be taken seriously" ( here). Raimo Tuomela thought that "examples of pseudoscience as the theory of biorhythms, astrology, dianetics, creationism, faith healing may seem too obvious examples of pseudoscience for academic readers" ( here and a few pages later here). One remedy, passed 3 December 2006, found in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience is "The term 'pseudoscience' shall be interpreted broadly; it is intended to include but not be limited to all article in Category:Pseudoscience and its subcategories" – faith healing is already included in the List of esoteric healing articles which is a subcategory of Category:Pseudoscience. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 21:55, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
  • Perhaps you should take a moment to think about the logical disjunction in the sentence you quote from the first source, which gives a long list of things that are "either pseudosciences or [not] to be taken seriously". "The cars are either red or blue" does not mean that all the cars are red. Some cars might be red, some might be blue, and some might be both—but Wikipedia absolutely cannot use a source that says "red or blue" to say "this source says it's definitely red, red, red, RED, RED!" Exactly like the sentence about the cars, "it's pseudoscience or nonsense" does not permit us to say that "it's definitely pseudoscience". WhatamIdoing ( talk) 02:30, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

@ WhatamIdoing: the sentence is disjunctive but it is logical. The sentence (and the article it is taken from) makes clear that the simple demarcation criteria that Popper proposed in the early 20th century are inadequate. The second phrase of the sentence both "does not permit us to say that 'it's definitely pseudoscience'" and it does not permit us to say the opposite, i.e. that it's definitely not pseudoscience. From this podcast (by coincidence posted last week) in which Massimo Pigliucci (Mahner's chapter that I quote is in Pigliucci's book) and Nigel Warburton discuss the the demarcation problem, we know that in philosophy there is are cluster concepts or family resemblance concepts, for example Ludwig Wittgenstein used the analogy of the definition of a game based on a target image, i.e. you look at and say "that is a game", "that is a game", "that is not a game", etc.; and then you come up with situations that you are not sure of, because it has some characteristics of a game but not enough to fully qualify it as a game. Pigliucci gives evolutionary psychology's status as a science as an application of family resemblance. In a cluster framework, the sentence can be read that faith healing has a family resemblance to both pseudoscience concepts and concepts that "lack of epistemic warrant to be taken seriously". – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 17:38, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

I think you need to make up your mind. Your !vote says that "Yes", we can use this particular source to label faith healing as pseudoscience. Your statement here says that we can not use this particular source to label faith healing as pseudoscience. It is not possible for both of these sentences to be true.

I don't believe that anyone is interested in having a sentence that says that faith healing is never pseudoscience; the question here is all about whether it (usually) is, or whether we should be (relatively) silent on the point. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 15:35, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

• Limited yes. We tend to give some berth to description of religious topics with regards to WP:FRINGE. If there's content describing the validity of it in it's own section with appropriate sources calling it pseudoscience (maybe discussing placebo effect, etc.), I'd be fine with that. Not throughout in other sections discussing general beliefs though. I'd be more interested in what scientific sources say in describing it though rather than the pseudoscience label, so I don't see a strong need to go with that term. Kingofaces43 ( talk) 00:39, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Should it be placed in the pseudoscience category?

• Depends on how "commonly and consistently" sources have to use a definition for it to be a defining characteristic. There are a lot of sources that refer to faith healing as pseudoscience, but far more that don't, as these searches indicate:

• Google Scholar: faith healing pseudoscience (about 7,340 results), faith healing -pseudoscience (about 360,000 results)
• Google Books: faith healing pseudoscience (about 1,150 results), faith healing -pseudoscience (about 31,900 results).

But that's still a lot of reliable sources calling it a pseudoscience, so maybe that qualifies. Another approach would be to see how much material on faith healing as a pseudoscience is justified in the article body, then decide whether it is enough to justify summarizing it in the lead. If not, by NON-DEFINING it probably shouldn't be in that category. RockMagnetist( talk) 22:36, 8 September 2015 (UTC)

• For those who don't "do" math, or at least not in their heads, that's about 98% of Google Scholar hits that don't use "faith healing" and "pseudoscience" together, and the remaining 2% includes some sources that directly say that faith healing is not pseudoscience. Among Google Books, that 96.5% of books that don't use the two words together, and 3.5% that do—again, including a non-trivial number that mention both words to say that they're not the same thing. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 21:54, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• @ WhatamIdoing: It might help to provide a few links to the latter kind of source. RockMagnetist( talk) 22:53, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• Comment The question and topic both have too many aspects for a simplistic categorisation to suffice.v There are aspects of faith without significant scientific associations and too much invocation with quackery for it to escape the pseudoscientific label. I agree pretty well in detail with RockMagnetist's summary and reckon that is the way to look at it and proceed. JonRichfield ( talk) 04:54, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
• Marginally Pseudoscience.  If you're talking purely about the belief that (presumably religious) faith can bring about physical healing, then it's probably not pseudoscience. But inevitably people perpetuate stories of cases where people were supposedly healed by "faith healers" and/or the "power of prayer." When such anecdotal "evidence" is presented as "proof," then it definitely becomes pseudoscience.
  Richard27182 ( talk) 05:27, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

  If that is the standard then there are not going to be many subjects that could not have a pseudoscience label thrown on them, including probably every article dealing with religion or religious faith. - Ad Orientem ( talk) 08:51, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

  Yes, but most of those do not have a faux-scientific literature around them. That is what characterises actual pseudoscience. Faith healing has a cottage industry of ideologically motivated "researchers" publishing a steady trickle of papers in the literature. Guy ( Help!) 12:55, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

  I see very few such articles in my trip to PubMed, and most on the subject say that it doesn't work for organic diseases—hardly what I'd expect an industry of ideologically motivated authors to publish. (Even skeptics believe it could occasionally "work" for purely psychological conditions.) WhatamIdoing ( talk) 21:54, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• Not pseudoscience for purposes of categorization any more than any other religious/spiritual/philosophical topic that professes certain beliefs. Pseudoscience is a claim, belief or practice which is incorrectly presented as scientific. Some faith healing claims may be pseudoscientific, but this subject as a whole is not. - Mr X 13:37, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
• Yes Faith healing is already included in the List of esoteric healing articles which is a subcategory of Category:Pseudoscience – one remedy, passed 3 December 2006, found in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience is "The term 'pseudoscience' shall be interpreted broadly; it is intended to include but not be limited to all article in Category:Pseudoscience and its subcategories". Citing Pseudoscience and the paranormal by Terence Hines, Martin Mahner [ de wrote that "Despite the lack of generally accepted demarcation criteria, we find remarkable agreement among virtually all philosophers and scientists that fields like astrology, creationism, homeopathy, dowsing, psychokinesis, faith healing, clairvoyance, or ufology are either pseudosciences or at least lack the epistemic warrant to be taken seriously" ( here). Raimo Tuomela thought that "examples of pseudoscience as the theory of biorhythms, astrology, dianetics, creationism, faith healing may seem too obvious examples of pseudoscience for academic readers" ( here and a few pages later here). Faith healing is pseudoscience and should be included in Category:Pseudoscience. It is based on pre-scientific ideas and follows procedures. Faith healing is dangerous when it used as a substitute for science based medicine and benign when it used as a supplement for science based medicine. Non-fraudulent faith healing employs a pre-scientific method analogous to a scientific method: there are presuppositions, that something supernatural exists, that the supernatural affects the natural, etc.; there is observation that something is perceived as not normal; there is a protocol followed, i.e. some type of ritual, prayer, etc.; there is observation for perceived change; there is a followup protocol, i.e. some type of ritual, prayer, etc.; there are hypotheses for negative results, e.g. lack of faith. Fraudulent faith healing (of the type by some televangelists like Peter Popoff in the article) employs active deception and intentional psychological manipulation in addition to some type of ritual, prayer, etc. The term paranormal is less than a century old and, from what I have read in the past, was used to reframe the spiritualists activities in a more positive way after over a half-century of exposed fraud. Nevertheless, if faith healing is defined in a paranormal sense it is still pseudoscience by definition. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 14:29, 9 September 2015 (UTC) modified 21:55, 16 September 2015 (UTC)
• Omit category. With very rare (=notorious) exceptions, religious activities should not be included in any science or pseudoscience category. People looking for information about pseudoscience will not be looking for prayer (or for fraud: I should check the cat page to see whether there's a pointer to a cat for fraud). As noted in the stats above, only a very small minority of sources even discuss the two ideas in the same article or book. "Follow the sources" and "give DUE weight to the mainstream position" means that this should not be categorized as pseudoscience (and certainly not as a defining characteristic). WhatamIdoing ( talk) 21:54, 9 September 2015 (UTC)
• Weak possible support of category - I am the first to acknowledge that most faith healing isn't called pseudoscience, but, honestly, that is I think primarily because it is a hugely significant factor in religious studies, and that is a much broader field than pseudoscience. The topic is however included in the (apparently not highly regarded) Williams Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience as a separate article, although I don't see it in the Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience and don't have a copy of Brian Regal's Pseudoscience: A Critical Encyclopedia readily available to see if it is there. If it is a separate entry, or significant subsectionn of a larger entry, in that last book, I would think that there would be cause to add a category. If anyone has access to that book, that would help a lot. With or without it, though, I think pseudoscience is probably a defining characteristic of some forms of faith healing, most of which probably don't have separate articles, so the inclusion of the category might be reasonable on that basis. John Carter ( talk) 23:03, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience has the topic Prayer and Healing (pages 190-194); Pseudoscience: A Critical Encyclopedia has a chapter on Miracles and miracle cures (pages 107-109). RockMagnetist( talk) 23:12, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• Yeah, I actually have the Skeptic Encyclopedia in front of me, That article is specifically regarding prayer, of the rather non-showy, private individual or group, variety, as opposed to the more showy variety I at least associate the term "faith healing" with, which is the Oral Roberts-kind. It is basically a review of the comparatively few studies to date, many of which have been funded by the Christian Templeton Foundation, which is reasonable cause for their being questioned. I myself like I said think of the Oral Roberts variety of faith healing, which isn't specifically mentioned in the Skeptic Encyclopedia, as being non-pseudoscientific, because so far as I can tell they don't make any specifically "scientific" claims, which is why I said above that some aspects are pseudoscientific, but others, like the showy stage version, might not be. John Carter ( talk) 23:32, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• Definitely not, even if we could quote people saying that it is pseudoscience, because we can also quote people saying it's not. St Anselm ( talk) 10:21, 10 September 2015 (UTC)
• No - this is still not pseudoscience, so it's no no and no. Markbassett ( talk) 01:42, 13 September 2015 (UTC)
• Weak yes. Here from bot invite. In terms of religious beliefs in general, the category wouldn't apply. However, one could argue the legitimacy of the category for people pushing faith healing as opposed to medical treatment or just plain quacks and scam artists. The category wouldn't mean it applies to the whole article, just that there can be noteworthy subjects within that would fall under the category. Kingofaces43 ( talk) 00:43, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Comments

• Comment - I'm not sure this RfC is going to achieve its intended goal - deciding how to handle references to pseudoscience in this article. Most people are simply offering opinions without any reference to sources or the article. It might be better to close it and start a more carefully worded RfC. RockMagnetist( talk) 14:50, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

• Comment: I tend to agree with RockMagnetist above. The question is as phrase too broad to be useful. Falun Gong, for instance, could be (rightly or wrongly) said to have claims to a scientific nature, and there have been some reported instances of "faith healing" involving its founder. So, as that movement makes claims which could be theoretically scientifically tested, aspects of it could be, conceivably, characterized as pseudoscientific. Oral Roberts, however, has never made any claims of a scientific nature to any of his alleged healings, so there would be reasonable difficulty in characterizing his healings as pseudoscientific. There are too many variations within the broad "faith healing" area for any single definition to be able to be reasonably applied in any and all instances. It could reasonably be said that at least some, maybe several, instances of faith healing contain pseudoscientific elements, and I wouldn't have any objection to that, or to more clearly itemized discussion of those variations which do clearly contain claims of a scientific nature, but I would be very hesitant to paint all the variations within this broad field with the broad brush of such labelling. John Carter ( talk) 15:46, 9 September 2015 (UTC)

@ Brustopher, StAnselm, SPACKlick, and MrX: I don't think the term pseudoscience is pejorative since there is a scientific claim of physical causality in all faith healing. I think it is WP:BLUE that faith healing is pseudoscience. It is common knowledge that believers in many types of faith healing claim that these processes have physical affects and that is a scientific claim of physical causality, i.e. if you do X, Y, Z then X, Y, Z will cause physical change. For example, the article about "therapeutic touch" in Shermer 2002, p. 243, which is titled The skeptic encyclopedia of pseudoscience, states that "[...] healing, practitioners claimed to treat illness and relieve symptoms [...]" It also states in the article about "prayer and healing" that it "teaches that illness is an illusion and that prayer, by invoking natural spiritual laws, can dispel illness. Thus, Christian Scientists avoid medical doctors when they are ill and choose prayer instead, either by themselves or with a Christian Science "practitioner" — someone who has a minimum of two weeks of instruction in the use of prayer to conquer disease" ( Shermer 2002, p. 190). "Healing magic is used either as a replacement for or a supplement to [...] medicines when an illness has a strong psychological or spiritual cause. Similar to faith healing, it is meant to work without directly affecting the biological or chemical attributes of the subject" ( Shermer 2002, p. 278 279). I have not found any Google Books snippets about faith healing by faith healing folks that claim not to cause a physical change – they claim to cause a change in the person who the target of the faith healing. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 16:44, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@ WhatamIdoing: I think the statistics of sources that contain both "faith healing" and "pseudoscience" is a participation bias, or as you wrote "that academic study is almost entirely uninterested in pseudoscience". There is a demarcation problem because of this participation bias; it is clear to me that there is a scientific claim of physical causality in all faith healing. I think the claim of physical causality is WP:defining. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 16:44, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@ JonRichfield and John Carter: is there any faith healing that claims not to cause an effect? In other words, is there any faith healing that claims to do nothing. Did Oral Roberts say that faith healing had no physical effect? – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 16:44, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@ Richard27182: a belief in faith healing is not faith healing itself. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 16:44, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@ Ad Orientem: I disagree that categorizing faith healing as pseudoscience will result in other religious articles being categorized as pseudoscience, it is sweeping assumption since few articles dealing with religion or religious faith claim any physical causality for either a cause or an effect. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 16:44, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@ RockMagnetist: how would you reword the RfC? It may be better to start another one. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 16:44, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Actually, I think it would be better just close this RfC as no consensus and not start a new one, at least for now. Instead, someone should look at the sources above and see if there is anything worth adding to the article; maybe a discussion of demarcation could be part of it. If a significant amount of material is added, we can go back to thinking about the lead and categorization. RockMagnetist( talk) 17:14, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

BoBoMisiu, I believe that you have confused "scientific" with "real". "A scientific claim" is a claim that is backed up by the scientific method. It is not a claim that is objectively true. Claims like "I'm wearing a green shirt" or "My car started when I turned the key in the ignition" or even "Drosophila is the genus name for fruit flies" can be objectively true, but they are not scientific claims. These are claims backed up by personal perception (the color of the shirt, the belief that decision to classify the garment as a shirt and not some other type of clothing), anecdote (I say that the car started), and linguistics (scientists could have chosen another name), not claims that are backed up by the scientific method. There are no claims of experiments, hypotheses, testing, refinement, or progress towards agreed-upon facts in those claims. Therefore, they are non-scientific claims. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 19:50, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

More simply: There is a major difference between "Something happened" and "The scientific method proved that something happened". WhatamIdoing ( talk) 19:53, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Also, "pejorative" means that the word is perceived as saying something bad or negative about the subject. Pseudoscience is pejorative. It communicates a negative, belittling POV about the subject. Note the definitely of pejorative says nothing at all about accuracy or efficacy. The sole function of a pejorative is to communicate your negative or belittling POV about the subject. "This is pseudoscience" means "This is something that pretends to use the scientific method, but which actually does not, and which I want you to think is bad". English has other words to say, "This doesn't work", like ineffective and useless, and other words to say, "This claims to affect reality through magic", like supernatural and fraud. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 20:13, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree with the contention that the use of the word pseudoscience is more or less often inherently pejorative, and taht it should be used only sparingly as a prominent description of many things, but, unfortunately, others disagree here, and existing policies and guidelines seem to support them, for whatever reason, and you will find that the word is used even in the first sentence of articles like intelligent design. The old arbitration ruling regarding pseudoscience is part of the problem here, because I think it has made people less willing to argue against the term itself, although I myself tend to think that the word should be used much more sparingly and less obviously than it at least sometimes is. John Carter ( talk) 20:19, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@ BoBoMisiu: I disagree that it's WP:BLUE (I also tend to subscribe to WP:NOTBLUE). I'm not even looking at perjorative or not. Pseudoscience is a subset of bullshit. Faith healing is bullshit. For bullshit to be pseudoscience it needs to explain its effects in scientific terms adding a veneer of credible bullshit to the incredible bullshit. Faith healing doesn't do that. It explains its bullshit with God/The supernatural. That's not pseudoscientific. Pseudoscience is

1. a collection of beliefs or practices mistakenly regarded as being based on scientific method. - Oxford Dictionary
2. a system of theories, assumptions, and methods erroneously regarded as scientific - Merriam Webster
3. Pseudoscience includes beliefs, theories, or practices that have been or are considered scientific, but have no basis in scientific fact. - Your Dictionary
4. a discipline or approach that pretends to be or has a close resemblance to science - Collins Complete
5. A pseudoscience is a belief or process which masquerades as science in an attempt to claim a legitimacy which it would not otherwise be able to achieve on its own terms - Chem1.com
6. A pseudoscience is a set of ideas put forth as scientific when they are not scientific. - Skeptic's Dictionary

That additional criteria of masquerading in the clothes of science is important because otherwise pseudoscience just deflates in meaning to "Bullshit that isn't true" SPACKlick ( talk) 20:55, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@ WhatamIdoing and SPACKlick: no, I don't think I'm confusing the two. The claim of faith healing is a claim of physical change; for example, if you have polio and if you are the target of faith healing and from that you do not have polio. That sequence from you have polio to you do not have polio is a claim of measurable physical change. Science uses techniques that measure physical change which though the scientific method vets whether the claim is objectively true. The scrutiny of the scientific method either verifies or falsifies that claim. This is not a theoretical cycle of the scientific method where you start with a theoretical model and develop experiments from that. Faith healing starts with a claim of physical fact, i.e. that faith healing caused physical change. From what I have read, the scientific claim of causing a measurable physical change is never verified by applying the scientific method; the claims fail scrutiny. I am not saying that faith healing claims are objectively true; I am also not saying that faith healing claims are "personal perception [...], anecdote [...], and linguistics [...] but that the claims are about measurable physical change. I agree that they are "not claims that are backed up by the scientific method" as you wrote. But, faith healing is not just claiming that "something happened" but that something happened (i.e. ritual, prayer, etc.) that caused something else to happen (e.g. you do not have polio). They make a scientific claim of causality, i.e. a link between events where one event causes the other event. They are not claims of correlation but cause. While it is very reasonable to assume that the scientific claim of causality will objectively fail the scrutiny of of the scientific method, the claim and the falsification of the claim are separate types of events. There is no progress in faith healing, there is no repeatability, there is no real design of experiments, there is no refinement of measurement techniques, there is generally no testing at all, there is only blatant claims of causality and claims of produced physical change and hypotheses about lack of faith; from that, faith healing is pseudoscience and not science but faith healing makes a scientific claim of causality and a resultant claim of physical change. I agree that it is bullshit. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 21:52, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

Actually, I think only some of the claims of faith healing are physical, as some also seem to be healings of what might be described as psychological problems. Psychological problems are harder to scientifically verify. Also, there is the somewhat problematic nature of spontaneous recoveries, which might be seen in at least a few of these cases, as well as the medical examination of those medical miracles approved as miracles by the doctors associated with the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Again, just to be clear, I am in no way saying that I believe no faith healings are pseudoscientific, but some may well, and, in the case of the Congregation-approved miracles, probably do in some cases to some extent qualify as if not proven, at least not scentifically discredited. John Carter ( talk) 22:08, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

It doesn't matter if it's physical or not. The color of my shirt can be measured using "scientific" instruments. Science does not "use techniques that measure physical change"; science is a way of thinking. Don't confuse the toys in the physics lab with the scientific method. You are not "doing science" if you take your temperature in the morning and take it again in the evening, even though you have "measured physical change" (namely, the physical property of heat). You are not "doing science" if you measure the color of my shirt, splash paint on it, and measure the color again. That's not science. Science is when you use the scientific method.

• Science is what you do when you honestly engage in all of that repeatability, design of experiments, refinement of measurement techniques, and other types of testing and trying to falsify it. (You might not be any good at any of this, in which case you get "bad science", or you might do a good job, in which case you get "good science".)
• Pseudoscience is what you do when you tell lies about whether you are engaging in all of that scientific method, by saying that you are trying to work on that repeatability, design of experiments, refinement of measurement techniques, and other types of testing and trying to falsify your hypothesis, but actually you're not doing anything of the sort.
• Non-science is what you do when you neither actually follow the scientific method nor claim that you're using the scientific method.

Faith healers are not making a scientific claim of causality. They are making a nonscientific claim that one action caused the other.

Maybe this will make more sense. Instead of "I asked God to give you a gift of health, and my request made you have more health", imagine that the claim is "I asked my mother to give you a bowl of ice cream, and my request made you have more ice cream". Even if I can produce scientific instruments to verify that I asked, that she's my mother, and that the contents of the bowl meet the U.S. government regulations for it to be described as ice cream, does that sound like "a scientific claim of causality"? Or does that sound like a non-scientific claim of causality? WhatamIdoing ( talk) 22:35, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

@ John Carter: thank you for the hint about Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience. From that I see faith healing is already included in the List of esoteric healing articles which is a subcategory of Category:Pseudoscience. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 01:51, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@ WhatamIdoing: I understand the concepts of measurement and that you don't need to follow the scientific method to measure something. The claim of faith healing is a claim of physical change in a person (and psychological as John Carter reminds). That claim of physical change is a claim of something measurable. Things that are claimed to be measurable can be verified or falsified by actual measurement. Your ice cream example is not the same type of claim – it is about an external event while faith healing is about an internal event. You have introduced doing science which is far broader than the practical use of measurement in science to test a claim – science is "a way of thinking" it is also the application of that thinking. I think every field of science "use[s] techniques that measure physical change" and those techniques involve instruments. If it is physical it is measurable, if it is measurable it can be tested using the scientific method, if it fails scrutiny using the scientific method it is not science. Could you explain how using my example of you have polio and if you are the target of faith healing and from that you do not have polio could be an observable and measurable claim but not a scientific claim. You sound like you know the routine – can you label events as non-scientific, if the events claim to be observable and measurable, without testing them. Rhetorically, is there way to describe that an event claimed to be observable and measurable is not within the set of all observable and measurable science – I don't think so, until that claim is tested. Over time more and more of these statements are rightly refuted and build the belief based on that evidence that predicts future faith healing claims will likely not pass the scrutiny of the scientific method. There are cases that do have observable and measurable physical change but the claim of causality is a tested false cause, i.e. something other than ritual, prayer, etc. caused that physical change. Would you label the claim of causality as non-scientific if the cause was tested to be the placebo effect or a more nebulous social conditioning? – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 01:51, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Oh, yes, absolutely: I call things non-scientific even if there are things that can be measured scientifically. You can measure the color of my shirt scientifically, but when I tell you that it's green, I'm not making a scientific claim. You can measure the ingredients in the ice cream scientifically, and you can even use the scientific method to test a hypothesis about whether it is ice cream, but when I tell you that it is, I'm not making a scientific claim. You can contrast Jackson Pollock's splatter paintings with that of any amateur and measure the differences based on mathematical models, but when I tell you that this one is a Pollock and that one is not, I'm not making either a mathematical or scientific claim. You can measure the length of your sidewalk—it is readily "observable and measurable" and your answer is even fully "falsifiable"–but if you say that it's X meters long, then you are still not making a scientific claim. You simply aren't using the scientific method. The fact that something could be measured, or even that it was measured, is not proof that your method is scientific. This extraordinarily broad idea that everything that is measurable or observable is "science" leads to nonsense statements, like "driving a car at a scientific speed" (all you need is a speedometer!) or "taking a test for a scientific amount of time" (ever take a timed test?) or "shirts of a scientific color". WhatamIdoing ( talk) 05:15, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Way to ignore my comment entirely. Let's break down the argument 1) Does faith healing make claims? Yes. 2) Does it make claims about changes in the real world? Yes. 3) Can those claims, in theory or practice be disproved/contraindicated by science? Yes. 4) Does faith healing explain how it works using bad/fake/lying science? No. I argue that you need 4 to be pseudoscience. You then ignore that point and point to 1 to 3. By definition faith healing is not pseudoscience. It's just bullshit. If faith healing made the claim that energons in the brain were emitted during the ritual of a faith healing service and that by focussing on the injured part of the patient the energons accumulated and that accumulated energons healed damage at a cellular level. We'd have pseudoscience. Faith healing makes the claim there is a powerful, willful entity who has the power to heal and we ask them to heal people and they do. What do they do that is explained in a masquerade of science? Nothing. These are non scientific claims not pseudoscientific claims. It's not a hard definition to understand. The distinctions between science and pseudoscience and pseudoscience and non science do have slightly fuzzy boundaries but this is well into the non-science segment of the graph. SPACKlick ( talk) 08:28, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

• BoBoMisiu Thanks for pinging me, but your arguments have not convinced me to change my !vote. For something to be called pseudoscience, it has to have had scientific claims made about its mechanism of operation. I don't see that that's the case here, anymore than it would be for God, prayer, or love. The obvious WP:BLUE clue is the word "faith" in the subject name.- Mr X 04:29, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
  • The mechanism of operation. Count Iblis ( talk) 04:52, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@ Count Iblis: I watched the hour long BBC documentary about the placebo effect, thank you. The Parkinson's section was interesting. The description about physical characteristics of the the placebo dose (starting around 37:00) was shocking for me. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 15:29, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@ SPACKlick and MrX: the claimed mechanism of operation is faith – that is self evident, it is even part of the term faith healing. The actual mechanism of operation is likely something else and in that case the claim of causality is a false cause. SPACKlick, I am not ignoring your point but don't consider agency, e.g. supernatural or natural, because there is a wide variety of agency attributed and those types of agency are outside the scope of science. There are examples in science that are described like "we don't yet know why X happens but since X does happen X is used this way functionally". For example the early 19th century Avogadro's number was not determined experimentally until the early 20th century – yet it was useful for chemists in the interim. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 15:29, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@ WhatamIdoing: your examples are categorically different:

• Your color example is not the same type of claim – it describes observation of a static state and does not include events that claim any change.
• Your new ice cream example is also not the same type of claim – it also describes observation of a static state, e.g. the ice is not claimed to start as cookies and cream that undergoes a physical change of the removal of the cookies pieces. — BoBoMisiu 15:29, 11 September 2015 — continues after insertion below
  • [insert] No, it's exactly the same type of claim: you claimed not to have any, I asked someone to give you some, and now you do have some (or you don't, as the case may be). What I'm claiming about what I did is exactly the same in both instances, regardless of whether the thing you wanted was "health" or "ice cream". It should be obvious that what I'm claiming about what I did has nothing at all to do with science, and therefore what I did cannot be pseudoscience, even if the net result was that you didn't get any ice cream. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 03:03, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

[insert] @ WhatamIdoing: your example of measuring the ingredients in the ice cream is just a process or test. You do not include any claim of physical change. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 16:06, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

• Your Pollock example is also not the same type of claim – I can see the difference too but it is a comparison of one painting to a different painting and not the same painting that undergoes a physical change of the removal of the white paint.
• Your sidewalk example is also not the same type of claim – like your new ice cream example, it also describes observation of a static state, e.g. the concrete is not claimed to undergo a physical change of the removal of the large aggregate. — BoBoMisiu 15:29, 11 September 2015 — continues after insertion below
  • [insert] You're going to have to take your pick here: either "all measurable and observable" things are scientific or the measurable and observable (if hopefully more or less static) length of the sidewalk is not scientific. You cannot claim that the measurable and observable length of the sidewalk is non-scientific while still claiming that all measurable and observable things (except, apparently, the measurable and observable length of that sidewalk) are scientific. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 03:03, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

[insert] @ WhatamIdoing: no, you misunderstand the distinction, of a claim of change in composition within something vs claim of change in external dimension of something vs no claim of change. Yes the physical dimensions of the sidewalk are measurable and observable, but a physical change, such as the removal of the large aggregate from a piece of hardened concrete, is categorically different than either a dimensional change of a piece of concrete or no change. Your example does not include any change at all, it is a straw man that you then attack with " but if you say that it's X meters long, then you are still not making a scientific claim". – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 15:30, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Do you now agree that it is possible to make a statement of fact that is "measurable and observable" and is still not a scientific claim? WhatamIdoing ( talk) 15:37, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

@ WhatamIdoing: there is more than one sense of "make a statement of fact", are you talking about the legal concept? For Wittgenstein, terms like fact and game lack essential meaning. Can you give an example that involves a claim of physical change that is not scientific? – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 16:06, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Sure, I can give you an example of a claim of physical change that is not scientific. Here's one: "I made ice cream." There is a physical change (from liquid to solid) and a chemical change (from uncooked egg to denatured egg albumin). And it's not a scientific claim, because I do not claim to have used any science or scientific process at all to do it. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 21:58, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

• Your examples of speed, time, and color are also not the same type of claims – they are measurable characteristics of the things that you describe and they can change, but the thing does not that undergoes a physical change of same type, e.g. if you have polio and if you are the target of faith healing then you do not have polio.

Although they are not systematized, all the mundane physical events if they are measurable or observable can be translated into data which is either useful for a purpose or not. For example, I watched on PBS that the overwhelming majority of collision data collected at CERN is simply dropped because it shows uninteresting collisions – only the filtered data is used. Each of those dropped measurements was in a scientific context yet not useful for the purpose of the experiment – those dropped measurements are scientific. Measurable commonplace events can be scientific in one context but not scientific in another; most are generally not useful and just banal. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 15:29, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

No, "faith" is not a "mechanism of operation", it's a convenient catch-all word for "belief, "divine intervention", or "Jesus magic". Show me that faith healing adherents widely claim that faith triggers great disturbances in the aether due to the actions of midichlorians and we'll talk. - Mr X 16:50, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@ MrX: ridicule has no effect on me, I am not writing about the veracity of the claim only about the claim itself. I wrote that the "claimed mechanism of operation is faith" not that the mechanism is faith. The claim of faith healing is a claim of physical change on Earth to real people and not a claim on a fantasy planet to fantasy characters in a science fiction movie. Defining what the claims of faith healing are is encyclopedic but knocking down a straw man of pre-science aether or a straw man of fantasy-science midichlorians is not – talking about either straw man in a 21st century context that we live in would be nonsensical. Listing what you believe are synonymous terms for faith neither detracts from nor adds to the term faith. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 17:35, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@ BoBoMisiu: That was not ridicule, just a bit of levity with a sprinkling or irony. The underlying point was, without a single, coherent description of how adherents claim the mechanism works, it really comes down to belief. As a baseline for pseudoscience, I look to homeopathy where there are proposed mechanisms that are based, for example, on quantum entanglement or transmission of effect. Similar examples can be found in oil pulling and magnetic water treatment. Conversely, faith healing is much closer to prayer, yoga, and reincarnation. DGG's point below pretty much nails it.- Mr X 18:33, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

@ BoBoMisiu: You seem to be assuming the disagreement is over what faith healing is or what claims it makes. It isn't. It's about what pseudoscience is and you still haven't said how Faith healing fits the definition of pseudoscience. Yes, it makes claims about the real world but it doesn't masquerade as, pretend to be or cover itself in the language of Science . See the definitions from above

Either make reference to these definitions and show how faith healing fits them or give alternate definitions with support as to why we should use them. Without one of those two you're blustering past the point of disagreement. SPACKlick ( talk) 10:13, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@ SPACKlick: as I wrote above on 11 September to User:John Carter: {{tq|I see faith healing is already included in the List of esoteric healing articles which is a subcategory of Category:Pseudoscience. One of the remedies, passed 3 December 2006, found in Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Pseudoscience is "The term 'pseudoscience' shall be interpreted broadly; it is intended to include but not be limited to all article in Category:Pseudoscience and its subcategories." I don't think you or anyone on this talk page is claiming that faith healing is not an type of esoteric healing. Separating faith healing from alternative medicine and in turn pseudoscience, in my opinion, would be pushing some kind of woo. The conversation on this page is frozen by uninformed sceptic fear of giving something credibility – that is not what is happening by providing a broad interpretation. It is a logical fallacy to push the beliefs that either faith healing is not alternative medicine or that alternative medicine is not pseudoscience. Your use of definitions does not connect to the discussion on this page. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 13:32, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@ BoBoMisiu: I'm not separating Faith healing from alternative medicine or alternative medicine from pseudoscience. I'm saying, as do most reliable sources, that AM is not a true subset of pseudoscience. There is bullshit in AM that isn't pseudo-scientific. The presentation of the two ideas makes them very easily distinguishable in broad categories.

The definition of the term Pseudoscience is ENTIRELY the crux of the discussion on this page. In order to call x pseudoscience x must fit the definition as used on wikipedia of the term pseudoscience. In order to categorise x as pseudoscience x must fit the criteria of the category pseudoscience as determined there. A broad interpretation of the term is one thing, ignoring the meaning of the word altogether is another.

The conversation on this page is frozen by uninformed sceptic fear of giving something credibility 1) way to WP:AGF and 2) The fear of giving something credibility would incentivise the application the label not its removal. You seem to be wanting to use pseudoscience as a label and a category to simply mean Wrong, False, Fringe or BS. However that's not how words or categories work. They have meanings and define things, this word has a meaning as shown above, that does not comport with faith healing. Faith healing doesn't lie about how scientific it is, it doesn't pretend to be science so it's not pseudoscience it's just BS. SPACKlick ( talk) 14:13, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@ SPACKlick: I am assuming good faith and sharing what I think. If the assertion is that alternative medicine does not belong in Category:Pseudoscience then the discussion should take place there. I see that archives at Talk:Alternative medicine have had several such discussions.

I am not ignoring definitions, as I explained on 9 September:

faith healing employs a pre-scientific method analogous to a scientific method:
there are presuppositions, that something supernatural exists, that the supernatural affects the natural, etc.;
there is observation that something is perceived as not normal;
there is a protocol followed, i.e. some type of ritual, prayer, etc.;
there is observation for perceived change;
there is a followup protocol, i.e. some type of ritual, prayer, etc.;
there are hypotheses for negative results, e.g. lack of faith.

There clearly is an identifiable process and a claim of physical causality. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 15:19, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Your first claim is false. The method of faith healing isn't analogous to the scientific method. You then never tie any of your claims back to pseudoscience. There is no argument presented there to discuss. SPACKlick ( talk) 15:26, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@ SPACKlick: I did tie it back here. Karl Popper wrote that "notion of the scientific method can be viewed simply as 'systematiz[ing] the pre-scientific method of learning from our mistakes'" ( here). For the last several centuries the scrutiny of the scientific method either verifies or falsifies claims. "Faith healing starts with a claim of physical fact, i.e. that faith healing caused physical change," "a scientific claim of causality, i.e. a link between events where one event causes the other event." "While it is very reasonable to assume that the scientific claim of causality will objectively fail the scrutiny of of the scientific method, the claim and the falsification of the claim are separate types of events." Long before the scientific method was used people explained the physical world the best way they knew how. They had other methods that today are well understood as erroneous interpretation of their observation and seen by many today as nonsense. Some of those pre-scientific methods were useful for understanding their environment and their bodies. search for:"faith cure" pseudoscience shows that a century ago the terms were used to even describe psychotherapy ( in a letter here). I wonder if a debate about the categorization of psychotherapy will exist in the 22nd century or if progress will make it a moot point. Mario Bunge wrote that "There are many fields of knowledge but they can be grouped into ten genera: ordinary knowledge, prescientific technics, pseudoscience, basic science, applied science, technology, the humanities, the sociopolitical ideologies, the arts, and religion" ( here). Some of these frameworks are incompatible, i.e. Bunge wrote that faith healing is incompatible with medicine ( here), and that "Mutability is an essential mark of mathematics, science and technology, just as stasis is one of ideology and pseudoscience" ( here). Bunge classifies research fields by twelve conditions into nonscientific, semiscience or protoscience, emerging or developing science, and pseudoscientific – "The difference between science and protoscience is a matter of degree, that between science and pseudoscience is one of kind. The difference between protoscience and pseudoscience parallels that between error and deception" ( here) and he gave examples in a later book. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 18:03, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

[insert] For the record, I also agree with SPACKlick about your ({{ dubious}} and unverifiable) assertion that faith healing uses any process similar to the scientific method. In fact, it's not clear that there is any "process" or "method" at all. You claimed that faith healers allege that they can produce a physical change by asking a divine being or magical force to make such a change upon request. You did not claim that faith healing uses experiments, tests hypotheses, or does anything else that would actually be similar to the scientific method. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 04:04, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

[insert] @ WhatamIdoing: you need to separate two discussions on this talk page that involve me:

• contrasting my unverified opinions with other contributors unverified opinions: My main point is that "the claim of faith healing is a claim of physical change; for example, if you have polio and if you are the target of faith healing and from that you do not have polio. That sequence from you have polio to you do not have polio is a claim of measurable physical change." I do not discuss faith healers or any agency. I never "claimed that faith healers allege that they can produce a physical change by asking a divine being or magical force to make such a change upon request", as you wrote.
• contrasting the reliable and verifiable opinions of experts that I included with other contributors unverified opinions: For example, it is not up to me to "claim that faith healing uses experiments, tests hypotheses, or does anything else that would actually be similar to the scientific method". I have provided the salient statements that can be included in the article itself. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 16:47, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

@ BoBoMisiu: Psychotherapy was attempting to look like a science, over time it became science. As Karl popper said in the "Demarcation Problem" it's hard to distinguish science and pseudoscience. What you've described above and what faith healing is is non-science. Faith healing is an ideology and a religion, it doesn't attempt to explain the world it is a precept of beliefs. It's not prescience or protoscience it's non-science. You keep failing to make a case which should be trivial It would form two parts "A pseudoscience is something that has properties A, B, C ... as shown in sources [a] [b] [c]...". "Faith healing has properties A, B, C as shown in sources [d] [e] [f] ...". Therefore faith healing is pseudoscience and is described as such commonly as can be seen from these sets of sources [g] [h] [i].

However the reason you're skirting the topic is you're trying to make an unjustified inference along the lines of Faith healing makes a claim about the world, That claim is unscientific and false, Pseudosciences are unscientific and false therefore Faith healing is a pseudoscience.

Faith healing makes no offer of scientific explanations for how any of it works, pseudoscience offers false explanations. Faith healing doesn't attempt to show proof of mechanism, pseudoscience offers bad science as proof of mechanism. Faith healing is regarded by believers as spiritual, pseudoscience is regarded by believers as scientific. Faith healing lacks all the critical properties of pseudoscience as the term is used and nothing you've said so far indicates otherwise. We agree it's non-science. We agree it makes claimswhcih can be tested with science and have so far found no support. The only disagreement is over the definition of pseudoscience and whether it fits this term. If you won't talk about what pseudoscience is I find it hard to believe you are being genuine in your attempts to argue it is pseudoscience, because that is the only point of disagreement. So I'll ask some basic questions. Do you accept the above definitions of psuedoscience as accurate or mostly accurate? Do you accept that faith healing is presented and accepted by adherents as religious/spiritual/faith based rather than presented as a result of scientific inquiry? Do you agree that religious/spiritual/faith based beliefs don't fit or nearly fit the above definitions of pseudoscience. SPACKlick ( talk) 21:09, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

@ SPACKlick: no, I'm skirting the topic.

"Do you accept the above definitions of psuedoscience as accurate or mostly accurate?"

My opinion does not matter. Citing Pseudoscience and the paranormal by Terence Hines, Martin Mahner [ de wrote that "Despite the lack of generally accepted demarcation criteria, we find remarkable agreement among virtually all philosophers and scientists that fields like astrology, creationism, homeopathy, dowsing, psychokinesis, faith healing, clairvoyance, or ufology are either pseudosciences or at least lack the epistemic warrant to be taken seriously" ( here). Raimo Tuomela thought that "examples of pseudoscience as the theory of biorhythms, astrology, dianetics, creationism, faith healing may seem too obvious examples of pseudoscience for academic readers" ( here and a few pages later here).

I am talking about what pseudoscience is. I am not making a novel inference that faith healing is a pseudoscience.

"Do you accept that faith healing is presented and accepted by adherents as religious/spiritual/faith based rather than presented as a result of scientific inquiry?"

Yes, I agree that it is presented as religious and yet Mahner, an academic source, presents it as "either pseudosciences or at least lack the epistemic warrant to be taken seriously" and other academic sources such as Tuomela call it pseudoscience.

"Do you agree that religious/spiritual/faith based beliefs don't fit or nearly fit the above definitions of pseudoscience."

No, I disagree. The academic sources show that there seems to be little consensus. The disagreement is not over the definition of pseudoscience but over both the claim of causality and the claim of physical change and whether that is a scientific claim. Claiming that something physically changes is not a metaphysical religious claim that is unrefutable but is a physical scientific claim that can be measured, tested, and refuted. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 22:39, 14 September 2015 (UTC)

Should astronomy be labeled as a pseudoscience for believing that the Milky Way is not the center of the universe since all bodies evenly red-shift from it? There is no proof that it isn't and "logical" to believe that it is. Astronomers choose to "believe" that it isn't.

Or for believing that the universe is finite or infinite since the size of the universe cannot be measured nor computed to everyone's satisfaction.

Nearly everyone subsists on "beliefs" that they choose.

"Guaranteed" faith healing might be another problem. Student7 ( talk) 16:06, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

@ Student7: astronomy is an empirical science and should not be labeled as a pseudoscience. While an astronomer may hold beliefs about the body of empirical concepts contained in astronomy, those beliefs are useful mental representations of external reality, e.g. things, based on reason and are mutable since empirical science is mutable. So, the belief that a particular galaxy is the center of the universe may have been useful in the past but over time, just as the the belief that a particular planetary system is the center of the universe, may become meaningless and no longer useful. Bunge wrote that science is not free of error but characteristically self corrects through research ( here). Those astronomer's beliefs, i.e. useful mental representations, are different than concepts in the sense of the term faith healing like trust or confidence or expectation or faith. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 21:52, 17 September 2015 (UTC)

Well argued!

The problem with "faith" is there seems to be no point of contact between the logical (or empirical, I suppose) realms and spiritual realms. I cannot run a test to compare faith healing with modern medical treatment. I "believe" in what cannot be logically proved. If I could "prove" it, presumably there would be no atheists!

But we all share a common "belief" system for which there is no immediate proof. I believe the sun will rise in the morning despite the fact that it might have gone nova during the night, or stretched out a tendril... The world is round, but I have never perceived it's roundness from the pov of the moon. I belive the word of those who have.

"Logical proof" automatically removes something from any belief system.

I may have a problem with some people who insist that "faith healing" always works or performs "better than" medical methods. I believe that my prayers are answered. But I don't believe that God is a short order cook!

If faith healing breaches this wall, it is perhaps pseudo-science. If healers pray, guaranteeing nothing, but hoping, they are no worse than any religion, IMO. Student7 ( talk) 15:31, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

@ Student7: No, you "cannot run a test to compare faith healing with modern medical treatment", Bunge wrote that faith healing is incompatible with medicine. The comparison "that 'faith healing' always works or performs 'better than' medical methods" would most likely show the opposite. But the argument is an improper disjunctive syllogism, a kind of logical fallacy. Also, you are assigning an external spiritual agency to the term faith, that assumption restricts faith to some metaphysical, in other words purely speculative, type of understanding. I read that faith is internal, i.e. a person has faith about something. Nevertheless, faith healing claims not only a metaphysical change but a physical change. Spontaneous remission is documented. The placebo effect is a physical response of a person. A century ago psychotherapy was described as "faith cure" but today it is not. An atheist a century ago or today in my opinion would not assign any spiritual agency to either spontaneous remission, the placebo effect or to psychotherapy for example. The example that a person's lack of experience of the "roundness from the pov of the moon" doesn't take into account that the roundness is demonstrated by empirical data, e.g. see the Earthrise photo. A conspiracy prone individual might decide to reject the authenticity of that photo but it is almost universally accepted as empirical knowledge that Earth is basically round. I think you are wrong when you say that "'logical proof' automatically removes something from any belief system" since it is not reasonable to think that a belief system would reject a constituant belief if that constituant belief is logically verified. As far as breaching a wall, I have cited reputable scientists and philosophers that do identify faith healing as pseudoscience. Most of the other reasoning I see on this talk page is either anecdotal or the bad company fallacy (charlatans are claiming faith healing, therefore, faith healing must be wrong). – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 20:01, 18 September 2015 (UTC)

You have cited one source that says it is pseudoscience or that it is not pseudoscience (hardly a basis for claiming that it definitely is), and one that says that it is (but which sadly gives no evidence in support of his belief that proponents of faith healing believe that it is truly a branch of that self-correcting, experiment-based, non-belief-oriented thing that we call science [which is his definition]). There are other sources that say the opposite (i.e., that it is a non-scientific religious activity), and an enormous number of sources that consider the subject too trivial to even mention. The idea that prayer uses the scientific method, or even that it claims to, is, at best, a minority POV that could perhaps be mentioned but should not be considered a defining characteristic. — WhatamIdoing 04:04, 21 September 2015 (UTC) — continues after insertion below

[insert] @ WhatamIdoing: I have cited two academic experts on the subject on the subject of pseudoscience. Bunge's categories are: nonscience, semiscience or protoscience, emerging or developing science, and pseudoscience; his 12 carecteristics for classification into those categories are not restricted to the beliefs of proponents, i.e. the beliefs of proponents are not exclusive criteria for classification. You misunderstand what I writing, it is not "that prayer uses the scientific method", that is a straw man. What I am saying is that faith healing is pseudoscience as do academic experts on the subject. As I have written previously, the defining characteristic of faith healing is the claim that faith healing causes physical change in a person. As I written previously, a "claim of physical change is a claim of something measurable. Things that are claimed to be measurable can be verified or falsified by actual measurement." Faith healing claims may be explainable by science just as the placebo effect is explainable. For many, faith healing is a religious practise – found in shamanism, spiritism, wicca, hinduism, islam, christianity, and probably most other religions – which claims to cause physical change. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 14:49, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Also, let us quote Bunge (1983) more fully, rather than a brief snippet:

"To be sure, some conceptual frameworks are mutually compatible with one another. For example, the conceptual frameworks of the plumber and the engineer, of the realist novelist and the sociologist, and of the scientific philosopher and the basic scientist are mutually complementary and even partially overlapping. But others are not. For instance, magic is incompatible with technology, faith healing with medicine, existentialism with logic, psychoanalysis with experimental psychology, and science with ideological or religious dogma. Not only do certain fields compete with others, but some of them are superior to their rivals. For example, magic, religion and pseudoscience are inferior to science and technology as modes of knowledge and guides to action because they do not involve research and do not possess error-correction mechanisms such as analysis and experiment"

.

Bunge is discussing the philosophical underpinnings, rather than actual practice: a patient may well choose to engage in both conventional medicine and faith healing (or even with evidence-based medicine and faith healing), just like a stage magician may use technology and a pro-science environmental activist may also push ideological dogmas (e.g., about whether GMOs will destroy the planet or save the world, or about whether it is morally incumbent on wealthy societies to change their lifestyles to slow climate change). He's also thinking about guides to practical action, as science is not a good guide to issues of values, like whether a patient should choose to live through a single DALY as one reasonably healthy year or two mostly disabled years. Once you've used non-scientific values (religion is a common source for said values) to decide which you prefer, then science can guide you to medical actions that will produce the desired outcome, but it can't tell you which one you should choose. — WhatamIdoing 04:04, 21 September 2015 (UTC) — continues after insertion below

[insert] @ WhatamIdoing: yes, exactly, "Bunge is discussing the philosophical underpinnings" of classification and categorization of knowledge. He writes faith healing is incompatible with medicine. The rest of what you write is a red herring because there is variety in faith healing praxis in various cultures around the world, while I agree with you that "a patient may well choose to engage in both conventional medicine and faith healing [...] just like a stage magician may use technology", they are just the methods and techniques. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 14:49, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Student7, I share your skepticism about the pointfulness of testing faith healing. Let's take it strictly from the POV of true believers in faith healing:

Given: at least one omnipotent, omniscient divine being that is inclined to grant requests for healing made by some humans on behalf of some other humans. — WhatamIdoing 04:04, 21 September 2015 (UTC) — continues after insertion below

[insert] @ WhatamIdoing and OnlyInYourMind: you are assigning a supernatural agency to faith healing. User:OnlyInYourMind cited a paper ( Google Scholar) by Nicholas Humphrey that it is a placebo effect. I previously noted that a century ago Catholic Encyclopedia printed that "It is often said that the cures at shrines and during pilgrimages are mainly due to psychotherapy — partly to confident trust in Providence, and partly to the strong expectancy of cure that comes over suggestible persons at these times and places". There is a broader understanding of faith healing than the one that you portray. Also, the label true believer is loaded language, that for skeptics is a code word that implies error and uncritical rejection of contradicting evidence. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 14:49, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Please feel free to go back and look at the sentence that you you blanked just now: This list is written "strictly from the POV of true believers". You may find the article Arguendo helpful if you're not familiar with what "Given" implies. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 22:30, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

Trial design assumption #1: Said divine being will only pay attention to the pleas from registered participants and not from the patients themselves, or their family, friends, neighbors, etc., or at least will pay significantly more attention to requests from faith healers registered in the trial than to others.

Trial design assumption #2: Said omnipotent being is either unable or unwilling to screw with the computer that is randomizing patients in the trial to produce whatever outcome it wants, especially including the scenario in which patients most in need of help get the help they need, but the results look statistically insignificant at the end.

Result: I could go on, but if this were a plot point in a fantasy novel, then my suspension of disbelief just collapsed in a swamp of plot holes. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 04:04, 21 September 2015 (UTC)

Suspension of disbelief is not even required for the placebo effect, as implausible as it seems, people can be told about the placebo and it still has effect. What you are describing in the cases above is a version of the traditional argument from evil, but not the veracity of the claim that faith healing causes physical change in a person or whether faith healing is a pseudoscience. – BoBoMisiu ( talk) 14:49, 22 September 2015 (UTC)

I'm not talking about whether faith healing "works" (at least as well as placebo).

I'm talking about whether a person who both is a true believer in faith healing and also engages in logical thinking would realistically expect scientific testing of divine intervention to produce valid, repeatable results. The assumptions behind it—even if you start from the POV of the true believer, e.g., that a divine being exists—are ludicrous: Here is an absolutely all-powerful, all-knowing God, but some human creature and his random-number generator is able to constrain said all-powerful being by randomizing which patients are assigned to which group? I don't think that sounds even slightly realistic. The Newsweek article says that this idea is "borderline sacrilegious" and quotes an expert as saying that the idea of scientifically measuring the effect of a "dose" of prayer like it were a chemical or mechanical process is "based on total misconceptions of [God]". I think that Newsweek article is being rather polite and restrained in its description of the illogic in that mindset. WhatamIdoing ( talk) 22:30, 22 September 2015 (UTC)