God’s Perfect Child

"The first book I’ve chosen is God’s Perfect Child by Caroline Fraser. It’s about the Christian Science Church. Caroline Fraser was, as a child, part of the Christian Science movement, but then she left. This book is partly an autobiography, but it’s also an analysis of what’s fundamentally wrong with Christian Science. There’s the word ‘science’ in the title, of course: those who practise Christian Science believe that what they’re doing is good science. But the truth is that it is not. They’re doing a kind of fake science. Fraser is very good at explaining what’s wrong with Christian Science. The movement was started by a woman called Mary Baker Eddy. “You shouldn’t pretend that you’ve got good evidence when you haven’t” Members of the Christian Science Church believe that matter doesn’t exist, and that illness and disease are ultimately an illusion. They don’t believe in using conventional medicine. Their approach involves prayer. Christian Scientists believe they have a good track record of success. The Christian Science Journal includes many reports of people who have been treated in this way and who have recovered, allegedly as a result of Christian Science methods being applied. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of these reports. What Christian Science does is point to all these cases and say, ‘Here is a great quantity of scientific evidence supporting Christian Science – evidence that shows that it works, that it really does make people better.’ It’s a nice example of a belief system looking like science, but not really being science. Why isn’t it science? It seems to me that what Christian Science is guilty of is something called ‘confirmation bias’. Suppose I show you a small target at which I’ve fired my rifle, and you can see that I hit the target five times. You might be very impressed with my marksmanship…until I show you the barn door on which this target was hanging, and you can see the thousands of misses. Those were just five lucky hits. Now, it’s very important that you don’t simply count the hits when you’re looking for evidence. You must also count all of the misses. Christian Science never counts its misses. It only counts the hits. Now, of course, if you practise Christian Science, many of the people treated will get better anyway. Many have minor ailments from which they will spontaneously recover. In other cases, even more serious cases, you may find that a disease attributed to a person involved a mistaken diagnosis, so the person gets better. If you count all these successes, then you will be able to count a great many, in the end — thousands. Is this good evidence that Christian Science works? No. You must also count the misses. That’s something that Christian Science does not do. In fact, there are many cases where Christian Science has been applied, and people have not got better. Children have died as a consequence of their not being given orthodox medicine and a Christian Science practitioner has instead practised Christian Science. The child has consequently died of an illness that could easily have been cured: a condition such as a burst appendix, for example. So, this is an illustration of how something that looks like science, and indeed may be called ‘science’, isn’t really science when you look at it more closely. The particular reasoning error here is that the Christian Scientists only count the hits, not the misses, committing the classic fallacy of confirmation bias."