Where Have All the Sceptics Gone?

The Emperor Is Still Buck Naked


We posted recently on the idolatry of scientism which proceeds on the assumption that empirical reality alone is real. Now the mere existence of scientism proves its provenance in superstition and ignorance. Empiricism long ago was reduced by people like Hume to acute scepticism, where nothing can be known for certain about anything. Scientism has built its modern edifice only by ignoring and wilfully blinding itself to Hume's scathing and acute analysis.

Folk often posit a dichotomy between science and faith as if the two were contra-polar opposites. With the rescue of the miners in Chile has come a fatuous argument purporting that "science" not "God" saved the miners. Once again, wilful ignorance is on display. We Christians know that there is no dichotomy between God and science--which is to say, the material world, for the latter lives and moves and has its being only by the command, will, and faithfulness of God to His creation. Science was only able to serve in the rescue of the Chilean miners because God remains the all conditioning Conditioner of His creation.

Therefore, Christians love natural science as a discipline. We get really excited about it. But as soon as science is elevated into an absolute, it has no foundation upon which to stand, and it collapses into superstition, ignorance, and prejudice. Its rigour dies. Consequently, in our post-Christian world, science has degenerated, more often than not, into mere propaganda.

A modern illustration of this can be found in a recent article in The Atlantic. It is entitled Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science. David H. Freeman reviews the career of Dr. John Ioannidis who has devoted himself to challenging his medical peers by exposing their bad science.

Here is the money-quote:

Though the results of drug studies often make newspaper headlines, you have to wonder whether they prove anything at all. Indeed, given the breadth of the potential problems raised at the meeting, can any medical-research studies be trusted?

That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.

Ioannidis has been exercised by the way so much medical research widely accepted, later ends up discredited or falsified. How could this be--because it has been done by scientists, after all?

But beyond the headlines, Ioannidis was shocked at the range and reach of the reversals he was seeing in everyday medical research. “Randomized controlled trials,” which compare how one group responds to a treatment against how an identical group fares without the treatment, had long been considered nearly unshakable evidence, but they, too, ended up being wrong some of the time. “I realized even our gold-standard research had a lot of problems,” he says. Baffled, he started looking for the specific ways in which studies were going wrong. And before long he discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.

This array suggested a bigger, underlying dysfunction, and Ioannidis thought he knew what it was. “The studies were biased,” he says. “Sometimes they were overtly biased. Sometimes it was difficult to see the bias, but it was there.” Researchers headed into their studies wanting certain results—and, lo and behold, they were getting them.

The sociology of science and the power structures operating within the scientific establishment persistently bias and skew outcomes. Not necessarily overtly, but insidiously.

We think of the scientific process as being objective, rigorous, and even ruthless in separating out what is true from what we merely wish to be true, but in fact it’s easy to manipulate results, even unintentionally or unconsciously. “At every step in the process, there is room to distort results, a way to make a stronger claim or to select what is going to be concluded,” says Ioannidis. “There is an intellectual conflict of interest that pressures researchers to find whatever it is that is most likely to get them funded.”

Perhaps only a minority of researchers were succumbing to this bias, but their distorted findings were having an outsize effect on published research. To get funding and tenured positions, and often merely to stay afloat, researchers have to get their work published in well-regarded journals, where rejection rates can climb above 90 percent. Not surprisingly, the studies that tend to make the grade are those with eye-catching findings. But while coming up with eye-catching theories is relatively easy, getting reality to bear them out is another matter. The great majority collapse under the weight of contradictory data when studied rigorously. Imagine, though, that five different research teams test an interesting theory that’s making the rounds, and four of the groups correctly prove the idea false, while the one less cautious group incorrectly “proves” it true through some combination of error, fluke, and clever selection of data. Guess whose findings your doctor ends up reading about in the journal, and you end up hearing about on the evening news? Researchers can sometimes win attention by refuting a prominent finding, which can help to at least raise doubts about results, but in general it is far more rewarding to add a new insight or exciting-sounding twist to existing research than to retest its basic premises—after all, simply re-proving someone else’s results is unlikely to get you published, and attempting to undermine the work of respected colleagues can have ugly professional repercussions.

The politicisation of science is an inevitable result. This also helps explain why in almost any modern scientific debate it very quickly descends into ad hominem attacks. Objectivity and truth is no longer the goal or issue: preservation of one's position is. This extends fairly quickly to attempts to control even the peer review process so as to favour one's position.

The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views.

It is not just that this happens some time. It is the scale of the problem. Ioannidis focused on 49 articles which were identified as articulating the most significant research findings in recent times. In other words--these were the relatively big breakthroughs.

He zoomed in on 49 of the most highly regarded research findings in medicine over the previous 13 years, as judged by the science community’s two standard measures: the papers had appeared in the journals most widely cited in research articles, and the 49 articles themselves were the most widely cited articles in these journals. These were articles that helped lead to the widespread popularity of treatments such as the use of hormone-replacement therapy for menopausal women, vitamin E to reduce the risk of heart disease, coronary stents to ward off heart attacks, and daily low-dose aspirin to control blood pressure and prevent heart attacks and strokes. Ioannidis was putting his contentions to the test not against run-of-the-mill research, or even merely well-accepted research, but against the absolute tip of the research pyramid. Of the 49 articles, 45 claimed to have uncovered effective interventions. Thirty-four of these claims had been retested, and 14 of these, or 41 percent, had been convincingly shown to be wrong or significantly exaggerated. If between a third and a half of the most acclaimed research in medicine was proving untrustworthy, the scope and impact of the problem were undeniable.

To solve the problem Ioannidis argues that science needs to become, once again, the hand-maiden, not the master. The deification of science into redeemer, saviour, healer, and deliverer of mankind has meant that society in general has vastly unrealistic expectations of science. It is necessary that one's idol work, after all. Ioannidis says that this needs to change.

We could solve much of the wrongness problem, Ioannidis says, if the world simply stopped expecting scientists to be right. That’s because being wrong in science is fine, and even necessary—as long as scientists recognize that they blew it, report their mistake openly instead of disguising it as a success, and then move on to the next thing, until they come up with the very occasional genuine breakthrough. But as long as careers remain contingent on producing a stream of research that’s dressed up to seem more right than it is, scientists will keep delivering exactly that.

“Science is a noble endeavor, but it’s also a low-yield endeavor,” he says. “I’m not sure that more than a very small percentage of medical research is ever likely to lead to major improvements in clinical outcomes and quality of life. We should be very comfortable with that fact.”

Not likely--as long as scientism remains our favorite idol.