Pseudoscience in the classroom

[Kitsune]

I'm not too popular in my World Religions class at the moment.

Some background, first, before I get to the big questions: One week before he was to lecture to class, a guest speaker came in and distributed free copies of his book that discusses how he believes science and spirituality will find common ground in the future and that it will somehow have to do with dark matter and its energy -- something he calls "subtle bodies". We were told to read through the book to get a good understanding of the guy's field of expertise and formulate questions for him based on the material.

By the time I got halfway through the book, I was so frustrated that I had a very difficult time finishing. I underlined some research he cited and spent some days doing some of my own. Sure enough, during his lecture on how we're all connected via invisible dark matter, he brought up some amazing bits of information that had been "confirmed by credible experts". As he described the findings, many in the class gasped in awe. Here are some examples:

* The Backster experiments have shown that plants react to a person's thoughts via a lie detector attached their leaves. Concentrating on a plant with the intent to harm it will cause the lie detector to spike. This has something to do with "subtle bodies".

*On similar lines, it has been shown that pets waiting at home for their owners to return will react to their owner leaving work and, in some cases, the pet's owner simply thinking of coming home. The pets are connected to their owners through some psychic medium that science has yet to be able to explain. This also has something to do with "subtle bodies".

* East German scientists weighed dying patients just before and immediately after death. In case after case there was a weight loss of precisely 1/3000th of an ounce. The conclusion they came to: this is the weight of the human soul and it has been detected leaving the body.

The man presenting these cited examples in his work and lecture claims a masters in physics from Cincinnati State and a doctorate in biophysics from The Pennsylvania State University. I was appalled. I raised a question, asking if he felt it would be possible to design experiments in the future that would not be subject to The Backster Effect (a bias error in experiments based on the faulty plant experiment that is taught in every basic university intro lab course) and he asked what I was talking about. After explaining, the response I got was that he was not "that kind of researcher" and noted that clearly some people are "not going to believe what they don't want to". Oh, the irony.

The following week after the guest lecturer had gone, we were asked what we thought of his work. I responded I was disappointed that he didn't check his sources and pointed out that the article about the weight of the human soul that he cited from a magazine published in 1993 was originally published as the front page article of The Weekly World News in 1988 and is clearly fictional. Going on our professor's suggestion that we heavily check publisher credentials, I pointed out to the grad student teaching this week that the publisher had only published one book and found it an interesting coincidence that the address listed for the publisher happened to match the author's residential address. The speaker also isn't the primary (or even secondary) author in any published material other than that book in the past twenty years.

This did not make me popular in class.

This recent session, we watched the movie "What The Bleep Do We Know?!" which, along with valid information about the bizarre field of quantum physics, called in some amazing data about human thought affecting freezing water and how a group of people meditating lowered the crime rate in Washington DC.

A couple other students also pointed out the pseudoscience and bad data, but the surprising reaction of much of the class is that people shouldn't be questioning the material being presented -- those that question it are quickly identified as people with closed minds. One student even pointed out that if we can't trust the information being presented, then how can anyone trust the contradicting information from a skeptic? Under their breath, a student behind me commented that "there is always one of these guys in every class". (this geology major had earlier confessed to me he uses dowsing to locate things underground and fully believes it, no matter what research has told him)

While my intention is not to dismiss the overall idea of what is being presented, I have to ask if it is right for me to point out what mainstream science doesn't agree with these little factoids that are woven into the material to grab the interest of students. I don't believe any of the presentations are being intentionally dishonest. Am I not being open minded enough to see that people believing in these "experiments" are relying on just as much faith as the rest of the religious beliefs being described?