The theory of homeopathy is not one
that I profess belief in, and at this time I do not recommend making
crucial medical decisions based on it. But I do think it is an
interesting hypothesis that might be worthy of further study. A
better name for the theory might be to call it a hypothesis of
anomalous aqueous traces. The idea behind homeopathy is that if you
take water and put certain chemicals or medicines in it, and then
dilute the water repeatedly, until no recognizable trace of the
original ingredient is left, then somehow the water retains some
beneficial effect from these earlier ingredients – almost as if the
water somehow “remembered” what was previously in it.
To a materialist scientist, such an
idea is a pure abomination. But it could just possibly be that such
an effect occurs, if there are mysterious unknowns involving water
that we are ignorant of. Water is a most astonishing substance which
is a great example of unpredictable emergence. There are many unusual
properties of water (some of them vital for our existence) that are
not at all predictable from merely considering the things that
water is composed of (two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom).
Considering that fact, it does not seem so implausible that water
might have some unknown abilities which we are ignorant of, including
just possibly some ability to store traces of previous ingredients in
some anomalous way.
There actually seems to be evidence
suggesting that inanimate objects may be able to somehow hold
anomalous traces of information. Such evidence falls under the
category of what parapsychologists call psychometry. Psychometry
allegedly involves a mysterious ability to hold some old object, and tell
information about facts associated with that object, such as
incidents it was involved with, or previous people who owned it. The
idea seems outrageous, but significant evidence has been gathered to
suggest such a thing may actually occur. For example, anthropologist
David E. Jones was able to find four people who did surprisingly well
when asked to provide information relevant to artifacts and fossils
that they were asked to touch. In one case, three subjects were given
nondescript rocks gathered from a Mayan site, and the subjects were
able to describe a site and culture like those where the rocks were
taken from.
The idea of anomalous invisible traces
may not seem so outrageous if one considers an interesting scene from
a famous movie. In the classic Alfred Hitchcock thriller North by
Northwest, there is a scene where Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant
are in a hotel room. Talking on the phone, Eva writes down a number
on a notepad, rips off the top sheet of the notepad, and departs.
Cary needs to get that number, but it now seems impossible to do so.
But it is actually possible – because of an invisible trace of the
phone number. Cary takes the notepad Eva used, and fills the top page
with pencil scratches. Holding that top page to a light, he sees a
previously invisible trace of the phone number. It is not unthinkable
that nature may have hidden within it something equivalent to that
page – something that stores information on previous states of
material objects. If such a thing exists (as psychometry evidence
suggests), then a hypothesis such as homeopathy may not be so
unthinkable.
But such possibilities cannot be
conceded by the critics of homeopathy. One of these critics has
recently escalated his loathing for homeopathy into a shocking new
level. He has flatly stated that all those who believe in homeopathy
are mentally ill. This statement was made in a recent post entitled
“Homeopsychopaths.” The post was approvingly published on two
web sites run by scientists, the "Science 2.0" site at Science20.com and the site
RealClearScience.com.
It must be noted that this type of
deplorable hate-mongering may be a serious warning sign. During the
1930's people in Germany began publishing inflammatory claims about
Jews. The next step a few years later was to start smashing the
windows of Jewish stores, and the next step after that was to lock up
the Jews in concentration camps.
When an authority tries to punish
deviant thought by claiming that all who hold such opinions are
mentally ill, it almost makes me wonder whether there is any chance that
this is a first step in a path that may eventually lead to enforced
confinement of those who hold views that deviate from materialist
orthodoxy. Think that such a scenario could never happen? It did
happen in the Soviet Union. For many years one of the many “symptoms”
that could cause you to be confined to a Soviet psychiatric center
was the supposed “mental illness” of holding anti-materialist
views.
Let's hope that if this happens in
America, it never gets as bad as suggested by the following sign,
which depicts a “psychiatric hospital” decades in the future.
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