“Faith Across the Multiverse: Parables from Modern Science” by Andy Walsh

Faith Healing Confronts Modern Medicine

This is the second of a 3-part series analyzing a recent report in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine claiming to have shown positive results (a 100% increase in pregnancies from in vitro fertilization) resulting from distant prayers performed simultaneously by 3 different volunteer prayer groups in 3 different countries. Part 1 analyzed the scientific defects of the study. Part 2 analyzes th...

Faith in science.

Faith is the desire to believe in something as true, or, if not absolutely true, then at least dependable. Faith seems to have been promoted through evolutionary trends, and, as such, it is a concoction of deep brain processes. Related to faith is the concept of truth. Truth is an ephemeral mental construct. We each have some idea of the meaning of truth. Most of the time, our ideas of truth re...

Working across faith and science to improve the health of African Americans.

The 7th Episcopal District African Methodist Episcopal Church represents 23% of African Americans in South Carolina. We describe lessons learned when a large faith community and two research universities collaborate. In 2001, the bishop of the 7th Episcopal District and the president of the Medical University of South Carolina signed a memorandum of understanding on how to collaborate, includin...

Alternative to faith-based science.

The legacy of Islamic world in modern medicine and science

The legacy of the Islamic world in medicine and natural science is the legacy of Greece, increased by many additions, mostly practical. Rhazes, the Iranian, was a talented clinical observer, but not a Harvey. Abd al-Latif, the Arab, was a diligent seeker in anatomy, but in no way to be compared to Vesalius. The Muslims possessed excellent translations of the works of the Hippocratic Corpus and ...