Biased (aka Junk/Agenda/Tobacco) Science:

If New Scientific “Discoveries” Imply the Need for Doctrine Must Change — Apply Brakes!

In 2002, journals retracted 119 papers from the scientific literature. What a difference two decades makes. On several occasions this year, publishers announced they were retracting several times that number, all at once. (For some of the stories among 2022’s retractions that captured the most attention, see our 10th annual roundup for The Scientist).

I believe it is entirely unfair to exclude the creation model without ever considering what the implications of the model would be [in scientific terms, they failed to propose a null hypothesis.[7]

He who, through God’s grace, has adopted a supernatural stance will victoriously fight against these “illegitimate sufferings,” i.e., the sufferings which are consequences of our false and sinful attitudes. God does not give his grace for such self-inflicted sufferings [i.e., normalizing LGBTQ sexual acts — SML] — this is why they are unbearable — but in his goodness — he does come to the help of those who carry a real cross — a cross that he has chosen for them for their sanctification, and for which they can count on his grace.[8]

Principia Scientific International

[Serving] the public interest in providing educational resources freely in the fields of scientific inquiry. Principia Scientific International CIC is about transparency and truth; the only publishing international science association shunning political advocacy and defending the traditional scientific method.

PSI’s review process, i.e., ‘PROM’ (short for: ‘peer-review in open media’) works by PSI inviting and engaging independent third party input in the peer-review process. [In other words, scientists who have no vested interest in how the study turns out, are the one who freely perform the peer-review — SML].

Biomedical research papers are being published in which the abstract, the discussion section, and even the title contradict the content within the paper.

This is unlikely to be happening because the authors don’t understand their own data. It’s more likely that the authors are being pressured by their financial backers and the editorial staff of journals to reach conclusions that advance the prevailing narrative.

It’s a well thought out deception that uses seemingly intellectual analysis to lead the undiscerning reader into believing the wrong conclusion. Skewing statistics is easy to accomplish simply by using the wrong statistical test, using a weak test when a stronger one should apply, or just about any other trick to misrepresent the data.

Medical journals have become financially dependent on their advertisers, which are almost exclusively the big pharmaceutical companies. With enough money, they can buy a scientific study that says what they want it to say.

Sometimes these studies are “ghost” written by people working for industry with credentialed unscrupulous scientists and doctors names misattributed as authors when in fact they did none of the writing.

The pharmaceutical industry uses its profits to control biomedical science at every level, from researchers to journal editors, to government regulatory agencies, and to the media who are supposed to interpret science for the public.[9]

In the U.S. alone, Big Pharma contributed to the 2020 campaigns of: 1) around 2,400 state lawmakers; 2) 72 members of the U.S Senate, and; 3) 302 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. In aggregate, 66% of the U.S. Congress received contributions from Big Pharma.[10]

Pressure is being placed on independent researchers by the journal editors and peer reviewers, many of whom have ties to Big Pharma. Valid studies, honestly reported, can be rejected for publication if they convey a message that threatens corporate profits. Many scientific authors know how difficult it is to get a paper through peer review at most “reputable” medical journals when the results are not in line with the official narrative.

Many biomedical scientists have become shills for the pharmaceutical companies. Rigging clinical trials the old-fashioned way is expensive, time-consuming, uncertain, and recent legislation makes it more difficult. Sometimes the truth emerges even if a study is designed to hide it. Even a study that is designed to fail might succeed when the inconvenient truths are stubborn enough. It’s easier to report the actual results and then tack on an abstract and a discussion section that convey the right message, regardless of the data in the main body of the article. This can then be used in the “citation bluff” fraud, that depends on people not carefully reading supposed supportive evidence, to perpetuate the false narrative.

Often the cited evidence in support of a particular narrative doesn’t really support the narrative being advanced. In fact, the supposed supportive evidence can sometimes even completely contradict the narrative being pushed.

This is something to bear in mind the next time you get into an argument with someone demanding to see peer-reviewed evidence and rejecting any evidence that has not been peer-reviewed regardless of its merits.

Journals and the peer review process have been corrupted by powerful vested interests.[11]

The Existence of Agenda-Science in Matters of Doctrine

The authors and editors of an October 2019 study, titled “Reduction in mental health treatment utilization among transgender individuals after gender-affirming surgeries: a total population study,”[12] have retracted its primary conclusion. … The Bränström study reanalysis demonstrated that neither “gender-affirming hormone treatment” nor “gender-affirming surgery” reduced the need of transgender-identifying people for mental health services. Fad medicine [emphasis SML] is bad medicine, and gender-anxious people deserve better.[13] … [Andre Van Mol et al.], concluded our letter by comparing [The Bränström] study to the one we consider perhaps the best of its kind, also from Sweden, the 2011 Dhejne study.[14] The Dhejne team made extensive use of numerous, specified Swedish registries and examined data from 324 patients in Sweden over thirty years who underwent sex reassignment. They used population controls matched by birth year, birth sex, and reassigned sex. When followed out beyond ten years, the sex-reassigned group had nineteen times the rate of completed suicides and nearly three times the rate of all-cause mortality and inpatient psychiatric care, compared to the general population.[15]

It has been an open secret for some time that there is a crisis of irreproducibility of scientific studies in medicine and other fields. No less a figure than the [former] Director of the NIH, Dr. Francis Collins, wrote that, “the checks and balances that once ensured scientific fidelity have been hobbled. This has compromised the ability of today’s researchers to reproduce others’ findings.” For example, the National Association of Scholars reports, “In 2012 the biotechnology firm Amgen tried to reproduce 53 ‘landmark’ studies in hematology and oncology, but could only replicate 6 (11%).”[16] In 2015 an article was published in Science in which there was an attempt to replicate 100 studies from three well-known psychology journals [emphasis SML] in 2008.[17] In the original studies, nearly all had produced statistically significant results, whereas in the study replications, only a little over a third produced similar significant results.[18]

The Church’s Naïve Reliance on Junk Science

One of the temptations in the Church today is to constantly compare Jesus’ teaching with the current developments in psychology and the social sciences. If something in the Gospel does not agree with the current state of knowledge in these sciences, the disciples, wanting to save the Master from being compromised in the eyes of his contemporaries, try to “update” the Gospel. The temptation to “modernize” concerns in a particular way the sphere of sexual identity. It is forgotten, however, that the state of scientific knowledge changes frequently and sometimes dramatically, e.g., due to paradigm shifts. Changeability is inherent in the very nature of science [e.g., the science of epigenetic plasticity, also covered below AND in Scripture — SML], which has only a fragment of all possible knowledge. Discovering errors and analyzing them is the driving force of progress in science.

However, some scientific errors have had dramatic consequences. Just think of scientific theories such as racism and eugenics. Based on the most recent scientific advances, the U.S. Congress passed the National Origin Act in 1924, imposing restrictive migration quotas on people from Southern and Central Europe and banning almost entirely Asian immigration. The main reason was the belief that peoples such as Italians and Poles, for example, were racially inferior. On the other hand, based on knowledge of eugenics, an estimated 70,000 women belonging to ethnic minorities were forcibly sterilized in the United States in the 20^th century.[22] In this case and in others, we speak of so-called “scientific errors.” Alongside these, however, there are also “ideological fallacies.” These underlie, for example, the change in attitudes toward sexuality that is now being observed [23].[24]

Regensburg Bishop Rudolf Voderholzer repeatedly disagreed with other bishops in the plenary session. On the diocese’s website, he published a statement, part of which he repeated in the assembly, saying he “would like to see a scientific examination of the prerequisites and secret agendas of all the (sexual abuse) studies repeatedly cited here [emphasis SML].”

And the suspicion arises that the real problem of the past decades has been that clergy have adapted too much to the spirit of the times and have maintained too little their clear profile, fed by the church’s teaching of the belief of a God-given sexuality in marriage between man and woman. The reforms of the Synodal Path, however, are obviously also to a great extent adaptations to the spirit of the times and a dilution of our profile.[26]

Appealing to Bio-chemical (not Spiritual) Compassion

[I]t is widely recognized and accepted, even within homosexual advocacy circles, that homosexuals do have a “greater incidence of mental illness, particularly depression and suicide, than do heterosexuals. Activists quickly explain that this connection implies neither a necessary psychological nor a necessary biological link between homosexuality and depression. They argue, rather, that suicidal depression is the unsurprising effect on otherwise healthy individuals of living a closeted existence in an abusive and hostile society.

Similar arguments have been made before”. It has long been obvious, for instance, that parental divorce is associated with both severe distress and behavioral problems among children. But in the 1970s the divorce industry argued that it was the social stigma attached to divorce that caused children’s distress, not divorce itself. If divorce were normalized, they claimed, the children could walk away unscathed. Indeed, children would be helped by divorce, for they would not suffer the trauma of being reared and cared for by less-than-totally-personally-fulfilled parents.

Until recently, no scientific studies were available to prove what has been painfully obvious to everyone, but science has finally caught up with experience and common sense. Numerous studies now confirm that divorce inflicts lifelong damage on children, far greater than that caused by parental unhappiness. Even divorce experts are beginning to withdraw their earlier claims [27].[28]

From May 1989 through April 1990, 1001 adult homosexual and bisexual men attending sexually transmitted disease clinics were interviewed regarding potentially abusive sexual contacts during childhood and adolescence. Thirty-seven percent of participants reported they had been encouraged or forced to have sexual contact before age 19 with an older or more powerful partner; 94 percent occurred with men. Median age of the participant at first contact was 10; median age difference between partners was 11 years. Fifty-one percent involved use of force; 33 percent involved anal sex. Black and Hispanic men were more likely than white men to report such sexual contact. Using developmentally based criteria to define sexual abuse, 93 percent of participants reporting sexual contact with an older or more powerful partner were classified as sexually abused. Our data suggest the risk of sexual abuse may be high among some male youth and increased attention should be devoted to prevention as well as early identification and treatment [30].[31]

The association between perpetration of sexual abuse and the offender’s own victimization as a child has been well documented in the literature. Various researchers have examined this relationship by assessing the exclusiveness of the sexual abuser’s behavior, the gender of his victims and the gender of his own childhood abuser. . . . Subjects were 135 pedophiles. . . who admitted to their offenses. A total of 42 percent of pedophiles . . . reported being sexually victimized in their own childhoods. . . . [and] appear to choose their age specific victims in accordance with the age of their own experience of sexual victimization. Although the cause of child molestation remains undetermined these results support social learning and modeling theories [32].[33]

Studies, like the one cited immediately above, do suggest that both the high levels of emotional distress and homosexuality itself have at least one common root in painful childhood experiences, as do other deviations from the sexual norm such as pedophilia. It makes as much sense to claim that the high levels of psychological abnormality and personal distress found among pedophiles are due solely to the [widespread] social disapproval of pedophilia.[34]

Conclusion

ENDNOTES:

Note: John Ioannidis is a Professor of Medicine and of Health Research & Policy at Stanford University School of Medicine, and a Professor of Statistics at Stanford University School of Humanities and Sciences.

Source Cited by PSI: The Expose.

Source Cited by PSI: The Expose.

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