Right sequence, wrong foot

**In order to get out of marching around on an October's cold, muddy field in Buffalo, I volunteered for the ROTC band. It didn’t seem to matter that I said I played piano, they needed drummers and so I was handed a drum. I can keep a beat pretty well, though I don’t do all the flourishes real drummers can do. I enjoyed rehearsing with the band up in a nice, warm third floor lecture hall that overlooked the frozen sleety grounds where my less fortunate comrades slogged around hefting icy rifles and soggy boots. The band practiced all winter for the big spring parade, which of course occurred outdoors in a still-cold Buffalo spring, like March or April, maybe even May. One of my first impressions on reaching the street was that the drum was damn heavy to walk with, and had sharp hardware that bashed against my thigh with every step. Never having been fleet of foot, and concentrating so much on dodging the pain of marching with a drum on my hip, I lost track of the “left-right-left-right” cadence bellowing from the drum major ahead. While everyone was stepping with their left foot, I was stepping with my right, and vice versa. So while I was perfectly in time step to step, I was completely out of step with my group. Of course I was soon made aware of this mistake and skipped around to reverse it - with corresponding extra jabs to my thigh.

A current luminary in the Christian Science movement, is also an astrophysicist. So he’s not only a scientist who happens to be Christian, he’s a Christian who also claims to be scientific about Christianity. About the only thing these two disciplines have in common is that their arguments follow in logical progression. But like my faulty marching, CS starts on the wrong foot. Which pretty much invalidates all of its conclusions. And results in pain. I recently read the text of a talk he’d given in which he made many unsubstantiated claims, using the same quotes and cadences I used to make when I was on the same lecture circuit. 

I was once impressed with that tight logic. Until I discovered that the starting assumption — that there is a divine entity managing everything in perfect harmony— was bogus. It had previously, over many years, been an unchallenged assumption, I having been brought up with that assumption and participating in all the religious activities that sprang from it. So, while the CS arguments stemming from that assumption are in time with each other, they are totally out of step with reality.

Another kind of theist might find the logic of CS convincing, if they were free enough from parochial influence. But in the end they’d wind up just as disappointed and frustrated as I was. While some may argue that the existence of God cannot be proved, or unproved, the claim of CS to be true is defeated by its own measure. All through its literature is the claim that the truth of its assumptions are demonstrated by physical healing. Not just feeling better, or bearing up optimistically or becoming a nicer person. Physical healing. The kind of healing that millions (billions?) of people seek and find without resort to prayer of any sort, least of all “Christianly scientific prayer.”

No matter how strenuously Christian Scientists claim to be healed, there have been no convincing instances of it in my experience. Just the opposite. I’ve seen people so sick and unhealed through prayer that they let growths develop on their face or body; who put up with days of migraine pain; who even let helpless children endure suffering, sometimes to the point of death. Despite all kinds of rationalizations, it is not the patient but the practice that is at fault. 

If “spiritual healing” were effective, people would seek it, pay dearly for it. It would be so popular that whole industries would spring out of it, and educational institutions would teach it. And there’d be no bad press. Believers say that such can’t happen because of the perversity of humanity, its materialism and false education. But a healing practice based on the principle that there is an infinite, omnipotent and readily available divine source cannot have such conclusive and consistent failures. At least there should be some spectacular successes! And those successes would drive further interest and patronage. But what do we have instead? An increasingly inward-looking church, members and publications quietly congratulating themselves that, despite all the evidence to the contrary, real physical healing is going on and therefore they are in step with the truth. 

The CS “movement” is quietly grinding to a halt. The decline is aided, of course, by the fact that a large segment of its (lucky) membership is aging and dying. The righteous claims of younger, more robust members are being shredded as they age by the ailments typical of a human body that is exceeding its evolutionary design. Many secretly use medical services. Most parents are compelled by community laws to have their sick children treated by real medical doctors, cutting down on the most egregious of their practices. Many of their kids, not brainwashed by parents and grandparents, don’t join churches and thus don’t make up for the deceasing membership. 

Whatever can be said about the sound logic of Christian Science, it does not deliver on its promises. There is no spiritual healing. None. And if there is no such healing then the logic that would predict it is totally internal, and its practice is out of step with reality.