Joe Rogan | The Placebo Effect of Religion w/Richard Dawkins

Well, people find great comfort in these belief systems. It gives them sort of, I've often said that it gives them some sort of like a scaffolding for their structure of the world, their ethics, their morals. They can use religion as some sort of a mechanism to help them get by, something that they can climb on to ease some of the confusion of the unknown. I'm sure that's true, but I don't understand why anybody therefore thinks that therefore the religion is true. Why would you think that because it provides you with a scaffold you can climb on? That makes it true. I could understand you erecting a scaffold that was, say, gymnastics or a certain dire or something like that, but a belief about the universe, that's either going to be true or not. And it doesn't make it true just because it's comforting or provides you with a scaffold to climb on. Well, it's almost like it's a spiritual system like a placebo effect, like a spiritual placebo effect. And by believing that this is true, it gives you this comfort and allows you to condense your thoughts into a better path. The placebo effect, of course, is very real and doctors know about it. But did you know that the placebo effect works even if the patient is told it's a placebo? Yes. That's what I don't get. Incredible. That's incredible, isn't it? Yeah, it's very strange. Well, sometimes people doing things and knowing that they're doing things gives them this sort of feeling of momentum, of accomplishment, of progress. And I think so many people are just so adrift and don't have focus that even just telling them, hey, you're going to be a part of this program, this program to treat X, Y disease, whatever it is, and here's this thing. Just focusing on it. I think the main reason why so many people believe in homeopathy, which not only doesn't work but cannot work, is the placebo effect. It's partly they're going to get better anyway, of course, but it's also the placebo effect that homeopathic, I wouldn't say doctor, homeopathic practitioner, gives them nonsensical piece of medicine. And they believe it's going to work. And so it does. And so the placebo effect is important. The CFI Center for Inquiry has actually got a lawsuit going on at the moment against pharmaceutical shops selling homeopathic remedies alongside genuine ones. We can't stop them actually selling homeopathic remedies. What we can try and do is stop them putting them on the same shelf as though there's no difference between them. But my colleague Nick Humphrey, who's a psychologist, very insightful one, thinks you could actually even justify homeopathy on the grounds that homeopathic practitioners are allowed to prescribe placebos. They call them homeopathic, but they are placebos, whereas real doctors are not allowed to prescribe. They used to. Real doctors used to prescribe placebos all the time. But they're now no longer allowed to because it violates human rights. But homeopaths are allowed to, bizarrely, because they don't call them placebos. If they did, they wouldn't be allowed to. Well, I have a similar thought about chiropractic work. Chiropractors do relieve pain for some people, but there's no reason why it works. I would not be totally surprised if it worked. I haven't looked into it enough. I would absolutely be surprised if homeopathy works. It cannot work because there's no active ingredient. I can't wait to tell you the story of chiropractic medicine then. It was created by a guy who was a magnetic healer who was murdered by his own son. And his son took over the business and started saying that it can cure everything from leukemia to heart disease, all by manipulating the spine. It was done in the 1800s, and there's no science behind it at all. But yet, so many people have found pain relief. And chiropractors today, it's weird to lump them all in together, but many chiropractors today do do good work because they incorporate legitimate modalities in terms of rehabilitation. Like cold laser and all these different massage remedies and all these different things that actually physically work. I know a woman who is a horse chiropractor. She does chiropractors. Oh Christ. But the point I'm trying to make is that whereas it's an empirical question where the chiropractic works, in the case of homeopathy, it cannot work because the dilution is such that there's nothing there physically. There's nothing there. Right. There's no chemical reason. Or they say it can work because water has a memory. But if they could prove that water has a memory, they'd get the Nobel Prize for physics, and they're not going to.