Faith Healing or Scientific Medicine: How Homeopathy Bridges the Secular/Sacred Divide
Alan Levinovitz, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, James Madison University
Homeopathy is one of the most controversial forms of so-called “alternative” or “complementary” medicine. There is a near-unanimous mainstream scientific consensus that its purported mechanism of action—using a highly diluted substance to allow “like to cure like”—runs counter to basic principles of chemistry and biology. In the popular and scholarly debate over whether homeopathy ought be understood as medicine, detractors routinely associate homeopathy with “spirituality,” “faith,” “magic,” “witchcraft,” and “religion.”
In this paper I trace history of the Anglophone debate over the relationship between homeopathy and religion, a debate that dates back to the early 19th century and has received only limited scholarly attention. I argue that recurring difficulties classifying homeopathy as secular or sacred healing are due to its reliance on what I call *underdetermined ontological entities*. These entities, variously translated from the original German, include “spirit,” “energy,” “dynamism,” “miasma,” “psora” and “vital force” (Lebenskraft). I use recent work in philosophy of science to develop the concept of *ontological underdetermination*, a quality that allows ontological entities to maintain certain key traits—causality, being—while simultaneously claiming membership in mutually exclusive epistemologies and ontologies. Thus critics of homeopathy point to the doctrinal centrality of “spirit” as proof of homeopathy’s incompatibility with properly scientific medicine, while supporters point to precisely the same entity as proof of homeopathy’s compatibility with scientific medicine.
My treatment of the Anglophone debate begins with a key moment in the early history of homeopathy. In 1853, Scottish obstetrician James Simpson published a criticism of homeopathy entitled Homeopathy: Its Tenets and Tendencies, Theoretical, Theological, and Therapeutical. A crucial point in Simpson’s critique is that homeopathy amounts to little more than witchcraft, and he spends an entire chapter devoted to exposing its “spiritual” tendencies. For Simpson, the underdetermined ontological entities of homeopathy, such as “spirit,” clearly belong to a religious ontology that has no place in secular medicine. Simpson’s criticism met with an immediate rebuttal, Homeopathy Fairly Considered, by William Henderson, a homeopath and professor of pathology at the University of Edinburgh, who argued that homeopathy was entirely secular, and reclassified “spirit” as a secular entity.
Meanwhile, Christian clergy in the United States, Europe, and Russia embraced homeopathic medicine because they saw its central explanatory theories as essentially religious, helpfully undermining the authority of scientists and medical doctors with whom they found themselves competing for social capital and authority. In this sense they sided against secular defenders of homeopathy such as Henderson, instead construing “spirit” in much the same way that Simpson did—as a fundamentally religious entity. The key difference, of course, was that for members of the clergy the “spiritual” tendency of homeopathy was a selling point, not a decisive critique.
I conclude that *ontological underdetermination* makes it impossible to adjudicate between those who see homeopathy as essentially scientific and those who see it as essentially spiritual. I then discuss how this concept can illuminate contemporary debates about other healing practices that appear to bridge the secular/sacred divide.
Homeopathy is one of the most controversial forms of so-called “alternative” or “complementary” medicine. There is a near-unanimous mainstream scientific consensus that its purported mechanism of action—using a highly diluted substance to allow “like to cure like”—runs counter to basic principles of chemistry and biology. In the popular and scholarly debate over whether homeopathy ought be understood as medicine, detractors routinely associate homeopathy with “spirituality,” “faith,” “magic,” “witchcraft,” and “religion.”
In this paper I trace history of the Anglophone debate over the relationship between homeopathy and religion, a debate that dates back to the early 19th century and has received only limited scholarly attention. I argue that recurring difficulties classifying homeopathy as secular or sacred healing are due to its reliance on what I call *underdetermined ontological entities*. These entities, variously translated from the original German, include “spirit,” “energy,” “dynamism,” “miasma,” “psora” and “vital force” (Lebenskraft). I use recent work in philosophy of science to develop the concept of *ontological underdetermination*, a quality that allows ontological entities to maintain certain key traits—causality, being—while simultaneously claiming membership in mutually exclusive epistemologies and ontologies. Thus critics of homeopathy point to the doctrinal centrality of “spirit” as proof of homeopathy’s incompatibility with properly scientific medicine, while supporters point to precisely the same entity as proof of homeopathy’s compatibility with scientific medicine.
My treatment of the Anglophone debate begins with a key moment in the early history of homeopathy. In 1853, Scottish obstetrician James Simpson published a criticism of homeopathy entitled Homeopathy: Its Tenets and Tendencies, Theoretical, Theological, and Therapeutical. A crucial point in Simpson’s critique is that homeopathy amounts to little more than witchcraft, and he spends an entire chapter devoted to exposing its “spiritual” tendencies. For Simpson, the underdetermined ontological entities of homeopathy, such as “spirit,” clearly belong to a religious ontology that has no place in secular medicine. Simpson’s criticism met with an immediate rebuttal, Homeopathy Fairly Considered, by William Henderson, a homeopath and professor of pathology at the University of Edinburgh, who argued that homeopathy was entirely secular, and reclassified “spirit” as a secular entity.
Meanwhile, Christian clergy in the United States, Europe, and Russia embraced homeopathic medicine because they saw its central explanatory theories as essentially religious, helpfully undermining the authority of scientists and medical doctors with whom they found themselves competing for social capital and authority. In this sense they sided against secular defenders of homeopathy such as Henderson, instead construing “spirit” in much the same way that Simpson did—as a fundamentally religious entity. The key difference, of course, was that for members of the clergy the “spiritual” tendency of homeopathy was a selling point, not a decisive critique.
I conclude that *ontological underdetermination* makes it impossible to adjudicate between those who see homeopathy as essentially scientific and those who see it as essentially spiritual. I then discuss how this concept can illuminate contemporary debates about other healing practices that appear to bridge the secular/sacred divide.