
Science of the Gaps
TheraminTrees, the pseudonymous video essayist behind There Are No Gods, answers a viewer's question about what makes him angry by arguing that pseudoscience runs on the same psychological manipulation as religion. He walks through Rosenhan's 1973 study "On Being Sane in Insane Places" to show how confident diagnosis can override plain evidence, then turns to cases where that same false certainty did real damage: Nadean Cool's recovered-memory therapy, and Candace Newmaker, a ten-year-old who died during a rebirthing session meant to fix her attachment. Chantal Lavigne's death in a Quebec detox program and Bruce Hines's account of Scientology's internal enforcers add more cases of self-appointed authorities claiming esoteric knowledge nobody can check. TheraminTrees lays out the shared defenses, unfalsifiable claims, deflected criticism, appeals to secret expertise, that let both religion and pseudoscience shrug off scrutiny. His point is that treating pseudoscience as too silly to matter is exactly the attitude that lets it hurt people.