The new ABC tv series Eli Stone deals with some serious issues—most importantly the question of whether our time is a congenial one for religious truths. Central to the story is the premise that the title character may actually be a religious prophet.
The main evidence for this startling proposition is in the visual and auditory hallucinations he experiences. The show gives a natural explanation—he has an inoperable brain aneurysm—but as an acupuncturist points out later in the narrative, the natural cause of the visions does not explain the content of the visions, which included insights that Eli cannot possibly have come upon through natural means.
Hence, the narrative insists, there must be some supernatural intervention involved. And of course the protagonist’s name suggests as much: Eli, from the Old Testament Elijah and several other names, and Stone, from Peter (Petra, the Rock) in the New Testament.
Like most ABC fiction series, Eli Stone incorporates these strongly fantastic and melodramatic elements in a largely realistic narrative shot in a style based on Italian neorealism updated for color film and American sensibilities. It’s visually bright, cheery, crowded, and energetic. The visual style makes the strange material seem more plausible, conveying the TV equivalent of literary magical realism.
The main plotline deals with a contemporary issue, as is also common in ABC series. As lawyer for a plaintiff suing a pharmaceutical company, the title character comes upon proof that the firm’s vaccines cause autism. He springs it in court, and ultimately wins the case.
The notion that vaccines are responsible for autism is a very bad rumor to be spreading, because creating false fear in parents about vaccine safety will leave numerous children prey to infectious diseases that could easily be prevented.
In this case, irrational fears can condemn children to needless suffering and death.
There is a very simple explanation for the facts of the case. The mother noticed that her child was acting differently a week after the vaccination; he turned from a normal boy to an increasingly autistic one. The obvious explanation is that the two events were not causally related but instead were mere coincidence.
The intuitively obvious question, of course, is how this could be just a coincidence. The problem is that the question arises from a logical error known as the fallacy of special pleading. Instead of looking at one case in isolation, or even a few, causal proof requires that the effect be repeated in controlled circumstances. Yet that is not what happened in this case, and coincidence is not only possible but likely.
The reality is that hundreds of thousands of children across the country getting vaccines every year, and that thousands of children are discovered to be autistic every year. It’s obvious that in numerous cases, then, children who are vaccinated will be discovered to be autistic soon afterwards.
It’s a simple matter of numbers. With enough instances of two different things happening to people, a great many will come in close temporal proximity and seem to have a causal relationship. But they’re quite unrelated. The child’s condition is indeed tragic, but there’s no reason at all to suspect that a vaccine caused it, any more than that milk, peanut butter, or sunshine is at fault.
What is worse is that the episode equates this belief with faith in God. I should hope I needn’t point out that such a claim is absurd, for the two things are of entirely different orders. We know nature solely by knowing nature: the more we know about it, the more we understand its workings. Hence, anything inconsistent with what we know about nature cannot be accepted as a premise for action. And our way of understanding nature is by testing it. Faith does not enter into it.
Our belief in God is also based on our understanding of nature, but is of a different order entirely, for it is not testable. Neither belief nor unbelief is provable in this world. Each is a leap of faith. (Note that point carefully: disbelief in God is just as much a leap of faith—we may call it a leap of unbelief—as is belief in God. Neither is provable in scientific terms.) One either accepts God, or one doesn’t. What we call faith is really just the fundamental prism through which we see all that we experience.
Eli Stone does get that part right, even if Eli Stone the lawyer doesn’t. An acupuncturist tells him, "There are two explanations for everything: the scientific and the divine." The healer makes the point that one chooses either to believe in God or not, and it is at the very least an equal choice, with the evidence allowing for one to hold either position reasonably.
The acupuncturist actually suggests that belief in God has a stronger cae, and I fully agree with him. In any case, to see a TV program deal with this issue in this way is quite appealing. It’s too bad the producers had to tie it to a poor understanding of a political issue, but at least they seem to have gotten the big issue right—so far.
Very interesting. All the reviews I came across for this show panned it as horrible. So I didn’t watch the first episode. Sounds like something worth checking out.
Sam’s point about faith is very important. With the slew of strident atheist books out last year, many who confronted them failed to point out that atheists are people of faith too! An author of an otherwise wonderful article at NRO allowed Christopher Hitchens to get away with stating that he has no capacity for faith. Popycock!
The question isn’t faith vs. no faith. It’s what do you choose to believe based on the evidence in front of you, just as Sam said. We should never, in this context, refer to religious folk as believers. Atheists are believers too, only they believe in nothing as the explanation for everything. Talk about a LEAP of faith!
February 1, 2008
Congratulations to ABC for being the first to stand up and reveal a slight glimpse into the world of autistic children with their new show Eli Stone on Thursday nights. Even though the majority of autistic children are not so quiet and well behaved like the boy actor in the show, it gives a “glimmer of hope” to the overwhelming number of families affected that someone is listening.
Parents deserve to know all the facts before making decisions about their children’s health and welfare. For more information go online to read “The Truth Behind The Vaccines Cover-Up” by Dr. Russell Blaylock. For information about the current vaccines that continue to contain mercury go to http://www.vaccinesafety.edu/thi-table.htm .
I am the author of “A Shocking Discovery, Observations of a Speech/Language Pathologist from 1975-2005, What Have We Done to Our Children?”, a book about my 30 year experience of working with children, my observations of how children’s communication abilities have declined and how that relates to the changes in the childhood vaccination schedule.
In his article. “Mercury on the Mind”, Dr. Donald W. Miller, cardiac surgeon and Professor of Surgery at the University of Washington in Seattle, states, “The hypothesis that mercury causes autism and Alzheimer’s disease is a new truth. And as Schopenhauer points out, each new truth passes through three states: First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. And third, it is accepted as self-evident. The mercury truth is now in the second stage.”
Thanks ABC for starting the discussion on this controversial subject. Hopefully we can begin to put aside our strong opinions and just merely look at the facts so we can come together to heal a generation of children and adults.
Marcia Abbott, M.S., CCC/SLP
Speech/Language Pathologist
You offer some good insights. I hadn’t yet made the connection between Stone and Peter. However, I think you, and everyone else who centers their discussion of the pilot episode of this show around autism have been distracted from the central message.
This episode was not about autism and it wasn’t about a link between autism and vaccines. It was about a man who makes a choice.
Our hero makes a choice to listen to the “voices”, to quit worshipping what he calls the trinity of “Armani, accessories and ambition”. He decides to align his values and the vision he had for his life as a child with his actions. He decides to become the man he wanted to be all along, the man his father knew he could become.
Upon making this choice he is met with almost immediate positive results. I would argue that the statement made by his client (the child’s mother) that the case would be lost not because of the science or the lawyering but because Eli didn’t believe and that Eli’s lack of faith was a far greater tragedy than anything that happened to her or her family is the central point of this narrative. Her statement confirms this in and of itself.
In this day it is hard to refer to a TV show as art. But, like all good art this show made me question myself. It made me question the choices I make (and what I worship). I found it inspirational.