---
title: "List of topics characterized as pseudoscience"
chunk: 17/18
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_topics_characterized_as_pseudoscience"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:29:53.539791+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Affirmative prayer is a form of prayer or a metaphysical technique that is focused on a positive outcome, rather than a negative situation. For instance, a person who is experiencing some form of illness would focus the prayer on the desired state of perfect health and affirm this desired intention "as if already happened" rather than identifying the illness and then asking God for help to eliminate it. William James described affirmative prayer as an element of the American metaphysical healing movement that he called the "mind-cure"; he described it as the United States' "only decidedly original contribution to the systemic philosophy of life." What sets affirmative prayer apart from secular affirmations of the autosuggestion type taught by the 19th century self-help author Émile Coué (whose most famous affirmation was "Every day in every way, I am getting better and better") is that affirmative prayer addresses the practitioner to God, the Divine, the Creative Mind, emphasizing the seemingly practical aspects of religious belief.
Christian Science is generally considered a Christian new religious movement; however, some have called it "pseudoscience"  because its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, used "science" in its name, and because of its former stance against medical science.  Also, "Eddy used the term Metaphysical science to distinguish her system both from materialistic science and from occult science." The church now accepts the use of medical science. Vaccinations were banned, but in 1901, Eddy, at the age of 80, advised her followers to submit to them.
Energy is used by writers and practitioners of various esoteric forms of spirituality and alternative medicine to refer to a variety of claimed experiences and phenomena that defy measurement and thus can be distinguished from the scientific form of energy. There is no scientific evidence for the existence of such energy. Therapies that purport to use, modify, or manipulate unknown energies are thus among the most contentious of all complementary and alternative medicines. Claims related to energy therapies are most often anecdotal (from single stories), rather than being based on repeatable empirical evidence.
Exorcism (from Greek ἐξορκισμός, exorkismós "binding by oath") is the religious or spiritual practice of evicting demons or other spiritual entities from a person, or an area, that is believed to be possessed. Depending on the spiritual beliefs of the exorcist, this may be done by causing the entity to swear an oath, performing an elaborate ritual, or simply by commanding it to depart in the name of a higher power. The practice is ancient and part of the belief system of many cultures and religions.  Requested and performed exorcism began to decline in the United States by the 18th century and occurred rarely until the latter half of the 20th century, when the public saw a sharp rise due to the media attention exorcisms were getting. There was "a 50% increase in the number of exorcisms performed between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s".
Koranic scientific foreknowledge (or Qur'anic science or Hadeeth science) asserts that foundational Islamic religious texts made accurate statements about the world that science verified hundreds of years later. This belief is a common theme in Bucailleism. According to Turkish American physicist Taner Edis, many Muslims appreciate technology and respect the role that science plays in its creation. As a result, he says there is a great deal of Islamic pseudoscience attempting to reconcile science with their religious beliefs. Edis maintains that the motivation to read modern scientific truths into holy books is also stronger for Muslims than Christians. This is because, according to Edis, true criticism of the Quran is almost non-existent in the Muslim world, causing Muslims to believe that scientific truths simply must appear in the Quran.

=== Creation science ===
Creation science or scientific creationism is a branch of creationism that claims to provide scientific support for the Genesis creation narrative in the Book of Genesis and disprove or reexplain the scientific facts, theories and scientific paradigms about geology, cosmology, biological evolution, archaeology, history and linguistics.

Baraminology – taxonomic system that classifies animals into groups called "created kinds" or "baramins" according to the account of creation in the book of Genesis and other parts of the Bible.
Creation biology – subset of creation science that tries to explain biology without macroevolution.
Creationist cosmologies – cosmologies which, among other things, allow for a universe that is only thousands of years old.
Flood geology – creationist form of geology that advocates most of the geologic features on Earth are explainable by a global flood.
Searches for Noah's Ark – attempts to find the burial site of Noah's Ark which, according to the Genesis flood narrative, is located somewhere in the alleged "Mountains of Ararat". There have been numerous expeditions with several false claims of success; the practice is widely regarded as pseudoscience, more specifically pseudoarchaeology.
Intelligent design – attempt to cast creationism in the language of science, invoking concepts such as:
Irreducible complexity – claim that some biological systems are too complex to have evolved from simpler systems. It is used by proponents of intelligent design to argue that evolution by natural selection alone is incomplete or flawed, and that some additional mechanism (an "Intelligent Designer") is required to explain the origins of life.
Specified complexity – claim that when something is simultaneously complex and specified, one can infer that it was produced by an intelligent cause (i.e., that it was designed) rather than being the result of natural processes.