UK medical experts have declared war on gambling, calling it “an urgent, neglected, understudied, and worsening public health predicament.”

This week, The Lancet Public Health journal announced the launch of its inaugural Commission on Gambling, which it claims will be a “scientific inquiry.” However, these scientists appear to have pre-judged the outcome of this inquiry by declaring early on that gambling is “not an ordinary activity: it is a health-harming addictive behavior.” 

To be charitable, starting with the conclusion and working backward to arrive at that conclusion is the polar opposite of a scientific approach. It brings to mind the efforts of evangelical Christians to get ‘intelligent design’ taught alongside the theory of evolution in US schools. 

Intelligent design, if you’ve forgotten, was the ‘evidence-based scientific theory’ that there was an intelligent creator who created the natural world all at once rather than it happening in fits and starts as the universe expanded from the big bang. How did these evangelicals know this? Well, they just knew, and they wanted kids to know, too.