There is, for instance, a lot of talk about ‘quantum consciousness’: explaining consciousness by the use of quantum theory. There is some serious research here and Roger Penrose, for example, has argued that he believes the solution to the problem of consciousness will come from quantum theory. But the vast majority of the ‘literature’ on this is just a combination of speculation and dubious analogy. So, for example, Danah Zohar in The Quantum Self, speculates that the quantum wave/particle duality corresponds to the duality between the physical and the mental. The reasoning seems to be that particles are a bit concrete and so like the physical, and waves are more fluffy and thus more like the mental. This analogy added to a liberal dose of speculation leads to her explaining consciousness as the fusing of the two in quantum states of the brain, even though almost all physicists think that the kind of quantum state Zohar thinks explains consciousness – the Bose-Einstein condensate – could not exist in something as warm and wet as the brain.3 Quantum mechanics is difficult and hard to understand, so people seem to think that anything else difficult and hard to understand should somehow be seen as a quantum phenomenon. But this adds up to no explanation at all. As the psychologist Susan Blackmore said in a report on a conference at which these theories were offered as explanations for consciousness, ‘… they didn’t explain it. They quantummed it.’4 The spurious use of quantum theory is an example of another bad argumentative move: substituting one mystery for another, as though that were an explanation. I wonder, however, if some very popular ideas also fall under this description. For instance, is the mystery of Creation explained by positing a mysterious God, beyond our comprehension, as the first cause? As well as the misuse of science to explain things, isn’t there a misuse of religion to explain what science cannot?