Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time

by Michael Shermer

  Can Jach Pursel actually speak to someone who has been dead for tens of thousands of years? This seems rather unlikely. More likely is that we are listening to Jach Pursel's active imagination. Can the Brain/Mind Expansion Intensive Dome really cure brain damage? Let's see the evidence for this remarkable claim. None is offered. Can a psychic really give me deep and meaningful insights over the phone (or even in person)? I doubt it.

  What is going on in our culture and thinking that leads to such beliefs? Theories proffered by skeptics and scientists abound: no education, miseducation, lack of critical thinking, rise of religion, decline of religion, displacement of traditional religion by cults, fear of science, the New Age, the Dark Ages revisited, too much television, not enough reading, reading the wrong books, poor parenting, lousy teachers, and plain old ignorance and stupidity. A correspondent from Ontario, Canada, sent me what he called "the vilest embodiment of what you are up against." It was a DayGlo orange cardboard sign from his local bookstore on which was scrawled: NEW AGE SECTION MOVED TO SCIENCE SECTION. "I am truly frightened by the ease with which society is substituting voodoo and superstition for inquiry and critical examination," he wrote. "If there was ever to be an icon showing how far this phenomenon has ingrained itself into our culture, then this sign would surely be it." As a culture we seem to have trouble distinguishing science from pseudoscience, history from pseudohistory, and sense from nonsense. But I think the problem lies deeper than this. To get to it we must dig through the layers of culture and society into the individual human mind and heart. There is not a single answer to the question of why people believe weird things, but we can glean some underlying motivations, all linked to one another, from the diverse examples I have discussed in this book:

  Credo Consolans. More than any other, the reason people believe weird things is because they want to. It feels good. It is comforting. It is consoling. According to a 1996 Gallup poll, 96 percent of American adults believe in God, 90 percent in heaven, 79 percent in miracles, and 72 percent in angels (Wall Street Journal, January 30, p. A8). Skeptics, atheists, and militant antireligionists, in their attempts to undermine belief in a higher power, life after death, and divine providence, are butting up against ten thousand years of history and possibly one hundred thousand years of evolution (if religion and belief in God have a biological basis, which some anthropologists believe they do). Throughout all of recorded history, everywhere on the globe, such beliefs and similar percentages are common. Until a suitable secular substitute surfaces, these figures are unlikely to change significantly.

  Skeptics and scientists are not immune. Martin Gardner—one of the founders of the modern skeptical movement and slayer of all manner of weird beliefs—classifies himself as a philosophical theist or, a broader term, a fideist. Gardner explains,

  Fideism refers to believing something on the basis of faith, or emotional reasons rather than intellectual reasons. As a fideist I don't think there are any arguments that prove the existence of God or the immortality of the soul. More than that I think the better arguments are on the side of the atheists. So it is a case of quixotic emotional belief that really is against the evidence. If you have strong emotional reasons for metaphysical belief and it's not sharply contradicted by science or logical reasoning, you have a right to make a leap of faith if it provides sufficient satisfaction. (1996)

  Similarly, to the frequently asked question, "What is your position on life after death?" my standard response is "I'm for it, of course." The fact that I am for life after death does not mean I'm going to get it. But who wouldn't want it? And that's the point. It is a very human response to believe in things that make us feel better.

  Immediate Gratification. Many weird things offer immediate gratification. The 900 number psychic hotline is a classic example. A magician/ mentalist friend of mine works one such hotline, so I have been privileged to hear how the system operates from the inside. Most companies charge $3.95 per minute, with the psychic receiving 60c per minute; that's $36.00 an hour for the psychic, if the psychic works continuously, and $201 an hour for the company. The goal is to keep callers on the line long enough to turn a good profit but not so long that they refuse to pay the phone bill. Currently, my friend's record for a single call is 201 minutes, for a total of $793.95! People call for one or more of four reasons: love, health, money, career. Using cold-reading techniques, the psychic begins broad and works toward specifics. "I sense there is some tension in your relationship—one of you is more committed than the other." "I'm getting the feeling that financial pressures are causing problems for you." "You have been thinking about changing careers." Such trite statements are true for almost everyone. If your psychic chooses the wrong one, the psychic only has to say it will happen—in the future. And the psychic only has to be right occasionally. Callers forget the misses and remember the hits, and, most important, they want the psychic to be right. Skeptics don't spend $3.95 a minute on psychic hotlines, believers do. Calling mostly at night and on weekends, most need someone to talk to. Traditional psychotherapy is formal, expensive, and time-consuming. Deep insight and improvement may take months or years. Delay of gratification is the norm, instant satisfaction the exception. By contrast, the psychic is only a telephone call away. (Many 900 number psychics, including my friend, justify it as "poor man's counseling." At $3.95 a minute, I beg to differ. Interestingly, the two major psychic associations are in conflict, with the so-called "real" psychics feeling that the psychic "entertainers" are making them look phony.)

  Simplicity. Immediate gratification of one's beliefs is made all the easier by simple explanations for an often complex and contingent world. Good and bad things happen to both good and bad people, seemingly at random. Scientific explanations are often complicated and require training and effort to work through. Superstition and belief in fate and the supernatural provide a simpler path through life's complex maze. Consider the following example from Harry Edwards, head of the Australian Skeptics Society.

  As an experiment, on March 8, 1994, Edwards published a letter in his local newspaper in St. James, New South Wales, about his pet chicken, which perches on his shoulder, occasionally leaving its calling card there. Keeping track of the time and location of the chicken's "deposits," and correlating them with subsequent events, Edwards told readers that he was the recipient of good luck. "Over the past few weeks, I have won the lotto, had money returned to me that I had completely forgotten about and received a large order for my recently published books." Edwards's son, who also dons the chicken and its markings, on one wearing "found wallets containing sums of money which he has returned to owners and received rewards, on another a wrist watch, an unused phone card, a pensioner's card and a clock." Edwards then explained that he took the chicken's feathers to a palmist, "checked its horoscope and consulted a past lives reader who confirmed that it was a reincarnated philanthropist and that I should spread the good luck around by selling the product." He ended his Jetter by offering to sell his "lucky chicken crap" and providing an address where readers should send their money. Edwards wrote to me exuberantly, "As a firm believer that one can sell anything as long as it is associated with 'good luck,' believe it or not I received two orders and $20 for my 'lucky chicken crap'!" I believe it.

  Morality and Meaning. At present, scientific and secular systems of morality and meaning have proved relatively unsatisfying to most people. Without belief in some higher power, people ask, why be moral? What is the basis for ethics? What is the ultimate meaning of life? What's the point of it all? Scientists and secular humanists have good answers to these good questions, but for many reasons these answers have not reached the population at large. To most people, science seems to offer only cold and brutal logic in its presentation of an infinite, uncaring, and purposeless universe. Pseudoscience, superstition, myth, magic, and religion offer simple, immediate, and consoling canons of morality and meaning. Because I used to be a born-again Christian, I empathize with those who feel threatened by s
cience. Who feels threatened?

  Like other magazines, every so often Skeptic sends a mass mailing to tens of thousands of people in order to increase circulation. Our mailings include a "Business Reply Mail" envelope, along with literature about the Skeptics Society and Skeptic. Never in these mailings do we discuss religion, God, theism, atheism, or anything whatsoever to do with such subjects. Yet every mailing we receive dozens of our postage-paid envelopes back from people obviously offended by our existence. Some of the envelopes are stuffed with trash or shredded newspaper; one was glued to a box filled with rocks. Some contain our own literature scrawled with messages of doom and gloom. "No thank you—there is none so blind as he who will not see," reads one. "No thanks, I will pass on your anti-Christian bigotry," says another. "Including you skeptics every knee'll bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord," warns a third. Many are filled with religious pamphlets and literature. One person sent me "FREE TICKET NO. 777 ETERNAL ADMITTANCE TO SPEND ETERNITY IN HEAVEN WITH JESUS CHRIST THE SON OF GOD." The "price of admission" is simple. I merely have to acknowledge "Jesus Christ as YOUR Savior and Lord. THAT VERY MOMENT you are saved FOREVER!" And if I don't? The flip side is another ticket, this one a "FREE TICKET TO SPEND ETERNITY IN THE LAKE OF FIRE WITH THE DEVIL AND HIS ANGELS." Can you guess the number of this ticket? That's correct: 666.

  If there were only one thing skeptics, scientists, philosophers, and humanists could do to address the overall problem of belief in weird things, constructing a meaningful and satisfying system of morality and meaning would be a good place to start.

  Hope Springs Eternal. Linking all these reasons together is the title of the final part of this book. It expresses my conviction that humans are, by nature, a forward-looking species always seeking greater levels of happiness and satisfaction. Unfortunately, the corollary is that humans are all too often willing to grasp at unrealistic promises of a better life or to believe that a better life can only be attained by clinging to intolerance and ignorance, by lessening the lives of others. And sometimes, by focusing on a life to come, we miss what we have in this life. It is a different source of hope, but it is hope nonetheless: hope that human intelligence, combined with compassion, can solve our myriad problems and enhance the quality of each life; hope that historical progress continues on its march toward greater freedoms and acceptance for all humans; and hope that reason and science as well as love and empathy can help us understand our universe, our world, and ourselves.

  18

  Why Smart People Believe Weird Things

  "When men wish to construct or support a theory, how they torture facts into their service!"

  —John Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 1852

  Contingency: "A conjuncture of events occurring without design." (Oxford English Dictionary)

  Consider the following conjuncture of events that led me to an answer to the question suggested in the title of this chapter. During the month of April, 1998, when I was on a lecture tour for the first edition of this book, the psychologist Robert Sternberg (best known for his pioneering work in multiple intelligences) attended my presentation at the Yale Law School. His response to the lecture was both enlightening and troubling. It is certainly entertaining to hear about other people's weird beliefs, Sternberg reflected, because we are confident that we would never be so foolish as to believe in such nonsense as alien abductions, ghosts, ESP, Big Foot, and all manner of paranormal ephemera. But, he retorted, the interesting question is not why other people believe weird things, but why you and I believe weird things; and, as a subset of Us (versus Them), why smart people believe weird things. Sternberg then proceeded to rattle off a number of beliefs held by his colleagues in psychology—by all accounts a reasonably smart cohort—that might reasonably be considered weird. And, he wondered with wry irony, which of his own beliefs . . . and mine . . . would one day be considered weird?

  My contingency came the following day when I was in Boston for a lecture at MIT. Speaking at the same time in the same building just a few doors down from me was Dr. William Dembski, a mathematician and philosopher lecturing on the inference of design signals within the noise of a system. By the criteria that counts in the academy Dembski is smart. He has a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago, a second Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and a master's degree in theology from Princeton Theological Seminary. His 1998 book, The Design Inference, is published by Cambridge University Press. Yet the subject of his lecture and book—in fact, the subject of his full-time occupation as a research fellow for the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture at the Discovery Institute in Seattle—is to show that science proves God's existence (design inferred in nature implies a grand designer). In my pantheon of "weird things" to believe this one is toward the top of the list (Darwin debunked Paley's design argument nearly a century and a half ago), yet as we chatted for several hours at a quaint Boston pub following our joint lectures I was struck by just how thoughtful, rational, and intelligent Dembski is. Why would someone with such talent and credentials bypass a promising career in favor of chasing the chimera of proving what is inherently unprovable—God? (For a full defense of this position see my 1999 book How We Believe.)

  To be fair to William Dembski, he is not alone among highly intelligent and educated scholars and scientists who share his beliefs. Although old-guard creationists like Henry Morris and Duane T. Gish sport Ph.D.s after their names, they are in fields outside the biological sciences and they have no mainstream academic affiliations. But the new breed of creationists are coming from more traditional venues, such as Philip Johnson, a law professor at the flagship campus of the University of California at Berkeley, whose 1991 book, Darwin on Trial, helped launch the latest wave of evolution deniers. Hugh Ross earned his Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of Toronto and had a position as a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) before founding Reasons to Believe, an organization whose stated purpose (implied in the name) is to provide Christians with scientific reasons for their faith (see Ross 1993, 1994, and 1996). Even more impressive is Michael Behe, a Lehigh University biochemistry professor and the author of the 1996 book Darwin's Black Box that has become something of a bible of the "Intelligent Design" movement. And both received the ultimate endorsement of the conservative intelligentsia when they were invited by William F. Buckley to join his team in a television PBS debate on evolution and creation. (Buckley's PBS Firing Line show aired in December 1997, where it was resolved that "Evolutionists should acknowledge creation." The debate was emblematic of the new creationism, employing new euphemisms such as "intelligent-design theory," "abrupt appearance theory," and "initial complexity theory," where it was argued that the "irreducible complexity" of life proves it was created by an intelligent designer, or God.)

  For my money, however, the quintessential example of a smart person believing a weird thing is Frank Tipler, a professor of theoretical mathematics at Tulane University and one of the world's leading cosmologists and global general relativists. Tipler enjoys close friendships with such luminaries as Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, and Kip Thorne. He has published hundreds of technical papers in leading physics journals, and when he is doing traditional physics he is held in high regard among his colleagues. Yet Tipler also authored the 1996 book, The Physics of Immortality: Modern Cosmology, God and the Resurrection of the Dead, in which he claims to prove (through no fewer than 122 pages of mathematical equations and physics formulas in an "Appendix for Scientists") that God exists, the afterlife is real, and we will all be resurrected in the far future of the universe through a super computer with a memory large enough to re-create a reality virtually indistinguishable from our own. This is Star Trek's holodeck writ large.

  How can we reconcile this belief with the fact of Tipler's towering intellect? I posed this question to a number of his colleagues. Caltech's Kip Thorne shook his head in utter befuddlement, notin
g in an exchange with Tipler at Caltech that while each step in Tipler's argument was scientifically sound, the leaps between the steps were wholly unfounded. A UCLA cosmologist said she thought Tipler must have needed the money, for why else would anyone write such nonsense? Others offered less printable assessments. I even asked Stephen Hawking's opinion, who said (through his now-infamous voice synthesizer): "My opinion would be libelous."

  Of course, to be sure, both Tipler and Dembski would see me as the one with the weird belief—a dogmatic skepticism in the face of their overwhelming empirical evidence and logical reasoning. "You can't libel the laws of physics," Tipler responded when I told him of Hawking's assessment. "If I didn't think there was something to these design arguments I wouldn't be making them," Dembski told me. So it is reasonable to be skeptical even of the skeptics, although we would do well to remember that the burden of proof is on those making the original claims, not on the skeptics who challenge them. My aim here, however, is not to assess the validity of these claims (I know Dembski and Tipler and consider them friends, yet I critique Dembski's ideas in my book How We Believe, and I made Tipler's theory the penultimate chapter of this book). Rather, my purpose is to explore the relationship between intelligence (and other psychological variables) and beliefs—particularly beliefs that, by almost any standard (and regardless if they turn out to be right or wrong) are considered to be on the fringe.

  Weird Things, Smart People

  Through my work as the editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine, the executive director of the Skeptics Society, and as the "Skeptic" columnist for Scientific American, the analysis and explanation of what we loosely refer to as "weird things" are a daily routine. Unfortunately, there is no formal definition of a weird thing that most people can agree upon, because it depends so much on the particular claim being made in the context of the knowledge base that surrounds it and the individual or community proclaiming it. One person's weird belief might be another's normal theory, and a weird belief at one time might subsequently become normal. Stones falling from the sky were once the belief of a few daffy Englishmen; today we have an accepted theory of meteorites. In the jargon of science philosopher Thomas Kuhn (1962, 1977), revolutionary ideas that are initially anathema to the accepted paradigm, in time may become normal science as the field undergoes a paradigm shift.