13
Obsessed with Reality
A shipowner was about to send to sea an emigrant ship. He knew that she was old, and not overwell built at the first; that she had seen many seas and climes, and often had needed repairs. Doubts had been suggested to him that possibly she was not seaworthy. These doubts preyed upon his mind, and made him unhappy; he thought that perhaps he ought to have her thoroughly overhauled and refitted, even though this should put him to great expense. Before the ship sailed, however, he succeeded in overcoming these melancholy reflections. He said to himself that she had gone safely through so many voyages and weathered so many storms, that it was idle to suppose that she would not come safely home from this trip also. He would put his trust in Providence, which could hardly fail to protect all these unhappy families that were leaving their fatherland to seek for better times elsewhere. He would dismiss from his mind all ungenerous suspicions about the honesty of builders and contractors. In such ways he acquired a sincere and comfortable conviction that his vessel was thoroughly safe and seaworthy; he watched her departure with a light heart, and benevolent wishes for the success of the exiles in their strange new home that was to be; and he got his insurance money when she went down in mid ocean and told no tales. What shall we say of him? Surely this, that he was verily guilty of the death of those men. It is admitted that he did sincerely believe in the soundness of his ship; but the sincerity of his conviction can in nowise help him, because he had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him. He had acquired his belief not by honestly earning it in patient investigation, but by stifling his doubts . . .
William K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief (1874)
At the borders of science – and sometimes as a carry-over from prescientific thinking – lurks a range of ideas that are appealing, or at least modestly mind-boggling, but that have not been conscientiously worked over with a baloney detection kit, at least by their advocates: the notion, say, that the Earth’s surface is on the inside, not the outside, of a sphere; or claims that you can levitate yourself by meditating and that ballet dancers and basketball players routinely get up so high by levitating; or the proposition that I have something called a soul, made not of matter or energy, but of something else for which there is no other evidence, and which after my death might return to animate a cow or a worm.
Typical offerings of pseudoscience and superstition – this is merely a representative, not a comprehensive list – are astrology; the Bermuda Triangle; ‘Big Foot’ and the Loch Ness monster; ghosts; the ‘evil eye’; multi-coloured halo-like ‘auras’ said to surround the heads of everyone (with colour personalized); extrasensory perception (ESP), such as telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, and ‘remote viewing’ of distant places; the belief that 13 is an ‘unlucky’ number (because of which many no-nonsense office buildings and hotels in America pass directly from the twelfth to the fourteenth floors – why take chances?); bleeding statues; the conviction that carrying the severed foot of a rabbit around with you brings good luck; divining rods, dowsing and water witching; ‘facilitated communication’ in autism; the belief that razor blades stay sharper when kept inside small cardboard pyramids, and other tenets of ‘pyramidology’; phone calls (none of them collect) from the dead; the prophecies of Nostradamus; the alleged discovery that untrained flatworms can learn a task by eating the ground-up remains of other, better educated flatworms; the notion that more crimes are committed when the Moon is full; palmistry; numerology; polygraphy; comets, tea leaves and ‘monstrous’ births as prodigies of future events (plus the divinations fashionable in earlier epochs, accomplished by viewing entrails, smoke, the shapes of flames, shadows and excrement; listening to gurgling stomachs, and even, for a brief period, examining tables of logarithms); ‘photography’ of past events, such as the crucifixion of Jesus; a Russian elephant that speaks fluently; ‘sensitives’ who, when carelessly blindfolded, read books with their fingertips; Edgar Cayce (who predicted that in the 1960s the ‘lost’ continent of Atlantis would ‘rise’) and other ‘prophets’, sleeping and awake; diet quackery; out-of-body (e.g., near-death) experiences interpreted as real events in the external world; faith-healer fraud; Ouija boards; the emotional lives of geraniums, uncovered by intrepid use of a ‘lie detector’; water remembering what molecules used to be dissolved in it; telling character from facial features or bumps on the head; the ‘hundredth monkey’ confusion and other claims that whatever a small fraction of us wants to be true really is true; human beings spontaneously bursting into flame and being burned to a crisp; 3-cycle biorhythms; perpetual motion machines, promising unlimited supplies of energy (but all of which, for one reason or another, are withheld from close examination by sceptics); the systematically inept predictions of Jeane Dixon (who ‘predicted’ a 1953 Soviet invasion of Iran and in 1965 that the USSR would beat the US to put the first human on the Moon*) and other professional ‘psychics’; the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ prediction that the world would end in 1917, and many similar prophecies; dianetics and Scientology; Carlos Castaneda and ‘sorcery’; claims of finding the remains of Noah’s Ark; the ‘Amityville Horror’ and other hauntings; and accounts of a small brontosaurus crashing through the rain forests of the Congo Republic of our time. [An in-depth discussion of many such claims can be found in Encyclopedia of the Paranormal, Gordon Stein, ed., Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1996.]
[* Violating the rules for ‘Oraclers and Wizards’ given by Thomas Ady in 1656: ‘In doubtful things, they gave doubtful answers . . . Where were more certain probabilities, there they gave more certain answers.’]
Many of these doctrines are rejected out of hand by fundamentalist Christians and Jews because the Bible so enjoins. Deuteronomy (xviii, 10, 11) reads (in the King James translation):
There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch. Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer.
Astrology, channelling, Ouija boards, predicting the future and much else is forbidden. The author of Deuteronomy does not argue that such practices fail to deliver what they promise. But they are ‘abominations’, perhaps suitable for other nations, but not for the followers of God. And even the Apostle Paul, so credulous on so many matters, counsels us to ‘prove all things’.
The twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides goes further than Deuteronomy, in that he makes explicit that these pseudosciences don’t work:
It is forbidden to engage in astrology, to utilize charms, to whisper incantations . . . All of these practices are nothing more than lies and deceptions used by ancient pagan peoples to deceive the masses and lead them astray . . . Wise and intelligent people know better. [From the Mishneh Torah, Avodah Zara, Chapter 11.]
Some claims are hard to test – for example, if an expedition fails to find the ghost or the brontosaurus, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Others are easier – for example, flatworm cannibalistic learning or the announcement that colonies of bacteria subjected to an antibiotic or an agar dish thrive when their prosperity is prayed for (compared to control bacteria unredeemed by prayer). A few -for example, perpetual motion machines – can be excluded on grounds of fundamental physics. Except for them, it’s not that we know before examining the evidence that the notions are false; stranger things are routinely incorporated into the corpus of science.
The question, as always, is how good is the evidence? The burden of proof surely rests on the shoulders of those who advance such claims. Revealingly, some proponents hold that scepticism is a liability, that true science is inquiry without scepticism. They are perhaps halfway there. But halfway doesn’t doit.
Parapsychologist Susan Blackmore describes one of the steps in her transformation to a more sceptical attitude on ‘psychic’ phenomena:
A mother and daughter from Scotland asserted they could pick up images from each other’s minds. They chose to use playing cards for the tests because that is what they used at home. I let them choose the room in which they would be tested and insured that there was no normal way for the ‘receiver’ to see the cards. They failed. They could not get more right than chance predicted and they were terribly disappointed. They had honestly believed they could do it and I began to see how easy it was to be fooled by your own desire to believe.
I had similar experiences with several dowsers, children who claimed they could move objects psychokinetically, and several who said they had telepathic powers. They all failed. Even now I have a five-digit number, a word, and a small object in my kitchen at home. The place and items were chosen by a young man who intends to ‘see’ them while travelling out of his body. They have been there (though regularly changed) for three years. So far, though, he has had no success.