Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time (49 page)

6. 
The Problem of History and the Lost Past.
A human being may be only a computer consisting of DNA and neuronal memories, but a human
life,
that is, the
history
of a human, is much more than DNA and neuronal memories. It is a product of all a person's interactions with other lives and life histories, plus the environment, itself a product of countless interactions as a function of countless conjunctures of events in a complex matrix with so many variables that it is inconceivable that even Tipler's computer, which can store 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123 bits (a 1 followed by 10
¹²³
zeros), could represent it. (This figure depends on the Bekenstein bound being real, which cosmologist Kip Thorne says is highly questionable.) Even if it had the computational power to reconstruct all the innumerable historical necessities—climate, geography, population immigrations and emigrations, wars, political revolutions, economic cycles, recessions and depressions, social trends, religious revolutions, paradigm shifts, ideological revolutions, and the like—how does Omega/God recapture all the individual conjunctures, all the interactions between the contingencies and necessities of history?

Tipler's answer is that quantum mechanics tells us there can be only a finite number of these memories, events, and historical conjunctures, and because the computers of the far future will have unlimited computing power, they will be able to resurrect every possible variation of you at all given times in your life. But, on page 158, Tipler confesses to a significant problem with an aspect of this answer: "I should warn the reader that I have ignored the problem of opacity and the problem of loss of coherence of the light. Until these are taken into account, I cannot say exactly how much information can in fact be extracted from the past." The problem of the irrecoverable past is serious, since history is a conjuncture of events compelling a certain course of action by constraining prior events. History often turns on tiny contingencies, very few of which we know about. Given the sensitive dependence on initial conditions—the butterfly effect—how does Omega/God resurrect all the butterflies?

This perception of history derails Drs. Tipler and Pangloss, as Voltaire noted at the end of
Candide:

Pangloss sometimes said to Candide: "All events are linked up in this best of all possible worlds; for, if you had not been expelled from the noble castle by hard kicks in your backside for love of Mademoiselle Cunegonde, if you had not been clapped into the Inquisition, if you had not wandered about America on foot, if you had not stuck your sword in the Baron, if you had not lost all your sheep from the land of Eldorado, you would not be eating candied citrons and pistachios here......Tis well said," replied Candide, "but we must cultivate our gardens." (1985, p. 328)

Namely, whatever the sequence of contingencies and necessities in our lives and in history, the outcome would have seemed equally inevitable. But in Candide's response is another kernel of truth. We can never know all of the contingencies and necessities guiding history at any given point in time, let alone the initial conditions of any historical sequence, and from this methodological weakness comes philosophical strength. Human freedom—cultivating our gardens—may be found not only in our inability to process all the data of the past and present but also in our ignorance of the initial conditions and conjunctures of events that shape our actions. We are free in our ignorance, free in the knowledge that most of the causes that determine us are lost to the past. . . forever. It is in this knowledge, rather than in the physics of immortality and resurrection by supercomputers, that hope springs eternal.

17

Why
Do
People Believe Weird Things?

On the evening of Thursday, May 16, 1996,1 walked across burning coals barefoot for an episode of the PBS show.
Bill Nye "The Science Guy"
The producers of this splendid science education series geared toward children wanted to do a segment on pseudoscience and the paranormal, and they thought a scientific explanation for firewalking would make for dramatic television. Since Bill Nye is my daughter's hero, I agreed to host the firewalk. Bernard Leikind, a plasma physicist and one of the world's leading experts on firewalking, got the fire going, spread out the coals, and strolled across, sans shoes, socks, or blisters. As I made my way to the edge of the coals, Leikind reminded me that the temperature in the middle of the raked-out path was about 800°F, I tried to focus on his assurance that this was not a matter of the power of positive thinking but of physics. When you bake a cake in an oven, by way of analogy, the air, the cake, and the metal pan are all at 400°F, but only the pan will burn your skin. Hot coals, even at 800°F, are like cake—they do not conduct heat very quickly—so as long as I strode across the bed without delay I should be safe. My naked toes, inches away from the glowing red coals, were skeptical. This was no cakewalk, they told my brain. It wasn't, but six feet and three seconds later, they were none the worse for wear. My confidence in science was restored, right down to my toes.

Firewalking. What a weird thing to do. I have filing cabinets and bookshelves filled with the records of such weird things. But what constitutes a weird thing? I have no formal definition. Weird things are like pornography—difficult to define but obvious when you see them. Each claim, case, or person must be examined individually. One person's weird thing might be another's cherished belief. Who's to say?

Well, one criteria—the criteria of choice for me and millions of others—is science. What, we ask, is the scientific evidence for a claim? Infomercial megastar Tony Robbins, the self-help guru who got his start in the early 1980s by holding weekend seminars climaxing in a firewalk, queries his audience: "What would happen if you were to discover a way to achieve any goal you desire now?" If you can walk on hot coals, says Robbins, you can accomplish anything. Can Tony Robbins really walk barefoot over hot coals without burning his feet? Sure he can. So can I. So can you. But you and I can do it without meditating, chanting, or paying hundreds of dollars for a seminar because firewalking has nothing to do with mental power. Belief that it does is what I would call a weird thing.

Firewalkers, psychics, UFOlogists, alien abductees, cryonicists, immortalists, Objectivists, creationists, Holocaust deniers, extreme Afro-centrists, racial theorists, and cosmologists who believe science proves God—we have met a lot of people who believe a lot of weird things. And I can assure you after two decades of tracking such people and beliefs that I have only scratched the surface in this book. What are we to make of these?

• Whole Life Expo workshops on such topics as "Electromagnetic Ghostbusting," "Megabrain: New Tools for Mind Expansion," "The Revolutionary Energy Machine," and "Lazaris," the 35,000-year-old guru channeled by Jach Pursel.

• The Brain/Mind Expansion Intensive Dome "designed by John-David for a broad range of brain/mind expansion applications, including brain damage re-education." The dome comes complete with a "comprehensive sound training and Certification Training, stereo decks, amplifiers, switchers, cables and the Brain/Mind Matrix Mixer (pat. pending). Soundproofing materials and consulting also included." The price? Only $65,000.

• A bulk-mailing card instructing you to rub a purple spot on the card with your index finger and then to "press your finger firmly in the ball below and roll it from left to right. You are now ready to call THE COSMIC CONNECTION!" The connection is a 900 number, of course, costing only $3.95 per minute. "An experienced psychic will enlighten you on all matters PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE!"

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.