Why do people believe in ghosts and amulets? Because they want to believe

Book review: }Superstition, And Why People Believe Weird ThingsB – OtherConfusions of Our Time

,306pp, $22.95 Michael Shermer. WH Freeman and Company
12.5.1999
By: Yosef Neuman

In surveys conducted in the 46s in the USA, it became clear that 19% of the adult population believe in psychic perception, 65% believe in the existence of witches, 42% believe in the biblical flood, 72% believe that it is possible to communicate with the dead, 22% believe that there are angels and - XNUMX% of the Americans who participated in the survey answered that the Holocaust might not have happened.
How can such findings be explained in the "age of science?" How to explain the flourishing of esoteric classes, the phenomena of mass hysteria or the existence of historians who deny the Holocaust? These are troubling questions, and in recent years several books have been published that tried to answer them. One of them, "A Haunted World - Science as a Fiddler in Alta," was translated into Hebrew and reviewed in this supplement. The uniqueness of the book before us is that it discusses a very wide range of topics - astrology, psychic activity, Satan worship, Ayn Rand's "objectivist" movement, creationism, Holocaust denial and various phenomena of mass hysteria.
The author, Michael Shermer, is a historian of science, and in addition he is also the editor of a magazine called "The Skeptic" and the chairman of the "Association of Skeptics". It was personal experience that made him a "professional" skeptic. A few years ago, Shermer interviewed John Marino, the US long-distance cycling champion (3,000 km from coast to coast), to insist on the secret of his success. Marino revealed to him that his success came from virtue A series of tricks that included, among other things, a vegetarian diet, vitamins, fasting, mud baths, acupuncture, mobilizing the power of the pyramids and using negative ions.
Shermer, who was very eager to win the championship, decided to systematically test the entire set of treatments for himself, one by one, and found that they were all useless. As a result, he decided to examine other extraordinary claims as well. His work brought him to several personal conflicts, some of which will be mentioned later, and they add a dramatic touch to his book.
What is skepticism? This is a critical position or method, an attempt to examine every claim and find out what (and who) is behind it. Criticality is essential because humans are capable of believing almost anything, and the results are sometimes fatal. One can mention the witch hunts in Europe at the beginning of the modern era, but phenomena of mass hysteria also occur today.
How can strange claims be handled? First, says Shermer, one must find out if the claims are true; Secondly, it is necessary to examine which well-known and solid truths that have proven themselves to be contrary to, and what price we will be required to pay if we accept them. Sometimes it is also useful to examine what is the background, what is the training and what are the motives of the people presenting the claim. The main tool at our disposal is science - a method based on experiment, observation, logic, and statistical analysis - and with it, baseless claims can be tattooed. In recent years, following the important book of the philosopher and historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions," there has been a challenge to the accepted notion that science reveals objective truth and that it is continuously progressing. Kuhn's extreme followers, the relativists, prefer to see scientific theories as culture-dependent structures, the fruit of convention, similar to the rules of a sports game. According to this approach, it is possible to assess the truth of scientific theories in any period only in relation to the overt and hidden assumptions of the scientific community dealing with the field in question, and there is no scale for preferring one theory over another. According to this approach, Darwinism has no priority over the "science" of creation, or astronomy over astrology. This is a wrong conclusion.
Kuhn's appeal concerns the comparison of the truth of deep metaphysical assumptions in different periods, and not the validity of specific theories. Einstein's theory of relativity did not abolish Newton's mechanics, it limited it to certain conditions. Scientific theories are tested experimentally by the community of scientists in every field, and if they do not pass these tests over time they are abandoned. This is one of the great advantages of science, which has a self-correcting mechanism.
In contrast, mysticism is the fruit of personal revelation, its "truths" are not tested by empirical and public standards and are immune to any refuting evidence. Shermer is not a zealous follower of science and does not turn it into a new religion. He tries to take a balanced position between extreme skepticism that leads to closures to every new idea, and boundless openness according to which "anything goes."
In view of the great successes of science it is not surprising that even people who advocate esoteric ideas or religious beliefs claim to be "scientific". Creationists who deny evolution and Darwinism and rely on the story of creation call themselves "creation scientists," and a sect that prefers the Christian faith over medicine has adopted the name Science Christian.
Modesty is also not the measure of the heads of various classes. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, opens his main book with the sentence "The discovery of Scientology is a signpost for humanity similar to the discovery of fire and it surpasses the invention of the wheel and the bow." The psychologist Wilhelm Reich claimed that "the discovery of orgonomy (the name that is supposed to indicate sexual energy) constitutes a revolution in biology and psychology that is no less important than the Copernican revolution!"
In the different chapters of the book, Schermer tries to refute a long series of false claims. How to convince "creation scientists" about the existence of biological evolution? Its existence is proven by the combination of many testimonies from different fields - geology, the reality of fossils, comparative anatomy, molecular genetics and more, and all this is the result of 200 years of scientific research. No evidence alone has "evolution" written on it. The basic mistake of the "creation scientists" is the absurd attempt to turn myth into science. Creationists (without explicitly admitting it) deny not only biological evolution, but also cosmology, physics, geology, paleontology, archeology and much of human history. If you believe in God's power to influence the laws of nature, all science is invalid.
Historical sciences cannot be tested experimentally, but this does not mean that they do not rely on evidence. The variety of evidence for the existence of the Holocaust is enormous - eyewitness testimony of the victims, the perpetrators and passive witnesses, photographs and films, remains of the extermination camps, as well as demographic evidence of the decline of the Jewish people after the war. And yet there are people who deny its existence. According to the philosophical tradition, one should not use ad hominem arguments, meaning one should not refer to the motives of the claimants but to the claims themselves. However, when, despite all the evidence, there are people who deny the Holocaust (and a considerable public listens to them), there is an interest in finding out who these people are and what motivates them, and Schermer does this thoroughly.
Schermer found a similarity in the way the "creation scientists" and Holocaust deniers were treated: taking quotes out of context, exploiting and inflating every marginal controversy that arose in the accepted theory as evidence of the denial of the entire field. However, in the last hundred years, the Darwinists are the ones who have provided evidence for the evolutionary theory, and anyone who pretends to offer an alternative theory is on him. After all, in this polemic it is appropriate to adopt the advice of Arthur Kestler: "These people should be taken and forced to read the appropriate literature for a year."
An important factor that explains the temptation and power of vanity beliefs is our ignorance and failures to understand statistics and probability. Shermer visited the famous Edward Case Institute in Virginia, USA, which specializes in the study of parapsychological phenomena.
There he confronted one of the institute's employees, who claimed that through fortune-telling with cards he was able to identify people with extrasensory perception (ESP). Shermer refuted his claim, clearly showing that the results obtained in the "experiment" do not deviate from the statistical dispersion expected according to the "bell curve."
The tendency to attribute a deep meaning to accidental events or to see them as an expression of mysterious forces is quite common. For example, it turns out that in a group of 30 people there are two who were born on the same date. It seems that the probability of this is very low, but no - the probability is 71% or, for example: you intend to call so-and-so and at that very moment the phone rings and he is on the line. telepathy? Not necessarily. People tend to forget how often it doesn't happen: you mean to call a certain person, the phone rings and someone else is on the line. Or how many times a certain person rings, although our thoughts are given to another thing or person. The same is true in the field of astrology. Does the position of the planets at the time of birth affect our destiny? The answer is no. But for that there is no need to delve into the movement of the planets and the law of gravity. It's enough to ask if the astrologers deliver the goods and check how many of their predictions match it.
Shermer discusses in detail various phenomena of mass hysteria - from the witch hunts at the beginning of the modern era to the events that are happening right before our eyes (more precisely, before the eyes of US residents. A separate book should be written about what is happening here). What characterizes them is that they spread like wildfire. The discovery of the first "witches" required more "vigilance," this vigilance led to further "discoveries" and God forbid it was in the century The .16 may be surprising, but on August 31, 1944, in a small town in the USA, a woman claimed that in the dead of night a stranger entered her house, sprayed her legs with gas and caused her temporary paralysis. A local newspaper published the news, and after a few days more cases of paralysis were reported. The number of reports grew, the police were mobilized, the men guarded their homes with guns drawn. After a long investigation nothing was found and the matter was forgotten. In the 80s, the rumor spread in the US that thousands of satanic classes were secretly operating throughout the country, engaged in animal sacrifice, sexual assault of children and Satan worship - all of these things turned out to be falsehoods.
Another phenomenon that has reached epidemic proportions is the "recovery of repressed memories" of women who suffered sexual abuse. Cases of sexual abuse of children are indeed known, but the accusations turned out to be false in many cases, the memories were not "restored" but were implanted in the minds of the patients by agile hypnotherapists - through hypnosis, watching tapes that supposedly recorded a similar process in other women, and other methods of brainwashing. All this indicates the intolerable ease with which people are influenced by preachers, idol doctors, psychics and other eyewitnesses. The influence of these increases in crisis situations. It is interesting to mention that following the intoxication of the senses after the Six Day War, the parapsychological association led by Margot Klausner, who organized séances and claimed to communicate with the dead, also began to flourish here. The prejudices and the vanity beliefs have deep roots. People believe false promises because they want to believe them. People long for simple and immediate answers, while scientific explanations are complex and require a lot of effort. What's more, science is seen as cold, abstract, based on logic, and the world it describes is intellectual, hostile and foreign. Man is aware of his death and his life, which is full of uncertainties.
All these are a constant source of anxiety, but science cannot deny these facts: on the contrary, it reinforces them. In contrast, the myths, magic or religion offer immediate comfort as well as moral instructions. In stressful situations, the critical tools weaken, and those who promise eternal life manage to inspire hope and trust (and win an adequate return for their bank account). Belief in the next world is ancient, and perhaps its roots are evolutionary. This belief probably served man to one degree or another of success in the distant past. However, in the face of complex and complicated problems - in the societies of the past and even more so in the modern society in which we live - these beliefs can deteriorate the individual and also an entire society into catastrophe.
There are people who wonder about the fact that the belief in spirits or mysterious forces does not decrease in the "age of science". It is common to think that science eliminates prejudices, and that with the development of science, the belief in phenomena such as witches, demons and ghosts will decrease. This is a mistake. The medieval craze of witch-hunting began precisely at the time when experimental science began to establish itself. Furthermore, science and myth have existed side by side since the beginning of science and philosophy in Greece, some 2,500 years ago.
Shermer, like other researchers discussing similar issues, tries to offer ways to deal with the tendency to superstition, and how to stop the various forces that increase and exploit this tendency. From everything that has been described it is clear that this is not an easy task. The means that Schermer and others suggest are, among other things, education, the cultivation of critical thinking and a serious defense against the ongoing "information" attack from the television and tabloid pages that serve powerful economic and political interests. However, some weaknesses should be mentioned. One is misplaced rulings. Thus, for example, specific refutations of specific supersensible phenomena do not completely negate the existence of phenomena of this type. Also, there is no mention of an entire field that developed a few years ago, based on biofeedback and other methods, through which humans can, in some cases, control the autonomic nervous system and influence physiological processes, things that were previously considered impossible. Another disadvantage is the lack of regard for the limitations of science. Science is not omnipotent: the great achievements of science since the scientific revolution in the 16th and 17th centuries blinded the eyes of Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Rousseau, who believed that through the right method it would be possible to discover the truth not only in relation to the world around us but also in social life , the political and moral and everything that concerns the existence of the individual and the mental processes. This is an illusion that even today not everyone has been freed from (especially scientists).
Finally, a book that encompasses so many fields of knowledge will inevitably contain errors. Two of the most prominent are the statement that the child receives 25% of the genes from each parent - he receives 50% and the second, that the verdict in the Demaniuk trial that was conducted at the time in Israel stated that the accused was innocent, while the court ruled that due to doubt it cannot be established that Demaniuk is Ivan the Terrible.
However, these mistakes, and others that I must have overlooked, do not detract from the great importance of the book. In this period, when the wave of brainwashing is increasing in Israel, the use of amulets, spells and curses, which even influence weighty political and existential decisions, it is appropriate that a publisher be found who will publish in Hebrew, and thereby make even a modest contribution to stopping the murky wave.

* Prof. Yosef Neuman is a biology and philosophy lecturer at Tel Aviv University

Published on - 12/05/1999