Here are some video clips of people claiming to have supernatural powers.
In the first, magicians Penn and Teller debunk a person who claims that she can talk to dead people. (Language advisory)
Notice how, when she interviews the black man at the end about whom she has no inside information, she resorts to inferences based on racial stereotypes and simple hereditary similarities in order to make her guesses. She is clearly hoping that he has a father, uncle, or other father figure who died from heart disease. Such ‘mediums’ often play the odds this way.
In the next clip, Penn and Teller take a look at someone who claims that she can talk to animals using telepathy
In the third clip, Penn and Teller and fellow magician James Randi debunk Nostradamus-based predictions.
In the final one Penn and Teller take a look at an exorcist at work. (Language advisory)
What do all these things have in common? They all share one feature and that is that unscrupulous people are taking advantage of people’s gullibility about the existence of the supernatural and using their emotional needs to con them. A lot of people would love to talk with their dead loved ones, they would love to talk to their pets, they would love to know what lies in the future, they would love to think that their problems are caused by demons that can be removed by a simple procedure. Thus they are only too eager to believe charlatans who promise them that they can do these things.
But all this rampant naïve credulity about the supernatural has to have a source. Why are there so many people who are so willing to believe things for which there is no evidence? I think that it is because religion has softened their minds up since childhood, weakening their powers of reasoning and logic. It has taught them that there are mysterious things out there that are beyond the reach of normal logic and evidence and science, and that one must simply believe in them. Such people are easy prey to all the charlatans out there, out to make a quick buck.
It is necessary for their very survival that religious organizations cultivate a deliberate naivete in their flock. They may say they appealing to the virtues of unthinking faith for noble reasons but they are effectively making their religious followers susceptible to fraud.
In Christopher Hitchens’ book God is Not Great, he describes how religions depend upon and take advantage of people’s credulity.
It is not snobbish to notice the way in which people show their gullibility and their herd instinct, and their wish, or perhaps their need, to be credulous and to be fooled. This is an ancient problem. Credulity may be a form of innocence, and even innocuous in itself, but it provides a standing invitation for the wicked and the clever to exploit their brothers and sisters, and is thus one of humanity’s great vulnerabilities. No honest account of the growth and persistence of religion, or the reception of miracles and revelations, is possible without reference to this stubborn fact. (p. 160)
Without people being indoctrinated early on by religion, these other fraudsters would have a much harder time making a go of it. They depend on the dulling of reason and the intellect produced by religion in order to ply their trade.
The most recent XKCD meshes perfectly with your post.
The most recent XKCD meshes perfectly with your post.
The most recent XKCD meshes perfectly with your post.
The most recent XKCD meshes perfectly with your post.
The most recent XKCD meshes perfectly with your post.
The most recent XKCD meshes perfectly with your post.
The most recent XKCD meshes perfectly with your post.
Hi Mano,
This is a very interesting post. I’ve long be an advocate for the
scientific investigation and (to date, demonstrably universal)
debunking of claims of supernatural and paranormal phenomena. These
kinds of things are wonderful examples of the power of the application
of the scientific method. And of course, if any of these supernatural
phenomena were real and demonstrable, then science would be just as
effective and proving these claims to be true. But it has never
happened. I always like to point out that James Randi still has his
million dollars.
Having said this, however, I do have a bone to pick here. When you
say “It is necessary for their very survival that religious
organizations cultivate a deliberate naivete in their flock. They may
say they appealing to the virtues of unthinking faith for noble
reasons but they are effectively making their religious followers
susceptible to fraud….” I would ask, what evidence do you have to
support such a claim?
Again, I am making my usual complaint here that perhaps you unfairly
characterize all religious perspectives as manifesting those traits
that are characteristic of fundamentalist/literalist perspectives. I
will certainly grant you that if a particular religious perspective
requires that the methods of science be rejected outright, because the
application of such methods leads to a direct contradiction with
specific doctrinal religious claims, then I agree this certainly
weakens the likelihood that practitioners of such a particular
religion will employ such methods when considering the plausibility of
supernatural phenomena. And, in fairness, since the influence of
fundamentalists/literalists in the US and around the world is
significant, then in principle I suppose this could play an important
role.
But personally, I suspect that the reason why people are gullible has
much less to do with the negative influence of religions as a whole
much more to with the fact that many people simply do not understand
(and do not wants to understand) how science works and how scientific
evidence can be used to support or refute a particular claim.
So perhaps the blame can be laid more at the feet of those of us who’s
job it is to educate and convey what the power and value of science,
and less at the feet of religion as a concept. I might argue that the
fact that so many people are vulnerable to supernatural flim-flam has
less to do with the pervasive influence of religion and more to do with
the fact that scientists and those who advocate for the scientific
method have not done a very good job of explaining why and how these
claims should be investigated scientifically. So with the possible
exception of fundamentalist religion of all kinds, I do not see much
empirical evidence for your assertion that religion as a concept plays
a significant factor in determining the vulnerability of any
individual to false supernatural or pseudo-scientific claims.
For example, it seems to me that if your supposition were true, then
one might expect that people who live in Russia or mainland China —
places where the influence of organized religion has been
substantially diminished — would be significantly less inclined to be
susceptible to the influence of superstitions, those who make claims
supernatural abilities, and/or pseudo-scientific claims. But my
understanding is that superstition and pseudo-science is alive and
well in these places.
Consider further, these tidbits (which I found on the web site of the
British Humanist Association:)
— Surveys in the UK: 1954 10% believed in ghosts; in 2004 42%.
— In the UK: Before WWII the population who regularly went to church
on Sundays was 40% to 50%. Today it is only 7.5 percent.
So here is at least one counter-example of a modern society where it
can be demonstrated that a dramatic decrease in the direct influence
of the dominant religion is anti-correlated with with a likewise
dramatic increase in the same population’s surveyed acceptance of at
least one major supernatural belief, namely the existence of ghosts.
Corbin,
Evidence is not necessary in the face of self-contradiction. Telling children from the earliest age that there is an invisible Magic Man who can do the most amazing things without being detected is hardly the thing to do if you want to do to build respect for reason, logic, and evidence, is it?
Of course, people believe in these other things for other reasons as well. I have argued before that the desire to believe in an afterlife likely predates and may be antecedent to belief in god.
But it beats me how you can instill in children an unquestioning belief in a Magic Man and then argue that all the people shown in the post are obviously frauds. The distinction between “fundamentalist” religion and “non-fundamentalist” religion seems to me to be more of a political division.
Hi Mano,
Hmmm. I think I will stand by my post.
First, I am a little surprised to hear you argue that you do “not need
evidence” to support your assertion. I would think that given that
you are attempting to make a persuasive argument, and given that the
topic is controversial, and (mostly) given your general advocacy on
behalf of the power of evidence, that this would be important,
regardless of your topic. Even if all of your assumptions were dead-on
accurate, and even if your logic was impeccable, you would still
strengthen your claim if you were able to point to any kind of
measurements or observable facts that would logically follow from your
claim. Conversely, if you are unable or unwilling to provide
empirical evidence to support your assertion when asked to do so,
doesn’t this weaken the strength of your argument? Can you
effectively argue that you do not need evidence to support your claim
when it seems that your whole philosophy is based on the notion that
nothing should be taken for granted without supporting evidence?
Indeed, it seems to me that simply pointing out what appears — to you
personally — to be a logical self-contradiction in the viewpoints of
religious persons does not automatically imply a general gullibility
of these selfsame persons to all kinds of supernatural claims. If
exposure to and acceptance of any kind of religious ideas universally
undermined respect for reason, logic, and evidence, then one might
expect that religious people would be demonstrably handicapped and
unqualified to apply critical thinking and the scientific method in
all kinds of other situations where this was needed. But as you,
yourself, have argued, there is no evidence to suggest that religious
people who work as scientists, doctors, lawyers, etc., are in any way
less capable of effectively performing their jobs just because they
are religious.
I also do not share your characterization of the distinction between
fundamentalist vs. non-fundamentalist as essentially political. To my
understanding the distinction is doctrinal, not political, and to just
this extent it makes quite a big difference in terms of the logical
implications of your argument. When you characterize a religious
tradition as advocating an “unquestioning belief in a Magic Man” then
this seems to me like a patently fundamentalist perspective. If, on
the other hand, we have a more liberal religious perspective where the
narratives represent metaphor and poetry, not empirical facts, then I
do not see how can such a teaching automatically undermine a skeptical
approach to specific claims of supernatural abilities.
Further, I would say that to my mind the people shown in the video
posts who are making claims of paranormal abilities are not
“obviously” frauds. The charter of CSICOP, which provides a very
effective guideline to my view, provide that we should not dismiss
paranormal claims “a priori” (e.g., simply because we find them
personally ridiculous). Instead we dismiss these claims because they
can be objectively investigated and scientifically refuted (as was
done nicely in these videos). The people are frauds because the
claims that are made can be directly and measurably contradicted and
falsified using the scientific method.
In contrast, if a person has a liberal religious perspective where all
of the religious teachings are to interpreted as poetry, not empirical
truths, such teachings are subject to neither empirical verification
nor refutation. And just to this extent, I believe, there is a
qualitative difference between those who would make the kinds of
in-principle-testable claims that were made in the video clips and
those who would embrace a doctrinally “non-fundamentalist” (liberal)
religious perspective.
Corbin,
Are you making the claim that a non-fundamentalist religion consists of nothing more than metaphor and poetry, and that any claim that religion involves more than that is what makes it fundamental? If you claim that all religious beliefs and texts have the same status as metaphor and poetry, then I have no problems with religion, anymore than I have with Shakespeare.
But almost all religions require their believers to believe in the most fantastical supernatural things at a very young age. That hardly seems the way to promote scientific thinking. The fact that large numbers continue, even after they reach adulthood, to refuse to apply to their religious beliefs the normal tenets of skepticism that they may apply elsewhere is surely evidence of a weakened commitment to reason.
Hi Mano,
The answer to your question “Are you making a claim that a
non-fundamentalist religion consists of nothing more than metaphor and
poetry” is mostly yes, but before I make any attempt to defend this
claim, I should say that I do not believe my criticism of your
assertion — namely, that religion leads to increased gullibility
in general regarding claims of the supernatural — depends much on the
validity of this particular claim.
As I said before, even if it were the case that I were to grant all of
your general assumptions regarding the nature of religion, I am not
persuaded that people who are raised in a religious environment will
actually be significantly more gullible than anyone else to the sorts
of supernatural claims you show in the video. Yes, this sounds
plausible. And it might be true. But I do not know, and I can think
of some things that are apparent counterexamples, and might work the
other way. So in the absence of evidence to support your claim, I
remain unpersuaded.
Indeed, I would say that there is not really any such thing as an
argument that you or anyone else can make where there is no obligation
to consider evidence that might support a given claim. The claim that
“religion generally causes people to be more gullible to bogus claims
of supernatural phenomena” is a an assertion of fact, and it ought to
be testable based on the expected consequences. In this case, for
example, if what you say is true, then one ought to be able to show
statistically in some kind of survey or psychological tests that
people who are members of all kinds of religious organization have
some measurable traits indicating that they are less skeptical about
these sorts of claims or like this, relative to those who would not be
members of any religious organizations. In my opinion, if you are
unable to present measurable evidence, then this weakens your
argument, regardless of any other considerations.
By the way, regarding your point above that many people with religious
beliefs fail to apply the standards of skepticism to these beliefs and
that this fact is in itself evidence of a “weakened commitment to
reason”: Even if I grant you premise as true, I do not see how this
fact has much bearing on the question of gullibility to claims of
supernatural phenomena in general. Indeed, you yourself have argued
in the past that people who hold particular religious beliefs seem
quite happy to dismiss others beliefs of the supernatural as highly
implausible. I’ve even read one article a while back where the author
claims that as the influence of organized religion in modern society
wanes, there is an associated rise in fascination with the occult, New
Age, pseudo-science, etc. in the general population. His claim was
that there is a natural tendency towards belief in the supernatural,
and as religion wanes, other things will come in to “fill the vacuum”.
I am not sure if this idea is really true, but it would at least would
explain the anti-correlation where declining attendance in church is
accompanied by an increase in beliefs in ghosts. So crazy as it
sounds, if people have a strong tendency to believe in the
supernatural (and are therefore quite resistant to “reasoned”
arguments of skeptics and atheists) then it might be the case that
on average religion actually inoculates people against gullibility
to being scammed by those who claim to have supernatural powers.
Under this scenario, the trait of “gullibility” is not much effected
by religious training or experience, and is instead either an
“intrinsic” characteristic of a certain fraction of the population, or
else is a characteristic that is governed by other variable in the
upbringing environment or education. Admittedly, I have no
particularly compelling evidence to support such a scenario, but in my
view such a scenario is at least as plausible to me as your assertion
that religion itself promotes gullibility. And, in consideration of a
completely non-scientific assessment, if I were a betting man, I might
have to put my money on this idea that gullibility is a largely
“intrinsic trait”. I have three daughters, each ostensibly raised in
the same “environment” and of these one is dramatically “gullible” to
this sort of thing (we have to talk to her constantly about this
business of drawing the line between “fantasy” vs. “reality”), while
we have another daughter is sort of a “natural skeptic”, not buying
into almost anything that anyone tells her without first checking the
facts for herself. My (admittedly unsupportable) suspicion is that
gullibility to supernatural and pseudo-scientific claims is wildly
variable from person to person, being a by-product of temperament, and
that this variability is generally not significantly influence by
typical religious training, and (sadly) also apparently not very much
influence by education training either — although I am not inclined
to give up trying on this front.
Now turning to this second issue, “Are you making the claim that a
non-fundamentalist religion consists of nothing more than metaphor and
poetry, and that any claim that religion involves more than that is
what makes it fundamental?” I would say yes, but there are two
caveats.
The first is that I assume when you say “of nothing more than metaphor
and poetry” you are talking about in the sense of not making specific
claims that are to be taken as “factually and literally true” in the
empirical sense of the word.
I like your Shakespeare analogy quite a bit, actually. In some sense,
I might say that the works of Shakespeare are “nothing more” than a
bunch of made-up stories about events that never really happened. And
at the same time — in a poetic sense — the works of Shakespeare are
to some people deeply meaningful, profound, and life-changing. Or at
least worth spending time with. For some people the poetic “truths”
that are found between the pages of Shakespeare are of equal or
greater value than the “factual truths” that can be demonstrated to
many decimal places of significance through scientific endeavors.
So I would say that this also applies for many adherents of
non-fundamentalist religions. In these cases, the value of religion
has very little to do with issues of factual or literal truths and
instead has much more to do with what you might call poetic, artistic,
and/or experiential “truths”. All of these kinds of “truths” are, it
seems to me, generally inaccessible to any sort of scientific
assessment one way or the other.
Secondly, perhaps some would quibble with my definition of
“fundamentalist”. I am not a scholar of religion or religious
history, so I may well be using the term in a non-standard way. But
to me, personally, would classify as “fundamentalist” pretty much any
religious claim that is presented along with an assertion that the
claim is to be interpreted as factually true.
Of course there are degrees of fundamentalism, and religious groups
can span the range from very fundamentalist (making explicit claims
that there is a large set of beliefs and text that are all literally
and factually true) to very liberal (making explicit claims that
precisely none of the tenets and texts are to be taken as factually
true). And there are religions that lie in between. A good example
of a very liberal religious denomination would be the Unitarian
Universalists which (as I understand it) actually take the time to
rather explicitly look at a wide range of cultural and religious
traditions, each time starting with the caveat that every tradition
and text is to be interpreted metaphorically. I would say that in the
case of most other “mainstream” religious traditions there is a mix of
both fundamentalist and liberal views and which will dominate will
vary greatly from denomination to denomination, and from local group
to local group.
I would say further that while fundamentalist religious perspectives
seem to dominate the religious landscape in the US, it is also true
that finding groups that advocate and/or happily tolerate dominantly
liberal viewpoints are not hard to find either. It’s not hard to find
books, blogs, etc. which are doctrinally liberal (and are also usually
also socially progressive).
In particular I would take issue with your assertion that “almost all
religions require their believers to believe in the most fantastical
supernatural things at a very young age.” I find it very implausible
that “almost all” religions apply any such a requirement. This is
certainly not my experience. I can think of many people I know who are
members of religious groups that they attend which they selected, at
least in part, because precisely no such requirement is imposed on
them — or their children. So just to the extent that critics of
religion characterize religion as doctrinally rigid and demanding, is
the extent to which such criticisms are unfairly applied to those
denominations and groups which impose no such doctrinal requirements.
I am not sure of the numbers, and it certainly varies based on
geographical location and other demographics, but religious
organization that are doctrinally dominantly liberal or
moderate-to-liberal are easy enough to find. They may be in the
minority in our culture, but they are not a completely negligible
minority. And when you criticize religion as a whole for having
characteristics that are specific to fundamentalist perspectives,
effectively lumping liberals in with everyone else, in my view you are
doing something akin to stereotyping.