Caveman Logic: The Persistence of Primitive Thinking in a Modern World (11 page)

Obviously, lack of scientific support for the pseudoscience that Park decries has done nothing to diminish its appeal. The US government could come out and report in categorical terms that parapsychological phenomena do not exist. In fact, they did: the National Academy of Sciences issued a report in 1987 stating categorically that, having surveyed 130 years of research and reports, there was “no scientific justification” for any such phenomena. That includes reading minds, foretelling the future, influencing physical objects with thoughts, and so on. It mattered not. Belief continues to grow. Talk to a “believer” and he will tell you that the government either looked at the wrong evidence or is part of a massive conspiracy to keep paranormal abilities secret so they can be put to some malignant use. Belief in alien visitations and abductions follows the same pattern. Either the real data weren’t examined or the government continues to maintain a massive cover-up operation out in the New Mexican desert somewhere, as it has since 1947.

If you are reading this book in the United States, you are living in one of the most religious nations on earth. The United States is one of the few places where a political candidate can announce that he asked God what to do with his life and God told him to run for president. Indeed, a PBS
Frontline
feature on April 29, 2004, reported that on the day he was inaugurated as the governor of Texas, George W. Bush announced, “I believe that God wants me to be president.” Such statements about personal dialogue with a deity might be grounds for commitment to a mental institution in some places. To any but a born-again Christian, such presumptions about knowing the mind of God might seem arrogant, at the least, especially when they are so nakedly self-aggrandizing. In the United States, where nearly half of the US Congress received 80-100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Rights groups in 2004, they are a way to broaden one’s political appeal.

A 2004 survey commissioned by the BBC
¹³
reports that Great Britain is among the most secular nations on earth. In fact, more than a quarter of persons surveyed believed that the world would be a more peaceful place if nobody believed in God. Nevertheless, 67 percent of Britons reported that they believed in God or a higher power. Depending on your point of view, that number may appear particularly high or extremely low. To add perspective, the comparable figure for Nigerians was 100 percent. Indeed, the study revealed that the highest levels of supernatural belief are found in “the world’s poorer nations,” such as Nigeria, India, and Indonesia. However, any attempts at drawing simple correlations with wealth, education, or standard of living have to contend with the United States, which excels in all three categories and yet reports a belief score of 91 percent. In fact, as we shall see, this estimate of American belief may be unduly conservative. Indeed, a further measure of the
depth
of belief in supernatural agency is reflected in the question of whether the informant was willing to die or kill for their God or their beliefs. Seventy-one percent of Americans said they were, placing them in a tie with respondents in Lebanon.

Belief in the active role of dead ancestors or supernatural entities in guiding our daily lives is common to many, if not most of the world’s religions. The May 23, 2006, issue of
Time
magazine reported on an outbreak of avian flu in a village in Sumatra. The public health official on the scene asked the villagers if it was avian flu. “No,” they responded uniformly. The cause was ancestor spirits. When a massive earthquake measuring 7.6 on the Richter scale flattened parts of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan in October 2005,
Time
quoted the imam at the Illahi Bagh Mosque in Srinagar, India, as saying, “Whatever the scientists say, our Prophet said that when this Earth is replete with sin, this would happen.”

Even atheism gets a black eye from the BBC study, which reports that 30 percent of atheists, regardless of nationality, admitted to praying occasionally. A 2008 Pew Trust poll
¹⁴
reports that 21 percent of self-described atheists express “a belief in God or a universal spirit.” The figure exceeds 50 percent for self-professed agnostics. If nothing else, these findings underscore the difficulty of keeping prehistoric thinking at bay. Like a dieter trying to resist the lure of French fries or chocolate cake, will power and social support may not always be enough. It is hard work to keep thoughts and actions from occasionally slipping under the control of Pleistocene default settings.

The BBC study revealed that it was a rare nation (such as Great Britain), indeed, that didn’t report at least an 80 percent belief rate. Other surveys paint an even more extreme picture of American belief in supernatural agency. A Gallup poll conducted in May 2004
¹⁵
reports that 90 percent of Americans believe in God (4 percent declare that they do not; the balance are undecided); 81 percent believe in heaven (only 8 percent are willing to report that they do not); 78 percent believe in angels as actual beings (10 percent do not); and 70 percent report belief in the devil and hell as real (17 percent and 19 percent, respectively, do not). These beliefs come at a price. On August 28, 2006,
Time
magazine reported that 77 percent of Americans could name two of Snow White’s dwarves, but only 24 percent could name two Supreme Court justices. According to the
New York Times
, the United States once ranked first in the world in the rate of high school graduation. By 2004, it had slipped to 17th. The United States also ranked 49th in the world in literacy rate, and 28th of 40 countries in mathematical literacy.

An ABC News poll from February 2004
¹⁶
reports that between 60 and 64 percent of Americans hold a literal interpretation of the Bible (the rate differs for different stories, with Moses parting the Red Sea receiving the highest marks, owing perhaps to Charlton Heston’s impact on American culture). These data would suggest that nearly two-thirds of the American population qualify as religious fundamentalists. A Fox News poll from September 2003
¹⁷
provides essentially the same portrait of American supernatural belief, with slightly higher estimates (92 percent belief in God; 85 percent belief in heaven; and 74 percent in hell). According to this same survey, just over one-third of Americans also believe in UFOs and ghosts, and one-quarter of the population believes in reincarnation.

In 2006, the journal
Science
published a cross-cultural comparison of public acceptance of evolution.
¹⁸
Testing samples from 34 countries, the acceptance levels ranged from nearly 90 percent (Iceland), through values in the 80 percent range (Denmark, Sweden, France, Japan), to the 70 percent range (Spain, Germany, Italy, Holland). Poland, Austria, and Croatia lay slightly below in the 60 percent range. At the very bottom of the 34 nations tested were the United States and Turkey. Allowing for sampling error, it may well be that more than half of Americans reject evolution.

Indeed, a more detailed Pew Trust poll conducted in 2005 reports that nearly half of Americans reject Darwinian natural selection as a basic biological principle.
¹⁹
They answer yes when asked if species have always existed exactly as we see them today. Such a view goes well beyond creationism or intelligent design, which confines its disdain for evolution to cases of complex designs such as human beings. There is no such distinction here. This is a magical, unchanging world, a still photograph of life taken the day it was willed into existence (about 5,000-10,000 years ago). Such a view literally denies centuries of observations by naturalists and painstaking research by paleontologists and biologists of all nations and faiths. That is a lot of ignorance to profess.

One might assume that such scientific illiteracy would be accompanied by a greater reliance on the Bible as a source of information about the world. In his book
Religious Literacy
,
²⁰
author Stephen Prothero cites a recent Gallup poll showing that close to two-thirds of Americans believe that the Bible contains the answers to “all or most of life’s basic questions.” This would suggest that biblical literacy has replaced scientific literacy in America. But it hasn’t. Data reported by pollster George Gallup suggest that while they may cite the Bible as an important resource in their lives, Americans are generally as ignorant of its content as they are about science. In fact, Gallup concludes that America is “a nation of Biblical illiterates.”
²¹
The trend appears as dramatically among the families of Evangelicals as it does for the non-Bible-toting person on the street. Americans appear to be a nation of equal-opportunity illiterates.

Compared to the United States, the picture in Canada is a little more reassuring, although by no means cause for celebration. According to a November 2003 survey in
Reader’s Digest
,
²²
64 percent of Canadians in general believe in God. Twenty-seven percent of those surveyed weren’t sure, and 10 percent did not believe in God. Seventy-seven percent of Canadians believed God to be an “impersonal spiritual force,” whereas 17 percent described God as “a person.” Thirteen percent believed God was “punishing.” Fifty-five percent of Canadians professed to believe in an afterlife. When asked about spirituality in general, the numbers are considerably higher. Ninety-five percent of Canadians expressed belief in at least one spiritual or supernatural entity or process. Nearly as many believe in angels (61 percent) as believe in God (64 percent). In addition, 59 percent of Canadians believe in “synchronicity” (the “meaningfulness” of coincidences); 55 percent believe in destiny or karma; 45 percent believe in personal auras; 43 percent in out-of-body experiences; 37 percent in ghosts; 29 percent in past-life regression; and 27 percent in communicating with the dead. These numbers are surprisingly high, given the relatively low percentages associated with ordinary measures of religiosity. In a country where “only” 64 percent of the people believe in God, it seems odd that virtually half the population accepts as part of their day-to-day reality the existence of everything from angels to auras to out-of-body-experiences, with more than a third accepting the existence of ghosts.

The old adage “There are no atheists in foxholes,” may not be true. Just who are these exceptions? Even if there aren’t many of them out there, just
who
is it that does not embrace the supernatural, and how did they get this way?

The headline of an article in the prestigious journal
Nature
in 1998 offers some insight: “Leading Scientists Still Reject God.”
²³
The two key words here turn out to be “leading” and “still.” The latter term refers to the fact that the present study, by Larson and Witham, is a replication of a landmark study performed by James Leuba in 1914. In that work, Leuba reported that 58 percent of US scientists expressed disbelief or doubt in the existence of God. The word “leading” is important because Leuba actually distinguished between competent, everyday scientists and what he took to be the elite subgroup among them. Among that rarified sample of “Greater Scientists,” the disbelief number increased to 70 percent. When Leuba replicated his own study twenty years later, he found those numbers had increased to 67 percent and 85 percent, respectively. In other words, by 1934, only 15 percent of America’s leading scientists professed a belief in God. Moreover, belief in their own personal immortality barely nudged 18 percent.

The purpose of Larson and Witham’s modern replication was to see whether the ensuing sixty-four years had nurtured further supernatural belief in this elite group. Distinguishing between scientists in general and members of the National Academy of Scientists (NAS), Larson and Witham reported that, if anything, the degree of atheism and rejection of the supernatural had grown even more pronounced. By 1998, only 7 percent of “leading scientists” reported believing in God. The number actually dropped to 5.5 percent in biological scientists, with physicists and astronomers slightly higher at 7.5 percent—the same belief rate they held for personal immortality. There are distinctions within the category of “scientist.” The
New York Times
reported in 2008
²⁴
that mathematicians were more likely to believe in God than biologists (14.6 percent vs. 5.5 percent), although both fell considerably below the national rate, which exceeds 90 percent.

Commenting on these data, Oxford University scientist Peter Atkins observed, “You clearly can be a scientist and have religious beliefs. But I don’t think you can be a real scientist in the deepest sense of the word (and believe in supernatural or paranormal agents) because they are such alien categories of knowledge.”
²⁵
This is an interesting distinction. In essence, it suggests that one can be a high school chemistry teacher or perhaps teach first-year physics in a college or university and still believe in God, your immortal soul, angels, heaven, hell, and communication with the dead. There is no reason to believe you won’t do a bang-up job at work. But, as Atkins suggests, if you want to be a “real scientist,” to use his term in its deepest sense, you can’t embrace all that supernatural or paranormal agency into your worldview. It’s not about apples and oranges. It’s about consuming orange juice when you have a life-threatening intolerance to citrus.

In debates, my theist opponents often mention Einstein’s name as evidence that a scientist can also be a “spiritual” person. That’s unfortunate. Einstein is probably not a good example of what my opponents want to celebrate. To be sure, Einstein believed in God, but the nature of that God is frequently misunderstood. Albert Einstein viewed the universe with awe and pondered how a divine spirit might be involved in such lawful goings-on. But he dismissed, often with considerable disdain, the very kind of God that is central to much conservative Christian faith in America today. He was opposed to the notion of a God who became personally involved in the events of our daily lives; a God who answers prayer by altering lottery results, romantic conflicts, health problems, workplace promotions, and the outcomes of athletic contests. Pregame prayers in locker rooms were not the stuff of Einstein’s beliefs. On those matters, Einstein left no room for doubt. He did not believe in a powerful deity whose favors could be curried with a few well-aimed prayers and entreaties.