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During this process his colleagues talk to the audience until the answer comes. For this final question, however, the effect was one of unbearable anticipation. Asked an essentially unanswerable question, Hawking sat there in his chair, rigid and stone quiet, only his eyes darting back and forth across the computer screen. One had the feeling of having traveled to Delphi or Mecca, now forced to wait in bursting expectation of The Answer to the Biggest Question. A minute or two went by as cosmologist Kip Thorne politely explained how Stephen’s computer works. Finally it came. With humor and politeness Hawking, wisely, explained: “I do not answer God questions.”

It did not matter, because the answers themselves do not matter as much as the process of thinking about the questions and contemplating their ultimate meaning. God is not dead because God represents these ultimate concepts that have been with us as long as we have been human. It is the concepts themselves that reach into the deepest parts of our minds. To contemplate them is not the exclusive domain of either science or religion. It belongs to all of humanity. To that end science too is sacred in the sense of pondering these majestic and timeless issues. What can be more soul shaking than peering through a 100-inch telescope at a distant galaxy, holding a 100-million-year-old fossil or a 500,000-year-old stone tool in one’s hand, standing before the immense chasm of space and time that is the Grand Canyon, or listening to a scientist who gazed upon the face of the universe’s creation and did not blink? That is deep and sacred science.

Chapter 3

THE BELIEF ENGINE

How We Believe

We do everything by custom, even believe by it; our very axioms, let us boast of freethinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned.

—Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, III, 1836

At 9:00 P.M. on Wednesday evening, August 3, 1997, the renowned sage and Vedic philosopher from India, Sri Leachim Remresh, took to the airwaves on WGN radio’s Milt Rosenberg Show to offer pearls of psychic wisdom to Chicago listeners. Remresh explained that he presently lives in Sedona, Arizona, a New Age capital of sorts, where the Earth’s mystical energies are focused in special vortices. Having traveled extensively throughout India, and studied under some of the great Himalayan sages, Remresh enlightened his listeners on how the linear mode of Western scientific thinking restricts our ability to perceive other dimensions, times, and forces. Callers were told they need only give their birth date and ask a single question for Remresh to tap into the cosmic vibrations.

The first caller, a woman born in 1953, wanted to know if her present relationship was going to work out. Remresh cut straight to the woman’s heart, telling her that she had previously been married but was now in a relationship with a man who was not as committed as she. In fact, he might even have someone else on the side. The woman gasped in acknowledgment. That was precisely the problem. What should she do? Remresh told her that she already knew what she needed to do. Another caller, a woman born in 1941, wanted to know what she should do about her son. Remresh once again drew upon psychic harmonies, telling the woman that her son was presently adrift in life but that in a few years he would turn his life around; she should not worry too much that he has no goals. Remresh was absolutely right. She wished her son would do something, anything! She gave Remresh a 95 percent psychic accuracy rating. The host then announced he had an even more startling revelation, right after the break, of course.

Sri Leachim Remresh, it was revealed, was simply Michael Shermer spelled backwards (with a couple of letter reversals to ease pronunciation). I was in Chicago as part of my national book tour for Why People Believe Weird Things, and Milt asked if I would play along with this experiment to show how easy it is to appear to have special insight into people’s lives, and how convinced people can become