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(Maybe it is not a truly superstitious belief that if I drive without a license I’ll be stopped by an officer. It may be that if I drive without a license I cannot stop thinking I have no license, and cannot stop looking in the mirror for a police car. It’s my imagination I cannot control, not my logic.)

We’ve been taught by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that many people are innocent of statistical sampling, that many get “anchored” by a randomly produced number, that many are seduced by “representativeness,” and many don’t understand “regression to the mean.” You walk into a public library in the suburb of a large city and see a man, dressed in tie and jacket, reading Thucydides; you have already learned that he is either a concert violinist or a truck driver. Which do you guess he is? Considering that there are 10,000 concert violinists in the country and 2 million truck drivers, if 1 in 200 truck drivers is as likely as any single concert violinist to read Thucydides in the public library dressed in jacket and tie, you should guess truck driver, but you (and I) usually don’t.

RELIGION AND SUPERSTITION

An article in the magazine of the American Association of Retired People on the prevalence of belief in miracles reported that among 1,300 people over 45 years of age 80 percent believed in miracles. Fully 37 percent said they had actually witnessed one. The article defined a miracle as “an incredible event that cannot be scientifically explained.” (What about credible events that cannot be scientifically explained? Believers must find miracles credible, else they’d not believe in them.)

The American Heritage Dictionary defines miracle as “an event that appears unexplainable by the laws of nature and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of god.” It defines superstition as “a belief, practice, or rite irrationally maintained by ignorance of the laws of nature or by faith in magic or chance.” (Emphasis added.) If magic is supernatural, these definitions are distinguished mainly by the somewhat superfluous adjective irrationally.

Of course, what is in accordance with the laws of nature can be somewhat ephemeral. Isaac Newton believed in the transmutation of elements; alchemy was not yet against the laws of nature. Eventually the laws of nature made the transformation of one element into another not possible. Then, in the twentieth century, it proved possible to convert Uranium 238 into Plutonium 239 by irradiation.

In 1997, a religious organization called Heavensgate believed that a space vehicle was hidden on the far side of the Hale Bopp comet and could be accessed by the devout if they would commit communal suicide. Seventy-five followers killed themselves. Was their belief “against the laws of nature”? Most of us don’t believe they made it to the other side of Hale Bopp but many of us do believe in heaven and hell, which “appear unexplainable by the laws of nature.” As miracles go, the Heavensgate project is not uniquely unimaginable, but the media treated it as superstition.

During the New Hampshire Republican primary campaign George H. W. Bush shouted at Ronald Reagan, “That’s Voodoo economics!” (I couldn’t tell whether he capitalized voodoo.) I doubt whether anyone would dare to say, in a New Hampshire primary campaign, “That’s Mormon economics” or “That’s Seventh Day Adventist economics” or “That’s Jehovah’s Witnesses economics.” There might be a Mormon, or an Adventist, or a Witness in the audience but probably not someone from Haiti registered to vote.

Most people I encounter appear willing to dismiss Voodoo as superstition, are amusedly patronizing of Native American theology, but respectful of monotheisms whether or not they subscribe to one.

All three of the world’s great monotheisms entail prayer, “a reverent petition made to a deity or other object of worship” (American Heritage Dictionary ). It is no insult to those who pray to observe that a response to a reverent petition