The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [0]
For our small contribution—6,895 days or 18.9 years from birth to independence—to the metaphorically miraculous 3.5-billion-year continuity of life on Earth from one generation to the next, unbroken over the eons, glorious in its contiguity, spiritual in its contemplation. The mantle is now yours.
For the mind of man is far from the nature of a clear and equal glass, wherein the beams of things should reflect according to their true incidence; nay, it is rather like an enchanted glass, full of superstition and imposture, if it be not delivered and reduced.
—FRANCIS BACON, Novum Organum, 1620
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: I Want to Believe
Part I: Journeys of Belief
1. Mr. D’Arpino’s Dilemma
2. Dr. Collins’s Conversion
3. A Skeptic’s Journey
Part II: The Biology of Belief
4. Patternicity
5. Agenticity
6. The Believing Neuron
Part III: Belief in Things Unseen
7. Belief in the Afterlife
8. Belief in God
9. Belief in Aliens
10. Belief in Conspiracies
Part IV: Belief in Things Seen
11. Politics of Belief
12. Confirmations of Belief
13. Geographies of Belief
14. Cosmologies of Belief
Epilogue: The Truth Is Out There
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
About the Author
Also by Michael Shermer
Copyright
Prologue
I Want to Believe
The 1990s’ über conspiracy-theory television series The X-Files was a decade-defining and culture-reflecting mosh pit of UFOs, extraterrestrials, psychics, demons, monsters, mutants, shape-shifters, serial killers, paranormal phenomena, urban legends turned real, corporate cabals and government cover-ups, and leakages that included a Deep Throat–like “cigarette smoking man” character played, ironically, by real-life skeptic William B. Davis. Gillian Anderson’s skeptical FBI agent Dana Scully played off David Duchovny’s believing character Fox Mulder, whose slogans became posterized pop-culture catchphrases: “I want to believe” and “The truth is out there.”
As the show’s creator-producer Chris Carter developed the series narrative arc, Scully and Mulder came to symbolize skeptics and believers in a psychological tug-of-war between reality and fantasy, fact and fiction, story and legend. So popular was The X-Files that it was parodied in a 1997 episode of The Simpsons entitled “The Springfield Files,” in which Homer has an alien encounter in the woods after imbibing ten bottles of Red Tick Beer. The producers ingeniously employed Leonard Nimoy to voice the intro as he once did for his post-Spock run on the television mystery series In Search of…, a 1970s nonfiction version of The X-Files. Nimoy: “The following tale of alien encounters is true. And by true, I mean false. It’s all lies. But they’re entertaining lies, and in the end isn’t that the real truth? The answer is no.”
No squared. The postmodernist belief in the relativism of truth, coupled with the clicker culture of mass media, in which attention spans are measured in New York minutes, leaves us with a bewildering array of truth claims packaged in infotainment units. It must be true—I saw it on television, the movies, the Internet. The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, That’s Incredible!, The Sixth Sense, Poltergeist, Loose Change, Zeitgeist: The Movie. Mysteries, magic, myths, and monsters. The occult and the supernatural. Conspiracies and cabals. The face on Mars and aliens on Earth. Bigfoot and Loch Ness. ESP and psi. UFOs and ETIs. OBEs and NDEs. JFK, RFK, and MLK Jr.—alphabet conspiracies. Altered states and hypnotic regression. Remote viewing and astroprojection. Ouija boards and tarot cards. Astrology and palm reading. Acupuncture and chiropractic. Repressed memories and false memories. Talking to the dead and listening to your inner child. It’s all an obfuscating amalgam of theory and conjecture, reality and fantasy, nonfiction and science fiction. Cue dramatic music. Darken the backdrop. Cast a shaft of light across the host’s face. Trust no one. The truth is out there. I want to believe.
I believe that the truth is out there but that it is rarely obvious