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By Root 507 0

and almost never foolproof. What I want to believe based on emotions and what I should believe based on evidence do not always coincide. I’m a skeptic not because I do not want to believe, but because I want to know. How can we tell the difference between what we would like to be true and what is actually true?

The answer is science. We live in the Age of Science, in which beliefs are supposed to be grounded in rock-solid evidence and empirical data. Why, then, do so many people believe in what most scientists would consider to be the unbelievable?

The Demographics of Belief

In a 2009 Harris Poll of 2,303 adult Americans, people were asked to “indicate for each [category below] if you believe in it, or not.” The results were revealing.1

God

82 %

Miracles

76 %

Heaven

75 %

Jesus is God or the Son of God

73 %

Angels

72 %

Survival of the soul after death

71 %

The resurrection of Jesus Christ

70 %

Hell

61 %

The virgin birth (of Jesus)

61 %

The devil

60 %

Darwin’s theory of evolution

45 %

Ghosts

42 %

Creationism

40 %

UFOs

32 %

Astrology

26 %

Witches

23 %

Reincarnation

20 %

More people believe in angels and the devil than believe in the theory of evolution. Disturbing. And yet, such results do not surprise me, as they match findings in similar surveys conducted over the past several decades,2 including internationally.3 For example, in a 2006 Reader’s Digest survey of 1,006 adult Britons, 43 percent of respondents said that they can read other people’s thoughts or have their thoughts read, more than half said that they have had a dream or premonition of an event that then occurred, more than two-thirds said they could feel when someone was looking at them, 26 percent said they had sensed when a loved one was ill or in trouble, and 62 percent said that they could tell who was calling before they picked up the phone. A fifth said they had seen a ghost, and nearly a third said they believe that near-death experiences (NDEs) are evidence for an afterlife.4

Although the specific percentages of belief in the supernatural and the paranormal across countries and decades vary slightly, the numbers remain fairly consistent: a majority of people hold some form of paranormal or supernatural belief.5 Alarmed by such figures and concerned about the dismal state of science education and its role in fostering belief in the paranormal, the National Science Foundation (NSF) conducted its own extensive survey of beliefs in both the paranormal and pseudoscience, concluding “Such beliefs may sometimes be fueled by the media’s miscommunication of science and the scientific process.”6

I, too, would like to lay the blame at the feet of the media, because the fix then seems straightforward—just improve how we communicate science. But that’s too easy, and it isn’t even supported by the NSF’s own data. Although belief in extrasensory perception (ESP) decreased from 65 percent among high school graduates to 60 percent among college graduates, and belief in magnetic therapy dropped from 71 percent among high school graduates to 55 percent among college graduates, that still leaves more than half of educated people fully endorsing such claims! And for embracing alternative medicine (a form of pseudoscience), the percentages actually increased, from 89 percent for high school grads to 92 percent for college grads.

Part of the problem may be that 70 percent of Americans still do not understand the scientific process, defined in the NSF study as grasping probability, the experimental method, and hypothesis testing. So one solution here is teaching how science works in addition to what science knows. A 2002 article in Skeptic magazine entitled “Science Education Is No Guarantee of Skepticism” presented the results of a study that found no correlation between science knowledge (facts about the world) and paranormal beliefs. “Students that scored well on these [science knowledge] tests were