The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [107]
William K. Clifford, The Ethics of Belief (1874)
At the borders of science - and sometimes as a carry-over from prescientific thinking - lurks a range of ideas that are appealing, or at least modestly mind-boggling, but that have not been conscientiously worked over with a baloney detection kit, at least by their advocates: the notion, say, that the Earth’s surface is on the inside, not the outside, of a sphere; or claims that you can levitate yourself by meditating and that ballet dancers and basketball players routinely get up so high by levitating; or the proposition that I have something called a soul, made not of matter or energy, but of something else for which there is no other evidence, and which after my death might return to animate a cow or a worm.
Typical offerings of pseudoscience and superstition - this is merely a representative, not a comprehensive list - are astrology; the Bermuda Triangle; ‘Big Foot’ and the Loch Ness monster; ghosts; the ‘evil eye’; multi-coloured halo-like ‘auras’ said to surround the heads of everyone (with colour personalized); extrasensory perception (ESP), such as telepathy, precognition, telekinesis, and ‘remote viewing’ of distant places; the belief that 13 is an ‘unlucky’ number (because of which many no-nonsense office buildings and hotels in America pass directly from the twelfth to the fourteenth floors - why take chances?); bleeding statues; the conviction that carrying the severed foot of a rabbit around with you brings good luck; divining rods, dowsing and water witching; ‘facilitated communication’ in autism; the belief that razor blades stay sharper when kept inside small cardboard pyramids, and other tenets of ‘pyramidology’; phone calls (none of them collect) from the dead; the prophecies of Nostradamus; the alleged discovery that untrained flatworms can learn a task by eating the ground-up remains of other, better educated flatworms; the notion that more crimes are committed when the Moon is full; palmistry; numerology; polygraphy; comets, tea leaves and ‘monstrous’ births as prodigies of future events (plus the divinations fashionable in earlier epochs, accomplished by viewing entrails, smoke, the shapes of flames, shadows and excrement; listening to gurgling stomachs, and even, for a brief period, examining tables of logarithms); ‘photography’ of past events, such as the crucifixion of Jesus; a Russian elephant that speaks fluently; ‘sensitives’ who, when carelessly blindfolded, read books with their fingertips; Edgar Cayce (who predicted that in the 1960s the ‘lost’ continent of Atlantis would ‘rise’) and other ‘prophets’, sleeping and awake; diet quackery; out-of-body (e.g., near-death) experiences interpreted as real events in the external world; faith-healer fraud; Ouija boards; the emotional lives of geraniums, uncovered by intrepid use of a ‘lie detector’; water remembering what molecules used to be dissolved in it; telling character from facial features or bumps on the head; the ‘hundredth monkey’ confusion and other claims that whatever a small fraction of us wants to be true really is true; human beings spontaneously bursting into flame and being burned to a crisp; 3-cycle biorhythms; perpetual motion machines, promising unlimited supplies of energy (but all of which, for one reason or another, are withheld from close examination by sceptics); the systematically inept predictions of Jeane Dixon (who ‘predicted’ a 1953 Soviet invasion of Iran and in 1965 that the USSR would beat the US to put the first human on the Moon*) and other professional ‘psychics’; the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ prediction that the world would end in 1917, and many similar prophecies; dianetics and Scientology; Carlos Castaneda and ‘sorcery’; claims of finding the remains of Noah’s Ark; the ‘Amityville Horror’ and other hauntings; and accounts of a small brontosaurus crashing through