The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [117]
The book enjoins us not to turn to the next page until we have understood the page we are on. This is one of several factors that makes finishing it difficult.
‘Of doubters,’ it reveals later, ‘I can say only this: let them take from the matter just what they wish. They end up with nothing - a handful of space, perhaps. And what does the believer have? EVERYTHING! All questions are answered, since all and any answers are correct answers. And the answers are right! Argue that, doubter.’
Or: ‘Don’t ask for explanations of everything. Westerners, in particular, are always demanding long-winded descriptions of why this, and why that. Most of what is asked is obvious. Why bother with probing into these matters? ... By belief, all things become true.’
The last page of the book displays a single word in large
letters: we are exhorted to ‘THINK!’
The full text of The Teachings ofCarlos was of course written by Randi. He dashed it off on his laptop computer in a few hours.
The Australian media felt betrayed by one of their own. The leading television programme in the country had gone out of its way to expose shoddy standards of fact-checking and widespread gullibility in institutions devoted to news and public affairs. Some media analysts excused it on the grounds that it obviously wasn’t important; if it had been important, they would have checked it out. There were few mea culpas. None who had been taken in were willing to appear on a retrospective of the ‘Carlos Affair’ scheduled for the following Sunday on Sixty Minutes.
Of course, there’s nothing special about Australia in all of this. Alvarez, Randi, and their co-conspirators could have chosen any nation on Earth and it would have worked. Even those who gave Carlos a national television audience knew enough to ask some sceptical questions - but they couldn’t resist inviting him to appear in the first place. The internecine struggle within the media dominated the headlines after Carlos’s departure. Puzzled commentaries were written about the expose. What was the point? What was proved?
Alvarez and Randi proved how little it takes to tamper with our beliefs, how readily we are led, how easy it is to fool the public when people are lonely and starved for something to believe in. If Carlos had stayed longer in Australia and concentrated more on healing - by prayer, by believing in him, by wishing on his bottled tears, by stroking his crystals - there’s no doubt that people would have reported being cured of many illnesses, especially psycho-genie ones. Even with nothing more fraudulent than his appearance, sayings and ancillary products, some people would have gotten better because of Carlos.
This, again, is the placebo effect found with almost every faith-healer. We believe we’re taking a potent medicine and the pain goes away - for a time at least. And when we believe we’ve received a potent spiritual cure, the disease sometimes also goes away - for a time at least. Some people spontaneously announce that they’ve been cured even when they haven’t. Detailed follow-ups by Nolen, Randi and many others of those who have been told they were cured and agreed that they were - in, say, televised services by American faith-healers - were unable to find even one person with serious organic disease who was in fact cured. Even significant improvement in their condition is dubious. As the Lourdes experience suggests, you may have to go through ten thousand to a million cases before you find one truly startling recovery.
A faith-healer may or may not start out with fraud in mind. But to his amazement, his patients actually seem to be improving. Their emotions are genuine, their gratitude heart-felt. When the healer is criticized, such people rush to his defence. Several elderly attendees of the channelling at the Sydney Opera House were incensed after the Sixty Minutes expose: ‘Never mind what they say,’ they told Alvarez, ‘we believe in you.’
These successes may be enough to convince many charlatans, no matter how cynical they were at