No Sacred Cows

by David G. McAfee

  Although I think this investigative approach to the paranormal is a good one, I’m not under the delusion that my work is inherently special or that my ideas have never before been seen. Critical thinking has been around forever and I simply want to help popularize it for everyone. I can’t count the number of times I’ve dreamed up of what I thought was a revolutionary idea, only to then realize James Randi or Carl Sagan or another great thinker had the same idea years earlier. As Dr. Michael F. Shaughnessy of Eastern New Mexico University and Jeanine Pinkney have noted, the quest for critical thinking is “nothing new.”

  “In ancient legend, Eve craved the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, and Socrates goaded the young men of Athens to question assumptions and discern subtleties,” Shaughnessy and Pinkney wrote in Teaching Critical Thinking Skills: A Modern Mandate.10 “However, such earlier efforts were not accompanied by legal or social mandate that all children must develop proficiency. Indeed, Eve and Socrates were punished for their quests.”

  After some time engaging in discussions involving the implausible and paranormal, I was surprised at the large number of atheists, some (but not all) of whom actively opposed religion and/or belief in deities, who were sucked into other equally ridiculous notions and belief systems. I concluded that, whether it’s supernatural claims, superstitions, or unfounded and farfetched conspiracy theories, unsubstantiated beliefs serve as sanctuaries for the nonreligious yet faithful. Some people might even give up belief in gods and religion only to find new beliefs about which to be irrational and apologetic; they simply want to believe (see chapter 4). I also found out that, by consistently treating religion the same as any other superstitious belief, some religious believers would unintentionally make that same connection and recognize that they are indeed related. They could see that I don’t hate their god and that I’m not picking on their particular religion, I’m just doing what I do—pointing out the flaws in faith-based thinking and promoting scientific skepticism and logical reasoning. Similarly, some people who advocate for astrology or any other pseudoscientific practice recognized that my objections were about evidence, and not disdain for spirituality or magic. Some believers do more with this realization than others, including giving up supernatural beliefs entirely, but it’s an important point to note regardless of the long-term outcome of the individuals at issue.

  THE SUPERNATURAL SURGE

  Although secular supernatural beliefs and theistic religious beliefs are similar and often connected, they are different in one key aspect: adherence to unaffiliated paranormal ideas is continuing to grow in areas where organized religion is slowly being disregarded in light of modernity and the age of information. For instance, in America, polls suggest that somewhere between 31 and 48 percent of adults believe in ghosts.111213 The situation in Britain is even more astounding. In October 2013, a “Belief in Post-Religious Britain” survey for the Christian think tank Theos found that 77 percent of participants believed that, “there are things in life that we simply cannot explain through science or any other means,” while 59 percent believed in “some kind of spiritual being or essence.”14 Although the numerous polling agencies vary in their estimates, each of them reports a growth in belief in nonreligious supernatural concepts over previous years.

  Popular media is at least partly responsible for the renewed popularization of some nonreligious but faith-based beliefs, including psychics, ghosts, Bigfoot, and the ancient astronaut theory. At the center of this pop culture resurgence are “reality” television shows and “documentaries” that promote the beliefs, including shows like Crossing Over with John Edward, Ghost Hunters, Finding Bigfoot, and Ancient Aliens. One popular series that purports to show evidence of the paranormal, Most Haunted, makes me wonder what, specifically, most haunted actually means. Is it the building that has been scientifically shown to have the most ghosts per square foot? It must be difficult to measure “hauntedness” levels without a single scientifically proven haunting.

  TV shows built on supernatural foundations are based on unproven (and in many cases unprovable) ideas, yet they are often taken as true accounts by uninformed viewers. This acceptance ushers in a new generation of believers who buy into the false hope and outright lies the shows often peddle, and is basically a paranormal version of the CSI effect, which attributes jurors’ unrealistic expectations when it comes to evidence partly to TV crime dramas like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.15 Because of the credulity of the public at large when it comes to these faulty claims, it’s important to point out that otherworldly TV shows and faux documentaries are not accurate representations of reality and they certainly don’t prove any outlandish theories or paranormal claims. In fact, for the most part, they are heavily edited programs mostly meant for entertainment purposes. Unfortunately, however, that doesn’t mean some people aren’t convinced by them.16 For the most part, I fault dishonest filmmakers. As English journalist Nick Cohen has noted, however, there is enough blame to go around.

  “Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you. They can harm no one, if no one listens to them. Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you. Believers are the liars’ enablers. Their votes give the demagogue his power. Their trust turns the charlatan into the president.”

  While these misinformation videos may seem to answer questions at times, the “answers” provided aren’t valuable and they are not to be confused with real scientific understandings or typical results. Much like the search for gods throughout history, these shows and movies have provided zero solid evidence for any supernatural or otherworldly claim. The pursuit of deities is so much like these other claims, in fact, that I expect there will one day be a show that follows so-called God Hunters—people who travel to sites of alleged religious miracles with electromagnetic field (EMF) meters and audio recorders to search for signs of divine intervention.17 After all, there are already numerous profitable TV shows spawned from this same flawed premise: a group of people searching fruitlessly for that which has never been shown to exist. It’s both sad and true that some people, including many producers of these shows, convince audiences they are making sense out of nonsense just by being intellectually dishonest in their presentation of the facts and ignoring answers rooted in real scientific research. That is not to say, however, that I can’t enjoy TV shows and other media related to the paranormal. In fact, I particularly enjoy when documentaries purport to show the “best evidence” for ghosts, psychics, and aliens who visit earth, because they expose how little evidence exists for those claims.18

  In Long Island Medium, an American reality series on Discovery’s TLC (formerly and ironically dubbed The Learning Channel) network, viewers follow the life of alleged medium Theresa Caputo. Like most so-called psychics, Caputo pretends to speak to her customers’ dead relatives, providing false hope—and faulty information—in exchange for a paycheck. Using classic cold-reading tactics, dramatized emotional interactions, and skillful editing, Long Island Medium has convinced thousands of people that Caputo can talk to the dead. But that doesn’t change the fact that no psychic has ever scientifically proven his or her talent—and this case is no different. In fact, stage magician and well-known skeptic James Randi called the show “utter nonsense and dangerous,” and his James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) awarded Caputo a Pigasus Award for Performance in 2012 for being the “psychic” performer who fooled the greatest number of people with the least effort in the preceding year.19 This example, while not inherently unique, draws attention to how easy it can be to fool others into believing the impossible, using nothing more than basic deception tactics and video editing (see chapter 11).

  For nearly two decades, the JREF, a nonprofit organization founded by Randi in 1996, offered a million-dollar prize to anyone who could show, under proper observing conditions, scientific evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event. A number of other skeptical organizations have tested paranormal claims, as well. The Independent Investigations Group at
the Center for Inquiry–Los Angeles, for example, an international network of trained investigators who look into paranormal claims, administers a substantially similar $100,000 challenge.20 Between 1997 and 2015, when the JREF announced it would terminate the challenge in favor of becoming a grant-making organization, the group received hundreds of official, notarized applications for its Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. Randi’s own words, however, highlight how unlikely it is that any supernatural claim will ever be empirically verified: “I don’t expect that the million will ever be won, simply because there is no confirming evidence for any paranormal claims to date,” he said.

  Despite the fact that no supernatural or paranormal forces have ever been shown to exist, belief in them remains rampant—even among the nonreligious and otherwise intelligent.

  “The hard but just rule is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away. Don’t waste any neurons on what doesn’t work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better explain the data. Valid criticism is doing you a favor.”

  —Carl Sagan

  NOTES

  1. “I am a great admirer of mystery and magic. Look at this life—all mystery and magic.”—Harry Houdini

  2. I majored in Religious Studies at a public university and learned about all religions, their histories, and how they interacted with one another over time. Theology classes, usually offered by private religious institutions, are often overtly religious in nature and involve studying scriptures from the perspective that they are divinely inspired.

  3. It was obvious to me throughout my religious studies education and earlier that, if one was interested in learning about the “mythologies” of humanity’s future, he or she would only need to examine the religions of today.

  4. David G. McAfee, “Why We Should Teach Religion to Children,” Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, September 28, 2013, richarddawkins.net/2013/09/why-we-should-teach-religion-to-children.

  5. David G. McAfee and Chuck Harrison, The Belief Book (Great Britain: Dangerous Little Books, 2015) and David G. McAfee and Chuck Harrison, The Book of Gods (Atheist Republic, 2016).

  6. David G. McAfee, Disproving Christianity and Other Secular Writings (Great Britain: Dangerous Little Books, 2011).

  7. David G. McAfee, Mom, Dad, I’m an Atheist: The Guide to Coming Out as a Non-Believer (Great Britain: Dangerous Little Books, 2012).

  8. While writing a book titled Disproving Islam or Disproving Judaism would be more of a lateral move than a step back, I think it’s important to note that many of the ideas in Disproving Christianity can be logically applied to other faiths, especially the Abrahamic traditions.

  9. For this book, I took the skills I used studying religion as a natural phenomenon and applied them to researching all sorts of false and paranormal beliefs. I call this discipline supernatural studies.

  10. Jeanine Pinkney and Michael F. Shaughnessy, “Teaching Critical Thinking Skills: A Modern Mandate.” International Journal of Academic Research 5, no. 3 (2013).

  11. “31% Believe in Ghosts,” Rasmussen Reports, October 30, 2011, www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/lifestyle/holidays/october_2011/31_believe_in_ghosts.

  12. Lee Speigel, “Spooky Number Of Americans Believe In Ghosts,” Huffington Post, February 2, 2013, www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/02/real-ghosts-americans-poll_n_2049485.html.

  13. Sean Alfano, “Poll: Majority Believe in Ghosts.” CBS News, October 29, 2015, www.cbsnews.com/2100-500160_162-994766.html.

  14. The Spirit of Things Unseen (London: Theos, 2013), www.theosthinktank.co.uk/publications/2013/10/17/the-spirit-of-things-unseen-belief-inpostreligious-britain.

  15. Nicholas J. Schweitzer and Michael J. Saks, “The CSI Effect: Popular Fiction about Forensic Science Affects the Public’s Expectations about Real Forensic Science,” Jurimetrics (2007): 357–364.

  16. Sometimes I wonder what the world would be like if everyone believed what they saw on these supernatural mockumentaries and TV shows, but then I realize it wouldn’t make much of a difference since so many people already do.

  17. These methods and devices are commonly used by paranormalists looking for evidence of ghosts. They will be more thoroughly described in chapter 10.

  18. I’ll talk more about entertainment surrounding the supernatural and fictional in chapter 8.

  19. Karen Stollznow, “Long Island Medium: A Tall Story,” James Randi Educational Foundation, March 6, 2016.

  20. “The IIG $100,000 Challenge,” Independent Investigations Group, March 6, 2016, iighq.org/index.php/challenge.

  1

  NO SACRED COWS

  “We live, after all, in a world where illusions are sacred and truth profane.”

  —Tariq Ali

  You know what they say: “never talk about religion or politics.” That is, of course, unless you want to engage in discussion about some of the most important topics of this or any generation. Keeping certain beliefs out of discussions might keep them protected from further examination, but I don’t think that’s a good thing. Every idea should receive criticism and challenges to determine its worth—without exception. There is no special treatment; there are no sacred cows. As Winston Churchill said, “Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.”

  WHAT IS A “SACRED COW”?

  In Hinduism and some other religions, cattle are especially revered and considered a sacred symbol of wealth or the earth, or of a giver of nourishment.1 There is a lot of academic debate2 over how the sanctity of cows became a part of Hinduism (Was it a result of the economic or ecological3 benefits, a purely spiritual belief, or something else altogether?), but one thing is for sure: despite drastic changes in the way we live, that reverence didn’t cease in the modern era. In fact, the veneration of the cow and its elevated status within certain cultures has continued and even thrived over time. While this phenomenon might sound odd or extreme to some outsiders, the fact is that cultures and people very often have their own locally familiar yet outlandish beliefs that they accept without much scrutiny, largely due to tradition alone.

  As an idiom, a sacred cow has come to mean any idea that is thought to be immune from question or criticism. Many believers (of all sorts) insist that their particular sacred cows be avoided at all costs, often arguing that their beliefs are too old, widely held, or otherwise unworldly to be criticized or—in some extreme cases—even discussed in any way. For example, a religious person might feel comfortable disregarding the notion of telepathy as nothing more than nonsense, while clinging to petitionary prayer as a sacred and spiritual connection above critique or material examination. Likewise, a believer in psychics might scoff at a religious fundamentalist’s strict adherence to a completely unsupported dogma, while excusing or ignoring the fact that no so-called mediums have ever proven their abilities and refusing to address the topic entirely.

  In each of the two scenarios described above, the believer rejects criticisms of their sacred ideology while actively mocking another person’s—all without realizing what is really going on. This type of dissociative reasoning is possible with any topic, but is exacerbated by the very nature of all things supernatural or otherwise unfalsifiable because these subjects are often considered to be inherently (and conveniently) beyond practical investigation. This approach may seem like a safe one for believers who don’t want their ideas to be tested, but it creates a problem for anyone asserting that the supernatural world affects our own. Many religious believers, for instance, claim their god is “outside space and time” and can’t be shown to be real, but then in the next breath say their god came to earth as a man or inspired holy books. This “argument” is put forth by all kinds of believers who insist they know a significant amount about a supernatural presence that interacts with people on earth, and it always fails. The reasoning is flawed because claiming that your particular god, ghost, or other unknowable f
orce or entity is beyond proof is rigging the game—and often nothing more than an attempt to distract from the real issue: a lack of substance. The bottom line is that you can claim that your sacred cow can’t be tested by scientific inquiry, but then you can’t say it intervenes in the world—because, if it does, we can investigate it. This beyond reproach mentality, over time, has contributed to the social taboos on investigations (and sometimes even discussions) involving religion, the supernatural, and other cherished beliefs. Fortunately, not all researchers conform to these taboos. Can you imagine what the world would look like if every scientist—or even the vast majority of them—thought a particular hypothesis was too sacred to test or replace? It would undermine the very nature of scientific inquiry itself. American astronomer and cosmologist Carl Sagan, it seems, would agree. He said, “There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.”

  DON’T MARRY YOUR BELIEFS

  Some people, especially those with firmly held yet unproven beliefs, think my writing is necessarily argumentative—that skeptical inquiry cannot be encouraged without confrontation. But what they call arguments should actually be regarded as discussions … and possibly some of the most important in human history.

  I’m aware that the topics I discuss are controversial, but, despite what some people believe, I don’t mean to offend anyone with what I do. I’m very clear about my intentions: I want to help people think critically, analyze their beliefs, and follow the evidence wherever it leads. That means I don’t have the time or desire for bigotry and discrimination. Contrary to how many see my work, I don’t want to make fun of anyone or the forces they think are real. I want to make people think about questions that would otherwise just be background noise—easily ignored because of errors in information processing or as a result of cultural or familial indoctrination.