No Sacred Cows

by David G. McAfee

  GROUP EXPERIENCES

  Far too often, after the “I know what I saw!” argument has been thoroughly debunked as a piece of solid proof, the believer multiplies the failure of the personal testimony. The next objection is usually, “But a number of people have reported the same experience!” It’s true that countless people believe in gods, ghosts, good and bad luck, astrology, Tarot cards, psychics, far-fetched conspiracy theories, reincarnation, and more, often based on nothing more than personal experiences, but that says more about the gullible mindset of most humans than it does about the veracity of those ideas. In fact, because some of these claims are most certainly false, the fact that people accept them shows that a huge number of people are capable of believing ridiculous, unverifiable things with absolutely no solid evidence.

  If hundreds or thousands or even millions of people believe something similar and proclaim that belief, does it become true? Of course not. When someone insists a claim is true because it’s what many (or all) people believe, they are committing another fallacy: appeal to the people, or argumentum ad populum.10 If you believe others’ similar experiences show that a particular extraordinary claim is justified, then you should try following the same logic and applying it to assertions with which you disagree. Would that standard hold weight if thousands of people believed in the magical powers of chain letters? Or that some people possess superhuman powers like those seen in comic books? Many people believe those things and a lot more. Anecdotes, even hundreds or thousands of them, shouldn’t be used in place of scientific evidence.

  Many believers in ghosts, gods, aliens, etc. use the fact that others witnessed the same event as evidence of the veracity of their supernatural claims. The problem here is that nobody doubts that a person or group of people had an experience; scientific skeptics merely doubt extraordinary and unverifiable causations of those events until they have been proven empirically. This shared memory argument for the paranormal ignores the fact that it’s not only possible for multiple people to have the same false memory or false interpretation of events, but that it actually happens all the time. Your social group has a huge influence on what you believe, and people who tend to desire conformity will often (knowingly or subconsciously) mutually agree upon experiences based on that urge. This phenomenon demonstrates the power of groupthink, which occurs when people make faulty decisions because of group pressures that cause the deterioration of “mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment.”11

  The Asch conformity experiments, developed in the 1950s by gestalt psychologist Solomon Asch, helped us see how readily people will conform with a group’s conclusion even when they think the answer is wrong.12 To understand faulty group experiences even further, one should also learn about the phenomenon of collective hallucinations. If a person sees something that’s not there, it is the result of an internal or external force—including the obvious things, like drugs or deception, as well as the not so obvious, like grief or fear. When other people are put under identical or near-identical conditions, it makes sense that they could also see “something” and then interpret it similarly. These experiences are rare, but they happen and have even been reported throughout human history. For example, psychologist Edmund Parish summarized in 1897 an instance in which shipmates saw an apparition that appeared to “all the crew of a vessel” as their recently deceased cook walking on water with his peculiar limp. That vision later turned out to be a “piece of wreck, rocked up and down by the waves.”13 These minor triggers can also lead to mass hysteria, which causes false and irrational beliefs and is often the result of group excitement or anxiety.14

  RELIGIOUS EVENTS AND SO-CALLED MIRACLES

  When an experience is deemed supernatural, it’s often called a “miracle,” but what most people call miracles are more like placeholders because they have come to describe any event or action that is (seemingly) unexplainable using the modern scientific method and natural laws. The first problem with this classification is that, throughout the history of humanity, there have been countless unexplained phenomena that were later understood and determined to be of natural origin. Mark Twain was right on target when he wrote, in Letters from the Earth: Uncensored Writings, that the difference between a miracle and a fact is “exactly the difference between a mermaid and a seal.” Not once in recorded history, however, has the opposite occurred: we have never had a scientific understanding that was overtaken by a supernatural or miraculous one. To find an example of this type of now-explained miracle, let’s go back to September 1995, when people started reporting that statues of the Hindu god Ganesha were “drinking” milk offerings provided by worshipers. This event, dubbed the Hindu milk miracle, took place throughout India and other parts of the world. It was covered extensively by the media,15 with reporters describing individuals’ mysterious experiences when offering milk to statues of the deity, but the alleged miracle didn’t last long. Scientists and skeptics tested the phenomenon and concluded that capillary action, which describes a liquid’s ability to flow in miniscule spaces like those found in the statues’ porous material, was the likely culprit.16 This effect was exaggerated by mass hysteria that resulted from the persistent media coverage. T. Jayaraman of the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, who describes the Hindu milk miracle as “unprecedented in its spread,” explains:

  When water or milk or any other fluid is taken in a spoon or a suitably shallow container, it is a well-known fact that the surface of the fluid is not flat but slightly curved. This is due to the phenomenon of surface tension, whereby the fluid tries to minimise its surface area. If a spoon is filled with milk or water and taken to the mouth of an idol, or indeed any statue, then it is natural that the upper lip on the idol will touch the surface. In the case of a Ganesa idol without a lip, the gap between the underside of the trunk and the face would be the place used, and again some portion of the idol will touch the fluid surface. When the surface is thus punctured, then the fluid has a chance to flow out.17

  The second problem with prematurely describing something as a “miracle” with a divine or otherwise paranormal origin is that there is no proof of causation. There has never been an instance in which the only possible (or even the most probable) answer was divine intervention—nothing that indisputably points to a deity or magic power affecting the world at all. We have always had a more readily available natural answer and, until something supernatural is shown to exist, that conclusion is the most reasonable one. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Scottish philosopher David Hume stated that “no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavors to establish.”18 Said more simply, if it’s more likely that the claimant has been tricked or is lying than the physical laws of the universe have been violated, then the former is probably the case.

  Miracles are commonplace in religious scripture. Ancient people are said to have felt Jesus’ fatal wounds, verified Muhammad’s ascent to Heaven, and even interacted with their respective deities directly. Today, however, believers have no such luxury. They are forced to rely on blind faith that these things occurred, that people were at one time able to overcome or render inert the world’s natural laws.19 In this sense, religious believers don’t utilize the argument that is the basis for this chapter. They don’t claim to know what they saw; they claim to know what other people allegedly reported seeing thousands of years ago. Unfortunately for those believers, any reasonable person can see that all the gods of the various religions have conveniently neglected to perform grandiose miracles or make themselves apparent in other ways since the invention of recording devices. And in the rare instances in which a god is said to have revealed itself to a person or group in modern times, the events have been traced to hallucinations caused by mental illness or substance abuse—or it has been an outright lie. Philosopher and historian Joseph Ernest Renan described the essence of these miraculous occurrences
well when he said, “No miracle has ever taken place under conditions which science can accept. Experience shows, without exception, that miracles occur only in times and in countries in which miracles are believed in, and in the presence of persons who are disposed to believe them.”20

  Billions of people believe that a demigod named Jesus was resurrected from the dead or that a prophet named Muhammad traveled to the heavens on a winged horse, but these occurrences aren’t just personal experiences or memories—they’re secondhand tales. To see the differences between these two types of claims, we can compare acceptance of Jesus’ miracles with the Sasquatch and other modern myths. Belief in Bigfoot requires you to accept blurry photos and anecdotal evidence, but believing in Jesus’ divinity means you accept blurry and contradictory stories imparted by ancient ancestors. And while Bigfoot has modern eyewitnesses insisting they “know what they saw,” the only testimonies to Jesus’ alleged miracles are unverifiable. Likewise, the average Christian would outwardly reject claims that people saw Elvis Presley alive and well after his widely publicized death, but would cling to similar stories about Jesus from thousands of years ago. This double standard puts those who accept ancient religious myths but reject similar modern (and secular) claims in an interesting dilemma in which they must decide why their standards for evidence are different on these matters.

  Let’s take a closer look at a specific “miracle” from the Bible. Christians believe, as is reported in the New Testament scriptures,21 that Jesus of Nazareth healed 10 men with leprosy. This is just a story from a religious text with no historical evidence to support its veracity, but even if it did happen, would this be considered a divine act? It sounds like an astounding feat, but compare it to the work of physician and scientist Jacinto Convit, who saved thousands of lives threatened by leprosy when he developed the vaccine that protects us from it. In 1988, Convit was nominated for a Nobel Prize in Medicine for his anti-leprosy vaccine. So, while the promise of Jesus’ healing power is a centerpiece of the Christian myth, the demigod’s results leave something to be desired when compared to the rigor of man’s scientific inquiry. It makes one wonder why Jesus himself wouldn’t have provided the vaccine, or at least given predictive hints in his teachings to cures for some of the most horrific diseases that have historically haunted mankind. Maybe Jesus saw those 10 people as superior—more worthy of a healthy life—than anyone else who has suffered from leprosy before, during, and after that time. It’s more likely, however, that this story was created during an era in which the very idea of a vaccine was unfathomable—even to someone purported to be the Son of God and/or God incarnate.

  WHY ARE OUR EXPERIENCES UNRELIABLE?

  We know that personal stories aren’t evidence of the supernatural—and that they are frequently found to be unreliable—but why is that the case? One simple reason is that some people who report to have religious visions, ghost experiences, alien contact, and other extraordinary interactions have what’s known as a fantasy-prone personality, a term coined by American psychologists Sheryl C. Wilson and Theodore X. Barber in the early 1980s.22 It’s a completely normal trait, applying to roughly 4 percent of the world’s population, but these people have vivid fantasies and can have trouble distinguishing them from reality.23 Research also suggests that people who are likely to have delusions tend to make rushed decisions without all the available information, which could explain why a fantasy-prone individual would jump to a false conclusion during or immediately following some type of unexplained experience.24 These factors, coupled with the fact that there are a number of reasons that our memories have been found to be unreliable in general, make first-hand stories incredibly poor evidence for anything, especially the paranormal. As Steven Pinker explains, “Cognitive psychology tells us that the unaided human mind is vulnerable to many fallacies and illusions because of its reliance on its memory for vivid anecdotes rather than systematic statistics.”

  Our memories are not as effective as we’d like to believe.25 We are evolutionarily disposed to have confidence in the consistency of our senses and memories, but they are actually influenced and altered by our own biases, past experiences, time, and other factors. This is something we all have to realize about ourselves if we hope to get closer to the truth. In your own life, you can become aware of the differences between reality and your recollection in a number of ways, including by being presented with proof of inaccuracies, by noticing your own conflicting memories, and by analyzing past events from the perspectives of multiple people who were present. In fact, you can even make this usually taxing thought process into a game. For some false-memory fun, I recommend asking a close friend or family member to recount in detail a shared childhood memory that you haven’t discussed in years—and then compare notes. The results might be surprising. American philosopher and psychologist William James described false recollections, but generously assumed that most people are aware of these differences between their memories and real events. “Most people, probably, are in doubt about certain matters ascribed to their past,” he said. “They may have seen them, may have said them, done them, or they may only have dreamed or imagined they did so.”

  Many of our memories stray greatly from the original events because we sometimes misremember (and therefore misreport) where we heard something, merge more than one memory while forming a story, report others’ experiences as our own, or even describe completely imagined events as real. The fact is that we all have false memories; it’s just the nature of recollection. I think most of mine, for instance, are stories that I heard often as a child and later became real to me. In some cases, I wasn’t involved in the events at all, but I still “remember” being there because of how many times I heard the same details. My manufactured remembrances can therefore be at least partially explained by a common type of faulty recollection that can be formed through nothing more than time—misattributed memory. Misattribution is a well-studied phenomenon and it occurs when we recall something that didn’t actually happen to us because the memory is distorted by time or other factors. In one particularly notable instance of misattribution, Australian psychologist and lawyer Donald M. Thomson was arrested for assault and rape. He couldn’t have committed the crime, however, because he was on live television when it took place—explaining psychological research on eyewitness testimony. The victim saw Thomson’s face on TV while she was being abused by someone else and, in an unbelievable twist likely caused by the trauma of the moment, actually misattributed his face as that of her attacker’s.26

  HOW MEMORIES ARE MADE AND CHANGED

  Our memories are created by piecing together various things that make sense to us at the time, as opposed to being etched in our minds like a perfect recorder, making them inherently prone to being altered.27 According to cognitive psychologist and law professor Elizabeth Loftus, an expert on human memory at the University of California, Irvine, people bring information together from different times and places to construct what we “remember.”28 This process of compilation, along with the fact that people tend to place more faith in the accuracy of their recollection than they should,29 demonstrates the unreliable nature of our memories that inherently leads to false beliefs.

  “The process of calling it into conscious awareness can change it, and now you’re storing something that’s different,” Loftus said in an interview with Slate, pointing to misattribution.30 “We all do this, for example, by inadvertently adopting a story we’ve heard.”

  Misremembering events is something that happens with everybody, and it’s not a bad thing. It’s just the way we work. In fact, a study released in November 2013 found that even people with highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), a rare ability to remember dates and events with great accuracy, are susceptible to having false memories.31 These accidental recollection inaccuracies in people with and without HSAM are not unlike the false memories that one can generate through something as simple as excessive thoughts about a subject or through the power of s
uggestion. This includes false memories created through self or directed hypnosis, which requires the imagination and participation of the subject(s) involved and is not some mystical or unknown power.

  We all have some faulty beliefs about past occurrences, but certain circumstances and actions can make our memories more or less reliable. In a July 2014 study published in Psychological Science, for instance, researchers concluded that even something as minor as sleep deprivation can substantially increase the likelihood of a person forming false memories.32 A lack of sleep can further cause lost memories, impaired wit, and even hallucinations.33 Consuming cannabis has also been linked to an increased likelihood of false memory formation, according to a 2015 study in Molecular Psychiatry.34 Some researchers have implanted false memories into the brains of sleeping mice,35 while others, such as Julia Shaw of the University of Bedfordshire and Stephen Porter of the University of British Columbia, have even discovered how to implant false memories in people and make them believe they committed a crime. Shaw and Porter say their study “provides evidence that people can come to visualize and recall detailed false memories of engaging in criminal behavior.”36

  “Not only could the young adults in our sample be led to generate such memories, but their rate of false recollection was high, and the memories themselves were richly detailed,” the authors wrote. “Additionally, false memories for perpetrating crime showed signs that they may have been generated in a way that is similar to the way in which false memories for noncriminal emotional memories are generated.”