The notion that certain skilled individuals can discover underground water by using a mysterious talent known as “dowsing” (or “witching” or “divining”) is widely regarded among serious scientists as no more than a superstitious relic from medieval times. No plausible physical or physiological mechanism has ever been proposed by which such detection might be possible. Nevertheless, the worldwide persistence of this practice through the centuries might lead open-minded people to wonder whether there could be a germ of truth behind the folklore. After all, valuable additions to the modern pharmacopoeia have sometimes been derived from folk medicine, thus proving that not all folklore is unmitigated superstition.

Planning an Experimental Study

Many dowsers in Germany think that the stimuli to which they claim to respond ("earthrays,” said to be a subtle form of radiation not otherwise known to science) are potentially hazardous to human health, perhaps even inducing cancer. Hence, in the middle 1980s, the German government brought together a committee to consider how a proper study might be conducted to investigate the possibility that dowsing is a genuine skill. If dowsers can indeed detect (dangerous?) radiation, perhaps they might be able to contribute to research in public health issues.

The outcome of those deliberations was a grant of 400,000 German marks (about $250,000), in 1986, to university physicists in Munich. Generous funding assures a large-scale project, so that even weak effects might become evident; the reputation of university-based researchers for open-minded integrity means that their participation provides credibility that a project managed only by dowsers themselves would not have.

For an open-minded test of claimed extraordinary abilities, the claimants deserve a fair opportunity for success by providing conditions they regard as suitable, and in this regard, the Munich researchers seem to have bent over backward. Experiments designed only by doubters might, of course, leave dowsers with convenient reasons to discount a disappointing outcome. Enthusiasts for dowsing were therefore involved in the planning sessions. When practitioners of various occult “skills” have, in the past, been unsuccessful under controlled testing, they have at times claimed that the research was conducted in a skeptical (by implication, hostile) atmosphere, which interfered with their performances and invalidated the studies. That potential problem did not arise in the Munich experiments because the principal investigators, from the University of Munich and the Technical University of Munich, had publicly gone on record as thinking that dowsing is probably a genuine phenomenon. No hostility there!

Water dowsing ordinarily takes place out of doors, and this raises potential difficulties for meaningful experiments, because no two outdoor locations can be considered fully equivalent replicates; and the essence of proper scientific research is replicated testing to examine reproducibility. Most German dowsing practitioners, however, also claim to be able to dowse the location of water piping in a garden or within a structure, so indoor testing was decided upon.

Another potential problem is that among those who think that they have dowsing skill, some may be mistaken or perhaps are even deliberate frauds. To avoid these potential pitfalls, some 500 candidate dowsers were recruited for preliminary testing. That group was winnowed down to forty-three individuals for the final, critical experiments: those who seemed to be most successful in the preliminary tests. Those dowsers all freely participated in the carefully controlled final experiments, which they accepted as suitable to their abilities. There could thus be no basis for subsequent claims that the test program was inappropriate or unfair.

Experimental Design

Figure 1: Hypothetical examples of outcomes that might be expected from the Munich dowsing experiments, assuming various arbitrary categories of dowser skill. S.D.: standard deviation of the guesses around perfect correspondence. These graphs provide guidelines with which actual performance might be compared.

The detailed test procedure was a very simple one. On the ground floor of a large vacant barn near Munich, a ten-meter test line was established, along which a small wagon could be moved; and atop the wagon was a short length of pipe, perpendicular to the line and connected by hoses to a pump that could provide circulating water. Circulating water was chosen rather than still water because the traditions of dowsers postulate that useful underground water supplies are mainly to be found as flowing streams that they refer to as “water arteries” and not just within extensive deposits of permeable sediment, as geologists would tell them. The location of the pipe for each single test was to be determined by a computer-generated random number (although the settings actually used turned out to be decidedly nonrandomly located along the line).

On the upper floor of the barn, directly above the experimental line, a ten-meter test line was established. For the critical final experiments, a dowser was re-admitted to the upper-floor arena each time that the pipe had been repositioned, and was required, with his or her witching stick (or pendulum or other tool of choice), to guess where the pipe on the ground floor was located. A given dowser was tested in a sequence of from 5 to 15 single tests (typically 10), which typically took about an hour. During the two-year program in the barn, the forty-three selected dowsers participated in 843 single tests, grouped into 104 test-series of this sort. Some dowsers undertook only a single test series, selected others underwent more than ten test series.

It would seem that such indoor testing should appreciably simplify the dowsers’ task. Out of doors, the critical stimuli might be deflected or refracted by intervening layers of soil and rock, but in the barn, the only obstruction was the flooring between stories. Furthermore, in an outdoor setting, the detection of “water arteries,” as dowsers envision them, should require remarkable precision. If, say, a 3-meter-diameter stream of water were to be located at a depth of 100 meters, the dowser must achieve precision of less than 1° around the vertical in determining the point of maximal stimuli for drilling, and this apparently implies detection of minuscule changes in stimulus direction and/or intensity. Comparable 1°-precision around the vertical in the barn, however, with the target only, say, about five meters away, would result in uncertainty of less than 10 centimeters around the pipe’s actual location.

Before the experiments began, a professional magician was brought in to inspect the entire arrangement for the potential for deception or cheating by the dowsers. As an additional precaution against cheating (such as peeking through cracks in the floor), an experimenter/observer was also present to supervise the dowsers’ performances, and to record the guesses. Double-blind procedures assured that neither the observer nor the dowser knew the pipe’s location, even after a guess had been made; thus, no feedback was provided during the critical testing.

The study involved many thousands of preliminary tests, in which the careful controls of the final critical experiments were relaxed. Often, for example, feedback about success or failure was given in those preliminary tests. Sometimes the pipe was filled with fresh water, sometimes salt water, sometimes even empty; sometimes flow was turbulent, sometimes not; sometimes sand or gravel was mixed in with the water, and so on. The preliminary testing had two purposes: as indicated above, to eliminate those candidates whose trials showed no appreciable dowsing skill (more than 90 percent of the candidates!); and to choose for the selected participants those aspects of the preliminary tests (fluid, flow rate, etc.) that had led to their best initial results. Each individual’s final critical testing could thus be based on his or her “optimal stimuli.”

Figure 2: Dowsing results from the second of the four test series undertaken by dowser #99. These results were evaluated by the researchers as the “best” of all 104 series undertaken, and represent the only set of dowsing data from the barn presented graphically in the final research report. A: presentation in the format used by Wagner, Betz, and König (1990); b: presentation in the format of Figure 1 here.

Before a critical test series, each dowser was asked to determine whether there were any places along the test line (without pipe present) that seemed to provide stimuli that could be mistaken for the target (presumably indicating natural sources of “earth rays”). In quite a large number of cases, two or three such locations were reported along the 10-meter line. “Earth rays” are seemingly nearly everywhere! When such non-target stimuli were reported, the surrounding regions of the line (typically one meter wide) were then excluded for that dowser’s test series as potential test locations. (A given dowser often reported different artifact locations on different days; natural sources of “earth-ray” stimuli are apparently transient.)

An ideal experimental design was frequently compromised, because two dowsers arrived at the barn at the same time. Instead of testing those individuals one after the other, the two dowsers were tested alternately, each pipe setting being used twice in succession. It was assumed that their guesses could be treated as independent because the two individual dowsers were not simultaneously present in the test arena.

If a dowser felt that his or her concentration was waning during testing, the test series could be interrupted or terminated, which apparently happened quite often. Thus, it seems quite obvious that many accommodations were made to the wishes and whims of the dowsers and the experimenters. Nevertheless, many aspects of sound experimental design were built into the critical testing: double-blind protocol, no feedback about success or failure, randomized (well, sort of!) pipe settings, replicated testing of the same dowsers on different days, and a large-scale program (843 critical tests) so that small sets of “good” results would not deserve undue attention.

It is conceivable that the noise of water turbulence (sometimes with gravel in the water) could have provided localized auditory information during the testing. Another concern is that the experimenter supervising the dowsers may not have been properly “blinded,” when aware that identical pipe settings were being used for two dowsers in alternation. If truly remarkable dowsing success had been achieved in the experiments, such concerns would deserve careful attention. In fact, however, the overall negative outcome suggests that any residual defects in the experimental design usually had no important impact on the outcome.

Expectations

Proper planning requires that one consider in advance what sort of results might arise from experiments of this design, if dowsing were to be a real, reproducible phenomenon. Several examples of hypothetical outcome are shown in Figure 1. “Perfect” skill (the equivalent of using Superman’s X-ray vision to look through the flooring) would lead to a perfect correlation between the dowsers’ guesses and pipe locations (Figure 1a); weak skill (with a standard deviation of 3 meters along a 10-meter test line) would produce broad scatter around the same diagonal line (Figure 1e), and intermediate skill levels would involve lesser scatter about that diagonal line in this kind of plot. Note that while the “Weak-Skill” results are very scattered, they do not look random (nor are they: r = 0.57, p < 0.001) because of the vacant regions of the graph in the upper-left and lower-right corners, an issue that arises again below.

Results and Interpretation by the Experimenters

In the final report on their dowsing experiments, submitted to the granting agency (Wagner, Betz, and König 1990), the researchers concluded that most dowsers did not do particularly well in the experiments. That report, however, still painted a very positive picture of the overall outcome. The following quotation is a translation of the German text:

Some few dowsers, in particular tasks, showed an extraordinarily high rate of success, which can scarcely if at all be explained as due to chance ... a real core of dowser-phenomena can be regarded as empirically proven ... (5)

The evidence provided for this interpretation consisted of a plot of results from a single test series (out of 104 available), data shown here as Figure 2; and a table summarizing the purported statistical significance of each of the 104 test series. (This summary is based on nonstandard statistical methods that were conspicuously fitted to the data. More conventional statistical tests suggest less interesting conclusions [Enright 1995].) The peculiar plot in the report (Figure 2a) gives the visual impression of very good correspondence between observed and expected results. The re-plot in Figure 2b places those data in a more revealing context. Half of the results in Figure 2b (5 tests of 10) do indeed resemble an ideal hypothetical outcome (Figure 1a or 1b), but it deserves emphasis that Figure 2 cannot be considered “typical” but instead represents the very “best” results, consisting only of ten tests out of 843, from one test series out of 104. (In 843 spins of a roulette wheel, at least one sequence of 10 results that includes several seemingly exceptional events might be expected to arise by chance alone.)

Figure 3: Results from all of the 843 tests in the Munich barn, plotted in coordinates like those in Figure 1. Filled symbols represent two data points at identical coordinates.

A Broader Look at All the Data

Presented in Figure 3 is a plot of all 843 test results. The human eye is remarkably adept at detecting pattern in plots like this. Note, for example, groups of points that seem to follow curvy lines through certain regions of the graph. Resemblance to the expectations of Figure 1, however, is decidedly absent in Figure 3. Instead, the visual impression is that these results seem to be distributed more or less at random. In order to examine that interpretation, the actual results can be compared with the outcome of genuine randomization. To that end, the dowsers’ actual choices were randomly paired with pipe settings from other test series. (The x and y values of points shown in Figure 3 were thus randomly intermixed.) The results of two such randomizations are shown in Figures 4a and 4b. It would be difficult to defend a claim that the actual results (Figure 3) show better concordance with expectations (Figure 1) than do the randomizations of Figure 4.

Figure 4: A and b: Two sets of results from complete randomizations. Dowsers’ guesses were paired randomly with pipe locations from other test series. Filled symbols represent two data points at identical coordinates.

To depend on what seems evident by inspection, however, may seem like an unrigorous approach. As an elementary form of quantification, the coordinate system of Figure 3 can be divided into squares, each 2.5 meters on a side, and the enclosed data points counted. Some of those counts are presented in Figure 5. Recalling that even weak skill should produce very few observations in the upper left and lower right regions of such a graph (Figure 1e), those two corner quadrats in Figure 5 can be summed. The total (90) turns out to be greater than the sum of counts in the upper right and lower left (87), so these counting data could even be interpreted, if one were so inclined, as suggestive of weak anti-dowsing skill.

Figure 5: Numbers of dowser guesses in selected quadrats of Figure 3, based on subdivision of the coordinate system into squares, each 250 centimeters on a side.

A Few Unusually Talented Individuals?

The researchers in the Munich study would probably protest against this treatment of the data by noting that outstanding performances like these shown in Figure 2 have been obscured by results from unskilled candidates. That objection falters when one recalls that Figure 3 includes only the final tests of those forty-three dowsers (out of some 500 candidates) who were selected on the basis of preliminary testing as being the most skillful. Nevertheless, the possibility of unusual skill by only a very few individuals deserves careful scrutiny. In the tabulation of the final report, there were two other test series (in addition to that shown in Figure 2) that the researchers themselves evaluated as being particularly impressive. Results from all three of those test series are presented in Figure 6a. Furthermore, there were four other test series (from three other dowsers) that were considered by the researchers also to indicate lesser but nonetheless remarkable skill; those results are summarized in Figure 6b. These two graphs of the very “best” test series present the outcome of the entire research program in its most favorable light. Despite many errors, there are indeed an impressive number of guesses that were not far from the pipe’s actual location.

Do those results justify the assertion of the final report that “some few dowsers” were remarkably successful? Decidedly not! Each of the six dowsers who contributed to the data shown in Figures 6a and 6b participated in other test series, and the outcomes of those replicated series by those same dowsers (Figures 6c and 6d) seem to be quite unimpressive: just as scattered as the overall outcome (Figure 3). What it amounts to, then, is that among the 104 test series, there were several that seemed somewhat interesting, but those dowsers responsible could not reproduce that kind of result in other comparable tests. And seven series out of 104 (each with a probability, as evaluated by the peculiar statistical test of the researchers, of less than 0.05) is not appreciably different from what might be expected due to chance alone from ordinary statistical testing. So dowsing “skill” in the Munich experiments proved to be unreproducible across a spectrum of 500 candidates, as well as within a group of forty-three individuals selected because they initially seemed to be particularly talented (Figure 3); nor was it reproducible even by those six special individuals who on one occasion or another seemed to have guessed relatively well.

Figure 6: Selected examples of dowser performances. A: results from the three data sets that the Munich researchers considered “best” of all 104 series; b: results from the four test series, by three dowsers, that the researchers evaluated as also being exceptionally “successful"; c: results from the other test series in which the dowsers of part a participated; d: results from the other test series in which the dowsers of part b participated. In parts a and c, filled circles represent Dowser #99 (whose results are also presented in Figure 2), open circles represent Dowser #18, and open triangles represent Dowser #108. In parts b and d, filled circles represent Dowser #23, open circles represent Dowser #110, and open triangles represent Dowser #89. Separate graphs of the results of these six individual dowsers are presented as Figures 2 and 3 in Enright, 1995. There is no hint in those plots that any one of the six was appreciably more or less successful than the others.

A Simple Alternative Strategy

There is another way of evaluating the results from those dowsers who produced the “best” test series of Figure 6. Suppose that they had always left their dowsing equipment at home in the closet, and had simply, in each and every test, just guessed that the pipe was located exactly at the middle of the test line. As shown in Figure 7b, all six of the “best” dowsers would have done better on average by making mid-line guesses than achieved by actual dowsing, in terms of the root-mean-square error, a commonly used index of reliability (similar to the standard deviation).

The root-mean-square error puts particular emphasis on gross mistakes, but these results can also be evaluated in terms of a different criterion that does not have that property: average absolute values of the errors. (Absolute values are preferable to simple averaging of errors; simple averaging would mean that an error of two meters to the left and another two meters to the right of the pipe might be regarded, on average, as perfect performance.) On the basis of this absolute-value criterion, as shown in Figure 7a, five of the six “best” dowsers would have made smaller errors relative to the pipe by using the mid-line strategy than they actually made with their dowsing tools. And what about the sixth, whose dowsing was somewhat better than middle-of-the-line guesses (#89)? Those results from actual dowsing were on average 4 millimeters better than mid-line guesses would have been. An average improvement of 4 millimeters (0.16 inch) by one dowser out of six (or out of forty-three, or out of 500) along a 10-meter test line scarcely seems worth the time and effort that the researchers and the dowsers invested in this project, nor worth the 400,000 marks that the German taxpayers invested in the study.

On the basis of these results (Figures 3, 5, 6 and 7), then, the Munich experiments constitute as decisive and complete a failure as can be imagined of dowsers to do what they claim they can.

A Sad and Sorry Postscript

Figure 7: Dowser errors (average of absolute values, indicated by filled squares) compared with errors that would have been made by guessing that in each test, the pipe was located exactly at the middle of the test line (also average absolute values, indicated by short horizontal bars). B: Root-mean-square errors made by the dowsers compared with R.M.S. errors that would have resulted from guessing in each test that the test that the pipe was located at the midline, with symbols as in part a.

Professor Betz (the primary spokesman for the Munich study) and his colleagues have published a response (Betz, H.-D., König, H. L., Kulzer, R., Trischler, R. and J. Wagner 1996) to my critique of their results (Enright 1995). That defense is a relatively feeble one (Enright 1996), but such exchanges are a normal part of scientific controversies. Subsequently, however, Professor Betz (1997) published a paper in a fringe journal that crossed the ethical boundaries that usually characterize the scientific enterprise. In that article, he asserted that as a result of extensive scientific correspondence, I had conceded the validity of his own analyses and interpretations of the Munich dowsing data.

That statement is absolutely and categorically false. My only correspondence with Professor Betz (or anyone in his laboratory) since the publication of my original critique (Enright 1995) consists of an e-mail message sent him in July 1997, which dealt only with my request for documentation of an apparently implausible assertion about statistical procedures that had been attributed to him. He did not respond to that message, and so I re-sent the same message in August 1997, and again he did not respond. Two unanswered e-mail messages from me clearly do not constitute an “extensive scientific correspondence.” And I have never, in publication, in correspondence, or in casual conversation even hinted that I accept Betz’s analyses and interpretations of the Munich dowsing data. The results presented here as well as in the formal scientific literature (Enright 1995, 1996) provide such a clear demonstration against real dowsing skill that to assert that I had retracted my critique is both a false and an insulting assertion.

Conclusion

The Munich dowsing experiments represent the most extensive test ever conducted of the hypothesis that a genuine mysterious ability permits dowsers to detect hidden water sources. The research was conducted in a sympathetic atmosphere, on a highly selected group of candidates, with careful control of many relevant variables. The researchers themselves concluded that the outcome unquestionably demonstrated successful dowsing abilities, but a thoughtful re-examination of the data indicates that such an interpretation can only be regarded as the result of wishful thinking. In fact, it is difficult to imagine a set of experimental results that would represent a more persuasive disproof of the ability of dowsers to do what they claim. The experiments thus can and should be considered a decisive failure by the dowsers.

It seems very unlikely that any future careful experimental study of dowsing will produce results more favorable for the practitioners than the Munich experiments. An atmosphere more sympathetic to the dowsers, with so many concessions to their whims, seems hard to imagine. In view of the outcome of those experiments, it is very unlikely that any sponsor would ever provide funds for an even larger-scale study, such that very weak skills (which might conceivably have vanished into the statistical noise here) could be uncovered. (It is noteworthy that the U.S. Geological Survey concluded much earlier [Ellis 1917] that further testing of dowsing ” . . .would be a misuse of public funds.”) It seems appropriate, then, to reiterate here the general conclusion originally drawn from these analyses (Enright 1995):

(These) . . . experiments are not only the most extensive and careful scientific study of the dowsing problem ever attempted, but — if reason prevails — they probably also represent the last major study of this sort that will ever be undertaken. (Enright 1995, 369).

Because of the vigor, however, with which Professor Betz and colleagues defended their positive conclusions (Betz et al. 1996), and in view of the discouraging history of other claims about the occult, one may have residual doubts, as do I, about whether reason will prevail in this arena (Enright 1996).

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant BNS 93-13038. The substance of this article was presented in a lecture at the Second World Skeptics Congress, in Heidelberg, Germany, in July 1998.

References

• Betz, H.-D. 1997. Neue Ergebnisse der Rutengängerforschung. Wetter-Boden-Mensch (Zeitschrift für Geobiologie) 5: 55-59.
• Betz, H.-D., H. L. König, R. Kulzer, R. Trischler, and J. Wagner. 1996. Dowsing reviewed — the effect persists. Naturwissenschaften 83: 272-275.
• Ellis, A. J. 1917. Water-supply Paper 416, Department of the Interior, U.S. Geological Survey, Washington, D. C.: Government Printing Office.
• Enright, J. T. 1995. Water dowsing: The Scheunen experiments. Naturwissenschaften 82: 360-369.
• Enright, J. T. 1996. Dowsers lost in a barn. Naturwissenschaften 83: 275-277.
• Wagner, H., H.-D. Betz, and H. L. König, 1990. Schlußbericht 01 KB8602, Bundesministerium für Forschung und Technologie.

Is the world about to end? Are we living in the last days of civilization? Will the human species and the planet Earth be engulfed in fire storms, earthquakes, floods, or be destroyed by the impact of an asteroid? As we approach the year 2000 we are surrounded by prophets of doom who predict that terrible disasters await us. Obviously the year 2000 has special significance in these scenarios, for it marks the beginning of a new millennium. The year 2000 and the years soon thereafter seem to be the deadline for many end-time prophets. But we may ask: Does the new millennium start January 1, 2000 or 2001? The calendar we use begins at year 1 instead of 0 -- for a zero was left out in the transition from b.c. to a.d. Thus, a century does not begin with a double-zero year, but ends with it. If this is the case, the new century and millennium begin with an 01-year, not an 00-year.

But it is not clear that 2001 is the beginning of the new millennium, because the Western world measures it by the birth of Jesus Christ. But many Biblical scholars agree that we know very little if anything about him, though many believe that he was actually born four to six years before the year a.d. If this is the case, the third millennium might already may have begun in 1996, not in 2000!

The millennium is actually a human creation of our culture, an arbitrary date in eternity. Why it should be of special significance is muddled, aside from its religious meaning or cultural bias.

Most non-Christian cultures in the world do not measure the calendar by the date of Christ’s birth. The Chinese year in 1998 is 4696, the Hebrew calendar 5760. For the Muslims, the calendar begins in 622 a.d., when Muhammad went from Mecca to Medina, and 1998 is actually the year 1420. It is 6236 according to the ancient Egyptian calendar, 2749 for the Babylonian, 2544 for the Buddhist, 5119 for the Mayan great cycle, and 2753 according to the old Roman calendar.

The Gregorian calendar was first initiated by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, replacing the Roman Julian calendar of Julius Caesar, which was ten days different from today’s. After the decline of Rome, Britain celebrated New Year’s Eve on December 25th -- until William the Conqueror changed New Year’s to January 1, 1066, the date of his coronation. Britain subsequently changed it to March 25th, and later to accord with other countries. The French desired Easter Sunday to be New Year’s Day. For the Chinese, New Year’s Day is at the end of February.1

Thus, January 1, 2000 or 2001 is really a meaningless non-event -- an expression of Western socio-cultural prejudice, of no special significance in the nature of things.

Secular Doomsday Prophecies

Nonetheless, there is a perennial concern for the future. Human beings always wish to peer ahead and know what will ensue tomorrow or next year or in the next century. Many of these interests are based on expectations of a better and more promising world. But there are often predictions of gloom, and great apprehension.

Three kinds of forecasts may be distinguished among the Doomsday prophecies. First, secular predictions. We recently enjoyed a period of great economic optimism, as stock markets, at least in Europe and America, soared. The bulls dashed forward with rosy forecasts. There was sustained technological scientific expansion. Some people even predicted a long boom in which the economic cycle had been overcome. This was based on new industries: telecommunications and the information revolution, biogenetic research, and space technologies. Under this scenario the bulls predicted that Germany and France would overcome their recession, unemployment would be solved, the Asian and Russian economic slump would become a thing of the past, and gross domestic products would continue to expand as prosperity gains. This scenario was one of unlimited horizons. By contrast, the bears focus on the negative: The year-2000 computer bug will wreak havoc everywhere, they warn, oil shortages will appear, either deflation will overcome us or inflation will re-ignite, and the Dow-Jones stock exchange average will plummet from 9,300 to 3,000 in a short period of time. Here the pessimists prevail. Following the scenario of the Dutch Tulip bubble bust, crowd psychology rules the day, as the public is engulfed first by the fervor of speculative binge and then by pessimistic forecasts of doom. One may ask: whose prophecy of the future will prevail -- the optimists, pessimists, or neither?

Another key source of present doomsday scenarios is science fiction, in which the future is unusually bleak: either Big Brother will emerge, or complete anarchy will prevail. Science projects doomsday asteroids or comets striking the earth. Deep Impact and Armageddon, two Hollywood movies, arouse fear and terror, and Jurassic Park brings back the dinosaurs to devour us.

Probably the most frightening secular prognostications are environmental scenarios of runaway population growth and devastating ecological pollution.

Many of these forecasts are not end-of-the-world predictions, but they illustrate the difficulties of making long-range extrapolations. Of course there are real dangers -- from environmental damage to nuclear war -- and we need to be aware of them and to take rational precautions; for example, global warming and the depletion of the ozone layer. I am surely not denying that there are genuine problems that need to be seriously addressed. But not too long ago we were warned that the world would be overtaken by famine, that hundreds of millions -- even billions -- of people would starve to death, and that the cities and countrysides would be teeming with swollen bellies. Contrary to expectations, India and other impoverished countries have managed to increase their food production, and while there are famines in Africa, the predicted worldwide famine has not occurred.

Demographers told us only a decade ago that population growth would increase exponentially and that there was no way to stop it. By the year 2000, they said, there would be seven billion inhabitants on the earth, and by 2020, 15 billion or more. But, in many parts of the world, there has been a significant decrease in the rate of population growth; and the extreme projections for 2020 are most likely exaggerated.

Some ecologists maintained only twenty years ago that by 1980 the atmosphere would be so polluted that we would need to wear gas masks year-round -- not even in Los Angeles has this occurred! They warned that many of our lakes and waterways would be so despoiled that all of their fish and plant life would be destroyed. The Great Lakes, they said, would be totally dead. President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 visited the Buffalo River in western New York and ignited it with a match. Massive efforts to clean it up followed. There has been a noticeable increase in the fish harvest in Lake Erie, and the lake seems to be coming back. Ecologists have warned that we would deplete our natural resources and run out of oil, gas, and other fossil fuels in the near future. In the long run they are probably correct, but new resources have been discovered and new sources of energy developed.

A frenzied phobia of the unknown surrounds the additives and chemical wastes of modern technological society. There is fear of cancer-causing agents; everything from fluoride to sugar has been claimed to be noxious.

We have been told by successive Cassandras that the imminent collapse of major banks would bring down the entire world financial system, that galloping inflation was uncontrollable, and that we were on the verge of a depression that would change the face of society. No doubt we will continue to experience recessions, possibly even depressions, in the future. Marx predicted armageddon for the capitalist system. Millions of pessimists are still waiting for that to occur. They think every recession will lead to a worldwide economic collapse. Interestingly, George Orwell’s 1984 has arrived and passed and our freedoms are still intact, much to everyone’s surprise.

Overhanging all of this is the sword of Damocles -- nuclear energy. Nuclear fears engulfed large sectors of society. Anything related to radiation was considered diabolical. In many countries the public shrinks in terror at the thought of the opening of new nuclear power plants. The greatest fear of all is the fear of a thermonuclear holocaust. We are admonished on all sides that death stares us in the face and that some miscalculation would inevitably trigger a worldwide nuclear war. The results, we were told, will be a nuclear winter and the near extinction of all life on this planet. This was the Age of Anxiety par excellence.

Pessimists become angry at realists who think that civilization and the human species are likely to muddle through periodic crises and mini-crises but still survive these end-of-the-world forecasts. I am only advising that we place them in a balanced perspective. But to say this infuriates those who are convinced that our whole universe will collapse. In one film Woody Allen worried about what modern astronomers have to say about the cosmos, that there are two ultimate possibilities: either the universe will expand into infinity, cool down, and die, or eventually collapse into itself like an accordion.

For many the Apocalypse seems to be almost a wish fulfillment. The mundane world lacks the drama that a fertile apocalyptic imagination produces.

Religious Doomsday Prophecies

A second area for Doomsday scenarios are religiously based. Indeed, we today find hundreds of millions of people who interpret the world primarily through a biblical lens and see their own end-of-the-word scenarios. Much of this is based on the Book of Daniel of the Old Testament and the Book of Revelation of the New Testament. But their vision is far more terrifying than anything that mere secularists can dream up, because it is all part of God’s plan of punishment for sinners. And it is imminent. Moreover, only a small portion of suffering humanity will be saved from it. Several Protestant sects, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, have held apocalyptic theologies in the past.

Today the message that fundamentalist prophets are preaching is one of a millennial Armageddon. They are truly convinced that we are living in “the last days,” and they view earthquake tremors, wars, and rumors of war as signs of the impending apocalyptic disaster. The last great battle of Armageddon is approaching, we are warned. Indeed, this generation, many of them insist, is the last generation, and this was all foretold in the Old and New Testaments. Jesus said: “I tell you this: the present generation will live to see it all” (Matt. 24:34-35, New English Bible). And “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled” (Matt. 24:34, King James Version). Many of Jesus’ disciples believed that his admonitions applied to his own generation in the first century a.d. That prophecy did not come true for the early Christians, and almost 2000 years have since passed. We were told by Pat Robertson, Hal Lindsey, David Koresh, Harold Camping, Edgar C. Whisenant, and other evangelists that the generation referred to is ours. Even President Ronald Reagan was quoted as saying in the 1980s: “You know, I turn back to your ancient prophets in the Old Testament and the signs foretelling Armageddon, and I find myself considering if we're the generation that is going to see that come about. I don't know if you noted any of those prophecies lately but, believe me, they certainly describe the times we're going through.”

In his book, The Late Great Planet Earth (a bestseller in the U.S. in past decades), Hal Lindsey claimed that Armageddon is just around the corner. According to biblical prophecies, seven years of terrible tribulation will soon befall mankind. This period is about to begin because the Jewish people after the long Diaspora have finally returned to their ancient homeland in Palestine, which they left after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in a.d. 70. And it is a genuine reality, we are told, because of the establishment of the State of Israel.

Next, Lindsey says, the Israelis will rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. Then a whole series of cataclysmic events will trigger the final Armageddon. A great war will ensue. Israel will be invaded from all sides: by a confederacy from the North (which was said to be the Russians), by the Arab nations, and by a great power from the East (which was identified as the Chinese). During the period leading up to these events, there will also emerge a European confederation -- the old Roman Empire, now the European Common Market -- headed by an Antichrist preaching a new religion. These years will witness the greatest devastation that mankind has ever seen. The valleys will flow with blood, cities will be destroyed by torrents of fire and brimstone -- this, it is said, represents a thermonuclear war, World War III, the most awesome holocaust of all time. At that moment, Jesus Christ will return to rescue in rapture those true believers who accept the word. Christ will reign for a thousand years and eventually establish his final kingdom throughout all eternity.

In a series of four new books that have suddenly swept to the top of the bestseller list, millions of people disappear from the face of the earth. The have been snatched from homes and offices, automobiles and airplanes -- all saved by the rapture, which has taken God-fearing Christians to heaven, while the rest of humanity is left behind to suffer the terrible trials and tribulations inflicted by the Antichrist. This is the plot of the fictionalized apocalyptic series, Left Behind, by fundamentalist preacher Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins.2 LaHaye ominously forewarns on his Web site that the year 2000 computer problem could trigger a “financial meltdown” as prelude to the world’s destruction.

Fears of the “last days,” it has been claimed, appeared at the end of the first millennium. Charles Mackay, in his 1841 work, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, depicted the epidemic terror that seized Christendom in the middle of the tenth century, as people expected the last judgment.3 Some said that Mackay’s account was pure hyperbole. In any case, the first millennium passed without the destruction of the world! Why should it occur in the second?

Many people in history have believed in the end-of-the-world scenario based on the Bible, and they often thought that it applied to their own age. A graphic illustration is the case of William Miller and his followers in the nineteenth century. Miller, a fundamentalist Protestant preacher from Vermont (and precursor of the Seventh-Day Adventists) studied the Bible carefully. He was convinced that the world would come to an end in his own day, sometime between March 21, 1843, and March 21, 1844. He based his analysis upon a specific biblical passage that draws on the Book of Daniel. “And he said unto me, Unto two thousand and three hundred days; then shall the sanctuary be cleansed” (Dan. 8:14, King James Version). Miller interpreted “days” as “years.” Since the prophecy was dated 457 b.c., the end of the world, he said, would occur two thousand and three hundred years later, in 1843. The Millerite groups -- which numbered in the thousands -- sold their possessions and awaited the final day. But, as we know, nothing happened. When 1843 passed he extended his prediction by another year, but again nothing happened. This forecasting of the end of times has been repeated many times throughout history. The same thing is most likely true, in my judgment, of present-day predictions of Armageddon.

Other religious traditions have prophetic-apocalyptic themes: Buddhism awaits Lord Matrieya, Islam the Madhi; Orthodox Judaism the Messiah; and Native American Indians wish to return to nature as it was before the European invasion. For those who use the Mayan calendar, the world will end in 2012.

It is clear that a state of belief may help create a self-fulfilling or suicidal prophecy. A widely held belief can have profound political and social ramifications, especially if it is held by people in positions of power. Apocalyptic thinking may mean that those who are under its sway will do little or nothing to prevent overwhelming disaster, fatalistically awaiting what is inevitable; or they may so act as to allow it to come true, believing that they are fulfilling divine prophecy. The problem with faith in prophecy is that it can take control of the future out of the hands of those best able to shape it. We are supposedly impotent and helpless creatures awaiting our fate, unable or unwilling to exert any influence to rectify or modify the course of events. The fixation on apocalypse grows out of fear of the unknown, and it is fed by hope for redemption. Often when the prophecy is falsified, the convictions of the believing group are intensified and the prophecies extrapolated.4

In democratic societies we need an informed public capable of wise decisions and without fantasy. We know of the dangers that distorted, apocalyptic, survivalist, conspiratorial, or pseudoscientific ideologies have had on societies.

New Age Doomsday Prophecies

A third kind of doomsday prophecy is that offered by New Age cults. The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and the world skeptics movement have examined a great number of the paranormal claims that are proliferating today from psychics, fortune tellers, seers, and gurus of various kinds. These include the failed predictions of Edgar Cayce, “the Sleeping Prophet,” who warned of a massive shifting of the poles in the years 2000-2001. They involve a number of suicide cults, such as the UFO-related “Heaven’s Gate” and the French-Swiss-Canadian space-age religion, “The Order of the Solar Temple.” They also include the bizarre annihilation agenda of Japan’s “Aum Shinrikyo” cult, and the many New Age cults proliferating in Russia today. There are also numerous astrological predictions of disaster due to planetary alignments, such as the so-called “Jupiter Effect.” And psychics are now having a field day in their Armageddon prophecies. How many times are those who claim to have precognitive or psychic powers correct in their prophecies? The track record, I submit, is extremely weak. We can and do make predictions about the future based on evidence and rational inference, and often these predictions are reliable. But those made on the basis of mystic power, psychic intuition, or astrological forecasts prove to be no more accurate than anyone’s wild guesses. Those who make such claims often fit a prophecy or vision to present circumstances after the fact, or they make the prophecy so general that it can be related to virtually any case. This has been done with the predictions of the ever-popular Nostradamus, the sixteenth-century seer. His quatrains have been read by every generation, including the present one, and his prophecies have been adapted to all sorts of circumstances in every time period. Often what is taken as prophetic is only due to coincidence; events are not preordained and predetermined as the prophetic tradition maintains. The future depends upon our own actions in the given situations. There are no special secret paths to knowledge of the future.

In conclusion, we live in a highly developed scientific and technological society. We face awesome problems. If we are to solve them, we must draw upon the best critical intelligence available. We need to use our rational powers, not abandon them. In free societies anyone is entitled to his convictions. Yet democracy presupposes an educated citizenry. When apocalyptic faith is intermingled with ideology, it can have deleterious social, political, and military consequences. It is at this point that all those committed to skeptical inquiry have an obligation to carefully examine those claims being made about our collective future, whether they are based upon so-called revealed prophecies or not, and to submit them to empirical criticism. There is thus a compelling need for critical examination of the prophecies of doom -- whether secular, religious, or New Age -- for these have serious implications for the world at large. And that is one of the key tasks of this World Skeptics Congress.

Notes

1. For fuller discussion of this, see Richard Abanes, End-Time Visions: The Road to Armageddon? (New York and London: Four Worlds Eight Windows, 1998).
2. The four books, all by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, are Left Behind (1995), Tribulation Force (1996), Nicolae (1997), and Soul Harvest (1998), all published by Tyndale House Publishers.
3. Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (New York: Crown, 1980).
4. See Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, When Prophecy Fails: A Social and Psychological Study of Modern Groups That Predict the Destruction of the World (New York: Harper and Row, 1956).

Heretofore largely ignored by Western philosophers of any stature, the traditionally associated (but logically independent) doctrines of reincarnation and Karma are thoroughly examined in Paul Edwards’ enjoyable and encyclopedic treatise. Edwards proceeds with his usual precision to expose the hidden assumptions, the empirical flaws, and the often unpalatable implications of these teachings that, on the surface, can seem quite appealing. It is always a pleasure to watch an incisive thinker cut right to the heart of an issue and then proceed to lay out its logical consequents in clear and concise prose. It is a double treat if that exposition is accomplished with wit and flair, as is the case here. One all too rarely gets the bonus of chuckling through a detailed and cogent analysis by an eminent philosopher. Take for instance this example of the twinkle in the scholar’s eye that appears on page 18: “It seems ludicrous that something as important as creation of a soul that is going to exist forever should be tied to such accidents as the failure of a birth-control appliance.”

The belief that some essence of ourselves survives bodily death is perhaps the most comforting of all spiritual leanings. It has provided reassurance for human beings probably since our ancestors first evolved brains of sufficient complexity to anticipate the future and contemplate their own mortality. The solace provided by any sort of expectation of an afterlife would probably have been sufficient to assure its undiminished popularity all by itself, but, as Edwards points out, the version of immortality preached by most reincarnationists offers yet another enticement. Belief in reincarnation feeds not only the hope for life beyond the grave, but in conjunction with its frequent fellow traveler, the “law” of Karma, it also provides apparent support for another widespread human longing, the desire to believe that we inhabit a just universe.

The warm glow this solution provides for believers diverts their attention from the many inherent conceptual and practical difficulties that Edwards lays bare in this book. For instance, a major difficulty for reincarnationists is what he calls the “modus operandi” problem. For magical thinkers, just imagining something can bring it about. But for the rest of us, there is the inconvenient need for a plausible chain of causal mechanisms before we can grant the likelihood of any given phenomenon. With the many advances in scientific understanding since the formulative days of the reincarnation story, it has become increasingly difficult even to conceive of a reasonable mechanism whereby a bodily attribute (such as a birthmark or deformity, which are afforded much attention in reincarnationist circles) or a mental property such as knowledge, a personality trait, or an inclination, could be packaged up at the end of one person’s lifetime, held in abeyance in non-physical form between incarnations (the “interregnum problem”) and finally implanted in a fetus in its mother’s womb in preparation for another revolution of the eternal carousel. It likewise strains credulity to accept the requirement that detailed tallies of every good and bad deed committed by every person who ever lived could be kept somewhere and weighed, let alone harnessed to transgenerational retributive mechanisms as diverse as earthquakes, bacteria, raging bulls, lightning bolts, or a large, ill-tempered bar patron named Bob.

The Canadian psychologist Melvin Lerner and his colleagues have studied various psychological needs that make the idea of transcendental fairness enforcers such as Karma perennially attractive. Lerner describes a number of payoffs for believing in what he calls the “just world hypothesis,” i.e., the soothing notion that, in life, people generally get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Many of us rebel emotionally at the realization -- easily prompted by a quick glance at the daily headlines -- that the plums and brickbats of life seem to be somewhat randomly apportioned, morally speaking. Apparently, it is too threatening for a large portion of the populace to admit that, no matter how long and hard one has tried to do the right thing, the driver of that approaching bus could still be just about to doze off. It is this motivation to salvage belief in a hidden hand that metes out deserved rewards and punishments on a cosmic scale that explains the unsavory but widely observed tendency to derogate apparently innocent victims. For example, “She must have dressed or behaved provocatively or she wouldn't have been raped, would she?”

With adult victims of misfortune, it is often sufficient merely to distort our perception of the worthiness of the individual to preserve our belief in a just world, but what of infants afflicted with excruciating and disfiguring diseases, or children orphaned and tortured by the perpetrators of “ethnic cleansing"? How could they possibly have accumulated enough demerits in their short lives to have deserved such a cruel fate? A ready answer, if you can accept it, is supplied by those two objects of Edwards’ dissecting scalpel, reincarnation and Karma. Apparently, you can take it -- accumulated moral capital, anyway -- with you, after all. Herein we have the long-sought excuse for the panorama of gratuitous evil and unearned windfalls we encounter daily. Those kids deserved it all right, but not for what they did in this brief but brutal existence. Rather, they are expiating vicious acts in one or more of an infinite series of previous lives. And, incidentally, that Wall Street junk bond dealer does deserve his Rolex, BMW, and yacht after all -- he was obviously a somewhat more meritorious character in a previous incarnation.

Neat, huh? Well, yes, sort of and even Edwards admits that this account makes more sense than the traditional Christian explanation that napalmed babies are, for reasons beyond our feeble ken, an unfortunate by-product of Adam and Eve’s predilection for apples. But wait! As is so often the case, the large print giveth, but the small print taketh away. The small print, deftly enlarged by Edwards, reveals that the doctrines of Karma and reincarnation, so conducive at first glance, carry with them some truly revolting implications, ones their devotees seem rarely to have noticed. For instance, it follows from these views that I ought not to give a donation for African famine relief because those starving wretches must deserve that fate for having blotted their copybooks last time (or times) around. Helping the afflicted just thwarts their Karma, you see.

Another stumbling block raised by Edwards is the steadily climbing world population. If the souls of every one of today’s earthlings necessarily inhabited a body in a previous generation, and -- also according to doctrine -- no new souls are being created, and there were fewer bodies on the planet then than now, we would seem to be faced with a serious soul deficit. A few reincarnationists have attempted to sidestep this impediment with mind-numbing ad hoc gyrations (upgrading of animal souls, recruiting souls from other planets or dimensions, soul sharing, etc.), but the extremes to which these apologists have gone only underscores, as Edwards notes, how fanciful the whole reincarnationist enterprise really is.

Then we come to perhaps the weightiest, and for me (as a long-time student of brain function), the most engaging objection to reincarnation raised by Edwards. A compelling reason to doubt that a packet of personality traits and abilities could leap from a dying person, into limbo, and thenceforth to a newly conceived embryo, is the evident linkage of all psychological attributes to highly specific structures and functions in individual brains. While modern neuroscience cannot conclusively rule out the possibility that disembodied consciousness could exist, the staggering amount of evidence suggesting that thinking, remembering, and feeling require an intact, functioning brain serves to make the brain-mind link one of the most well-supported postulates to be found anywhere in science. I have presented an overview of that evidence and its implications for a number of occult beliefs, including reincarnation, in a previous issue of this journal (SI, Winter 1988).

While Edwards does not advocate, as I did on that occasion, the most extreme version of the materialist position on the “mind-body problem” -- the psychoneural identity hypothesis, which asserts that mental functions are identical with states of the brain -- he argues that the manifest dependence of all mental functions on specific brain functions makes the possibility that personal traits, knowledge, or self-awareness could skip from one incarnation to the next exceedingly remote. Either way, as I noted in the above-mentioned article, if this kind of transmigration of traits and knowledge is possible, my entire chosen field of behavioral neuroscience is essentially a fool’s errand. Fortunately, after reading this book, the prudent bettor will probably conclude that the chances of the concept of reincarnation being fatally flawed are substantially greater than the probability that the fundamental tenet of neuroscience (i.e., brain-mind linkage, which, if true, makes reincarnation so improbable) is in substantial danger.

The evidence, such as it is, is exhaustively examined by Edwards. Much of it comes from seemingly credible witnesses who claim to have seen the projected “astral bodies” of others at the time of the latter’s death, or from children who seem remarkably precocious, or who “remember” people, places or events that they seem unlikely to have known about if they had not actually experienced them in a previous life. Edwards shows that the empirical evidence, like the supporting arguments put forth by past-life explorers such as Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, Stanislav Grof, Raymond Moody, and Ian Stevenson are far less compelling than the tabloid headlines would have you believe. As with most anecdotal evidence of this sort, examination reveals that tales retold by the faithful have a way of becoming tidier and more convincing as they pass from mouth to mouth.

As Leonard Angel showed in these pages some time ago (SI, Fall 1994), careful reading of the acknowledged “best cases” for reincarnation, e.g., several from the parapsychologist Ian Stevenson, reveals significant internal inconsistencies in the accounts that throw them into doubt, even before the evidence itself is examined. Edwards notes similar problems in the evidential base and has taken the trouble to trace many other “best” cases back as close to their sources as possible. Along the way, we are treated to some hilarious examples of gullibility among those seized by the will to believe. In attacking the famous “Bridey Murphy” case, supposedly one of the strongest in the reincarnationists’ arsenal, Edwards does skeptics the additional service of pointing out that some of the rebuttals that skeptics like to tout (myself among them, until I read this chapter) were themselves the products of journalistic excess and thus not to be relied upon. Edwards finds much else, however, to discredit the evidence for Virginia Tighe’s prior existence as Bridey Murphy. In the process, he supplies trenchant critiques of the use of hypnosis and related techniques to “reveal” memories of past lives. Suffice it to say that, overall, the empirical case for reincarnation fares no better than the conceptual, logical, and moral ones.

Skeptics who follow my recommendation and read Reincarnation: A Critical Examination [by Paul Edwards] will derive much ammunition for arguing not only with reincarnationists but with “near-death experience” afficianados and afterlife enthusiasts of other stripes as well. They will be treated to a good read in the process — H. L. Mencken’s essays spring immediately to mind in this regard. Reincarnation is a useful adjunct to Edwards’ earlier edited volume, Immortality and to another work that both he and I admire, Susan Blackmore’s Dying to Live. Skeptics familiar with these works will enter debates well prepared. They should be warned, however, that if the logic and evidence contained therein were the final determinants of belief, fuzzy but comforting notions like reincarnation and Karma would never have gained their substantial cultural toehold in the first place.