One of Italy’s most famous “enigmas” certainly is Turin’s Holy Shroud. This cloth, that allegedly covered the body of Jesus Christ and retained a mysterious negative image of it, has attracted incredible controversy, especially after carbon 14 dating in 1988 revealed that the cloth had a Medieval origin, in agreement with the date of its first appearance (circa 1350, in Lirey near Troyes, France). Believers in the supernatural nature of the image on the cloth have always maintained that “somehow” the dating had to be wrong.

Their hopes were apparently met when a Russian researcher, Dmitri A. Kouznetsov, revealed he had found proof that an ancient fire had probably modified the carbon content of the cloth, thus altering any subsequent attempt in dating it. Kouznetsov’s claims were enough to have the believers say that his work was further proof of the authenticity of the Shroud.

The Unmaking of a Creationist

Many readers of this magazine may recall Kouznetsov. Born in 1955, he worked as a biologist in Moscow until 1989, when he abruptly ended his career in biology. Since 1983, he has been an active creationist. He was associated with the Institute for Creation Research, located near San Diego, California, the Slavic Gospel Association, and other similar associations. He was connected with American creationists such as Duane Gish and Henry Morris.

In 1989, he published a paper in the International Journal of Neuroscience (IJN) (49, 43-59), where he claimed he had found experimental proof in favor of creationist theses. The paper launched him into an immediate international career as a creationist propagandist. He toured the United States, lecturing about the biological proofs of creationism and published several papers in creationist journals.

In 1994, a Swedish biologist, Professor Dan Larhammar of Uppsala University, examined Kouznetsov’s 1989 paper in the IJN (77, 199-201). Apart from criticizing the contents, he discovered that eight key references in the bibliography referred to nonexistent papers in nonexistent journals. A recent check by Italian researcher Gian Marco Rinaldi revealed that the number of references to nonexistent papers is probably around fifty. Larhammar published his criticism in a note in the same journal (1994) and subsequently summarized it in Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 1995). The whole story of the faked references was also told in 1995 in the Australian journal The Skeptic.

For a while, Kouznetsov was embroiled in the scandal. The creationist associations that had promoted him publicly dissociated themselves from him. Kouznetsov’s career as a creationist ended in 1995.

However, the man was not done-he was in fact starting an entirely new career as a specialist in archaeological chemistry. During the very same months when the creationist scandal erupted, he was able to publish, in important chemical and archaeological journals, no less than nine papers related to the Shroud of Turin.

Friend and colleague Gian Marco Rinaldi has recently conducted the most in-depth investigation on Kouznetsov’s claims ever attempted and has come up with a series of startling discoveries. Right from the start, clear evidence pointing to serious fraud emerged. Though Rinaldi kept Kouznetsov at least partially informed about this inquiry, the Russian researcher has not yet replied to several letters sent to him.

The Making of a Sindonologist

Kouznetsov’s new career as a “sindonologist” was originated by Guy Berthault, a wealthy French creationist known for financing work in various fields of unusual research. Kouznetsov met Berthault for the first time at a creationist conference in England in 1992 and, from then on, in almost all of his papers, Kouznetsov thanks Berthault for his financial support.

Kouznetsov first appeared among sindonologists at a conference in Rome in 1993. Between 1994 and 1996, he published nine papers in qualified chemical or archaeological journals, where, more or less directly, he claimed to have provided experimental proof for the thesis that the composition of carbon isotopes in the linen cellulose can be altered as an effect of various factors, thus explaining the results of the 1988 dating. The obvious consequence, he claimed, was that the Shroud may be much older than established by the laboratories; indeed, it may be 2,000 years old. Until very recently, in sindonological publications (especially in Italy) he has been hailed as sort of saviour for the Shroud of Turin.

In 1997, however, he met with a misadventure in the United States, where he was jailed for bad checks in Connecticut and imprisoned for five months. By accepting a six-month rehabilitation program, he was freed and avoided trial.

After this episode, he returned to Moscow, but began to lose the confidence of his former supporters. The corpus of his publications connected with the Shroud and published in qualified scientific journals amounts to ten papers, all coauthored with his friend Andrey Ivanov. Nine of the papers were produced during several months in 1994. Actually, they are just three papers, cloned to nine by multiple publication. Rinaldi carefully examined each one, every single quotation, reference, publication, and affiliation given in them.

All papers are experimental studies of chemical modifications in the cellulose of linen textiles: a natural modification (alkylation) simply due to aging (groups 1 and 4, as listed in the references), or an induced modification due to ventilation (that is, to microorganisms brought on the textile from the atmosphere) (group 2), or to heating (group 3). The chemical modification of cellulose is the requisite to his thesis that the carbon isotopes composition of the shroud has changed as a consequence of aging, of microbial action, and of heating (due to a fire that nearly burned the shroud in 1532). The thesis sounds unrealistic and the results of his experiments look very odd. Rinaldi’s suspicions of fraud, however, are based on indirect clues, independent of the claimed experimental results.

On the Tracks of a Fraudster

In all of the papers, the author’s affiliation is to “E.A. [or S.A.] Sedov Biopolymer Research Laboratories” in Moscow. According to Kouznetsov himself, this was a private laboratory-of which he was the director-that was active between 1992 and 1998. It appears that no other research papers with this affiliation have ever been published in chemical literature. But things get darker.

Kouznetsov’s last paper (4) is a report of an experimental study on four ancient samples, of various ages, of burial linen of Irish provenance. Kouznetsov claims that the four samples were donated to him by a private foundation and by two private individuals in Ireland, and mentions two Irish consultants. For three pieces of the burial linen, he mentions the names of historical people who were buried in the tombs.

With the collaboration of a number of people in Ireland (among them archaeologists and local historians), Rinaldi has collected strong evidence that Kouznetsov has never been supplied with any of the samples. The Irish donors and consultants do not exist, and the sites and tombs have not been excavated or do not exist anymore. Since the paper is a report of experiments on just those four samples, then if the samples do not exist, it becomes clear that Kouznetsov has never done any experiments and has fabricated the whole report out of his own imagination.

In an independent inquiry, the officers of the Antiquities Division of the National Museum of Ireland, in Dublin, whom Rinaldi had alerted, reached the same conclusions: Kouznetsov could not possibly have obtained the samples of ancient Irish textiles.

In the acknowledgements to his paper, Kouznetsov thanks eleven people from eight American universities. At least six of these universities have never had the claimed persons on their staff. Two of the universities have not yet answered, but in both cases their Web sites list all the names of their staff and the names listed by Kouznetsov are not present.

One key reference is to a paper from the Proceedings of the Georgian Academy of Science. From Tbilisi, Rinaldi was informed that the paper does not exist in any of their publications and that the names of the three authors are not known.

Prompted by the results of the Irish investigation, Rinaldi turned his attention to a group of papers (1) where Kouznetsov reports about similar experiments on the chemistry of cellulose in fifteen samples of ancient textiles of various ages. Fourteen samples, so he claimed, had been supplied by six museums in Russia (two in Moscow and one in Vladimir), the Ukraine (Simpheropol and Ternopil), and Uzbekistan (Samarkand). He gives the name (not the street address) and the city for each museum, and, moreover, he mentions the names of the directors or curators whom he thanks in the acknowledgements for having supplied the samples.

Rinaldi has obtained evidence that these museums do not exist. As to the two museums in Moscow, things aren't clear, since in the city there are hundreds of museums, and it seems that nobody has the complete list. Correspondents from Russia cannot confirm the existence of those particular museums. Kouznetsov’s experiments, as he describes them, are not done on single samples but are comparisons among several samples of different ages, and lacking the samples from four of the museums, he could not have done the experiments. In Moscow, an archeologist in correspondence with Rinaldi asked Kouznetsov about his faked claims, but he was unable to answer.

Two other papers (2) are reports of comparisons between experiments performed in two different geographical locations, Moscow and Krasnodar. Kouznetsov and two coauthors worked in Moscow; two other coauthors worked concurrently in Krasnodar. These latter two coauthors are indicated as affiliated to a "Krasnodar Center for Environmental Studies, University of Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar-2,” but the complete address (with street name) is not given.

Rinaldi suspected that this Krasnodar Center and its two authors did not exist. He lacked contacts in southern Russia, and for this part of the inquiry much help was given by Odile Eisenstein of the University of Montpellier, France. She was the editor-in-chief of the New Journal of Chemistry at the time of publication of one of the papers (2a). From the information she collected and from further investigative work it appears that the “Krasnodar Center for Environmental Studies” does not exist.

The groups of papers labeled (2) and (3, except for 3a) contain results of Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) measurements on carbon isotopes. Kouznetsov claims that the AMS work was done in Protvino (near Moscow). Rinaldi’s investigative work on these was very long and difficult, but in the end it appears that even the laboratory quoted by Kouznetsov is fictitious. The AMS work, for example, is credited to a Ivan Shevardin and a Sergey Bakhroushin, neither of whom seems to be a familiar name among the international AMS community. Furthermore, it appears that AMS measurements were not available in Russia in 1994 (and still weren't in 2001).

Conclusions

Rinaldi painstakingly conducted a fascinating investigation which takes more than forty pages in Scienza & Paranormale (43, May/June 2002), the magazine of CICAP, the Italian skeptics. It is impossible here to give all the details of this incredible episode, but from what we have seen already it appears that the famous experiments that seemed to “save” the Shroud were a complete fabrication. Kouznetsov was repeatedly invited to defend himself, but so far he has refused to do so. Meanwhile, the sindonologists are quietly removing any reference to his work from their Web sites and papers. Does this mean that they now accept the 1988 carbon dating?

Notes

Dear Mr. Karr,

Below is a link to an article entitled “Notes on a Strange World— The Case of the Holy Fraudster.” I was alerted to this article through “Google Alerts.” Our organization is mentioned in connection with the subject of the article, a Russian researcher named Dmitri Kouznetsov, specifically that he is “associated” with Slavic Gospel Association.

This man has never worked for our organization, and was never “associated” with him in any formal way. After checking our records and with those who were in leadership at the time, the only possible link is that he might have been interviewed long ago on one of our Russian-language radio programs dealing with creation, just as a news media agency would interview someone for a story. That, and that alone, is the extent of our involvement with him.

I would appreciate some sort of correction or clarification.

Thanks in advance for your help and cooperation.

Sincerely,

Joel Griffith
Slavic Gospel Association

References

(1) Group of “aging” papers:

• Analytical Chemistry, 66 (23), 1994, 4359-65
• Journal of Archaeological Science, 23 (1), 1996, 23-34
• In Orna, M.V., ed., Archaeological Chemistry, American Chemical Society Symposium Series, 1996, 254-68

(2) Group of “ventilation” papers:

• New Journal of Chemistry, 19 (12), 1995, 1285-89
• Textile Research Journal, 66 (2), 1996, 111-14

(3) Group of “heating” papers:

• Textile Research Journal, 65 (4) 1995, 236-40
  
• Journal of Archaeological Science, 23 (1), 1996, 109-21
  
• Acta Archaeologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 48, 1996, 261-79
  
• In Orna, M.V., ed., Archaeological Chemistry, ACS Symp. Series, 1996, 229-47

(4) Studies in Conservation (London), 45, 2000, 117-26

The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) came for the first time to the American Southwest with its conference "Hoaxes, Myths and Manias” Nov. 23-26 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The region has a rich scientific heritage going back to Robert Goddard’s rocket experiments near Roswell in the early 1930s, the birth of the nuclear age here in the 1940s, two world-famous national laboratories pushing the frontiers of applied science and technology, new astronomical observatories sprouting up on mountain peaks, and a Ph.D. per-capita ratio greater than any other state. It also, ironically, has always attracted more than its share of New Agers, mystics, and seekers, and of course it is home to that most famous of all modern myths and associated hoaxes, the Roswell crashed flying saucer story.

The conference was a lively affair with sessions spread over four days, Thursday evening to Sunday noon. Happily this time none were concurrent, so the nearly 300 registrants didn't have to miss anything. It was preceded by a limited-attendance windshield tour of Sandia National Laboratories on the southeast edge of Albuquerque and followed by a nine-hour, two-bus tour to the southeastern part of the state to Roswell and its weird little UFO museum. Lots of out-of-state attendees took extra time to explore New Mexico’s natural history and cultural attractions.

Field Trip to Roswell

One of the things that seemed to mark this conference was a nice mixture of near-legendary figures who founded the modern skeptical movement in the 1970s (Paul Kurtz, Ray Hyman, and at least six other CSICOP Fellows spoke) and a newer generation of skeptical inquirers who are advancing the cause of scientific skepticism in their own ways on Web sites, Web publications, and so on. It was an opportunity for them all to meet and hear each other. Everyone seemed to have a lot of fun-both at the conference and in their work/hobbies of exposing various scams, shams, deceits, deceptions, misconceptions, and other manner of skullduggery.

Two noted psychologists and CSICOP Fellows started things off with presentations designed to help people understand some of the general principles underlying specific cases they'd be hearing later from others. Barry Beyerstein (Simon Fraser University) presented a useful tutorial on, essentially, the psychology of belief, with abundant references to the Belief Engine model of CSICOP colleague and fellow psychologist James Alcock (SI May/June 1995). Then Ray Hyman (University of Oregon, emeritus), who later in the conference would be given CSICOP’s In Praise of Reason Award (see In Praise of Ray Hyman) described the psychology of the con, which included some demonstrations of how easily we can all be deceived. Con men (and women) all have a good practical knowledge of human psychology, and they prey on the human trust that make societies function. Successful con artists charm potential victims with their immense likability, and they combine that with an utter lack of compassion for their victims. They also often work in teams with one person posing as an innocent customer to help draw the victim in.

Alex Boese (author of The Museum of Hoaxes and creator of the Web site museumofhoaxes.com) began the first full day of sessions with a presentation perhaps prototypical of those at the conference: an amusing treatment of Internet and media hoaxes. He called the Internet “the greatest medium for hoaxes of all time.” Some hoaxers use e-mail, some use the Web. E-mail hoaxes spread rapidly in viral fashion; some are outrageous and amusing, others have broad consequences.

Boese clearly seems to enjoy good hoaxes; he complained that annoying e-mail hoaxes “give the phenomenon of hoaxes a bad name.” Other kinds he finds “more interesting.” These include fake press release hoaxes. Examples: Microsoft is buying the Catholic Church and has bought exclusive rights to the Bible, 1994; the false report originated by a humor Web site that of all the presidents, George W. Bush’s IQ is the lowest at 92 (The Guardian published it as fact on July 21, 2001, and Gary Trudeau used it in his Doonesbury comic strip); and Alabama changes the value of pi from 3.14 to “the biblical value of 3.0,” an April Fool’s hoax that originated with New Mexicans for Science and Reason, the local host of this conference, as a parody of creationist attempts to block evolution).

There are hoax photographs, including Cordell’s cat, a photo of a digitally enlarged 23-pound cat that quickly went out to millions of people worldwide, and the humorous photo of a shark leaping at a helicopter, a splice of two digital images. Another category is hoax political humor photos (President Bush with a book upside down, Representative Tom Daschle pledging allegiance with his left hand over his heart). Still another is “dark humor in the wake of disastrous tragedy,” like the hoaxed photo of a tourist on the World Trade Center observation deck as one of the hijacked airliners of September 11, 2001, flew toward him. It was the wrong kind of plane.

Web hoaxes are a little more difficult, Boese said, since spoofing the look of real Web sites “takes some work.” Nevertheless there are hundreds of hoax Web sites; among the most infamous was Bonsaikitten.com, which showed uniquely shaped bonsai kittens, grown in jars, a hoax created by grad students at MIT. Another was the hoax auction on eBay of the “ghost in a jar.” Someone paid $50,000 for the jar, and there were ghost-in-a-jar fan clubs.

Why are there so many Internet hoaxes? Unlike other media, says Boese, the Internet “has almost no barriers to entry. There are no gatekeepers or editors.” In that sense, he said, “The Net has democratized the phenomenon of hoaxes.” The Net is a haven for hoaxes and misinformation, he said, one that “tends to be the price we pay for an open society.” Hoaxes and lies are part of the messiness of an open society and, in any event, said Boese, “frivolous hoaxes are not much of a problem.”

Robert Carroll, a professor of philosophy at Sacramento City College and author/creator of The Skeptic’s Dictionary (based on his lively Web site skepdic.com), is another example of a speaker who has found a major role using the new media to offer reliable information about claims. He spoke on pranks, frauds, and hoaxes from around the world. There are plenty to choose from. His examples ranged from the Indian rope trick of 1890 to the herbal fuel hoax of 1996. And we've had two human cloning hoaxes twenty-five years apart, David Rorvik’s in 1978 and the Raelians’ this past year.

Carroll offered several valuable lessons including: “Don't trust people you trust” and “Don't expect any help from the mass media” (with some exceptions). Another is that almost anyone can be hoaxed. “It’s pretty easy to hoax people,” he said. “We want to be deceived.”

Eugenie Scott

Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education (ncseweb.org), gave a special luncheon address about hoaxes of evolution. Creationist critics of evolution often attempt to denigrate science by pointing out various paleontological hoaxes such as Piltdown Man. But, said, Scott, hoaxes within science are quickly corrected-that’s how science works.

One example she gave of science’s screening mechanisms working was a case that happened a few years back (1999-2000) of Archaeoraptor, the “Piltdown” bird from China. The paper touting it was rejected by Nature - the history of the fossil “was a little suspect,” Scott points out. But the National Geographic Society prematurely heralded it, then had to recant. The fossil turned out to be a composite of the body of a bird with the tail of a dinosaur. "It was definitely a fake,” although not necessarily a fraud, Scott said. In any event, she said, none of this affects the general point that transition fossils are abundant. “We have a wonderful series of fossils from dinosaurs to birds.” She also debunked the claim of creationist writer Jonathan Wells in Icons of Evolution that the famous peppered moth example used in many evolution texts is a fraud. She ended with a pitch for scientists to become more involved in science education issues in their fields.

Jan Brunvand and Ray Hyman

Urban legends guru Jan Harold Brunvand (University of Utah) was the conference’s keynote speaker (and recipient the next night of CSICOP’s 2003 Distinguished Skeptic Award), and he offered a retinue of urban legends like those he has collected in a series of lively books. “Why do some people believe some of these weird stories some of the time?” he asked. Well, because many appear as news items in legitimate newspapers, the stories often refer to particular police authorities, and they often give specific details (Brunvand calls these “reality anchors”). Also they appeal to us because they often depict “sweet revenge or poetic justice,” and some actually offer good advice. "Urban legends depict the world as we imagine it,” said Brunvand. He concluded with a one-sentence summation that is the title of one of his books: The truth never stands in the way of a good story.

Eric Krieg

Eric Krieg, an electrical engineer and president of the Philadelphia Association for Critical Thinking, is an example of an energetic skeptic who has carved out a niche for himself, in his case investigating claims of the promise of free energy. Here he encounters all manner of dreamers, schemers, and conspiracy theorists. “Some of these people are insane,” he said. Others are just honestly deluded. Still others, he said, know exactly what they're doing. These are con men. “They're like modern snake-oil salesmen,” he said. (See Krieg, ”Examining the Amazing Free-Energy Claims of Dennis Lee,” SI July/August 1997.)

Krieg offers a Randi-style $10,000 bounty for any demonstration of a free-energy device under test conditions. Promoters have given him a host of excuses for not subjecting their ideas to his tests: “It needs a few more adjustments,” “I'm worried it will collapse the economy,” "Buy my videotape,” and even “God told me not to show it.”

As the first skeptic to take on these people (although he is pleased he now has a lot of help from skeptics groups throughout the country), Krieg has frequently been the target of promoters’ invective, or worse (legal threats, efforts to bury his Web page). But that doesn't seem to bother him. “I enjoy a good fight,” he said. “I don't need much sleep. I take 'em all on. It’s a hobby for me.”

Physicist/mathematician Dave Thomas, President of New Mexicans for Science and Reason, updated his previous investigations of the notorious “Bible Code” (SI, November/December 1997, March/April 1998, and March/April 2003), which he called “the mother of all statistical apologetics.” Dave’s general point, stated in his usual wry way, is that “hidden messages are everywhere,” not just in the Torah, the Hebrew Bible. But do they mean anything? No, of course not.

Employing the same equidistant- letter-sequence methods that Bible Code author Michael Drosnin uses to find supposed “hidden messages” in the Torah-and supposedly nowhere else-Dave is able to find such references in just about any work, including War and Peace. Dave used to leave his computer on overnight number-crunching various letter-steps to come up with interesting phrases, but he now writes his programs in C++ (it’s like “Godzilla,” he says) and can do the searches in real time, projecting the results on screen while we watch. Dave found that Hitler and Nazi occur in Chapter 2, Book 2 of War and Peace within a sequence of only 244 words, “one-third of one percent of the length” Drosnin needed to find them in. Thomas found "Roswell UFO” and “Darwin got it right” in Genesis. In a 6,000-word excerpt from the book Bible Code II posted on the Internet, Dave earlier found this message, which seems to say it all: “The Bible Code is a silly, dumb, false, evil, nasty, dismal fraud and snake oil hoax.”

Phil Plait

Astronomer Phil Plait (Sonoma State University) has made a name for himself with his Web site badastronomy.com and now a book of the same name. In his talk he wittily skewered a number of bizarre pseudo-astronomical claims, most notably Planet X, a planet unknown to astronomers that was supposedly to enter the solar system in May 2003 and destroy Earth. ("So much for doing your taxes,” he said.) He called his exposure of “The Planet (Hoa)X” case “the anatomy of some very, very bad astronomy.” The claim was made by a woman with little knowledge of astronomy who seemed to be able to see evidence of Planet X everywhere, while astronomers saw nothing unfamiliar.

“The hardest thing about being a skeptic,” Plait said about such claimants, "is maintaining a level of politeness.” Said Plait: “You cannot debunk these people. They are completely impervious to logic. . . . It’s just ridiculous.”

Another claim of a “Harmonic Concordance” revolved around an alignment of astronomical objects. But it mysteriously invoked, along with the moon and the major planets, Chiron, a 20-kilometer icy rock out past Saturn. Why? Because if Chiron weren't on the chart, “the chart wouldn't work,” Plait said. “It doesn't matter,” he said. The whole thing is a farce.

Plait labeled his viewgraphs with terms such as “The Achy Breaky Chart,” "The Grand Malignment,” and “Ommmmmmgod!” The latter was a reference to believers’ attempts to get 144,000 people chanting on the night of the concordance. The meaning? Plait asked, answering, “Not a damn thing!”

And so it went. . . speaker after speaker went on to expose promulgators of misinformation, misconceptions, hoaxes, scams, myths, legends, deceptions, and various other examples of human foibles and folly.

Benjamin Radford, Skeptical Inquirer's managing editor and author of the newly published Media Mythmakers (and co-author of a book with the same title as the conference), spoke on hoaxes and myths about monsters. He’s another example of the rising new generation of skeptics. So is Jim Underdown, executive director of the Center for Inquiry-West, who described his investigations in the studios of TV speak-to-the-dead mediums John Edward and James Van Praagh (SI, September/October 2003). Physicist Donald Simanek talked about perpetual motion machines and other unworkable devices. Astronomer and retired Air Force Maj. James McGaha described a variety of UFO hoaxes and debunked the claim of the so-called (and misnamed) Area 51 having anything to do with UFOs or aliens.

Ken Feder

Wally Sampson

Three more CSICOP Fellows rounded out the speakers. Joe Nickell, CSICOP’s Senior Research Fellow and SI's Investigative Files columnist, described some of his investigations of alleged ghosts and spirits. Archaeologist and SI consulting editor Kenneth Feder (author of Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries) entertainingly told the story of the Cardiff Giant hoax that was a phenomenon near Syracuse, New York, in 1864. Feder’s point was to show that even in a case where scientists immediately recognized a fraud, the public fell for it anyway.

And physician Wallace Sampson, editor of The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, discussed in some detail four major hoax medical claims. One was Ernest Krebs, Jr.'s Laetrile hoax (a theory Krebs invented in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley) that “completely snowed the scientific establishment. . . . It was all made up. It was very sophisticated. It was a con,” Sampson said. It was also part of a stock swindle involving hundreds of millions of dollars on the Montreal Stock Exchange. Sampson said the four examples of famous scams all had major investors (several also had strong political support), all were hoaxes, all were part of alternative medicine, and all are “part of the mental state of accepting alternative medicine.”

Sacramento Bee Reporter Helps Public Avoid Being Stung by Scams

The recipient of CSICOP’s Candle in the Dark Award for the media’s contribution to skepticism was Edgar Sanchez, a consumer affairs writer for The Sacramento Bee.

Sanchez, in his weekly Scam Alert column, has tackled many consumer frauds and scams ranging from Nigerian money scams to phony police detectives to car-mileage fraud. Previous winners of the award have included Bill Nye the Science Guy and Scientific American Frontiers producer David Huntley. Sanchez was unable to attend the conference, but sent the following statement:

“Every day, more Americans are defrauded. Many are victims of identity theft. Some are duped by self-appointed 'psychics.' Still others fall for that notorious phone call: 'Congratulations! You've won a new car! But you won't get it unless you send a $1,500 processing fee.' To paraphrase Carl Sagan, 'Today’s scam world has millions and millions and millions of deceptions.' Today, more than ever, the public needs to be aware of ongoing, devastating scams. That’s the mission of The Sacramento Bee's weekly Scam Alert: to explain the latest fraud and how to protect yourself. I am honored to receive The Responsibility in Journalism Award. My sincere thanks to CSICOP and the Skeptical Inquirer. Keep up the good work.”

CNN’s Larry King was selected for the Snuffed Candle Award, for “encouraging credulity, presenting pseudoscience as genuine, and contributing to the public’s lack of understanding of the methods of scientific inquiry.” (See ”King of the Paranormal” in the November/December 2003 issue of SI.)

Stigmata

Popularly associated with saintliness, stigmata refers to the wounds of Christ’s crucifixion supposedly reproduced spontaneously on the body of a Christian. Following the death of Jesus, about a.d. 29 or 30, the phenomenon waited nearly twelve centuries to appear (putting aside a cryptic Biblical reference to St. Paul [Galatians 6:17]). St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) is credited with being the first “true” stigmatist (after a man with the crucifixion wounds was arrested for imposture two years earlier).

Following St. Francis, a few hundred people have exhibited stigmata, including several saints-most recent Padre Pio (1887-1968). He was canonized in 2002, although not for his stigmata, the Catholic Church never having declared the alleged phenomenon miraculous (D'Emilio 2002; Tokasz 2003).

Indeed, in addition to its copycat aspect, stigmata is suspect on other grounds. It appeared in mostly Roman Catholic countries, notably Italy, until the twentieth century. Also, the form and placement of the wounds has evolved. For example, those of St. Francis (except for his side wound) “were not wounds which bled but impressions of the heads of the nails, round and black and standing clear from the flesh” (Harrison 1994, 25).

Subsequently, stigmata have typically been bleeding wounds, albeit with “no consistency even remotely suggesting them as replications of one single, original pattern” (Wilson 1988, 63).

It is well established that many stigmatics were engaging in trickery. For instance, Magdalena de la Cruz confessed, during a serious illness in 1543, that her stigmata had been faked. In 1587, Maria de la Visitacion, known as the “holy nun of Lisbon,” was caught painting fake wounds on her hands. Pope Pius IX privately branded as a fraud Palma Maria Matarelli (1825-1888), stating that “she has befooled a whole crowd of pious and credulous souls.” And more recently, in 1984, an Italian court convicted stigmatic Gigliola Giorgini of fraud (Wilson 1988, 26, 42, 147).

The twentieth century’s two best-known stigmatics-Theresa Neumann and Padre Pio-were suspected of deception. A Professor Martini who conducted a surveillance of Neumann observed that blood would flow from her wounds only when he was persuaded to leave the room, as if something “needed to be hidden from observation” (Wilson 1988, 53, 114-115). And a pathologist who examined Padre Pio concluded that his wounds were superficial at best and that the side “wound” had not penetrated the skin at all (Ruffin 1982, 146-154, 305).

Catholic scholar Herbert Thurston (1952, 100) found “no satisfactory case of stigmatization since St. Francis of Assisi.” He believed the phenomena was due to suggestion, but attempts to duplicate it experimentally through hypnosis have ranged from the doubtful to the unsuccessful. As to St. Francis, his extraordinary zeal to imitate Jesus may have led him to engage in a pious deception (Nickell 2000).

A New Stigmatist

Enter Lilian Bernas, a Catholic convert (in 1989) and one-time nursing-home worker. She first exhibited stigmata during Easter of 1992, having previously received visions of Jesus. According to one of her two self-published booklets, Jesus appears frequently to her, addressing her as “My suffering soul,” “My sweet petal,” and “My child” (Bernas 1999).

The Archdiocese of Ottawa, Ontario, where she then lived, established a commission to investigate Bernas’s claims. “The inquiry did not make a judgment on the authenticity,” stated a spokeswoman for the Archdiocese, Gabrielle Tasse. Tasse told The Buffalo News, “It doesn't really concern the general public. It just creates propaganda.” The Catholic Church often resists publicity regarding supernatural claims, noted the Rev. Thomas Reese, a Jesuit priest who edits the weekly Catholic magazine, America. “The church is very skeptical of these things,” Rev. Reese explained (Tokasz 2003).

Bernas now resides in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, living with a retired couple whom she asked to take her in in 1996, supposedly at Jesus’s request. They are impressed with Bernas whom they regard as a “victim soul” (one who suffers for others). In 2001 the Ottawa Citizen published a profile of Bernas (Wake 2001), apparently provoking displeasure from her home archdiocese of Ottawa. Their policy (according to a spokesman for the Buffalo Diocese) is “that she is not to speak publicly because her faith journey is private” (Tokasz 2003).

However, Bernas does speak publicly, addressing the faithful and the curious at various churches. I attended a talk she gave, for example, at Resurrection Church in Cheektowaga, New York. Although she claimed Jesus guided her in her talks (she sometimes departed from her prepared text), she said that “the Devil” was at her elbow at all times and that she had to struggle with pride and self will. She spoke of Lent, of praying the Rosary, and other Catholic topics, and claimed that Jesus had given her “a vision of aborted babies” (Bernas 2002a).

Afterward, she answered questions from those who gathered around her. Asked what Jesus looked like, she said he appeared as we did, solid. She added that he had shoulder-length hair with a beard and a mustache, and wore a white robe. In other words, he exhibited the conventional likeness of Jesus as it has evolved in art. Bernas’s devotees exhibit a portrait of Jesus, “drawn under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit on May 20, 1994, By Lil Bernas.”

The Wounds

I asked Bernas about her wounds, noting that there were reddish scars on the backs of her hands. She replied that she had also bled from the palms on occasion, but that no marks were left in those instances. She told me she was “permitted” to retain those on the backs of her hands and also on the tops of her feet. Someone asked about cross-shaped wounds (she has, for example, an apparent cruciform scar on her right jaw near the ear), and she stated that such stigmata were of the Devil, that before her genuine stigmata came she had periods of possession (Bernas 2002a).

I found the absence of wounds on the palms and soles highly suspicious. A sham stigmatist might well avoid those areas which would be subjected to additional pain-and made more difficult to heal-whenever one walked or grasped something. But a person truly exhibiting the nail wounds of Jesus should have his or her hands and feet completely pierced.

When I subsequently attended an exhibition of Lilian Bernas’s stigmata (at Navy Hall, Niagara-on-the-Lake, March 1, 2002), my suspicions were increased. Not only was the bleeding already in progress when she appeared, but there were only the most superficial wounds. These were limited to the backs of the hands and tops of the feet, in addition to small wounds on the scalp, supposedly from a crown of thorns (John 19:2). The latter were only in the front as if merely for show. (See figure 1.)

Figure 2: Although Bernas attracts the credulous, her stigmata do not convincingly replicate the wounds of Christ’s crucifixion.

Significantly, there was no side wound, like that inflicted on Jesus by a Roman soldier’s lance (John 19:34; 20:25, 27). Such a large wound would represent a real commitment by a fake stigmatist. It rarely appears, and then usually in a questionable fashion. Bernas exhibits a photo of an alleged wound in her left side, but it lacked rivulets of blood and- conveniently-was claimed to have soon disappeared without a trace. Bernas did say she was to receive a side wound later in the day (Bernas 2002b), but of course the crowd would not be there to witness the alleged happening.

The side wound was not the only one of Bernas’s stigmata reputed to have unique properties seemingly best displayed in photographs. Bernas exhibits other photos that depict a squarish nail head emerging from a hand wound (harkening back to St. Francis); a thorn in her forehead that supposedly emerged over a week’s time; even an entire crown of thorns that allegedly materialized around Bernas’s head-believe it or not!

As we watched Bernas bleed, I regretted that we were not getting to see such remarkable manifestations. I observed that her wounds soon ceased to flow, consistent with their having been inflicted just before she came out. After she had spoken to the audience for about an hour, people gathered to speak to Bernas (figure 2). (While shaking hands with her, one man attempted to get, rather surreptitiously, a sample of her blood, presumably as a magical "relic.” He clasped his other hand, containing a folded handkerchief, against the back of her hand. Unfortunately the blood had dried, and even rubbing did not yield a visible trace.)

Although I shook Bernas’s bloody hand, I obtained a better look at a wound shortly before, when she hugged the woman in front of me and thus placed her hand virtually under my nose. I noticed that the actual wound looked like a small slit, but surrounding that was a larger red area; this appeared to have been deliberately formed of blood in order to simulate the appearance of a larger wound, like one formed by a Roman nail. (For my demonstration of a similar effect see Nickell 2000, 27-28.)

Assessment

Bernas makes still other supernatural claims. For example, she says towels from her stigmata sessions, put away in plastic bags, allegedly “disappear within 48 hours” (Wake 2001). (I will wager they would not vanish while in my custody.)

Such outlandish and unsubstantiated claims should provoke skepticism in all but the most gullible. Yet a professor of philosophy at a Catholic college took exception to my views. I had told The Buffalo News that, on the evidence, I regarded stigmatics as “pious frauds,” and I said of Lilian Bernas’ stigmata: “Everything about it was consistent with trickery. Nothing about it was in the slightest way supernatural or intriguing” (Tokasz 2003).

Professor John Zeis (2003) replied with the astonishing statement that “Trickery is consistent with any reported miracle (including Jesus’ resurrection) but that is no reason to reject belief in the miracle.” He found more reasonable a priest’s statement that “It is up to each person to believe or not.”

CSICOP Public Relations Director Kevin Christopher (2003) responded: “Zeis is suggesting that objective evidence is irrelevant. What, in fact could be a more unreasonable conclusion?” Christopher also replied to Zeis’s claim that “the Skeptical Inquirer is biased against claims concerning faith in the miraculous.” Stated Christopher: “The magazine’s mission is to inform its readers about the state of the evidence for paranormal and supernatural claims. When the evidence is poor or nonexistent, it is not 'biased' to report that fact. It is, in fact, a moral duty.”

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Martin Braun for advising me of a lecture by Lilian Bernas. Benjamin Radford (Skeptical Inquirer) and Jenny Everett (Popular Science) accompanied me to witness Bernas’s stigmata and shared valuable notes and observations. I also received very useful material from John Zachritz.

References

• Bernas, Lilian. 1999. This Is the Home of the Father. . . . Privately printed.
• —. 2002a. Talk at Resurrection Church, Cheektowaga, N.Y., Feb. 17.
• —. 2002b. Remarks to audience at Navy Hall, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario, March 1. (Transcript by Jenny Everett, Popular Science magazine.)
• Christopher, Kevin. 2003. Letter to editor, The Buffalo News (Buffalo, N.Y.), July 7.
• D'Emilio Frances. 2002. Italian monk and mystic raised to sainthood. The Buffalo News (Buffalo, N.Y.), June 17.
• Harrison, Ted. 1994. Stigmata: A Medieval Phenomenon in a Modern Age. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
• Nickell, Joe. 1993. Looking for a Miracle. Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• —. 2000. Stigmata: In imitation of Christ. Skeptical Inquirer 24(1), July/August: 24-28.
• Radford, Benjamin. 2002. Visit to see stigmatic Lilian Bernas (typed notes), March 7.
• Ruffin, C. Bernard. 1982. Padre Pio: The True Story. Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor.
• Thurston, Herbert. 1952. The Physical Phenomena of Mysticism. Chicago: H. Regnery Co.
• Tokasz, Jay. 2003. In apparent stigmata, a question of belief. The Buffalo News (Buffalo, N.Y.), June 15.
• Wake, Ben. 2001. The crucifixion of Lilian Bernas, The Citizen’s Weekly (magazine of The Ottawa Citizen [Ottawa, Ontario]), July 8, C7-C9.
• Wilson, Ian. 1988. The Bleeding Mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
• Zeis, John. 2003. Letter to editor, The Buffalo News (Buffalo, N.Y.), June 27.

Religious beliefs and practices are found in all human groups and go back to the very beginnings of human culture. What makes religion so 'natural'? A common temptation is to search for the origin of religion in general human urges, for instance in people’s wish to escape misfortune or mortality or their desire to understand the universe. However, these accounts are often based on incorrect views about religion (see table 1) and the psychological urges are often merely postulated. Recent findings in psychology, anthropology, and neuroscience offer a more empirical approach, focused on the mental machinery activated in acquiring and representing religious concepts.[1]

Table 1: Do’s and don't’s in the study of religion. Table 1 is taken from Boyer P. Religious thought and behavior as by-products of brain function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 2003. 7(3): p. 119-124.

The first thing to understand about religion is that it does not activate one particular capacity in the mind, a “religious module” or system that would create the complex set of beliefs and norms we usually call religion. On the contrary, religious representations are sustained by a whole variety of different systems, of which I will describe some presently. A second important point is that all these systems are parts of our regular mental equipment, religion or no religion. In other words, belief in religion activates mental systems involved in a whole variety of non-religious domains. These two points have important consequences for our understanding of why there is some kind of religion in all human cultures, why religion is so easy to acquire and transmit.

When thinking about religion, one can make a number of very tempting mistakes, some of which are summarized in table 1. Here I want to discuss one particular view of religion, popular among skeptics, that I call the “sleep of reason” interpretation. According to this view, people have religious beliefs because they fail to reason properly. If only they grounded their reasoning in sound logic or rational order, they would not have supernatural beliefs, including superstitions and religion. I think this view is misguided, for several reasons; because it assumes a dramatic difference between religious and commonsense ordinary thinking, where there isn't one; because it suggests that belief is a matter of deliberate weighing of evidence, which is generally not the case; because it implies that religious concepts could be eliminated by mere argument, which is implausible; and most importantly because it obscures the real reasons why religion is so extraordinarily widespread in human cultures.

Religion as the “Sleep of Reason”

There is a long and respectable tradition of explaining religion as the consequence of a flaw in mental functioning. Because people do not think much or not very well, the argument goes, they let all sorts of unwarranted beliefs clutter their mental furniture. In other words, there is religion around because people fail to take prophylactic measures against beliefs, for one of the following reasons:

People are superstitious, they will believe anything. People are naturally prepared to believe all sorts of accounts of strange or counter-intuitive phenomena. Witness their enthusiasm for UFOs as opposed to scientific cosmology, for alchemy instead of chemistry, for urban legends instead of hard news. Religious concepts are both cheap and sensational; they are easy to understand and rather exciting to entertain.

Religious concepts are irrefutable. Most incorrect or incoherent claims are easily refuted by experience or logic but religious concepts are different. They invariably describe processes and agents whose existence could never be verified and are consequently never refuted. As there is no evidence against most religious claims, people have no obvious reason to stop believing them.

Refutation is more difficult than belief. It takes greater effort to challenge and rethink established notions than just accept them. Besides, in most domains of culture we just absorb other people’s notions. Religion is no exception. If everyone round about you says that there are invisible dead people around, and everyone acts accordingly, it would take a much greater effort to try and verify such claims than it takes to accept them, if only provisionally.

I find all these arguments unsatisfactory. Not that they are false: religious claims are indeed beyond verification. People do like sensational supernatural tales better than banal stories and they generally spend little time rethinking every bit of cultural information they acquire. But this cannot be a sufficient explanation for why people have the concepts they have, the beliefs they have, the emotions they have. The idea that we are often gullible or superstitious is certainly true; but we are not gullible in just every possible way. People do not generally strive to believe six impossible things before breakfast, as does the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. Religious claims are irrefutable, but so are all sorts of other far-fetched notions that we never find in religion. Take for instance the claim that my right hand is made of green cheese except when people examine it, that God ceases to exist every Wednesday afternoon, that cars feel thirsty when their tanks run low, or that cats think in German. I could make up hundreds of such interesting and irrefutable beliefs that no one would ever consider as a possible belief.

Religion is not a domain where anything goes, where any strange belief could appear and get transmitted from generation to generation. On the contrary, there is only a limited catalogue of possible supernatural beliefs. Even without knowing the details of religious systems in other cultures, we all know that some notions are far more widespread than others. The idea that there are invisible souls of dead people lurking around is a very common one; the notion that people’s organs change position during the night is very rare. But both are equally irrefutable. So the problem, surely, is not just to explain how people can accept supernatural claims for which there is no strong evidence but also why they tend to represent and accept these particular supernatural claims rather than other possible ones. We should explain why they are so selective in the claims they adhere to.

Indeed, we should go even further and abandon the credulity-scenario altogether. Here is why: In this scenario, people relax ordinary standards of evidence for some reason. If you are against religion, you will say that this is because they are naturally credulous, or respectful of received authority, or too lazy to think for themselves, etc. If you are more sympathetic to religious beliefs, you will say that they open up their minds to wondrous truths beyond the reach of reason. But the point is that if you accept this account, you assume that people first open up their minds, as it were; and then let it be filled by whatever religious beliefs are held by the people who influence them at that particular time. This is often the way we think of religious adhesion. There is a gate-keeper in the mind that either allows or rejects visitors, that is, other people’s concepts and beliefs. When the gate-keeper allows them in, these concepts and beliefs find a home in the mind and become the person’s own beliefs and concepts.

Our present knowledge of mental processes suggests that this scenario is highly misleading. People receive all sorts of information from all sorts of sources. All this information has some effect on the mind. Whatever you hear and whatever you see is perceived, interpreted, explained, and recorded by the various inference systems I described above. Every bit of information is fodder for the mental machinery. But then some pieces of information produce the effects that we identify as 'belief'. That is, the person starts to recall them and use them to explain or interpret particular events; they may trigger specific emotions; they may strongly influence the person’s behaviour. Note that I said some pieces of information, not all. This is where the selection occurs. In ways that a good psychology of religion should describe, it so happens that only some pieces of information trigger these effects, and not others; it also happens that the same piece of information will have these effects in some people but not others. So people do not have beliefs because they somehow made their minds receptive to belief and then acquired the material for belief. They have some beliefs because, among all the material they acquired, some of it triggered these particular effects.

A Limited Catalogue of Concepts

Do people know what their religious concepts are? This may seem an absurd question, but it is in fact an important question in the psychology of religion, whose true answer is probably in the negative. In most domains of mental activity, only a small part of what goes on in our brains is accessible to conscious inspection. For instance, we constantly produce grammatical sentences in our native tongue with impeccable pronunciation, often without any idea how this is done. Or we perceive the world around us as made up of three-dimensional objects, but we are certainly not aware of the ways in which our visual cortex transforms two retinal images into this rich impression of solid objects out there. The same goes for all our concepts and norms. We have some notion of what they are, but we certainly do not have full access to the way our minds create and sustain them. Most of the relevant mental machinery that sustains religious concepts is not consciously accessible.

People’s explicitly held, consciously accessible beliefs, as in other domains of cognition, only represent a fragment of the relevant processes. Indeed, experimental tests show that people’s actual religious concepts often diverge from what they believe they believe. This is why theologies, explicit dogmas, scholarly interpretations of religion cannot be taken as a reliable description of either the contents or the causes of people’s beliefs. For instance, psychologist Justin Barrett showed that Christians’ concept of God was much more complex than the believers themselves assumed. Most Christians would describe their notion of God in terms of transcendence and extraordinary physical and mental characteristics. God is everywhere, attends to everything at the same time. However, subtle experimental tasks reveal that, when they are not reflecting upon their own beliefs, these same people use another concept of God, as a human-like agent with a particular viewpoint, a particular position and serial attention. God considers one problem and then another. Now that concept is mostly tacit. It drives people’s thoughts about particular events, episodes of interaction with God, but it is not accessible to people as “their belief.” In other words, people do not believe what they believe they believe. [2]

A systematic investigation of these tacit concepts reveals that notions of religious agency, despite important cultural differences, are very similar the world over. There is a small repertoire of possible types of supernatural characters, many of whom are found in folktales and other minor cultural domains, though some of them belong to the important gods or spirits or ancestors of "religion.” Most of these agents are explicitly defined as having counterintuitive physical or biological properties that violate general expectations about agents. They are sometimes undetectable, or prescient, or eternal. The way people represent such agents activates the enormous but inaccessible machinery of “theory of mind” and other mental systems that provide us with a representation of agents, their intentions and their beliefs. All this is inaccessible to conscious inspection and requires no social transmission. On the other hand, what is socially transmitted are the counterintuitive features: this one is omniscient, that one can go through walls, another one was born of a virgin, etc.

More generally, we observe that most supernatural and religious concepts belong to a short catalogue of possible types of templates, with a common structure. All these concepts are informed by very general assumptions from broad categories such as person, living thing, or man-made object. A spirit is a special kind of person, a magic wand a special kind of artifact, a talking tree a special kind of plant. Such notions combine (i) specific features that violate some default expectations for the domain with (ii) expectations held by default as true of the entire domain. For example, the familiar concept of a ghost combines (i) socially transmitted information about a physically counterintuitive person (disembodied, can go through walls, etc.), and (ii) spontaneous inferences afforded by the general person concept (the ghost perceives what happens, recalls what he or she perceived, forms beliefs on the basis of such perceptions, and intentions on the basis of beliefs).

These combinations of explicit violation and tacit inferences are culturally widespread and may constitute a memory optimum. Associations of this type are recalled better than more standard associations but also better than oddities that do not include domain-concept violations. The effect obtains regardless of exposure to a particular kind of supernatural beliefs, and it has been replicated in different cultures in Africa and Asia.

To sum up, we can explain human sensitivity to particular kinds of supernatural concepts as a by-product of the way human minds operate in ordinary, non-religious contexts. Because our assumptions about fundamental categories like person, artifact, animal, etc., are so entrenched, violations of these assumptions create salient and memorable concepts.

Exchange, Morality, and Misfortune

We can understand other aspects of religious concepts as by-products of these ordinary, non-religious mental systems that organize our everyday experience. For instance, consider the fact that in all human cultures, a great deal of attention is focused, not so much on the characteristics of supernatural agents, as on their interaction with the living. This is visible in the constant association between moral judgments and supernatural agency, as well as in the treatment of misfortune and contingency.

Developmental research shows the early appearance and systematic organization of moral intuitions: a set of precise feelings evoked by the consideration of actual and possible courses of action. Although people often state that their moral rules are a consequence of the existence (or of the decrees) of supernatural agents, it is quite clear that such intuitions are present, independent of religious concepts. Moral intuitions appear long before children represent the powers of supernatural agents, they appear in the same way in cultures where no one is much interested in supernatural agents, and in similar ways regardless of what kind of supernatural agents are locally important. Indeed, it is difficult to find evidence that religious teachings have any effect on people’s moral intuitions. Religious concepts do not change people’s moral intuitions but frame these intuitions in terms that make them easier to think about. For instance, in most human groups supernatural agents are thought to be interested parties in people’s interactions. Given this assumption, having the intuition that an action is wrong becomes having the expectation that a personalized agent disapproves of it. The social consequences of the latter way of representing the situation are much clearer to the agent, as they are handled by specialized mental systems for social interaction. This notion of gods and spirits as interested parties is far more salient in people’s moral inferences than the notion of these agents as moral legislators or moral exemplars.

In the same way, the use of supernatural or religious explanations for misfortune may be a byproduct of a far more general tendency to see all salient occurrences in terms of social interaction. The ancestors can make you sick or ruin your plantations; God sends people various plagues. On the positive side, gods and spirits are also represented as protectors, guarantors of good crops, social harmony, etc. But why are supernatural agents construed as having such causal powers?

One of the most widespread explanations of mishaps and disorders, the world over, is in terms of witchcraft, the suspicion that some people (generally in the community) perform magical tricks to “steal” other people’s health, good fortune, or material goods. Concepts of witches are among the most widespread supernatural ones. In some places there are explicit accusations and the alleged witches must either prove their innocence or perform some special rituals to pay for their transgression. In most places the suspicion is a matter of gossip and rarely comes out in the open. You do not really need to have actual witches around to have very firm beliefs about the existence and powers of witches. Witchcraft is important because it seems to provide an “explanation” for all sorts of events: many cases of illness or other misfortune are spontaneously interpreted as evidence for the witches’ actions. Witchcraft beliefs are only one manifestation of a phenomenon that is found in many human groups, the interpretation of misfortune as a consequence of envy. For another such situation, consider the widespread beliefs in an “evil eye,” a spell cast by envious people against whoever enjoys some good fortune or natural advantage. Witchcraft and evil eye notions do not really belong to the domain of religion, but they show that, religious agents or not, there is a tendency to focus on the possible reasons for some agents to cause misfortune, rather than on the processes whereby they could do it.

For these occurrences that largely escape control, people focus on the supernatural agents’ feelings and intentions. The ancestors were angry, the gods demanded a sacrifice, or the god is just cruel and playful. But there is more to that. The way these reasons are expressed is, in a great majority of cases, supported by our social exchange intuitions. People focus on an agent’s reasons for causing them harm, but note that these “reasons” always have to do with people’s interaction with the agents in question. People refused to follow God’s orders; they polluted a house against the ancestors’ prescriptions; they had more wealth or good fortune than their God-decreed fate allocated them; and so on. All this supports what anthropologists have been saying for a long time on the basis of evidence gathered in the most various cultural environments: Misfortune is generally interpreted in social terms. But this familiar conclusion implies that the evolved cognitive resources people bring to the understanding of interaction should be crucial to their construal of misfortune.

Social interaction requires the operation of complex mental systems: to represent not just other people’s beliefs and their intentions, but also the extent to which they can be trusted, the extent to which they find us trustworthy, how social exchange works, how to detect cheaters, how to build alliances, and so on. These mental systems are largely inaccessible, only their output is consciously represented. Now interaction with supernatural agents, through sacrifice, ritual, prayer, etc., is framed by those systems. Although the agents are said to be very special, the way people think about interaction with them is directly mapped from their interaction with actual people.

Precaution, Ritual, and Obsession

Magic and ritual the world over obsessively rehash the same themes, in particular "concerns about pollution and purity […] contact avoidance; special ways of touching; fears about immanent, serious sanctions for rule violations; a focus on boundaries and thresholds.” [3] Anthropologists have long documented, not just these particular themes of magical and ritual thinking, but also the more abstract principles that organize them: (1) dangerous elements or substances are invisible; (2) any contact (touching, kissing, ingesting) with such substances is dangerous; (3) the amount of substance is irrelevant (e.g., a drop of a sick person’s saliva is just as dangerous as a cupful of the stuff). [4]

People spontaneously apply these principles in situations of potential contact with sources of pathogens and toxins: dirt, faeces, rotten food, bugs, diseased or decayed organisms. The three principles are particularly apposite when dealing with such situations, as most pathogens are invisible, use diverse vectors for transmission, and there is no dose effect. So it may be that “magical” thoughts are an extension of non-magical inferences about possible sources of contagion. [5] In this sense, many intuitions about magical "pollution,” “defilement,” etc., simply hijack, as it were, cognitive resources used in non-symbolic, non-religious domains.

More generally, rituals are usually performed with a sense of urgency, an intuition that great danger would be incurred by not performing them. These themes are also characteristic of obsessive- compulsive disorders (OCD). As many anthropologists and psychologists have noted, the themes of ritual, as summarized above, and those of personal pathological obsessions are almost exactly similar. The particular emotional tenor of rituals might derive from their association with neural systems dedicated to the detection and avoidance of invisible hazards. Neuro- imaging studies of OCD patients generally show a significant increase of activity in cortical and limbic areas dedicated to the processing of danger signals. [6] So the pathology might consist in a failure to inhibit or keep 'off-line' a set of normal neural reactions to potential sources of danger. We are still far from understanding to what extent this network is also involved in the production of “mild,” controlled, socially transmitted notions about purity and the need for magical ritual. But it seems that the salience of a particular range of ritual themes to do with hidden danger and noxious contact [7] and a susceptibility to derive rigid, emotionally vivid sequences of compulsory actions from such themes, may be spectacular cultural byproducts of neural function.

What Makes Religion “Natural”

For lack of space, I cannot pursue this list of the mental systems (usually activated in non-religious contexts) that sustain the salience and plausibility of religious notions. To be exhaustive, one should also mention the close association between ritual participation and group affiliation, the role of our coalitional thinking in creating religious identity, the specific role of death and dead bodies in religious thinking, and many other aspects of religion. Psychological investigation into these domains reveals the same organization described above. A variety of mental systems, functionally specialized for the treatment of particular (non-religious) domains of information, are activated by religious notions and norms, in such a way that these notions and norms become highly salient, easy to acquire, easy to remember and communicate, as well as intuitively plausible.

The lesson of the cognitive study of religion is that religion is rather "natural” in the sense that it consists of by-products of normal mental functioning. Each of the systems described here (a sense for social exchange, a specific mechanism for detecting animacy in surrounding objects, an intuitive fear of invisible contamination, a capacity for coalitional thinking, etc.) is the plausible result of selective pressures on cognitive organization. In other words, these capacities are the outcome of evolution by natural selection.

In other words, religious thought activates cognitive capacities that developed to handle non-religious information. In this sense, religion is very similar to music and very different from language. Every normal human being acquires a natural language and that language is extraordinarily similar to that of the surrounding group. It seems plausible that our capacity for language acquisition is an adaptation. [8] By contrast, though all human beings can effortlessly recognize music and religious concepts, there are profound individual differences in the extent to which they enjoy music or adhere to religious concepts. The fact that some religious notions have been found in every human group does not mean that all human beings are naturally religious. Vast numbers of human beings do without it altogether, like for instance the majority of Europeans for several centuries.

Is religion “in the genes,” and could it be considered a result of natural selection? Some evolutionary biologists think that is so, because the existence of religious beliefs may provide some advantages for individuals or groups that hold them. The evidence for this is, however, still incomplete. It may seem more prudent and empirically justified to say that religion is a very probable byproduct of various brain systems that are the result of evolution by natural selection.

Can We Reason Religion Away?

Taking all this into account, it would seem that the “sleep of reason” interpretation of religion is less than compelling. It is quite clear that explicit religious belief requires a suspension of the sound rules according to which most scientists evaluate evidence. But so does most ordinary thinking, of the kind that sustains our commonsense intuitions about the surrounding environment. More surprising, religious notions are not at all a separate realm of cognitive activity. They are firmly rooted in the deepest principles of cognitive functioning. First, religious concepts would not be salient if they did not violate some of our most entrenched intuitions (e.g., that agents have a position in space, that live beings grow old and die, etc.). Second, religious concepts would not subsist if they did not confirm many intuitive principles. Third, most religious norms and emotions are parasitic upon systems that create very similar norms (e.g., moral intuitions) and emotions (e.g., a fear of invisible contaminants) in non-religious contexts.

In this sense, religion is vastly more “natural” than the “sleep of reason” argument would suggest. People do not adhere to concepts of invisible ghosts or ancestors or spirits because they suspend ordinary cognitive resources, but rather because they use these cognitive resources in a context for which they were not designed in the first place. However, the “tweaking” of ordinary cognition that is required to sustain religious thought is so small that one should not be surprised if religious concepts are so widespread and so resistant to argument. To some extent, the situation is similar to domains where science has clearly demonstrated the limits or falsity of our common intuitions. We now know that solid objects are largely made up of empty space, that our minds are only billions of neurons firing in ordered ways, that some physical processes can go backwards in time, that species do not have an eternal essence, that gravitation is a curvature of space-time. Yet even scientists go through their daily lives with an intuitive commitment to solid objects being full of matter, to people having non-physical minds, to time being irreversible, to cats being essentially different from dogs, and to objects falling down because they are heavy.

In a sense, the cognitive study of religion ends up justifying a common intuition, best expressed by Jonathan Swift’s dictum that “you do not reason a man out of something he was not reasoned into.” The point of studying this scientifically is to show to what extent we can expect religious notions to be stable and salient in human cultures, not just now but for a long time to come.

Passages in the first part of the article are modified from Chapter 1 of Boyer, P., Religion Explained: Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, 2001, New York, Basic Books.

Notes

1. Boyer, P. 2001. Religion Explained: Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought. New York: Basic Books, 403.
2. Barrett, J.L., and F.C. Keil. 1996. Conceptualizing a nonnatural entity: Anthropomorphism in God concepts. Cognitive Psychology 31(3): 219-247.
3. Dulaney, S., and A.P. Fiske. 1994. Cultural rituals and obsessive-compulsive disorder: Is there a common psychological mechanism? Ethos 22(3): 243-283.
4. Nemeroff, C.J. 1995. Magical thinking about illness virulence: Conceptions of germs from “safe” versus “dangerous” others. Health Psychology 14(2): 147-151.
5. Cosmides, L., and J. Tooby. 1999. Toward an evolutionary taxonomy of treatable conditions. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 108(3): 453-464.
6. Rauch, S.L., et al., 2001. Probing striato-thalamic function in obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette syndrome using neuroimaging methods. Advances in Neurology 85: 207-24.
7. Fiske, A.P., and N. Haslam. 1997. Is obsessive-compulsive disorder a pathology of the human disposition to perform socially meaningful rituals? Evidence of similar content. Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease 185(4): 211-222.
8. Pinker, S. 1995. The Language Instinct. 1st HarperPerennial ed. New York: HarperPerennial, 494.

Imagine, if you will, the following scenario-admittedly an unlikely one:

• A new super-psychic has burst onto the world stage. He has amazing powers that go far beyond mere “cutlery distortion” and telling people things about themselves that they already know.
• This is a psychic whose powers apparently have already been tested in scientific experiments that produced highly statistically significant results.
• This is a psychic who has already personally entertained many of the world’s leaders, and impressed them with his powers.

Well, so far, this is not that different from what we have seen before perhaps, but now, suppose the following:

• This psychic has offered to use his powers to negotiate a lasting peace amongst warring factions in the Middle East, in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in Kashmir. He has told members of the United Nations Security Council, who gave him a private audience, that by being able to read the minds of the leaders of the protagonists in the various conflicts, he will bring about better communication and better understanding of issues. He might even resort to altering the mindsets of recalcitrant leaders by means of psychokinesis, turning them into peace-seekers and compromisers. The members of the Security Council have become so convinced of his powers that they are about to name him Ambassador-At-Large and Chief Negotiator for World Peace.

The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal is not amused by this news.

CSICOP and its supporters protest loudly, and finally we are informed by the Security Council that we may send an emissary-one person only-who will be allowed to evaluate the supporting research and to test the psychic directly, and then present his or her findings and conclusions directly to that world body.

Well, this is pretty important stuff-much more important than the usual CSICOP work. After all, if, as we suspect, this man is a phony, there is the likelihood of tremendous harm being done to the cause of world peace if he is allowed to mess about in these seemingly intractable conflicts.

Let’s not quibble about the likelihood of such a scenario, but let’s focus instead on what qualities we would want our emissary to possess in such a case. I've made a list:

1. Since scientific evidence has been adduced to support claims of the psychic’s powers, our emissary should be a scientist, preferably a social scientist, someone who knows how to conduct and evaluate research involving human subjects; someone who knows how to detect flaws and biases in such experiments.
2. We need an expert in statistics, since statistical analysis was part of the scientific support offered for the psychic’s powers.
3. We need an expert in the psychology of belief and deception, someone who knows all about how people can both deceive and be deceived.
4. We need someone with sound academic credentials, for credibility is going to be a very important if our emissary is to have an influence on the Security Council.
5. We need someone with expert knowledge of magic and mentalism, for if the psychic is using the magician/mentalist’s craft, only someone experienced and knowledgeable in this craft will be able to detect this. As the saying goes, it takes a thief to catch a thief.
6. We need someone who is experienced in evaluating supposed psychics and the research adduced in their support. Without such experience, even a very good social scientist may overlook important sources of error and bias.
7. We need someone who has a track record for fairness, someone who has gained the respect of skeptics and believers alike, so that our emissary will not be seen as some sort of hit man for CSICOP and skepticism.
8. We need a good communicator. It is not enough just to be able to show that the psychic is not really psychic at all. We need someone who can cogently present the skeptical case in such a way as to have an impact on the members of the Security Council.
9. We need someone who does not antagonize others, someone whose personality and charm will ease the sting of whatever critical commentary he or she has to offer to the Security Council.

Well, that’s quite a list, and one that is almost impossible to fill, one might think.

I know of only one person in the entire world-and believe me, I am not exaggerating here; I really mean it-who measures up to all these criteria. And he is in our midst tonight.

Let me tell you about Ray Hyman:

• Ray earned his Ph.D. at Harvard University, where he then taught statistics, amongst other subjects. He is now Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Oregon, where he taught for many years.
• He is an expert in cognitive psychology.
• He is an expert in statistical analysis.
• He is an expert in research design as applied to the study of human subjects.
• He is an expert in the study of deception and self-deception and has dedicated most of his professional career to the study of why people come to believe strange things, how they can be fooled, and how some people set out to fool them.
• He has published books, book chapters, and over 200 articles that critically evaluate studies of the paranormal and related domains. His article on cold reading, so Paul Kurtz informs me, has generated more requests for reprints than any other article in the history of the Skeptical Inquirer.
• He is an expert in magic and mentalism. Few people outside of magic circles are aware of just how accomplished he is as a magician/mentalist. Indeed, he started out by earning his living as a mentalist. He is also an accomplished inventor of magical effects and routines. He is highly respected by other magicians, and has had the rare honor of twice appearing on the cover of the Linking Ring, the monthly magazine of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.
• He has a long and unparalleled history of investigating psychics. Some of this work has been for official agencies such as the United States Defense Department and the United States National Research Council. He knows personally all of the leading, and many of the not-so-leading, parapsychologists in the world, and is respected by virtually all of them.
• He is, of course, a champion among skeptics, and one of the founders of CSICOP.
• He is known above all for being fair-minded-so much so that on more than one occasion I have been approached by people at CSICOP conferences who have complained that he had gone soft on parapsychology. They believed that he had “gone soft” because, rather than taking a debunking stance as they had wanted, he had approached the topic of paranormal claims from the point of view of scientific objectivity.
• In terms of personality, Ray is able to be highly critical of parapsychologists and psychics without antagonizing them. Indeed, no doubt every one of us who has talked with Ray knows of his warmth and charm, and knows as well that no matter how stupid or ill-informed our questions might be-and I've asked my share-he never makes us feel foolish for having asked. He is always patient in his explanations and never condescending.

Ray Hyman clearly meets all the criteria in my list. I can think of no other individual in the entire world who could do the same. The In Praise of Reason Award is CSICOP’s highest honor, and is given to those rare individuals who have made truly outstanding contributions to the promotion of science and the defense of reason. Previous recipients include such stellar scientists and communicators as Carl Sagan, Stephen Jay Gould, Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann, and our own outstanding editor, Ken Frazier.

Tonight, I take great personal pride in being able to present, on behalf of CSICOP, the In Praise of Reason Award to my friend and colleague Ray Hyman, from whom I-and I am sure all of us-continue to learn so much.

Congratulations, Ray.

Two important findings emerged from a recent study I conducted on learning scientific information from prime-time television programming (Whittle 2003). The study used an Internet-based survey questionnaire posted to Internet chat groups for three popular television programs, The X-Files, ER, and Friends. Scientific (and pseudoscientific) dialogue from ER and The X-Files collected in a nine-month-long content analysis created two scales, ER science content and The X-Files pseudoscience content. Respondents were asked to agree or disagree with statements from each program (such as, “Rene Laennec used a rolled-up newspaper as the first stethoscope” [ER], and “The Wanshang Dhole, an Asian dog thought to be extinct, has pre-evolutionary features including a fifth toe pad, a dew claw, and a prehensile thumb” [The X-Files].

My first finding, that ER viewers learned specific ER science content, is an indicator that entertainment television viewers can learn facts and concepts from their favorite television programs. The second finding was spooky. There was no significant difference in the level of pseudoscientific or paranormal belief between viewers of ER and The X-Files. This finding does not seem surprising in light of Gallup and Harris polls demonstrating high levels of paranormal belief in the United States, but the beliefs assessed in the study were fictional paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs created by the writers of The X-Files. Paranormal researchers ask questions such as, “Do you believe in astral projection, or the leaving of the body by one’s spirit?” My research asked, [Do you believe] “[d]uring astral projection, or the leaving of the body for short periods of time, a person could commit a murder?” A homicidal astral projector was the plot of an X-Files episode, but ER viewers were just as likely to acknowledge belief in that paraparanormal (a concept beyond the traditional paranormal) belief as were viewers of The X-Files!

Perhaps it is as Anderson (1998) pointed out in his Skeptical Inquirer article “Why Would People Not Believe Weird Things,” that “almost everything [science] tells us we do not want to hear.” We are born of primordial slime, not at the hands of a benevolent and concerned supreme being who lovingly crafted us from clay; we are the result of random mutations and genetic accidents.

Anderson cited quantum mechanics as a realm of science so fantastic as to have supernatural connotations to the average individual. Quantum physicists distinguish virtual particles from real particles, blame the collapse of the wave function on their inability to tell us where the matter of our universe is at any time, and tell us that in parallel universes we may have actually dated the most popular cheerleader or football quarterback in high school, whereas in this mundane universe, we did not. It is all relative. Ghosts are a fairly predictable phenomenon compared to the we-calculated-it-but-you-cannot-sense-it world of quantum physics. Most people will agree that ghosts are the souls of the departed, but quantum physicists cannot agree on where antimatter goes. It is there but it is not. Pseudoscientific and paranormal beliefs provide a sense of order and comfort to those who hold them, giving us control over the unknown. It is not surprising that such beliefs continue to flourish in a world as utterly fantastic as ours.

After researching the paranormal in an effort to discover why ER viewers might have the extraordinary paranormal beliefs indicated on their survey questionnaires, I constructed two models of paranormal belief from my research notes (heavily drawn from Goode 2000, Johnston et al. 1995, Irwin 1993, Vikan and Stein 1993, and Tobacyk and Milford 1983). Figure 1 shows the interrelationship between the natural environment, human culture, and the individual. The culture and the individual maintain General Paranormal Beliefs, which consist of at least four relatively independent dimensions: Traditional Religious Belief, Paranormal Belief (psi), Parabiological Beings, and Folk Paranormal Beliefs (superstitions). Individuals have cognitive, affective, and behavioral schema in which these beliefs are organized. Society creates and maintains paranormal beliefs through cultural knowledge, cultural artifacts (including rituals), and expected cultural behaviors. The “Need for control, order, and meaning” domain is speculative on the culture side, but supported by research on the individual side. The demographic correlates of traditional religious paranormal belief and nonreligious paranormal belief (see Rice 2003, Goode 2000, Irwin 1995, and Maller and Lundeen 1933) are highly variable and generally reveal low levels of association. It seems that almost everyone has some level of paranormal belief but scientists find few reliable predictors of these levels. [See “What Does Education Really Do?” by Susan Carol Losh, et al., Skeptical Inquirer, September/October 2003.]

A first step in future work is to identify the nonbelievers in paranormal phenomena and then explore why they are nonbelievers. Belief in the paranormal begins almost from infancy. We need to expand the research on the developmental stages of belief in the paranormal, and to do that we must study young children.

I have developed a linear model for the development of paranormal and supernatural beliefs at the individual level (figure 2). As children we are taught by parents and other adults (indoctrination by authority) about our culture’s beliefs and practices. Our elders’ teachings are filtered through hard-wired psychological processes. These include: control (magical) thinking, which allows a helpless infant to believe that he controls the actions of those around him ("Mother fed me because I pointed at her and smiled”), reducing his frustration level; psychological needs and desires, including making order and sense out of one’s environment, having an understanding of one’s place in the cosmos, feeling in control of one’s destiny, and having a fantasy outlet; and the desire to please and imitate adults.

Figure 2: Cultural and biological origins model of paranormal beliefs and experiences in the individual.

We are taught about angels, witches, devils, spirits, monsters, gods, etc. virtually in the cradle. Some of these paranormal beliefs are secular, some are religious, and the most pernicious are crossover beliefs, beliefs that are at times secular and at other times religious. Santa Claus, angels and vampires, ghosts and souls, and the Easter Bunny are examples of cross-over beliefs. Crossover beliefs are attractive to children (free candy and presents), and on that basis they are readily accepted. The devils, ghosts, and monsters are reinforced through Halloween rituals and the mass media. As the child matures, some crossover beliefs, called “teaser” paranormal beliefs, are exposed as false. Traditional religious concepts are reinforced as “true and real.” They give us Santa Claus and we believe in an omniscient, beneficent old elf and then they replace Santa with God, who is typically not as generous as Santa Claus and whose disapproval has more serious consequences than a lump of coal. We learn about God and Santa Claus simultaneously; only later are we told that Santa Claus is just a fairy tale and God is real.

In a synergy of cultural indoctrination and the individual’s cognitive and affective development, a general belief in the paranormal and the supernatural forms. Once we have knowledge of the paranormal, we can then experience it. One cannot have Bigfoot’s baby until one is aware that there is a Bigfoot, or aliens, or ghosts. In other words, you cannot see a ghost until someone has taught you about ghosts. Countervailing influences, experiential knowledge, and knowledge of realistic influence have little effect on paranormal beliefs because they are applied after the belief is established through cultural and familial authority.

The dismal statistics presented on the science literacy level of scientists and science educators by Showers (1993) argued against a rapid increase in science literacy. Scientists and science educators (1) have high levels of paranormal and pseudoscientific belief, (2) do not use their scientific knowledge when voting, (3) use nonscientific approaches in personal and social decision-making, and (4) do not have high levels of science content knowledge outside of their specific disciplines. How can we expect nonscientists to think and act scientifically if scientists and science educators do not? If we decide to mount a concerted program to disabuse the public of paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs, we must first ask if cultures can survive without paranormal beliefs.

The media may provide fodder for pseudoscientific beliefs and create new monsters and demons for us to believe in, but each individual’s culture is responsible for laying the groundwork for pseudoscientific and paranormal belief to take root. We can inform the public through dialogue in entertainment television programming about important scientific facts and concepts. We can inform the public in formal and informal science education environments, but we probably cannot greatly reduce paranormal belief without somehow fulfilling the needs currently fulfilled by it. Science educators must focus on what changes we can make and how to best make those changes. We must involve all stakeholders in the discussion of what is an appropriate level of science literacy. To paraphrase Stephen Hawking, then we shall all, science educators, scientists, and just ordinary people, be able to take part in the discussion of why it is that pseudoscientific beliefs exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason - for then we should know the mind of God.

References

• Anderson, Wayne R. 1998. Why would people not believe weird things? Skeptical Inquirer 22(5): 42-45, 62.
• Goode, Erich. 2000. Paranormal Beliefs: A Sociological Introduction. Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press.
• Irwin, Harvey J. 1993. Belief in the paranormal: A review of the empirical literature. The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 87(1): 1-39.
• Johnston, Joseph C., Hans P. De Groot, and Nicholas P. Spanos. 1995. The structure of paranormal belief: A factor-analytic investigation. Imagination, Cognition, & Personality 14(2): 165-174.
• Maller, J., and G. Lundeen. 1933. Sources of superstitious beliefs. Journal of Educational Research 26(5): 321-343.
• Rice, Tom W. 2003. Believe it or not: Religious and other paranormal beliefs in the United States. Journal for Scientific Study of Religion 42(1): 95-106.
• Showers, Dennis. 1993. An Examination of the Science Literacy of Scientists and Science Educators. ERIC Document ED 362 393. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching. Atlanta, Georgia.
• Tobacyk, Jerome J., and Gary Milford. 1983. Belief in paranormal phenomena: Assessment instrument development and implications for personality functioning. The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 44(5): 1029-1037.
• Vikan, Arne, and Erik Sten. 1993. Freud, Piaget, or neither? Beliefs in controlling others by wishful thinking and magical behavior in young children. Journal of Genetic Psychology 154(3): 297-315.
• Whittle, Christopher H. 2003. On learning science and pseudoscience from prime-time television programming. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico.