Now, I’ve not shown you images of our own tiny world, nor did Thomas Wright. He wrote, “To what you have said about my having left out my own habitation in my scheme of the universe, having traveled so far into infinity as but to lose sight of the Earth, I think I may justly answer, as Aristotle did when Alexander, looking over a map of the world, inquired of him for the city of Macedon, ’tis said the philosopher told the prince that the place he sought was much too small to be there taken notice of and was not without sufficient reason omitted. The system of the Sun,” Wright goes on, “compared but with a very minute part of the visible creation takes up so small a portion of the known universe that in a very finite view of the immensity of space I judged the seat of the Earth to be of very little consequence.”

This perspective provides a kind of calibration of where we are. I don’t think it should be too discouraging. It is the reality of the universe we live in.

Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that’s their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small. It’s after an exercise such as this that many people conclude that the religious sensibility is inevitable. Edward Young, in the eighteenth century, said, “An undevout astronomer is mad,” from which I suppose it is essential that we all declare our devotion at risk of being adjudged mad.But devotion to what?

All that we have seen is something of a vast and intricate and lovely universe. There is no particular theological conclusion that comes out of an exercise such as the one we have just gone through. What is more, when we understand something of the astronomical dynamics, the evolution of worlds, we recognize that worlds are born and worlds die, they have lifetimes just as humans do, and therefore that there is a great deal of suffering and death in the cosmos if there is a great deal of life. For example, we’ve talked about stars in the late stages of their evolution. We’ve talked about supernova explosions. There are much vaster explosions. There are explosions at the centers of galaxies from what are called quasars. There are other explosions, maybe small quasars. In fact, the Milky Way Galaxy itself has had a set of explosions from its center, some 30,000 light-years away. And if, as I will speculate later, life and perhaps even intelligence is a cosmic commonplace, then it must follow that there is massive destruction, obliteration of whole planets, that routinely occurs, frequently, throughout the universe.

Well, that is a different view than the traditional Western sense of a deity carefully taking pains to promote the wellbeing of intelligent creatures. It’s a very different sort of conclusion that modern astronomy suggests. There is a passage from Tennyson that comes to mind: “I found Him in the shining of the stars, I marked Him in the flowering of His fields.” So far pretty ordinary. But, Tennyson goes on, “In His ways with men I find him not. Why is all around us here as if some lesser god had made the world but had not force to shape it as He would?”

To me personally, the first line, “I found Him in the shining of the stars,” is not entirely apparent. It depends on who the Him is. But surely there is a message in the heavens that the finiteness not just of life but of whole worlds, in fact of whole galaxies, is a bit antithetical to the conventional theological views in the West, although not in the East. And this then suggests a broader conclusion. And that is the idea of an immortal Creator. By definition, as Ann Druyan has pointed out, an immortal Creator is a cruel god because He, never having to face the fear of death, creates innumerable creatures who do. Why should He do that? If He’s omniscient He could be kinder and create immortals, secure from the danger of death. He sets about creating a universe in which at least many parts of it and perhaps the universe as a whole, dies. And in many myths, the one possibility the gods are most anxious about is that humans will discover some secret of immortality or even, as in the myth of the Tower of Babel, for example, attempt to stride the high heavens. There is a clear imperative in Western religion that humans must remain small and mortal creatures. Why? It’s a little bit like the rich imposing poverty on the poor and then asking to be loved because of it. And there are other challenges to the conventional religions from even the most casual look at the sort of cosmos I have presented to you.

Let me quote a passage from Thomas Paine from The Age of Reason. Paine was an Englishman who played a major role in both the American and French Revolutions. “From whence,” Paine asks, “From whence then could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on His protection, should quit the care of all the rest and come to die in our world because, they say, one man and one woman ate an apple? And on the other hand, are we to suppose that every world in the boundless creation had an Eve, an apple, a serpent, and a Redeemer?”

Paine is saying that we have a theology that is Earth-centered and involves a tiny piece of space and when we step back, when we attain a broader cosmic perspective, some of it seems very small in scale. And in fact a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe.

Now, we can say, “Well, that’s just because the right words weren’t available back when the first Jewish or Christian or Islamic holy books were written.” But clearly that’s not the problem; it is certainly possible in the beautiful metaphors in these books to describe something like the Galaxy and the universe, and it isn’t there. It is a god of one small world; a problem, I believe, that theologians have not adequately addressed.

Now, I don’t propose that it is a virtue to revel in our limitations. But it’s important to understand how much we do not know. There is an enormous amount we do not know; there is a tiny amount that we do. But what we do understand brings us face to face with an awesome cosmos that is simply different from the cosmos of our pious ancestors.

Does trying to understand the universe at all betray a lack of humility? I believe it is true that humility is the only just response in a confrontation with the universe, but not a humility that prevents us from seeking the nature of the universe we are admiring. If we seek that nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception. If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing? Or would he prefer his votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case, the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.

Despite such breathless claims, the series provides little science and few answers but a lot of unintended skeptical laughs. The program’s inability to find explanations is not so mysterious given the lack of scientists and investigators on the show.

The Sci Fi Investigates team consists of four principal cast members. A young, attractive blonde named Debbie Dobrydney is identified as “a technician in the identification bureau (Crime Scene/Forensic Unit) of a municipal police department.” The paranormal investigator of the bunch is a man named Richard Dolan, who holds degrees in history and writes UFO books. Archaeologist Bill Doleman is the only one in the group who comes close to being a working scientist; he is director of New Mexico’s statewide archaeological archive and database, and his research specialties include environmental analysis, prehistoric hunter-gatherers, geological methods in archaeology, computer database design, and statistical analysis. The token skeptic of the group is Rob Mariano, a man with no apparent qualifications beyond having appeared on the reality TV shows Survivor and The Amazing Race.

Throughout the series, the team’s actions bear little resemblance to any sort of real scientific investigation. According to the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, investigate means “to study by close examination and systematic inquiry.” Judging by the episodes that have aired, the examination is not close, nor is the inquiry systematic. It is instead a hodgepodge of half-baked, unscientific experiments and studies with no clear strategy, purpose, or protocol. It is, in short, pseudoscience.

The team desperately needs the assistance of an actual, working scientist or investigator. With all due respect to the team members, the show’s producers can’t just assemble a team with little or no investigative experience and expect them to come up with scientifically valid answers to such mysteries.

Their lack of investigation experience is compounded by their overall ignorance of the actual scientific and skeptical investigations into the subjects they examine. Since they don’t have years of experience in these subjects, they should at least consult those who do. Yet, with a few ad hoc exceptions, skeptical investigators are notably absent in Sci Fi Investigates. To be fair, this is not really the team’s fault. If the show’s producers had wanted to actually “recruit the foremost scientists and . . . skeptics,” they certainly could have done so. Joe Nickell, an expert on several of the topics including Mothman, is nowhere to be found. David E. Thomas, an expert on the Roswell crash, is also absent. And so on.

What’s worse, the team members often seem to approach each mystery with a clean slate, apparently having done little or no background research on the subjects they are investigating. This may be done to enhance the appearance of objectivity, but the effect is that they often don’t know what to look for.

In one episode, for no apparent reason, the team tries (and fails) to make a convincing fake Bigfoot film. There is no investigative value whatsoever in creating a fake Bigfoot film; even if the team was successful in making a hoax that convinced some people (a difficult and expensive proposition), all it would prove is that that particular film was faked. It says nothing about the various extant films; it was a pointless exercise dreamed up by a TV producer instead of an investigator.

What is perhaps most remarkable about Sci Fi Investigates is how little scientific investigation is actually done. As a scientific paranormal investigator with years of experience looking into just such mysteries, I was amused that the team didn’t seem to know where to begin.

For example, many of their “investigations” consist of simply listening to second- or third-hand stories and anecdotes: Yvonne Brazel tells what her grandfather Mac told her about what crashed on his Roswell, New Mexico, ranch in 1947; Gabe Valdez, a former police officer, tells the team about what he says were animal mutilations many years earlier and a conspiracy to cover them up.

Incredibly, the team seems to think that simply listening to Valdez’s story while looking at photographs of the alleged mutilations is “aggressively investigating the phenomenon,” sufficient to come to a conclusion about the mystery. Instead of consulting a veterinarian or pathologist to understand how cattle may appear to be mutilated when they in fact aren’t, the team decides that the answers may lie in a secret military base which may or may not exist nearby. The team never checked for themselves Valdez’s claim that there were no tracks around the carcasses. Nor did they verify assertions that there were no signs of predation. The investigative team never researched how the “mutilation” marks Valdez reported and photographed can be explained by natural processes.

Without doing any actual investigation, the team concluded that something unexplained was clearly afoot. In a humorous and bizarre non sequitur based entirely on imaginative speculation, team member Rich Dolan states, “What I found most compelling were the photographs of the mutilated animals. No tracks around the carcasses, no signs of predators; they must have been dropped from the air. But who would do such a gruesome thing, and why? Could it be connected to a secret military base?”

But the real skeptical howler comes a little later when Dolan demonstrates his understanding of investigative principles: “Occam’s Razor states that the correct explanation of the phenomenon is the least complicated. If I apply that to mutilations, the UFO connection makes some sense.”

Despite the show’s premise and promise of professionals hunting for answers, this is amateur armchair investigation at its worst. The show’s real danger is that it gives the impression that science and real investigation are being brought to bear on these topics—and failing to explain them.

Some parts of Sci Fi Investigates seem to be tongue-in-cheek satire, such as when Rich Dolan and Bill Doleman, searching for the secret military base in a mountain, fly overhead in a small plane looking for heat signatures. Why the pair would use a thermal imaging camera to detect a hidden installation is never explained. Dolan seems baffled by “quite a lot of hot thermal signal” readings, a genuine mystery except for the fact that he is flying over a hot, sunny desert. Of all the ways to find out whether a military base exists in a mountain, this must surely be the most contrived. And what does all this have to do with the cattle mutilations? Who knows? The team’s “investigations” are guided not by any logic, systematic strategy, or investigative acumen but instead by what the TV producers think might look interesting.

As a final example, the program’s Web site states that “Rob concludes the final group discussion by pointing out that the eyewitness testimony of Bigfoot sightings, something all the team members agree is sincere, can’t be explained.” The idea that eyewitness testimony regarding Bigfoot, Mothman, or other topics can’t be explained is patently false, as I or any number of other experts could have told the Sci Fi Investigates team. Ultimately, of course, the program is about entertainment instead of investigation or answers. Which is a shame, because these topics deserve real skeptical inquiry.

Proponents of intelligent design (ID) and evolution each try to undermine the other’s position. Strangely absent from the contemporary debate is any critique of the Bible itself. ID is, after all, simply a “nonreligious” framing of divine creation as expressed in Genesis. Who else but God would the intelligent designer be?

The opening pages of Genesis actually contain two different and inconsistent versions of creation. One tells the events of seven days; the other is a tale about Adam and Eve.

Seven Days

Here is the story as found in Genesis 1:1 to 2:3 of The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Edition.

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters which were under the dome from the waters which were above the dome. And it was so. And God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. And God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit in which is their seed, each according to its kind, upon the earth.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation; plants yielding seed, and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind, and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. And God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm, and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind, and the cattle of every kind, and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”

God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. And God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all their multitude. And on the seventh day God finished his work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all his work which he had done in creation.

Aspects of the story may seem peculiar. Evenings and mornings alternate for three days before there is a sun, and for the same reason plants and fruit trees initially grow without photosynthesis. The dome of the sky has water above it (different from clouds within it) as well as below. Perhaps to the ancient mind an invisible sea above the sky was the source of rainfall.

Bible scholars note the affinity of the opening passage of Genesis to Enuma Elish, a Mesopotamian creation myth dated to about 1100 b.c. (Freedman 1992, 526—528). This poem, written in cuneiform on seven tablets and named for its first words, was discovered in the ruins of the library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh. The story, now known in different renditions, opens when there is no heaven or earth. Only the male god Apsu (fresh water) and the female god Tiamat (sea water) exist. Their mingling of waters produces other gods and silt in the waters. Then a horizon separates clouds from silt, forming heaven and earth. Much of the narrative is concerned with discord and battle among the gods from which Marduk emerges as dominant. Along the way, celestial lights are placed in heaven, and Tiamat produces fearful animals to aid her struggle against other gods. Marduk heaps up mountains and opens springs to create the Tigris and Euphrates. He creates temples and the city of Babylon, and then makes man. The work of creation is finished within the first six tablets. The seventh tablet exalts the creation and greatness of Marduk’s work.

Adam and Eve

The second creation story in Genesis (2:4—2:25), concerning Adam and Eve, immediately follows the account of seven days:

In the day that Yahweh made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no herb of the field had yet sprung up—for Yahweh had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground; but a stream would rise up from the earth and water the whole face of the ground—then Yahweh formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being. And Yahweh planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground Yahweh made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

A river flowed out of Eden to water the garden, and there it divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one which flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Cush. And the name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.

Yahweh took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And Yahweh commanded the man, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.”

Then Yahweh said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.” So out of the ground Yahweh formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to Adam to see what he would call them; and whatever Adam called every living creature, that was its name. Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the birds of the air, and to every animal of the field; but for Adam there was not found a helper as his partner. So Yahweh caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and while he slept took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that Yahweh had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then Adam said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.

As in Enuma Elish, the Tigris and Euphrates place us in the Middle East. The rivers are said to branch from an outflow of the Garden of Eden. Since the headwaters of these two great rivers are in Turkey, that nation is the closest we can come to locating the biblical origin of humankind. Anomalously, the Mormons, following a revelation to founder Joseph Smith, locate the Garden of Eden in western Missouri (Brodie 1971).

We read of Eden as being “in the East,” indicating the author’s own location as west of the Tigris and Euphrates, plausibly in or near ancient Israel. We have no modern identification of the Pishon and Gihon Rivers, said to branch from the same source as the Tigris and Euphrates. These names may be fictitious, reflecting the “western” author’s imperfect knowledge of Mesopotamia, or they may have been real rivers now lost through geological change.

Small details of text have come to have deep cultural meaning. Forming Adam “from the dust of the ground” evokes each person’s life course: “ashes to ashes, dust to dust.” Forming Eve from Adam’s rib suggests to some readers that women are (or should be) subordinate to men.

Of Genesis’s two accounts of creation, I prefer the story of Adam and Eve. It has characters with whom to empathize, and we can follow the family saga through subsequent passages. It has puzzles to ponder. Why did God so misunderstand his creation Adam as to offer an animal or bird as a suitable partner? Eve’s creation seems to be a second attempt at partnering, after it became clear to Yahweh that no animal or bird would do. If the first attempt had worked, would there have been a Cain or Abel? Why was Eve made from one of Adam’s bones instead of his hair or muscle or blood? Perhaps the reason is that skeletons are the most enduring remains of a body, and ribs are among the few redundant bones that, if taken away, would not leave Adam crippled, but a tooth might have done as well. One can speculate endlessly. There is no way to reach a correct answer except by faith or fiat.

Some traditionalists see the Bible’s two stories of creation as a telescopic narrative, with the opening account giving the “big picture” while the story of Eden narrows the focus. Adam and Eve’s tale is so engagingly different from the impersonal catalog of seven days that casual readers may not notice their contradictions. In the seven days story, all vegetation including seed plants and fruit trees is made on the fourth day. All sea creatures and flying birds are made on the fifth day. All land animals from cattle to creeping things are made on the sixth day, and afterward God makes humans—male and female—to rule over these fish, birds, and animals, and to use the plants for food.

In the second story, Adam comes first “when no plant of the field was yet on the earth.” Then plants are created in Eden. Then “out of the ground Yahweh formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air.” Finally Eve is made from Adam’s rib.

Early readers within both Hellenistic and rabbinic Judaism recognized these inconsistencies and considered how they might be reconciled. Some assumed the first-created human—“male and female”—was an androgyne, later split into Adam and Eve. The Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo thought the primal androgyne was without a body, and that humans with bodies described in Genesis 2 represented a separate act of creation (Boyarin 1993; 17, 38). [1]

Was the first man created before plants and animals and birds, or afterward? Did birds appear before land animals or at the same time? The sequences agree on only two points: (1) vegetation preceded animals and birds, and (2) the first woman was created at the end of the process. There is little correspondence between either of the biblical sequences and our modern understanding of life’s history. Water animals such as trilobites are the earliest known fossils of complex organisms, appearing long before land plants. Plant and animal life was abundant on land before many kinds of fish appeared; and marine mammals including whales are quite recent. Land plants did precede land animals that fed on them, but seed plants and fruit trees (angiosperms) appeared after dinosaurs and small mammals had long roamed the earth. Birds followed dinosaurs. Humans—of both sexes—are the newest of the major kinds mentioned in Genesis (Fortey 1998).

Multiple Authorship

Literary scholars of the nineteenth century developed methods of text analysis focused on such questions as whether a single author did indeed write all of the works attributed to Shakespeare. Their method, very briefly, is to compare themes and writing styles of the different works, on the assumption that particular authors may be recognized by their unique and consistent forms of expression, grammar, choice of words, and punctuation. In Germany, scholars applied the same method to the Bible, not to undermine belief but to gain a better understanding of this holy text.

As illustration, compare the two versions of creation. We have already seen that they contradict one another in sequencing the appearance of life forms on earth. They also differ in overall style, one a log of seven days, perhaps derived from Enuma Elish, the other a tale that a bard might tell about specific people, Adam and Eve. There is in addition an important difference in referring to the deity. The seven days version speaks impersonally of “God” (in Hebrew Elohim). In the Adam and Eve tale, God is called by his personal name, Yahweh. In the seven days account, the words used for creation are derivatives of one Hebrew root; in the Adam and Eve account they are derived from a different root (Rofé 1999). There is a strong case that the two passages were written by different authors.

After nearly two centuries of research, most nonfundamentalist biblical scholars agree that Genesis is a composite, a merger of previously separate documents. The Adam and Eve tale that speaks of Yahweh is the opening portion of what is called the “Yahwist” or J document (for Jahwist, as German scholars spell it). The “seven days” version of creation begins what is called the “Priestly” or P document, because of its exceptional interest in priestly issues. Though each document may be consistent in itself, when juxtaposed they produce inconsistencies or explicit contradictions.

One need not accept the hypothesis of multiple authors to see the logical inconsistencies and physical absurdities in Genesis. We can at least say in favor of intelligent design that it is free of these particular problems. Perhaps we owe its formulators some thanks for moving us away from a 6,000-year-old earth, Adam and Eve, and the story of a few men who in months built with simple tools a boat sufficiently large to house and feed representatives of every species of animal that ever existed.

Note

1. See here for examples of modern commentary that explain away inconsistencies between Genesis 1 and 2 by introducing novel English-to-Hebrew translations, ad hoc interpretation of words or phrases, or ignoring details in the text.

References

• Boyarin, D. 1993. Carnal Israel. Berkeley Calif.: University of California Press.
• Brodie, F. 1971. No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith. New York: Random House.
• Fortey, R. 1998. Life: An Unauthorized Biography. London: Flamingo.
• Freedman, D. (Ed.) 1992. Anchor Bible Dictionary. New York: Doubleday.
• The Holy Bible, New Revised Standard Version. 1989. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Rofé, A. 1999. Introduction to the Composition of the Pentateuch. Sheffield, United Kingdom: Sheffield Academic Press.

The science and religion debate in America has seen its fair share of controversy, much of it bitter. From the moment that Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of Species in 1859, Americans have debated evolution, its place and role and significance, especially with respect to Christianity. Almost immediately, two leading Harvard professors, Louis Agassiz, the transplanted Swiss ichthyologist then building the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Asa Gray, the diminutive professor of botany, clashed over the truth of evolution. Although both appealed to scientific facts, it was clear that religious issues were close to the surface. A decade later the leading American Presbyterian theologian, Princeton Seminary professor Charles Hodge, wrote a little book titled: What is Darwinism? He answered the question himself: It is Atheism!

Before long, especially in the South and (as the country expanded) in the West, evolution was taken to be the equivalent of godlessness. The great evangelist Dwight Moody—the Billy Graham of his day—lectured on the four great evils of the age: ignoring the Sabbath, Sunday newspapers, the theater, and evolution (including atheism). As is well known, this hostility between evolution and Christianity continued into the twentieth century, most famously in 1925 in Dayton Tennessee, when the young schoolteacher John Thomas Scopes was put on trial for teaching that humans and apes share a common ancestor. Prosecuted by the Great Commoner, three-times presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, and defended by noted freethinker Clarence Darrow, Scopes was found guilty (although the verdict was overturned on appeal) and the whole of America was riveted by the spectacle.

Many think that after the Scopes trial, Christian anti-evolutionism—such people took the Bible literally and were often known as Fundamentalists—sank with little trace. This is not true. After World War II, religiously based anti-evolutionism started to rise and gain in strength. This was in no small part because of the publication in 1961 of Genesis Flood. Coauthored by Biblical scholar John Whitcomb and hydraulic engineer Henry M. Morris, this work presented a definitive defense of a young Earth as well as a miraculous origin for the whole of life. A strong defense of Noah’s Flood was also prominent, being a key part of the authors’ “premillennial dispensationalism.” This is a theology committed to periods of time ended by violent events, the first of which ended with the Deluge and the last anticipated in the near future ending with Armageddon, and the thousand-year rule of Jesus before the Final Judgment.

Now called creationism (often scientific creationism, to emphasize the scientific credentials and hence the appropriateness of introducing the ideas into science classrooms) things came to a head in Arkansas in 1981. A law mandating the teaching of creation science had been passed by the legislature, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) brought suit claiming that it violated the constitutional separation of church and state. The law was declared unconstitutional. It seemed that now finally the anti-evolutionary forces were conquered. This was far from so! In 1991, Berkeley law professor Phillip Johnson published Darwin on Trial, another anti-evolutionary work, claiming now that the chief sin was a commitment to naturalism, and the fight started all over again. Revitalized, the new Christian evangelical cry was that an intelligent designer must have been responsible for the irreducible complexity of the living world. Supporters of the position—notably Lehigh University biochemist Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box, and mathematician-cum-philosopher William Dembski, author of The Design Inference—gathered much support and publicity for their claims. Another court case arose in 2005, this time in Dover, Pennsylvania, with no more success than the Arkansas case. Again, it would be very foolish to think we have heard the end of the matter. George W. Bush, an ardent evangelical Christian, is sympathetic to the thinking, and has already started to load the Supreme Court with people who think that the separation of church and state has gone too far.

Our time therefore is still one when those of us who think that Biblical literalism has no place in the science classrooms of the nation should be standing together and fighting ignorance and prejudice, if only on pragmatic grounds. The big threat today to America’s status is the rapidly growing economies of the East, such as China and India. Of course, one welcomes this—better by far that the rest of the world share the prosperity of the West than that it look enviously from outside. But the aim must to be to bring them up rather than us down. No greater foolishness could happen than the castration of modern science in the name of evangelical Christianity. Science secondary education in America is in bad enough shape as it is, and there is no reason to make it worse. Furthermore, scientific discoveries are among the greatest achievements of the human spirit and intellect. We owe it to our young people to share this with them, giving them the training to go on to even greater triumphs.

Yet at the moment, those of us against creationism live in a house divided. One group is made up of the ardent, complete atheists. They want no truck with the enemy, which they are inclined to define as any person of religious inclination—from literalist (like a Southern Baptist) to deist (like a Unitarian)—and they think that anyone who thinks otherwise is foolish, wrong, and immoral. Prominent members of this group include Richard Dawkins, the biologist and popular science writer; Daniel Dennett, the philosopher and also a successful popular pundit; and Jerry Coyne, the leading evolutionist. The second group is made of two subgroups. One has as members liberal Christians who think that evolution is God’s way of creating. This subgroup contains the Catholic theologian John Haught, the Anglican physicist John Polkinghorne, and the late Pope John Paul II. The second subgroup contains those who have no religious belief but who think that one should collaborate with liberal Christians against a shared enemy, and who are inclined to think that science and religion are compatible. Members include Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education, the late Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist and popular science writer, and me. (From now on, rather than drag others into the fight, I will speak only for myself.)

The rhetoric is strong and nasty. I have accused Dennett of being a bully and someone who is pig ignorant of the issues. He has told me that I stand in danger (perhaps over the point of danger) of losing the respect of those whose respect I should crave. He and Harvard linguist Steven Pinker wrote a letter to The New York Times, after a review of one of my books, regretting that something like this might receive favorable attention. Dawkins has gone even further; in his new, best-selling book, The God Delusion, Dawkins likens me to Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister who tried to appease Adolf Hitler. Dawkins introduces a new norm for journalists, begging them to interview others and get the real truth if they had previously spoken to me.

Without praising or excusing myself, I can say that I have been in the trenches for a long time. I first debated biblical literalists back in 1977. One opponent was the above-mentioned Henry M. Morris. He was joined by his associate Duane T. Gish, author of Evolution: The Fossils Say No! with then more than 150,000 copies sold, according to its cover. The site was an indoor sports arena at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and the audience, at least 3,000, had been brought in from all over the local area and neighboring states. Before the debate, at least ten people in the stands believed in evolution, and, after the debate, at most ten of them believed in evolution. I was judged to have lost.

Undaunted, I have kept up the fight—first against these older young-Earth creationists (believing in that 6,000-year span since Adam and Eve), and later against the more sophisticated intelligent design theorists, those who argue that something (or rather Something) must have intervened to cause the irreducible complexity of organisms. Alongside such luminaries as Stephen Jay Gould, I appeared as a witness for the ACLU in the Arkansas case, testifying against a creationist law that the legislature was imposing on the children of the state. I have appeared many times on radio and television, usually debating creationists and arguing that they are not just wrong but that their position is in no way scientific. And I have produced more words than any reasonable person might be expected to read, let alone write.

It is not surprising, therefore, that I am not universally loved by all of those who do battle in today’s fight in America between science and religion. It is true that the creationists have not been slow to criticize. Henry Morris, who died in 2006, accused me personally of being responsible—through my Darwinian materialism—of America’s altogether-too-slack attitude toward capital punishment. Would that this were true! But the ones who really are after me are my fellow Darwinians. In a way this is odd. For the record, I am absolutely committed to the belief that science is our highest form of knowledge. I believe that Darwinian evolutionary theory is true in all basic respects, and that it applies to humankind. I have even been recently quoted (correctly) in The New York Times as saying that I believe that ethics is “an illusion of the genes to make us good social animals.” And I have no religious faith at all. You could call me an atheist, although I prefer skeptic, for I simply have no answers to the ultimate questions.

I am on the outs with the militant atheist group because I do not see that committing oneself to science necessarily implies that one thinks that all of religion is false, and that those who worship a supreme being are in some respects at one with the fanatics who flew planes into the World Trade Center. Of course, I think some religious beliefs are wrong and dangerous. That is why I fight creationists. But overall, I don’t think someone is silly or immoral if he or she is a practicing Christian or Jew or Muslim or whatever. Although I don’t think you have to be a believer to be good, I fully accept that many believers are good because of their beliefs. Moreover, I think it is both politically and morally right to work with believers to combat ills, including creationism.

The Dawkins-Dennett school allows no compromise. Religion is false. Religion is dangerous. Religion must be fought in every way. There can be no working with the enemy. Those like me who work with religious people are like the appeasers before the Nazis. This was the message thumped out again and again at a recent meeting of true believers in San Diego, widely reported in the major newspapers [see George Johnson’s report, “A Free-for-All on Science and Religion,” page 24]. With some few exceptions (notably the anthropologist Melvin J. Konner) the word was that the right approach to religion in American life is unremitting hostility and attack. Only that way will the truth prevail. Sir Harry Kroto, a Nobel Prize winning colleague at my own university of Florida State, begged the John Templeton Foundation to give to Richard Dawkins its annual prize for advances in religion!

My response is in part pragmatic. The creationists and the ID supporters simply love Dawkins and his ilk. They pray that they will say more and more. Every time the atheists open their mouths they win converts to the literalist cause. The creationists have been saying all along that Darwinism equals atheism, and now the Darwinians apparently agree! Americans in the middle—meaning, generally, religious Americans in the middle—get the message that science, and Darwinism particularly, threatens their faith. Dembski once wrote to Dawkins: “I know that you personally don’t believe in God, but I want to thank you for being such a wonderful foil for theism and for intelligent design more generally. In fact, I regularly tell my colleagues that you and your work are one of God’s greatest gifts to the intelligent design movement. So please, keep at it!”

But pragmatic factors are not my real gripe. If I thought Dawkins and company were right, I would defend them one hundred percent and let the chips fall where they may. My real problem is one of scholarship, put simply, which is I guess what you would expect of a university professor like myself. I would be a lot more impressed with the ardent atheists if I felt that they were making a genuine effort to engage in dialog with those whom they criticize. I do not necessarily mean actual physical dialog, but at the least an intense study of the claims of those against whom they fulminate. Take, for instance, Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion, and his critiques of the various arguments for the existence of God. Why does he not acknowledge that few if any Christians have ever claimed that the proofs are the true reason for the belief in God? John Henry Newman, the great nineteenth-century English theologian, first an Anglican (Episcopalian) and then a Roman Catholic, spoke for many. About his seminal philosophical work, A Grammar of Assent, he wrote, “I have not insisted on the argument from design, because I am writing for the nineteenth century, by which, as represented by its philosophers, design is not admitted as proved. And to tell the truth, though I should not wish to preach on the subject, for forty years I have been unable to see the logical force of the argument myself. I believe in design because I believe in God; not in a God because I see design.” (This is from a letter written in 1872.) He continued, “Design teaches me power, skill and goodness—not sanctity, not mercy, not a future judgment, which three are of the essence of religion.”

The proofs are at best a backup for an already-received commitment. More than this, the proofs are a lot more subtle than these critics recognize. Take the cosmological argument, for example. From at least the time of Saint Augustine, around 400 a.d., theologians have been wrestling with the sense in which God can be said to be both necessary and eternal. Saint Augustine had a very sophisticated theory that entailed God being outside time—that is why Augustine would not have found the idea of evolution threatening, because for his God the thought of creation, the act of creation, and the product of creation are as one. Augustine explicitly claimed that God created seeds of life that then unfurled. The point is that for Augustine—and even more for Aquinas (1225—1274)—God is a stopping point in the chain of causation. The argument was that things have a cause and we must have some cause of the world in which we live. An infinite causal chain is no solution. Hence, there must be such a being that breaks the chain, namely the eternal God.

You may not like this argument and want to challenge it. I think I would. But I don’t find it stupid, and I do find it worthy of careful study. I want to dig into what the notion of necessary existence might mean and whether in this day of modern physics it makes sense to talk of things being outside time. (Of course it makes sense to talk of things outside time; 2+2=4 is outside time. It never became true and will never become false. The question is whether this sort of thinking can be transferred to God.) My point is simply that if you are going to consider religion the chief cause of the world’s ills, then you owe it to yourself and to others to take seriously the claims of religion, and this I do not think is done. I fear that emotion rules rationality, the very sin of which the critics accuse the religious! In other words, I start to suspect that these people are in their way are tarred with the same features of which they accuse the creationists. There is a dogmatism, a refusal to listen to others, a contempt for nonbelievers, a feeling that they alone have the truth, that is the mark of so many of the cults and sects that have sprung on American soil since the nation’s founding.

Blind religious conviction is a terrible threat in American society today. What we need is reason and cool thinking. Science is the highest form, even if not necessarily the only form. But let us not mistake science for scientism, the belief that science and science alone has all of the answers. Let us not think that those suspicious or rejecting of scientism are wrong, verging on immoral. And let us not say that those who are prepared to work with people who think that science does not have all of the answers are therefore akin to wimps groveling before Hitler. Indeed, to push the analogy, I would say rather that we are Churchillian rather than Chamberlain-like. When Hitler attacked Russia, England and America gave aid to Stalin. It was not that they particularly liked Stalin or his system, but they worked on the principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Fundamentalism, creationism, intelligent design theory—these are the real threats. Please God—or non-God—let us quit fighting among ourselves and get on with the real job that faces us.

The book’s success certainly tells us something about the unique abilities of its author, Richard Dawkins. Dawkins, who has made his name as a distinguished biologist and literate explainer and defender of evolution, is, as a public person, also legitimately deserving of his publisher’s moniker as “the world’s most prominent atheist.”

The two—scientist and atheist—don’t necessarily go hand in hand, but Dawkins here meshes his scientific knowledge and scientific worldview with a welcome freshness and directness in examining all aspects of the “god” question, a matter often treated with kid gloves and a philosophical abstruseness intended, if not to be understood, at least not to offend. Dawkins works very hard to be understood, bringing his considerable knowledge, insight, and clarity of expression to his cause.

Dawkins also hopes not to offend—I think he really does try to couch his arguments to appeal to the higher impulses of intelligent believers. But not giving offense is not the highest item on his agenda. In fact, society’s “hands-off” attitude toward religion, an “undeserved respect” by which generations of people have been raised to give religion a free pass, allowing it to avoid the no-holds-barred critical scrutiny all democratic societies apply toward politics and everything else, is one of the things Dawkins very much wants to change.

“I am intrigued and mystified by the disproportionate privileging of religion in our otherwise secular societies. . . . What is so special about religion that we grant it such uniquely privileged respect?”

A number of other such big consciousness-raising themes resound throughout these pages.

1. Atheism can no longer be marginalized and ignored. It is a respected intellectual tradition. Atheists and agnostics far outnumber Jews and even most other religious groups. Dawkins hopes to raise the consciousness of people who have had religion pushed on them and wish they could leave that tradition: “To be an atheist is a realistic aspiration, and a brave and splendid one,” he writes. “You can be an atheist who is happy, balanced, moral, and intellectually fulfilled.”
2. The God hypothesis is a scientific question, one that can, in principle at least, be answered empirically with a yes or no result. The existence of God is thus subject to legitimate scientific scrutiny, bringing to bear all we are learning in the research laboratory to a question that used to be considered one of opinion only. “The presence or absence of a creative super-intelligence is unequivocally a scientifically question, even if it is not in practice—not yet—a decided one,” he writes. Did Jesus have a human father? Was his mother a virgin? Did Jesus come alive again, three days after being dead? “There is an answer to every such question, whether or not we can discover it in practice, and it is strictly a scientific answer.”
3. Evolution by natural selection is the creative force that provides all the biological complexity we see on Earth. This “illusion of design” fools those unfamiliar with evolution (the majority of people, unfortunately) into thinking a master designer must be at work. Biologists know that no such hypothesis is needed.
4. Arguments for God’s existence all have pungent counterarguments. Dawkins himself spends some time on a number of them: The Argument from Beauty, The Argument from Personal “Experience” (the most convincing to those who have had one, “the least convincing to anyone else, and to anyone knowledgeable about psychology”), The Argument from Scripture, The Argument from Admired Religious Scientists, Pascal’s Wager, and Bayesian Arguments.

He has fresh things to say about all such arguments. How do you account for inspired works of art, the religious mind asks? Answers Dawkins: “Beethoven’s late quartets are sublime. So are Shakespeare’s sonnets. They are sublime if God is there and they are sublime if he isn’t. They do not prove the existence of God; they prove the existence of Beethoven and Shakespeare.” “Visions” and other personal experiences of God seem astonishing to the beholder, but “the formidable power of the brain’s simulation software . . . is well capable of constructing ‘visions’ and ‘visitations’ of the utmost veridical power.” He cites data showing that an overwhelming majority of members of the National Academy of Sciences and Fellows of the Royal Society are atheists. So much for admired scientists sharing the religious sensibility.

As for scripture, which means so much to so many, Dawkins cites chapter and verse of utter contradictions and the calls to violence and child-abuse and murder and wonders if religious people have even read the book they admire so highly. Even so, it doesn’t really matter. “Although Jesus probably existed, reputable biblical scholars do not in general regard the New Testament (and obviously not the Old Testament) as a reliable record of what actually happened in history, and I shall not consider the Bible further as evidence for any kind of deity.” He quotes the “farsighted words” of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote to John Adams, “The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as his father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” (One of his subthemes is that the founding fathers of the American republic were not the “Christians” imagined by today’s religious right but something very close to deists, agnostics, or, yes, even atheists.)

Dawkins saves his biggest guns for the most powerful argument of all, one that doesn’t depend upon personal subjectivity: The Argument from Improbability. Some observed phenomena about life is correctly extolled as statistically improbable. Theists think the argument falls in their favor. Dawkins sees exactly the opposite. The argument, in his view, “comes close to proving that God does not exist.”

In a core chapter “Why There Is Almost Certainly No God,” he calls the argument the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit. This is reference to the amusing image attributed to the physicist Fred Hoyle. Hoyle said the probability of life originating on Earth is no greater than the chance that a hurricane, sweeping through a scrapyard, would assemble a 747 airliner. It is the creationist’s favorite argument, and it seems powerful to those uninformed by natural selection. This is where Dawkins finds that biologists seem to have something up on some physicists who may understand natural selection intellectually but apparently not viscerally. Suggests he: “Perhaps you need to be steeped in natural selection, immersed in it, swim about in it, before you can truly appreciate its power.”

The argument, Dawkins says, “could be made only by somebody who doesn’t understand the first thing about natural selection: somebody who thinks natural selection is a theory of chance whereas—in the relevant sense of chance—it is the opposite.” In fact, as he sets out to show in the chapter (I think successfully), “Darwinian natural selection is the only known solution to the otherwise unanswerable riddle of where the information content [in living matter] comes from.”

The insights of evolution make biologists wary of the way that the idea of chance is so often misinterpreted. “A deep understanding of Darwinism teaches us to be wary of the easy assumption that design is the only alternative to chance, and teaches us to seek out graded ramps of slowly increasing complexity,” writes Dawkins. “The illusion of design is a trap that has caught us before, and Darwin should have immunized us by raising our consciousness. Would that he had succeeded with all of us.”

He notes that the “scientifically savvy” philosopher Daniel Dennett has pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: “the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. . . . You’ll never see a pot making a potter.” But as Dawkins points out over and over throughout this book, the incremental processes of evolution through natural selection do just that. “Darwin’s discovery of a workable process that does that very counter-intuitive thing is what makes his contribution to human thought so revolutionary, and so loaded with the power to raise consciousness.”

Again Dawkins clearly summarizes the point: “Chance and design both fail as solutions to the problem of statistical improbability, because one of them is the problem, and the other one regresses to it. Natural selection is a real solution. It is the only workable solution that has ever been suggested. And it is not only a workable solution, it is a solution of stunning elegance and power.”

Along the way Dawkins brings a biologist’s unique perspective to some pesky problems, such as the anthropic principle. Physicists seem to get tied up in knots writing about the anthropic principle, perhaps fearing that it provides fodder for the design hypothesis for the universe. The idea that the universe is apparently finely tuned for life as we know it (us) to exist—six constants have to be pretty much “just so”—is loved by what Dawkins calls “religious apologists,” a fact he finds strange. “For some reason that makes no sense at all, they think it supports their case,” he writes. “Precisely the opposite is true. The anthropic principle, like natural section, is an alternative to the design hypothesis. It provides a rational, design-free explanation for the fact that we find ourselves in a situation propitious to our existence.”

The anthropic idea—more or less that if the conditions weren’t right we wouldn’t be here to speculate about it—“has a faintly Darwinian feel,” Dawkins finds.

“What the religious mind fails to grasp,” he writes, “is that two candidate solutions are offered to the problem. God is one. The anthropic principle is the other. They are alternatives.”

The God solution seems deeply unsatisfying. “A God capable of calculating the Goldilocks values for the six numbers would have to be at least as improbable as the finely tuned combination of numbers itself, and that’s very improbable indeed.” He calls it the “Divine Knob-Twiddler” argument, and again sees that our tendency to resort to it “may have something to do with the fact that many people have not had their consciousness raised, as biologists have, by natural selection and its power to tame improbability.”

I found on every page of The God Delusion passages worth underlining that I want to turn to again and again. Dawkins has created here something not just for the nonreligious and those leaning that way—a powerful call for the respectability and intellectual validity of nonbelief—but a book also full of substance for any scientifically inclined reader. It repeatedly calls forth the powers of natural selection to provide understanding and insight into a natural world that deserves our highest and clearest levels of inquiry and curiosity.

Howe submitted soil and barley samples to W.C. Levengood, a biophysicist and PhD-Eq at the Pinelandia Biophysical Laboratory in Grass Lake, Michigan, who specializes in the investigation of crop circles. Levengood measured the “charge density plasma pulses” of the samples (whatever they may be). He found that the greatest “energy change” was about 200 feet south of the cow, and zero “energy” in the bounce mark in the ground. He concluded, “Right at the cow, the energy in the plants were also anomalously low. That would fit in because when the cow hit, the initial impact and second landing, the plant energies were neutralized.” Who says that UFOlogy is not scientific? Howe suggests that these “energy changes” might be due to “advanced beam technology,” a kind of tractor beam that aliens allegedly use to pick up and return cows, although it would seem that in this case the batteries or whatever powers the tractor beam must have been a bit weak, setting the animal down with a big thud. (For more on Levengood’s research see “Italian Skeptics Debunk Crop Cir-cle Electromagnetic Radiation Claim,” SI, September/October 2005.)

As if this were not sufficiently amazing, the famous animal that started it all, Snippy the Horse, is back in the news after almost forty years. Snippy, a three-year-old mare in Appaloosa, Colorado, became famous in 1967 when her owner, Nellie Lewis, claimed that she had been mutilated by space aliens. Lewis claimed that the dead horse gave off a sweet scent like incense, that its mane burned her fingers, and that the boots she was wearing were later found to be “radioactive.” No mention was made as to whether poor Snippy bounced when the aliens dropped her off. The Case of Snippy was investigated and included in the famous Condon Report (Case 32), which concluded in true closed-minded debunker style that “There was no evidence to support the assertion that the horse’s death was associated in any way with abnormal causes” (see www.ncas.org/condon/text/case32.htm). Another spoilsport was local veterinarian Wallace Leary, who determined that poor Snippy had been shot twice in the legs with a .22 caliber rifle. This probably would not have killed her, but may well have caused the infection that appears to have left her disabled.

Snippy was the first widely publicized claim of alien mutilation of livestock, and it seems to have started a big trend. Snippy now even has her own Web site (www.snippy.com), which includes a Snippy store selling Snippy merchandise. Recently Snippy’s skeleton was offered for sale on eBay, with a minimum bid of $50,000. However, bidding was suspended when ownership of the bones was disputed (see http://tinyurl.com/y3qutv). No mention was made of whether any bids for Snippy’s bones were actually received.

As scary as all this animal mutilation talk may be, it’s nothing compared to the hunt for the Skinwalker. A new book by Colm Kelleher and George Knapp, Hunt for the Skinwalker, tells the chilling tale. Kelleher is a physicist who formerly worked for the now-defunct National Institute for Discovery Sciences (NIDS), funded by Las Vegas billionaire Robert Bigelow. Knapp is a Las Vegas TV personality who has made a name for himself reporting sensational stories about Area 51 and such. When stories about an allegedly haunted ranch in northeastern Utah reached NIDS, Bigelow decided to buy the ranch to further his paranormal research. (The “Skinwalker Ranch” now has its own Wikipedia entry.

According to Knapp, “For as long as anyone can remember, this part of northeastern Utah has been the site of simply unbelievable paranormal activity. UFOs, Sasquatch, cattle mutilations, psychic manifestations, creatures that aren’t found in any zoos or textbooks, poltergeist events.” He suggests that it may be “the strangest place on Earth.” Some observers trace this weirdness back to an old Indian curse that the Navajo supposedly placed on the Utes. As you know, lots of paranormal problems can be traced back to old Indian graveyards or curses; one Indian graveyard in South Park, Colorado, has been particularly troublesome. One anthropologist quoted in the book describes Skinwalker beliefs as follows: “Skinwalkers are purely evil in intent. I’m no expert on it, but the general view is that skinwalkers do all sorts of terrible things—they make people sick, they commit murders. They are grave robbers and necrophiliacs. They are greedy and evil people who must kill a sibling or other relative to be initiated as a skinwalker. They supposedly can turn into were animals and can travel in supernatural ways.”

The previous owner of the ranch had reportedly encountered numerous unexplained phenomena, such as a bulletproof wolf that could not be killed, and apparently walked off into thin air. Later, three dogs were zapped by something while chasing blue orbs of light in a pasture. All that was left of each of the dogs was a greasy, butter-like glob.

One of the incidents described in the book occurred in August 1997. Two unnamed researchers were perched on a bluff of the ranch late at night, monitoring a pasture. One of them descended into the pasture to meditate, as he believed that this sometimes “activated the phenomenon.” After about two hours, they allegedly spotted a small yellow light a few feet off the ground. They watched as it began to expand. One of them grabbed a pair of Generation III ITT night vision binoculars, while the other reached for a 35mm camera loaded with infrared film. As seen in the binoculars, the light seemed to expand, and take on a tunnel like appearance. At the far end of the tunnel, what started out as an indistinct motion gradually became the head and shoulders of a humanoid creature. It stepped out of the tunnel and walked off into the night. All that remained was the smell of sulphur. Unfortunately, the observer with the camera saw only the circle of light, and doesn’t seem to have taken any pictures anyway. Researchers installed cameras atop telephone poles, but they were attacked and disabled by some invisible force. Another golden opportunity for scientific research, lost forever. . . .

As scary as all this Skinwalker stuff is, it’s nothing compared to the story now being told by Robert Duncan O’Finioan, who claims to have been “brainwashed, conditioned and controlled as part of a highly classified MKULTRA program called Project Talent,” and whose story is now being featured on Jerry Pippin’s mystery-mongering Internet broadcasts (www.jerrypippin.com). Of a thousand others allegedly trained as “child warriors” in 1966, he says he is one of only twenty left alive. He was selected, he says, because of his mixed Native American and Celtic heritage; both of those groups supposedly have unique spiritual and mental abilities, so the combination is unbeatable for making a powerful psychic warrior. His top-secret training, which was very abusive and brutal, supposedly gave him “enhanced physical and psychic abilities . . . including the abilities to hurl someone across the room with his mind, and walk through a solid wall.” His right arm was “hardwired” with an “enhancer” implant, supposedly giving it “astonishing speed and strength.”

Supposedly O’Finioan and eleven other child warriors were flown to Cambodia in 1972 to deliver a “death blow” to Khmer Rouge troops, “using only the combined power of their minds.” A helicopter lands, coming to the aid of a platoon of Marines pinned down by hostile fire. Twelve children disembark, form a semicircle, and hold hands. When their hands are raised, the combined psychic force kills every enemy soldier within twenty miles.

Now O’Finioan says he is beginning to recover conscious memories of all these alarming events from his past, which had long been repressed by the mind controllers. When he underwent a recent MRI scan, not only did it detect an implant deep inside his brain, but the implant caused the MRI machine to catch fire, sending doctors and nurses scurrying with fire extinguishers. This also seems to have burned out the implant, effectively freeing him from MKULTRA’s control. Unfortunately, none of his remarkable physical abilities are demonstrated on the video Ultimate Warrior on Pippin’s site, in which O’Finioan simply talks to the camera and doesn’t walk through any walls. By way of explanation, he says that most of his paranormal abilities belong to his “alternate personalities,” which cannot be brought out on demand. What do his enhanced mental abilities foresee for the future? A giant supervolcano in a western state will rip the U.S. apart, and “very soon.” So if this happens, as you’re being buried in ashes and debris, remember that you read it here first.

Aliens

Some assume that UFOs are a modern invention, but since ancient times men have reported seeing strange things in the sky. An increasing interest in air machines no doubt helped promote reports of strange “airships” in the 1890s. After World War I, “the world’s first ufologist,” Charles Fort, stirred interest in mysterious phenomena, including unidentified objects in the sky that Fort believed indicated visits from space aliens (Clark 1992, 21—23). In the 1920s through the 1940s, science-fiction pulp magazines became popular, especially Amazing Stories which debuted in 1929. When its circulation lagged, a new editor, Ray Palmer, boosted sales with wild stories of extraterrestrial visitations and decorated the covers with occasional illustrations of strange, circular spaceships (Baker and Nickell 1992, 186—187, 261—266; Clark 1992, 78).

The term flying saucers was coined after a sighting—in the Pacific Northwest—that triggered the modern wave of UFOs. On June 24, 1947, businessman Kenneth Arnold was flying his private airplane over the Cascade Mountains in Washington State when he saw a chain of nine tailless objects streaking south over Mount Baker and heading for Mount Rainier, each flying with a motion like “a saucer skipped across water” (quoted in Ruppelt 1956, 27). The name “flying saucers” was thus born, and Ray Palmer’s fiction had become a reality. By the following year, Palmer had helped create Fate, a mystery-mongering magazine that promoted UFOs and other “true” mysteries (as it continues to do today) (Clark 1992, 6—8; Nickell 1995, 192; Baker and Nickell 1992, 186—187). Palmer went on to co-author a book with Arnold, The Coming of the Saucers (1952).

Skeptics have put forth numerous explanations for Arnold’s UFOs: balloons, airplanes, hoaxes, hallucinations, mountain-top mirages, birds, droplets of water on the plane’s windshield, etc. (Maccabee 1995; Story 2001, 87—89). Arnold claimed he had viewed the objects carefully, even opening his window and taking off his glasses. He calculated the objects’ speed at 1,200 to 1,700 mph, an incredible figure.

Edward J. Ruppelt, former head of the U.S. Air Force’s Project Blue Book, which investigated UFOs, wrote of the controversy, noting two factions’ arguments at the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC). One side thought Arnold simply saw jet airplanes flying in formation:

The “Arnold-saw-airplanes” faction maintained that since Arnold said that the objects were 45 to 50 feet long they would have had to be much closer than he had estimated or he couldn’t even have seen them at all. Since they were much closer than he estimated, Arnold’s timed speed was all wrong and instead of going 1,700 miles per hour the objects were traveling at a speed closer to 400 miles per hour, the speed of a jet. There was no reason to believe they weren’t jets. The jets appeared to have a skipping motion because Arnold had looked at them through layers of warm and cold air, like heat waves coming from a hot pavement that cause an object to shimmer. (Ruppelt 1956, 28)

The other faction at ATIC noted Arnold’s claim that the UFOs had passed behind one mountain peak, thus supposedly helping establish their correct distance from him. (This faction thus thought the objects must have been about 210 feet long instead of Arnold’s estimated 45 to 50 feet [Ruppelt 1956, 28—29]). However, physicist/UFOlogist Dr. Bruce Maccabee (1995, I:15) has noted: “Geological survey maps show that mountain peaks behind which the objects could have disappeared have altitudes of 5,000 to 6,000 feet. Thus it appears that they were lower than 6,000 feet and that Arnold overestimated their altitude.” More recently, other evidence has shown that Arnold must have been mistaken about the objects traveling behind a peak (Easton 2000).

Ruppelt himself noted that Arnold’s story had been “warped, twisted, and changed” by the “bards of saucerism.” He added (1956, 27): “Even some points in Arnold’s own account of his sighting as published in his book The Coming of the Saucers, do not jibe with what the official files say he told the Air Force in 1947.” Moreover, Arnold’s sighting is significantly different from that of another alleged eyewitness, one Fred Johnson, a prospector who claimed to have witnessed a string of UFOs when he was in the Cascade Mountains on the same day and at about the same time as Arnold flew over.

Johnson’s description of the objects differed significantly from Arnold’s in their number and appearance. He reported seeing five or six similar objects, one of which he looked at with his telescope. It was reflective, “oval,” an estimated thirty feet in length, and had a pointed end and apparent “tail” (that shifted from side to side). He estimated the objects were about one thousand feet above him (who was then about five thousand feet above sea level), making their altitude approximately six thousand feet. Johnson wrote that the “Last view I got of the objects they were standing on edge Banking in a Cloud,” [1] although Arnold’s account implies a cloudless sky.

Even if Johnson’s contradictory report is put aside—he may well have been a publicity-seeking false claimant—Arnold’s report alone demonstrates that there is no precise set of facts on which to draw a definitive conclusion as to what the “objects” were. It seems plausible that Arnold could have mistaken jet airplanes for unusual flying objects. He himself thought he had seen some newly developed government aircraft (Maccabee 1995, 1:14). However, the Air Force disavowed ownership of the objects.

James Easton (2000) has ventured an explanation that begins with Arnold’s obvious distance-size-speed misperceptions and his likening the objects’ flight characteristics to “a formation of geese” (Arnold and Palmer 1952, 11). Easton’s suspects are the very large American white pelicans, who are among the largest birds in the world, are “highly reflective,” fly at high altitudes, and employ a distinctive undulating flying motion, flapping and gliding, that compares well with Arnold’s statement that the UFOs “fluttered and sailed” (qtd. in Maccabee 1995, 1:16).

Indeed, not longer after the Arnold-Johnson sightings, on July 2, “a veteran Northwest Airlines pilot who has flown over the Pacific northwest’s ‘flying saucer’ country for 15 years” spotted nine “big round discs weaving northward two thousand feet below us.” Capt. Gordon Moore (1947) stated, “We investigated and found they were real all right—real pelicans.”

Still, not only UFO proponents but also many skeptics doubt the pelican scenario. I interviewed Major James McGaha (USAF ret.)—a pilot, UFO expert, and director of the Grasslands Observatory in Tucson, Arizona. He thinks a much more likely explanation for Arnold’s UFOs (he dismisses Johnson as a probable copycat) is “mountain-top mirages” (see Hendry 1979, 69). McGaha notes that the conditions under which Arnold saw the strange objects—clear skies, smooth air, a potential temperature inversion—were ideal for producing mirage effects. So was the angle of the sun: 50.4 degrees from the horizon. Arnold’s insistence that the objects were “flying very close to the mountain tops” and seemingly “swerved in and out of the high mountain peaks” (Arnold and Palmer 1952, 10, 12) is fully consistent with the mirage hypothesis, states McGaha (2006).

In any event, the Arnold case is instructive. The implication of UFO proponents that—because the objects are “unidentified” and the incident “unexplained”—the Arnold sighting is therefore evidence of extraterrestrial visitation is absurd. Not only is such an attitude mystery mongering, but it is also an example of a logical fallacy called arguing from ignorance: One cannot draw a conclusion from a lack of knowledge. The problem is not a failure of science nor of excessive skepticism but rather Arnold’s own conflicting versions of what he saw and the serious misperceptions he quite obviously made. Such is often the case with reports of alien sightings.

Ghosts

Spirits of the dead are among the supernatural beings historically encountered by Native Americans. Alaskan Eskimos, according to a Smithsonian ethnography report (Murdoch 1885), often used weapons to fend off ghosts, even carrying a drawn knife for protection when traveling at night. One villager had set up a contrivance to protect his house: it had a dangling cord with a handle, supposedly helping a ghost get inside, but then pulling down on its head a large knife fastened to the wall. In 1883 U.S. Army Lieutenant P.H. Ray witnessed Eskimo villagers at Point Barrow engaged in expelling a ghost from a house. Several women stood at the door, swinging knives and clubs, while people inside worked to chase the ghost outside.

Today, not even weapons, apparently, can rid Juneau’s Alaskan Hotel of its ghosts, one of whom was allegedly even created by an angry man’s vengeful axe. Built in 1913 as a hotel and bordello (legalized prostitution only ended in 1956), the Alaskan experienced a colorful history before declining (under the name Northlander Hotel, beginning in 1961) and finally being condemned in 1977. It was subsequently restored and, in 1981, placed on the National Register of Historic Places.

On May 31, 2006, when our cruise ship made a stopover in Juneau (and I gave a scheduled talk and radio interview), I was able to tour the area courtesy of Michael S. Stekoll, professor of chemistry and biochemistry, University of Alaska Southeast. We stopped to investigate the historic “haunted” hotel, where we were given a tour by owner Bettye Adams and her son Joshua (see figure 1).

The Adamses and their excitable staff report various ghostly goings-on in several rooms of the Alaskan. In number 311, a manager having died there the previous February, staff members believe they can sense a ghostly presence, a subjective impression I was unable to share. Room 313 had yielded a photo by a former resident that showed several “orbs,” bright spheres believed by many to be a form of “spirit energy”; actually, however, when they are not mere reflections from shiny surfaces, orbs commonly result from the camera’s flash having rebounded from dust particles or water droplets close to the lens (Nickell 2006, 25).

It is room 315, however, that is most discussed, although the phantom habitué is supposedly the same as “the specter in room 321” and elsewhere in the hotel, according to the author of Haunted Alaska, Ron Wendt (2002, 71). He elaborates (2002, 73):

The ghost of the Alaskan Hotel carries a tragic story. In life, she was once the bride of a gold prospector. The man told her he was going to the Haines area to search for gold. He put her up at the Alaskan Hotel and said he would return in three weeks.

When her husband failed to return, the woman became desperate. She was out of money and had nowhere to run. An acquaintance told her there was a way she could support herself, and so she turned to prostitution.

About three months later, the miner returned. When he found out that his wife had been working as a prostitute, he killed her at the hotel.

Although the names of these dramatis personae are unrecorded, someone has, somehow, learned the woman’s name was Alice and that her husband killed her with “a hatchet” dislodged “from beneath his waistcoat” (Adams 2006, 5—6). But wait: maybe it was really a revolver with which he “shot her dead in that very room”—room 315 (Adams n.d., 56). Sources are also unsure whether the man was really the woman’s husband or merely her suitor; they are equally uncertain as to whether he was indeed a miner or instead “captain of his own fishing boat” who “went out to fish and possibly to whale” [2] (Adams n.d., 55).

According to the latter version, inexplicably, while at sea, this captain heard rumors of his girlfriend’s infidelity, and attempted to return to Juneau in a storm. According to a version of the story that does not involve murder (Adams n.d., 55—56):

Death came quickly to all beneath the turbulent waves, but the man continued, unhindered by flesh. He knocked, bodiless at the door, but none answered. So they say that the man simply stays there, waiting for his love to answer him, right around the time of month that he died.

Or so “they say.”

That there are proliferating versions of this story is at once evidence of folklore in the making and reason to be skeptical of its historicity. Its basic folk motifs (or story elements)—involving unfaithfulness, revenge, tragedy, and haunting [3]—persist, even when the factual details are questionable.

Figure 2. Joe Nickell looks for ghosts at the Alaskan Hotel. (Author’s photo by Michael S. Stekoll.)

Some form of the ghost tale apparently traces back at least to the time the building was called The Northlander Hotel and Marguerite Franklin was owner. She gave a discounted rate on the “haunted” room to a young, poor employee who worked the “graveyard” shift (midnight to eight a.m.). That woman soon reportedly sensed the presence of a “smelly fisherman,” even hearing his creaking footsteps and heavy breathing as well as smelling him. She seems to have been an impressionable, possibly even “fantasy-prone,” young lady who may have had “waking dreams,” which occur in the twilight between being fully asleep or awake (Nickell 1995, 40—42). Or, since she slept during the daytime, one wonders if she might merely have perceived the occasional hotel guest in the hallway. Supposedly the incidents occurred from the 24th to the 30th of each month, but there is no convincing record of such consistency (Adams n.d., 55—56).

As to reported apparitions, those are said to be of the legendary woman-turned-prostitute. States Wendt (2002, 71), “Witnesses have observed her walking down the hall, then simply vanishing from sight.” My own investigations as well as research data demonstrates that such experiences often derive from altered states of consciousness, such as when a person is tired or in a relaxed state or performing routine chores, etc. In imaginative individuals a mental image might be superimposed upon the visual scene, sort of a mental double exposure (Nickell 2000, 18).

Certainly, the Alaskan Hotel’s ghosts seem to have much in common with those alleged at other “haunted” sites as well as with other mysterious entities—monsters and aliens—of the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. “Where do entities come from?” asked noted psychologist Robert A. Baker (in an afterword to Nickell 1995, 275). He answered, “from within the human head, where they are produced by the ever-active, image-creating human mind.”

Acknowledgments

In addition to individuals mentioned in the text, I appreciate the assistance of those who helped make the Alaskan cruise a success, notably Toni Van Pelt and Pat Beauchamp. I am also grateful to Susan Fitzgerald and Jeff Brown of KTOO-FM, Juneau. Also, CFI Libraries Director Timothy Binga once again provided valuable research assistance.

Notes

1. Johnson gave two slightly differing and confusing accounts, one briefly written, the other summarized by an FBI agent who interviewed him at the request of the Air Force (Maccabee 1995, 3:6—7). I have attempted to harmonize the two versions. In the second Johnson stated he had a combination watch and compass and that, while the craft flew over, the compass needle oscillated unaccountably.
2. Adams (2006) has also given the conflicting stories as two different incidents, attributing one to room 315, the other to 318.
3. See for example, “Ghosts haunts place of great accident or misfortune” (motif E275), in Thompson 1955, 2:428.

References

• Adams, Joshua. N.d. The Life and Times of the Alaskan Hotel, 2nd ed. N.p.: n.p. (privately printed).
• —. 2006. A brief walking tour of the Alaskan Hotel. Computer printout supplied by the author to Joe Nickell.
• Arnold, Kenneth, and Ray Palmer. 1952. The Coming of the Saucers. Boise, Idaho, and Amherst, Wisconsin: Privately published by the authors.
• Baker, Robert A. and Joe Nickell. 1992. Missing Pieces. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• Clark, Jerome. 1992. UFO Encounters. Lincolnwood, Ill.: Publications International.
• Easton, James. 2000. Voyager Newsletter no. 10; voyager@ukonline.co.uk; received April 13.
• Maccabee, Bruce. 1995. The Arnold phenomena (in three parts). International UFO Reporter 20:1 (Jan./Feb.), 14—17; 20:2 (March/April), 10—13, 24; 20:3 (May/June), 6—7.
• McGaha, James. 2006. Interview by Joe Nickell, September 28—29.
• Moore, Capt. Gordon. 1947. Quoted in “Says flying saucers are pelicans,” New Westminster British Colombian, July 12; cited in Easton 2000.
• Murdoch, John. 1885. Ethnological results of the Point Barrow Expedition (1881—1883); published in J.W. Powell, Ninth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1892 [1893]; cited in Wendt 2002.
• Nickell, Joe. 1995. Entities: Angels, Spirits, Demons and Other Alien Beings. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books.
• —. 2000. Haunted inns. Skeptical Inquirer 24:5 (September/October), 17—21.
• —. 2006. Ghost hunters. Skeptical Inquirer 30:5 (September/October), 23—26.
• Ruppelt, Edward T. 1956. The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. New York: Ace Books.
• Story, Ronald D. 2001. The Encyclopedia of Extraterrestrial Encounters. New York: New American Library.
• Thompson, Stith. 1955. Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Rev. ed. 6 vols. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
• Wendt, Ron. 2002. Haunted Alaska: Ghost Stories from the Far North. Kenmore, Washington: Epicenter Press.

A prayer is, according to The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, “a solemn request to God or an object of worship; a supplication, thanksgiving, or other verbal or mental act addressed to God.” Petitionary prayers—messages seeking help or guidance for particular concerns—are common among Christians. They are also a feature of some other religions, such as Islam (Bouquet 1956) and Judaism where prayers expressing devotion and submission to almighty God prevail. But even these are intended communions with God. Although prayers are addressed to a supernatural being, prayer is an empirical behavior and thus accessible to scientific investigation.

Much prayer is silent (mental prayer). Silent praying is silent thinking, which “is really conducted largely in unspoken words” (Langer 1970) and which occupies a large part of our everyday lives (Bronowski 1978), a fact that attests to the enormous importance of language to human thought. So, silent prayers are simply verbal thoughts addressed to a god. Could therefore such thoughts be known to a supernatural being?

I explore this question in the following sections using modern information on mind and brain.

Although we all silently talk to ourselves a good deal (carry on internal dialogues), not all thoughts are verbal. Some are visual or auditory. We visualize people and places every day and often recall tunes from music we like. Thoughts are commonly mixtures of these and other types, often accompanied by emotions. Thoughts are mental phenomena, states of mind. But what then is mind?

The concept of mind encompasses our conscious mental life, including not only thoughts, but also perceptions, such as seeing and hearing; sensations, such as touch and cold; feelings, such as pain; and emotions (Sherrington 1951; Harth 1983; Harth 1993; Crick 1995). The brain is the organ of mind; it generates all that is mental. A few examples illustrate. A stroke that destroys the left occipital lobe deletes vision in the right visual field. Brain degeneration from Alzheimer’s disease causes progressive impairment of memory, reasoning, and other mental attributes. Intoxication of the brain produces well-known mental impairments. Electrical stimulation of the exposed human cortex can evoke images and sounds, and even a virtual reliving of past experiences (Penfield and Roberts 1959). Modern brain-imaging techniques, such as functional magnetic-resonance imaging, have connected certain mental states with heightened activity in specific brain regions (Kamitani and Tong 2005; Binder, et al. 2005; Ishai, et al. 2005).

How brain activity generates mental states is as much of an enigma today as it was more than a half-century ago when the great neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington (1951) said in wonder, “How can a reaction in the brain condition a reaction in the mind?” More recently, the physicist Erich Harth (1983) expressed this enigma when he wrote “Mind is like no other property of physical systems. It is not just that we don’t know the mechanisms that give rise to it. We have difficulty seeing how any mechanism can give rise to it.”

Transmission and Readability of Prayers

The brain, an electrochemical organ, consists of matter and energy, but the mental states that are the epiphenomena of its physiological processes are neither material substances nor forms of energy. Sherrington (1951) expressed this “scientific position” in saying, “Thoughts, feelings, and so on are not amenable to the energy (matter) concept. They lie outside it.” If thoughts—including silent prayers—are not a form of energy, then there is no known natural means by which they could be transmitted beyond ourselves or read within us.

Still, many credulously believe that some people (especially so-called “psychics”) can read minds and that thoughts can be transmitted from one person to another by mental telepathy or “extrasensory perception” (ESP). Perhaps this belief has been fostered by the seemingly substantive and energetic presence of our thoughts. But numerous experiments during some 150 years of research have not validated ESP and have left a wake of spurious statistical analyses (Lilienfeld 1999; Paulos 1990).

Though thoughts and prayers are neither transmissible nor readable by any natural means, could they be known to a supernatural being? Evidence for or against this can be obtained by determining whether prayers are followed by what was solicited by them. Only proper scientific studies, however, can provide reliable evidence by excluding chance occurrences, and biases from the results. To this end, a number of such studies have measured the effects of intercessory prayer (praying for others) on health-care outcomes in patients with various illnesses. A thorough review of the medical literature in 2000 concluded that the data were inconclusive (Roberts, et al. 2000). Since then, at least five studies have been published, the most recent in April 2006 (Benson, et al. 2006). All found no beneficial effect of intercessory prayer. (See also Bruce Flamm, “One Big STEP: Another Major Study Confirms That Distance Prayers Do Not Heal the Sick,” Skeptical Inquirer, July/August 2006.)

Transmission and Detection of Brain Activity

In contrast to thoughts, the brain activity underlying them consists of (electrochemical) energy. Could this energy be transmitted from us or be detected within us? If so, would it have the informational content of the thoughts arising from it? This activity, in brief, is the sending and receiving of electrochemical impulses among the brain’s densely packed microscopic neurons, which number in the tens of billions in the highly enfolded human cortex (Crick 1995). The impulses (“nerve action potentials”) sent by a neuron can be picked up by a microelectrode within 100 micrometers of it in the cortex. These impulses have amplitudes of several millivolts (Brecht, et al. 2004). Electrodes on the surface of the brain are, however, too distant to detect them, but can record synchronized fluctuations of electrical potentials in masses of cortical neuronal dendrites (branches receiving incoming impulses). These post-synaptic potentials vary in amplitude from about 0.5 to 1.5 millivolts, but when recorded on the scalp their amplitudes are only about 10 to 50 microvolts. The ionic (largely sodium and potassium) movements responsible for these voltage fluctuations can not be recorded outside the scalp, for their detection requires a medium affected by ionic movements. But these electrical potentials, like all moving electric charges, generate magnetic fields, which pass through the skull. They are, however, extremely weak (about 50 x 10 ^-15 Tesla), some nine orders of magnitude less than Earth’s magnetic field and as much as six orders below ambient magnetic noise (Volegov, et al. 2004). Thus, they can be recorded only by special sensors on the scalp in shielded rooms (Volegov, et al. 2004).

No one would suggest that these electromagnetic energies represent more than a smidgen of the neural activity underlying thoughts, which presumably includes repetitive firing of action potentials in neural circuitry containing millions of cortical and sub-cortical neurons (Harth 1993). Even if this immeasurable activity could be captured, seemingly insurmountable difficulties would prevent its translation into thoughts. To begin with, the translation would need to be simultaneous with the flow of thoughts as well as in the language of the thinker, for a full thought is its verbal expression. In view of what is known of brain development and organization (Harth 1993), the neural patterns underlying any thought, even a formulary prayer, would be unique for every individual. Thus, generic translations from neural patterns to verbal thoughts in any language would be impossible. A supernatural being would need to instantly surmount these difficulties—for multitudes of concurrent supplicants—in order to grasp the informational content of a mental prayer. Moreover, such a being would, logically, need to be with each supplicant while he or she is rotating with Earth at 1,038 miles per hour (if at the equator), orbiting around the Sun at 18.5 miles per second, rotating around the center of the Milky Way at about 150 miles per second, and moving through space with our galaxy at some thousands of miles per second.

Like all mental states, prayers are neither matter nor energy. Thus, they are not transmissible to or readable by another being by any means within the laws of nature.

Whether they can be known to a supernatural being hinges on the effects of the prayers’ solicitations as judged by proper scientific studies. To date, such studies of intercessory prayer have not shown it to improve health-care outcomes. In contrast to thoughts themselves, the brain activity from which thoughts arise does consist of energy—electrochemical energy within neural circuitry. Reading this teeming energy in millions of circuit neurons and translating it into the thought or prayer arising from it seems theoretically impossible for even a supernatural being.

References

• Benson, H., et al. 2006. Study of the therapeutic effects of intercessory prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: a multicenter randomized trial on uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer. American Heart Journal 151: 934-42.
• Binder, J.R., et al. 2005. Distinct brain systems for processing concrete and abstract concepts. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 17: 905—17.
• Bouquet, A.C. 1956. Comparative Religion. Baltimore: Penguin Books Inc.
• Brecht, M., et al. 2004. Novel approaches to monitor and manipulate single neurons in vivo. Journal of Neuroscience 24: 9223—7.
• Bronowski, Jacob. 1978. The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
• Crick, Francis. 1995. The Astonishing Hypothesis. New York: Touchstone.
• Harth, Erich. 1983. Windows on the Mind. New York: Quill.
• —. 1993. The Creative Loop: How the Brain Makes a Mind. Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company.
• Ishai, A., et al. 2005. Face perception is mediated by a distributed cortical network. Brain Research Bulletin 67: 87—93.
• Kamitani, Y., and F. Tong. 2005. Decoding the visual and subjective contents of the human brain. Natural Neuroscience 8: 679—85.
• Langer, Susanne K. 1970. Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press.
• Lilienfeld, S.O. 1999. New Analyses Raise Doubts About Replicability of ESP Findings. Skeptical Inquirer 23 (6): 9, 12 (November/December). Available online.
• Paulos, John A. 1990. Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and its Consequences. New York: Vintage Books.
• Penfield, Wilder, and Lamar Roberts. 1959. Speech and Brain Mechanisms. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
• Roberts, L., et al. 2000. Intercessory prayer for the alleviation of ill health. Cochrane Database Syst Rev (2): CD000368.
• Sherrington, Charles S. 1951. Man on His Nature. New York: Cambridge University Press.
• The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 1993. Edited by Lesley Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Volegov, P. A., et al. 2004. Noise-free magnetoencephalography recordings of brain function. Physics in Medicine and Biology 49: 2117—28.