Gary Schwartz believes many things. He believes in psychics, mediums, and life after death, and he believes there is scientific evidence to support these beliefs. Schwartz is now focusing his powers of belief on a new field: energy medicine. In a new book, The Energy Healing Experiments: Science Reveals Our Natural Power to Heal, he explains that we all emit human energy fields, that we can sense each other’s fields, and that healers can influence these fields to heal illnesses and injury. He believes these are not just theories but scientifically supported facts.

The book starts with three “gee-whiz” testimonials of supposed energy healing (which are frankly not very convincing and could be easily outdone by any self-respecting purveyor of quack remedies). He goes on to describe experiments done in his own lab that he claims establish not only our ability to detect and alter human energy fields but our ability to detect the thoughts and intentions of others. In the final part of the book, he descends into blethering about quantum physics, the oneness of the universe, the connectedness of all things, and the possibility that energy awareness will solve all of mankind’s problems.

He claims to have demonstrated many things. First, he claims to have shown that a subject can sense when a researcher’s hand is being held over his or her own hand and can sense when the researcher’s hands are being held near his or her ears from behind. Other experiments supposedly show that people can tell when someone is looking at them or thinking about them. He goes on to describe purported measurements of subtle human energy emissions, Reiki influences on lab cultures of bacteria, and photography of biophoton emission from plants, among other phenomena of dubious reality or significance.

He makes a big deal of the fact that humans emit electromagnetic energy (as picked up by EKG, EEG, etc.), and he would like to think energy healers can pick up that energy and decode it in the same way your radio picks up Rush Limbaugh out of the atmosphere. And then he would like to think that energy healers can send something back into the patient’s body to enable healing. He misses the crucial fact that there is information encoded in the electromagnetic waves your radio detects, but there is no reason to think there is any analogous information coming from the body, much less any way to change that information and send it back to produce healing. I only wish we could use “energy healing” on radio and TV waves to improve the quality of programming!

He makes a big deal of the fact that everything affects everything else. He seems to mean this in a holistic, metaphysical, New Age, “the universe is one and is conscious and we can create our own reality” sense. Science recognizes that small events can have far-reaching effects, but that doesn’t mean one thing can predict or control another. The flap of a butterfly’s wings may set up initial atmospheric conditions that will result in a tornado somewhere else, but that doesn’t mean you can predict the tornado or deliberately use a butterfly to cause one. Theoretically, a change in the magnitude or position of your body mass will enter into the overall gravity equations of the universe, but that doesn’t mean one thing can control or predict another. You could hardly expect to meaningfully influence someone out there beyond Alpha Centauri by losing ten pounds or moving to Antarctica. You can’t expect to change the EEG of an astronaut in the Space Station by exercising to change your own EKG. We are talking about very small influences. If a gnat pushes an elephant, it’s not likely to fall over; it’s not likely to even notice. And then there are inconvenient complications like quantum theory and chaos theory.

The only thing of substance in the book is the experiments, which lose credibility because they were not accepted for publication in mainstream peer-reviewed journals. Schwartz claims this is because of politics. He says prestigious journals tend to reject positive-energy studies. He doesn’t believe that his studies could have been rejected because they didn’t meet the standards of good science. I feel sorry for him: he’s a smart guy, he means well, he really believes he has found something wonderful, but he has a blind spot and just doesn’t get it when others try to point out the flaws in his experimental methods and reasoning. (See Ray Hyman, “How Not to Test Mediums: Critiquing the Afterlife Experiments,” Skeptical Inquirer, January/February 2003, and the follow-up exchange between Schwartz and Hyman, May/June 2003, plus the critical letters to the editor in that issue.)

To put the accusation of “politics” into perspective, consider the Helicobacter experiments. When researchers first suggested that ulcers might be caused by bacteria, they were laughed at. They published their results, peer review had a field day, other labs looked into the idea, more data came in, results from various lines of research coalesced, and within a mere ten years it became standard practice to treat ulcers with antibiotics. It didn’t matter that the idea sounded crazy at first; science responded to good evidence. (See Kimball C. Atwood IV, “Bacteria, Ulcers, and Ostracism,” Skeptical Inquirer, November/December 2004.) If Schwartz had evidence of equal quality, he would get an equal hearing by the scientific community.

Sure, Schwartz has some data that he finds convincing. So did the discoverers of N-rays, polywater, and cold fusion. Good science demands that we withhold judgment until data can be replicated in other labs and validated by other methods—especially when the data come from a researcher as clearly prejudiced as Schwartz. Even the best researchers can fall prey to errors of unconscious bias and unrecognized pitfalls in experimental design.

A good scientist considers the entire body of available evidence, not just the claims of one group of researchers. Schwartz only describes experiments that support his beliefs. Not until the end of the book does he even bring up the fact that other experiments have directly contradicted his findings. He finally gets around to mentioning Emily Rosa’s landmark experiment, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1998, which showed that therapeutic touch practitioners could not sense human energy fields as they claimed. She tested twenty-one experienced practitioners of therapeutic touch.1 They all thought they could detect Rosa’s human energy field and feel whether she was holding her hand over their right or left hand, but when they were prevented from seeing where her hand was, their performance was no better than chance.

Rosa was nine years old at the time, and the article grew out of her school science fair project. The experiment was beautiful in its simplicity. Adult true believers had published much research on the techniques and effects of therapeutic touch, but in the true spirit of childlike questioning, Rosa went back to basics and asked the crucial question: “Is the phenomenon itself real? Can they really feel something or is it possible they are fooling themselves?” Amazingly, no researcher had ever asked that question before. They had ignored one of the basic principles of the scientific method as explained by Karl Popper: it’s easy to find confirmation for any hypothesis, but every genuine test of a hypothesis is an attempt to falsify it.

Schwartz dismisses her experiment as having five “potential problems”:

1. It was a science-fair project done by a young girl.
2. She was the only experimenter.
3. She randomized by flipping a coin, which he calls “an unreliable procedure.”
4. One of the authors was the founder of Quackwatch.
5. The subjects did worse than chance.

These objections are just silly; they are either inaccurate or are ad hominem attacks:

1. It shouldn’t make any difference whether Rosa was a young girl or an old man or a sentient purple octopus from an alien planet. It shouldn’t matter whether she did the experiment for an elementary school project, a doctoral dissertation, a Coca Cola commercial, or a government grant. What matters is the quality of the evidence. In this case, her project was well designed and executed, had clearly significant findings, and was of high enough quality to be approved for publication in a prestigious peer-reviewed medical journal.
2. She was not the only experimenter. Others were involved; the experiment was repeated under expert supervision on Scientific American Frontiers. This should preclude any accusations of deliberate cheating or inadvertent failure to follow the protocol properly. Rosa was the only one to carry out the trials, but what would multiple testers have added to the experiment? The results didn’t depend on any special ability or quality of hers, but on the ability of the subjects who claimed they could sense anyone’s energy fields. For the televised trials, they even got to “feel” the “energy” from each of Rosa’s hands and choose which one they wanted her to use in the trials. About half chose her left hand and half her right. No one objected, “I can’t feel energy from either hand.”
3. Flipping a coin is not an “unreliable procedure”—unless the flipper is deliberately cheating. I hope Schwartz didn’t intend to suggest that. The number of heads and tails was approximately equal, and the distribution appeared random. The editors of JAMA found the method acceptable. There are situations where coin-flipping could legitimately be criticized, for instance in psi experiments where researchers are looking for minuscule differences in large bodies of data and even their computerized random number generators have been criticized for not being “perfectly” random. But in this experiment, the results were clearly significant; it is hard to envision how a different method of randomization could have altered the results. The coin flip was only used to determine which of the subject’s hands she would hold her hand over. The subjects claimed to be able to sense energy fields with either hand, so it shouldn’t have made a bit of difference to their perception. Faulty randomization might have allowed the subjects to perceive a pattern and guess, which would have tended to give false positive results rather than the negative results Rosa got.
4. One of the authors, the founder of Quackwatch, was admittedly skeptical of therapeutic touch. Yes, someone with possible bias was indirectly involved in the experiment. If that is an objection, there is an even greater objection to Schwartz’s own experiments: he and his colleagues are all strongly biased toward belief in energy phenomena and they were directly involved in their experiments.
5. It is simply not true that the subjects did “worse than chance.” Their performance was consistent with chance. If they had done worse than chance (significantly worse) that would have tended to support Schwartz’s claim that some kind of effect was present, even though it would have been the reverse of what he claimed to find.

In my opinion, none of these “problems” invalidates the conclusion that the therapeutic touch practitioners failed to do what they claimed they could do. And if he thinks these were valid problems, why didn’t he simply repeat her experiment in his own lab with multiple experimenters and a more reliable method of randomization? He could have published a failed replication study, and the scientific community could have proceeded to evaluate both studies and sort out the truth. In reality, Rosa’s experiment was a great example of a young child being able to see more clearly than prejudiced adults—a real “Emperor’s New Clothes” story.

I see a lot of “potential problems” in Schwartz’s research—not just ad hominem problems but flaws of experimental design. To start with his most basic experiment: his subjects were blindfolded, sat facing the experimenter with their hands on their laps, and tried to detect which hand the experimenter was holding his hand over. The experimenter held his hands together between trials to keep his hand temperature constant. The subjects often didn’t think they could tell, but they were asked to guess, and their guesses were statistically significant.

The first problem is that blindfolds don’t work. Rosa knew this. Instead, she had her subjects put their arms through holes in a screen and covered the gaps with a towel to preclude any possibility of conscious or unconscious visual cues. She also had subjects lay their arms on a table instead of on their laps, thus reducing the chance of their detecting subtle clues from the person sitting in front of them. Another problem is that when the researcher holds his hands together, that raises the skin temperature and raises the possibility that heat is being detected rather than any other type of energy. And if Schwartz’s results are real, independent researchers should be able to replicate them using the same protocol. Apparently they have not been replicated elsewhere. In fact, Rosa’s experiment amounts to an independent attempt to replicate Schwartz’s basic experiment, only with better controls; and it failed to confirm his results.

If a rigorous scientist thought he had found evidence that people could detect “human energy fields,” he would maintain a healthy skepticism; he would immediately try to prove himself wrong, and he would enlist his colleagues to help show him where he might have gone wrong. He would try to rule out all other possible explanations (the subject might be sensing heat, sound, motion, air currents, might be able to see under the blindfold, etc.). If the phenomenon proved robust, he would try to refine his understanding by doing things like varying the distance to see if it obeyed the inverse square law and interposing a sheet of cardboard or glass to see if the effect could be blocked. Then he would try to use instruments to measure what kind of energy was being sensed.

When a believer thinks he has found something to justify his belief, his approach tends to be less rigorous. Instead of subjecting his original experiment to outside scrutiny, he tends to do more new experiments to try to convince others that he is right. Schwartz goes off on a tangent doing other experiments that purportedly show that the subject is not sensing the energy field but is actually sensing the conscious intention of the experimenter. In one, he claims to show that persons can tell whether someone standing behind them is staring at their head or at their back! If he really believed energy medicine was some kind of psychic thought transmission, he would concentrate on that route of research, but instead he keeps trying to document the ability to detect measurable physical energy fields. His thinking is confused, and he’s trying to eat his cake and have it too.

Schwartz’s style of reasoning was revealed when an experiment to influence E. coli bacteria with Reiki didn’t produce the desired results. Instead of accepting that it didn’t work, he tried to find a way to make the experiment look like it worked. He did some inappropriate “data mining” and tried to show that before the trials where the Reiki practitioners apparently failed, they had been under more stress than before the trials where they apparently succeeded.

He finds a gifted individual who can detect whether a wooden box has a rock in it or not—his success rate is 95 percent for natural crystals, although barely chance for manmade crystals. Unfortunately, before this individual can be tested properly in an independent lab, he develops medical problems and loses his ability. (It’s strange how often these inconvenient things happen when psychic claims are involved.)
Schwartz is mystified by the work of John of God, the Brazilian spiritual healer who performs bloodless, painless surgery. He doesn’t recognize that this charlatan is merely using old gimmicks from the carnival sideshow repertoire to fool the gullible. Schwartz also believes science has established that the human mind can change the pH of water over long distances. He is far less skeptical about such claims than the average scientist.

Schwartz has tried to bolster his credibility by getting a former Surgeon General’s endorsement. In Richard Carmona’s foreword, he says he has seen things he can’t easily explain and says we don’t have all the answers. He helped establish the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM, which he curiously refers to as the National Center for Alternative and Complementary Medicine). The purpose of the NCCAM was allegedly to test complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and find out which treatments worked and reject those that didn’t. But in its entire history, despite consistently negative results, it has never dared to reject anything. Carmona is currently CEO of Canyon Ranch Health, where Schwartz is the Director of Development of Energy Healing. Canyon Ranch offers integrative medical wellness services, including therapeutic touch. Carmona says, “Where the science supports these integrative concepts of energy medicine, let’s use them. Where there is not enough science, let the studies begin and continue.”

What about “if there is no convincing science or plausible mechanism to support them, let’s stop wasting our time chasing moonbeams”? All of energy medicine hinges on one basic claim: that people can detect subtle human energy fields. If Schwartz is wrong about that, the rest of the claims for so-called “energy medicine” fizzle away.

Since 1996, the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) has offered a substantial reward (currently $1,000,000) to anyone who can demonstrate an ability to detect a “human energy field” under conditions similar to those of Rosa’s study. Of the more than 80,000 American therapeutic touch practitioners who claim to have such ability, only one person attempted to demonstrate it. She failed. The JREF challenge is admittedly not a definitive scientific test, but prudence would seem to dictate that if no one can even meet this simple challenge, we shouldn’t be wasting research money on what is probably a myth.

Others have attempted to establish the “science” of energy medicine and have failed.2 Even the NCCAM, which is willing to consider almost any possibility in alternative medicine, is skeptical. It distinguishes between real energy (sound waves, electromagnetism, and other energies measurable by physicists) and the kind of “putative” energy Schwartz is trying to validate. It concludes that the “putative” energy approaches “are among the most controversial of CAM practices because neither the external energy fields nor their therapeutic effects have been demonstrated convincingly by any biophysical means.”

Schwartz sounds like a scientist. He tries to talk the talk and walk the walk. He even makes some skeptical noises to try to convince us he is objective. But there is also a lot of very unscientific language in his book.

For instance:

Human rage and pain, especially generated by terrorism and war, create a global energetic climate whose negative effects can extend from the physical and environmental—potentially including climate—to the psychological and ultimately spiritual. . . . [P]ollution is not simply chemical, it is ultimately energy based and therefore conscious as well.

Really? Conscious pollution? So maybe if we talk nice to pollution it will cooperate and go away? Or should we try doing Reiki to lower the atmospheric CO2 levels? Does Al Gore know about this?

“Energy medicine” is an emperor whose new clothes still look awfully transparent to critical thinkers and to the scientific community no matter what glorious colors and fabrics Schwartz and his colleagues imagine they are seeing.

Notes:

1. “Therapeutic touch” is a bit of a misnomer because these practitioners don’t actually touch but simply massage the air a few inches from the patient’s body. They are convinced that they are detecting and manipulating the energy field, balancing and smoothing it, and correcting any abnormalities, thus allowing the body to heal itself.
2. Hall, H. 2005. A review of Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis. Skeptic 11(3): 89–93. Available at quackfiles.blogspot.com.
3. nccam.nih.gov.

References:

• Rosa, L., E. Rosa, L. Sarner, and S. Barrett. 1998. A close look at therapeutic touch. Journal of the American Medical Association. 279:1005–1010. Schwartz, Gary E., with William L. Simon. 2007. The Energy Healing Experiments: Science Reveals Our Natural Power to Heal. New York: Atria Books.

In earlier times even physicians could not always determine infallibly whether an individual was dead or instead in a comatose or cataleptic state. Actual cases of people seemingly returning to life may have inspired ancient folktales about persons being raised from the dead.

Moreover, in Europe, untimely inhumation helped spread fears of vampires—those who returned from the dead to prey on the living (Bunson 1993, 211). Edgar Allen Poe (1809–1849) expressed, with his usual genius, the grotesque horror of living interment with his tale, “The Premature Burial.”

Then there were incidents—real or imagined—in which for some motive such as punishment or revenge a person was deliberately entombed alive, the theme of another Poe story, “The Cask of Amontillado.”

One such alleged occurrence was in St. Augustine, Florida, at the Spanish-built fortress, Castillo de San Marcos. Purportedly, an eighteenth-century colonel discovered his wife was having an affair and chained her and her lover to a wall in the dungeon; he “mortared a new wall of coquina stone in front of them” (Hauck 1996, 125). In fact, however, investigation shows that the event is historically unrecorded, and the tale is traceable only to the rumors and outright concoctions of tour guides in the early twentieth century (Nickell 2005, 26).

In my travels, I have encountered other living-burial stories. Here are three that I have investigated, two being of the deliberate-entombment type, namely a walled-
up nun in the Netherlands and a castle’s mystery room in Switzerland, and the third belonging to the premature-burial genre, featuring a vault with a view in a Vermont graveyard.

Walled-up Nun

Figure 2: At the eastern end of Switzerland’s Bechburg Castle is a roofed little room (upper left) in which an evil knight allegedly was sealed after contracting leprosy. (Photo by Joe Nickell)

During a lecture and investigation trip to the Netherlands and Belgium in 2006 (Nickell 2007), I was escorted by Dutch skeptic Jan Willem Nienhuys to Singraven, an estate near the small town of Denekamp in northeastern Netherlands. Built on old foundations in the first quarter of the fifteenth century, the estate’s manor house or “castle” is said to be haunted.

Its secluded location helped give it an air of mystery and, as is the case with many historic sites, the ambience helped spawn ghostlore. After one lord of the manor began a cemetery on the grounds, superstitious folk began to say he invited bad luck. When his beard caught fire from an oil lamp, burning him severely, and when his wife died in childbirth, people would say, “The ghost of Singraven has struck again” (Wynia et al. 2006).

A young Dutch “psychic,” Robbert van den Broeke, has visited Singraven and claimed to perceive numerous ghostly presences. Robbert—who busies himself giving dubious readings, producing questionable otherworldly photos, conveniently discovering crop circles near his and his parents’ home, and so on (Broeke 2005)—did not, however, perform at his psychic best. He incorrectly identified an oil portrait as that of the noble with the burned beard (probably because he had seen a television show that made the same misidentification). He also placed the incident in the wrong room (Wynia et al. 2006).

In the mansion’s drawing room, Robbert “saw” various ghosts sitting in chairs or moving about. However, tour guides at Singraven pointed out that there had never been reports of ghosts in that particular chamber, which, in fact, had been added relatively recently (Wynia et al. 2006). At Singraven and elsewhere, Robbert has produced “ghost” photos, but these seem on a par with his “alien” ones (see Nanninga 2005, 28), which are indistinguishable from ridiculous fakes.

The main target of Robbert’s psychic and photographic efforts at Singraven is the colorful, spooky legend of a walled-up nun. A cloister occupied the estate from 1505 to 1515. According to a popular tale, one night a young nun slipped away for a clandestine liaison with her lover. Returning late, she attempted to sneak up the stairs, but they creaked and awakened the Mother Superior who decided to make an example of her. The unfortunate nun was sealed up in the wall near the foot of the stairway. As she slowly starved to death, her shouts of despair served as a warning to the other sisters (Wynia et al. 2006).

Now, this tale is implausible on the face of it—not only because it has an ostensibly devout prioress capriciously violating one of the Ten Commandments but because the cloister at Singraven was not for nuns at all but for Beguines (lay sisters). It is, in fact, a proliferating and often-debunked folktale. It has found its way into literature, for example in the epic poem Marmion by Sir Walter Scott (1808). Catholic scholar Herbert Thurston said of the legend (qtd. in Catholic 2006):

To anyone who honestly looks into the matter, it will be clear that no statutes of any religious order have yet been brought forward which prescribe such punishment; that no contemporary records speak of its infliction; that no attempt is made to give details of persons or time; that the few traditions that speak of discovery of walled-up remains crumble away the moment they are examined; that the growth of the tradition itself can be abundantly accounted for; that the few historians or antiquaries of repute, whether Catholic or Protestant, either avowedly disbelieve the calumny, or studiously refrain from repeating it.

Thurston’s skepticism is fully justified by the facts of our investigation at Singraven. The wall in which the nun was allegedly sealed—now graced with a mirror (see figure 1)—was actually opened up in the early 1990s. This was done by workmen who were replacing the manor’s electric wiring. The workers discovered no bones inside the wall, thus discrediting the local legend and with it the ghost sightings of the nun at the alleged site of her horrible death (Wynia et al. 2006).

Such legends of nuns being walled-up for punishment may be derived from the fact that ascetics were sometimes voluntarily enclosed, hermit-like, for solitary meditation. We learned of a church in Utrecht with just such a history. Visiting there the day following our investigation at Singraven, Jan Willem Nienhuys and I found an incised stone tablet in the walkway at the side of the edifice. It reads (in translation): “Sister Bertken Lived Here as Hermit Walled in a Niche in the Wall in the Choir of the Buurkerk 1457–1514.”

Called “anchoresses,” the walled-up penitents were not nuns (they did not take vows, for example), and while they led very austere lives, their “cells” could be quite roomy and often had a door that led into the church. Such hermits even kept in touch with both common folk and nobles, dispensing spiritual counsel and practical advice. When, after the Council of Trent (1545–1563) the Roman Catholic Church became increasingly male-dominated, the urban anchoresses disappeared. (See Mulder-Bakker 2005.)

Mysterious Castle Room

Another entombed-alive legend is attributed to a curious little structure high atop a medieval castle in Switzerland. Overlooking the village of Oensingen, near Solothurn, Bechburg Castle could have been built as early as the mid-thirteenth century, although the earliest document relating to it dates from 1313 (Schloss 2007).

The enigmatic structure is at the highest part of the castle, except for an adjacent tower that continues upward (see figure 2). Roofed but doorless and windowless, the structure is the subject of a legend of uncertain vintage.

Reportedly entombed there was a certain Kuoni, a despicable robber-knight who terrorized the populace and shed much innocent blood. Finally, though, he received a kind of justice when he became afflicted with leprosy or some other contagious disease. According to the tale, he was walled inside the chamber, and servants fed him food and water through a small opening. When he died, this was closed with a stone. Supposedly, however, the chamber could not contain the restless soul of the evil man, which still haunts the castle on certain nights (Roth and Mauer 2006).

The fanciful tale of a leprous knight being walled-in sounds less like historical fact (especially since the spot seems an unlikely place for such confinement) than folkloric fiction inspired by accounts of walled-up ascetics.

Nevertheless, the name Kuoni—a diminutive of Konrad—has been common among the barons of the Bechburg, and there is an old document that could seem to support the legend. Dated 1408 and penned by Count Egon von Kyburg, it reports repair work occurred on the “alcove” (or “little chamber”) in which “Kuoni reposes” (Roth and Maurer 2006). Ghost proponents assume that this refers to the mysterious structure and so confirms that someone named Kuoni is entombed there. But might it not also refer to another place on the premises where, say, a child—little Konrad—slept?

In any case, there is no apparent evidence that the small roofed structure ever had a door or windows. Moreover, when I visited the castle with German skeptic Martin Mahner on May 25, 2007, we discovered something that none of our sources mentioned: its shape is peculiar. While one side meets the front at right angles, the other curves smoothly into it (again, see figure 2). This suggests that, architecturally, its purpose may have been partially or even totally stylistic.

Figure 3: Atop this Vermont cemetary mound is a concrete-encased window to the grave below. The man interred reportedly feared “premature burial.” The stone in the foreground seals the stairway to the arched vault. (Photo by Joe Nickell)

As we learned from files at the city hall in Oensingen (Schloss 2007), a further possibility was suggested by a provincial historical-building supervisor. He had a worker use a jackhammer to drill into the mysterious structure from the top. While this was in progress, a severe lightning and hail storm arose and ended the exploration, but not before a depth of one meter had been reached. This led the supervisor to conclude that the little prominence has incredibly thick walls, indeed that it is probably not hollow at all but instead just a defensive bulwark.

Of course, even if the entire Kuoni folktale is untrue, that does not disprove the claims that the place is haunted. But what is the evidence that it is? Well, a tour guide who “usually” leaves the tower door open sometimes returns to find it closed again. Since it is latched from the inside, this cannot happen accidentally, and he dismisses suggestions that it could be a prank by visitors. He continually feels that he is not alone, and he sometimes hears voices along an empty hallway, but he is unsure whether they belong to ghosts or whether it is simply the wind carrying the voices of people who are walking nearby. Once, years ago, a volunteer worker during spring cleaning heard footsteps behind him as he descended the tower stairs. When he looked there was no one behind him, yet as he continued on so did the sounds. He insisted they were not the echoes of his own footsteps (Roth and Maurer 2006, 105–108).

Such anecdotal evidence, however spine-tingling it may be to some, has no weight in the scientific investigation of paranormal claims. If spooky happenings at Bechburg Castle are not due to the suggested causes already given—a prankster latching a door, the wind carrying voices, or the echo of one’s own footsteps—clearly there are other possible explanations (cf. Nickell 1995, 39–77; 2001). We must ask: how, without a brain, can a disembodied spirit think, walk, or say boo? Science has never attributed a single occurrence to the alleged supernatural realm.

Vault with a View

A large, grassy mound seems strangely out of place near the front of Evergreen Cemetery in New Haven, Vermont. At the top of the mound is a small glass window encased in a square of cement that invites passersby to peer into the grave below (figure 3). The window was placed there at the behest of its tenant, and therein lies a spooky tale.

The deceased was Dr. Timothy Clark Smith (1821–1893). Between stints as a schoolteacher, merchant, and Treasury Department clerk, he studied medicine at New Haven (1834–1844) and the University of New York (1853–1855), obtaining his MD degree in 1855. He subsequently became a staff surgeon in the Russian army (1855–1856). Afterward, he served as U.S. Consul, first at Odessa, Russia (1861–1875), and then at Galatz (1878–1883) (Robinson 1950, 117). One source states that Smith’s travels earned him the sobriquet “Odessa” Smith (Marquard 1982).

Smith died on February 25, 1893, at Middlebury, Vermont. I found his obituary in a later (March 3) Middlebury Register. It reported that he “died suddenly on Saturday morning at the Logan House [hotel] where he had been living. After breakfast, he walked out into the office and stood by the stove when stricken. . . .” A local-news article in the same issue noted that he was “formerly a resident of this town,” adding that “Many will remember the old red store where Timothy Smith, Sr., traded, and afterwards his son.” The article also noted that “The deceased leaves a wife and several children.”

A modern newspaper feature story on the grave (Marquard 1982) says of Smith’s era:

It was the late 1800s—in times before embalming—and folks didn’t have to travel far to hear tales of people who had been presumed dead, only to be buried alive.

One legend has it that Smith particularly feared contracting sleeping sickness, and waking up on the cold side of a coffin cover.

Smith therefore devised a plan that involved postponing his burial until he was assuredly dead and having his arched burial vault provided with stairs and a viewing window at the top of a glassed shaft.

One of Smith’s children, Harrison T.C. Smith of Gilman, Iowa, reportedly traveled to New Haven “to supervise construction of the unusual crypt” (Marquard 1982). The vault has two rooms, cemetery sexton Betty Bell told me (2003), the second being for Smith’s wife, Catherine (Prout) Smith.

According to the feature article, there are other legends about the tomb. One is that Smith had it outfitted with “tools for his escape.” Although condensation and plant growth inside the shaft now block one’s view, residents in years past claimed to see the tools along with Smith’s bones. Said one, “You can see the face of the skeleton down there with a hammer and chisel crossed on the ground next to it” (Marquard 1982). Another source claims that when Smith was interred, “In the corpse’s hand they placed a bell that he could ring should he wake up and find himself the victim of a premature burial” (Citro and Foulds, 2003, 292). Curiously perhaps, ghost tales about the grave seem scarce. The authors of Curious New England (Citro and Foulds 2003, 292) attempt to provoke the credulous. Mentioning the bell allegedly placed in Smith’s hand, they say, “So if you decide to visit the cemetery, keep very quiet . . . and listen.” I did but, not surprisingly, heard nothing.

Area resident John Palmer (2003) told me that for fun he used to send impressionable children to the site to scare them. He still felt guilty about one such event. He had his two older boys take a couple of six-year-olds to the grave, telling them a person was alive down there. Then suddenly they exclaimed, “The ground is moving!” whereupon Palmer—who had hidden in the trees—jumped out screaming. The two youngsters were so scared that they ran into each other’s arms and fell down.

Actually, Palmer told me, although as a child he had himself played there with other children, he never saw any ghosts or even heard any ghost tales. I guess Timothy Clark Smith is dead after all.

Acknowledgments

In addition to Jan Willem Nienhuys, Martin Mahner, and others mentioned in the text, I am grateful to Timothy Binga, Director of CFI Libraries, and Suzanne Douglas, librarian at the Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury, Vermont, for research assistance, as well as Paul Loynes for typing this manuscript.

References

• Broeke, Robbert van den. 2005. Robbert—Van zorgenkind tot medium (“Robert—from problem child to medium”). Utrecht: Kosmos.
• Bunson, Matthew. 1993. The Vampire Encyclopedia. New York: Gramercy Books.
• Catholic Apologetics. 2006. Available at http://www.catholicapologetics.net/qb130; accessed October 26.
• Citro, Joseph A., and Diane E. Foulds. 2003. Curious New England: The Unconventional Traveler’s Guide to Eccentric Destinations. Hanover: University Press of England.
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• —.2001. Phantoms, frauds, or fantasies? In James Houran and Rense Lange, eds. Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (London: McFarland and Company), 214–223.
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Gell-Mann spoke at the China conference opening plenary session on “Is Nature Conformable to Itself?” But before launching into that topic, he fired some arrows at certain enemies of science. He cited “a number of tendencies” toward “hostility to science” among fundamentalists, governments, and postmodern scholars. As for the latter, he said, “I call them ‘post-rational’ or ‘post-intelligent.’”

The laws of physics “are out there,” Gell-Mann emphasized. “These laws are not just created by the human mind.”
It is scientists’ job to discover them, and beauty, he said, as did Einstein, is a guide to truth. “What is especially striking and remarkable is that in fundamental physics a beautiful or elegant theory is more likely to be right than a theory that is inelegant.”

What do we mean by beauty or elegance? “A theory appears beautiful or elegant—or simple, if you prefer—when it can be expressed concisely in terms of mathematics we already have.”

Inherent in this discussion is the search for a basic law that would take the form of a unified field theory of all the fundamental forces and all the elementary particles. Yet Gell-Mann scorned the often-used phrase “theory of everything.” He said such a basic law would predict possibilities, but it can’t predict everything because contingency plays a heavy role.

“The basic law cannot be ‘a theory of everything’ because it doesn’t include these zillions of accidents that along with basic law determine the history of the universe. We should never use that term ‘theory of everything.’”

Life and mind can emerge from the laws of physics and chemistry, he said, but all scientific fields must be studied and valued at their own levels. “Reductionism is not wrong, but it is impractical.”

“It does not detract from achievements of humans to know that our intelligence and self-awareness have emerged from the laws of physics and biology, plus accidents.”

What does he mean by nature being conformable to itself? Gell-Mann began with the old analogy of peeling away an onion to discover more and more layers of reality. As we go to higher and higher energies, he said, “the next onion skin resembles the previous one to some extent. There is a self-similarity.” He said Isaac Newton even noticed this in the inverse law effect.

“Even more important than educating the young about science is to educate them about religion,” he said. He proposed educating all children about all religions, including origins, history, myths, and contradictions.

“Toxic religions depend on enforced ignorance of the young,” he said. “I propose we teach them about the facts of their own religion their elders don’t want them to know.” The goal: “So they will not be victimized by their parents’ religion. I think we should open the floodgates. Teach children about the world’s religions.”

Paul Kurtz, in his own closing comments, referred to and reinforced Dennett’s remarks. The CFI founder and chairman said among the rights of children is the right not to be indoctrinated into their parents’ religion. Instead, they should be exposed to the growing knowledge of the world. “Parents do not ‘own’ children,” said Kurtz. “We should teach children creative thinking and moral understanding and moral principles. That is the best way to bring us all into the twenty-first century.”

In the nearly twenty years since our last visit to China (see “CSICOP in China,” SI Summer 1988), the country has undergone a stunning economic and physical transformation. The major cities are almost unrecognizable. The capital city of Beijing is a sprawling mass of modern, new high-rises. Construction cranes steadily raise ever more. In marked contrast to the dreary public lighting of the late 1980s, giant neon advertisements and flashy decorative lights on buildings and bridges brightly illuminate the nighttime streets. On the northern outskirts of the city, a vast area hums under twenty-four-hour construction to accommodate the 2008 Beijing Olympics. (Given the new China’s obvious ability to carry out huge projects, I think Olympic visitors are likely to be impressed.) Cars are everywhere (and not small ones either), fast replacing the ubiquitous bicycles of two decades ago. Five multilane “ring road” freeways circle the enormous metropolitan area.

To the south in Shanghai, China’s economic capital with a population of around 17 million, the changes are breathtaking. An entirely new city, the Pudong area of Shanghai, has been constructed just east of the Huangpu River, marked by dozens of striking, imaginatively designed skyscrapers. One, nearing completion, is destined to be the third tallest in the world. All have been built since 1990. In this incredible period, three thousand new buildings of more than twenty stories have been erected. The three-sphered, three-legged Pearl Tower (468 meters, or 1,536 feet, high), beautifully illuminated at night, rivals the Eiffel Tower in iconic stature, and nearby skyscrapers likewise compete for the sky. An evening river cruise reveals the dramatic nighttime skyline. Some of the buildings sport twenty-story-high, swiftly changing, electric-lighted imagery.

And the planning and building goes on. Shanghai billboards tout the 2009 World Expo to be held there. The beautiful Shanghai Science and Technology Museum we visited is only five years old. The Shanghai Urban Planning and Exhibition Center boasts two huge, intricately detailed, three-dimensional scale models of the city. One is the core city as it is now. The other, the biggest in the world, extending over 600 square meters and covering most of an entire floor, envisions the city as it will be in 2020. The ports, the airport, the river facilities, and the subway system all are being expanded.

We took an evening ride to the international airport on Shanghai’s new Maglev (magnetic levitation) train, covering 30 kilometers in an effortless eight minutes. In contrast, our harrowing, lane-shifting, racecar-like morning taxi ride through heavy traffic back to the airport took an hour and threatened to cost us our lives.

In Beijing, the very nice China Science and Technology Museum, which we also visited, is only thirteen years old and is already being replaced by a huge, new one, which is under construction at the site of the 2008 Olympics. CFI members enjoyed a special tour. The museum’s deputy director proudly told us that as the biggest science museum in the world, it will encompass a total construction area of 180,000 square meters.

The energy and dynamism are palpable. Street markets remain, but on major thoroughfares every upscale store you see in New York, Paris, or London is stylishly present. The economic dynamo that is modern China has attracted and created great wealth. While we were there, news reports highlighted the fact that eight of the top twenty companies in the world (measured by their valuations on world stock markets) are now Chinese. One hundred of the world’s major companies have offices in Shanghai.

The stunning growth has been accompanied by typical consequences: urban sprawl, traffic jams, rapidly rising demand for electrical power, multitudinous new (but hardly clean) coal-fired power plants across the countryside (we saw half a dozen of them in a flight from Beijing to Xi’an), eye-watering air pollution, rapidly worsening income disparity, water capacity and water-quality concerns, water shortages in northern China, and rising urban vs. rural imbalances and tensions.

One could almost forget that the economic progress has not been accompanied by as much political progress—until viewing the formal, reverential, noncritical coverage on China Central TV and across the front pages of the Chinese newspapers of the seventeenth national Congress of the Communist Party in Beijing, which met while we were there. The TV and newspapers treated it all as an epic event, the cameras panning slowly over the aged, stone-faced party leaders, seemingly belying the modern transformation that has occurred all around them. (On the final day of the meeting, the congress did replace the vice president and two vice premiers with younger men.)

Nevertheless, China’s leaders do tout scientific and technical progress among their highest priorities, something seldom if ever heard anymore from American political leaders. China has tripled its research and development spending since 2000, an increase the U.S. National Science Foundation has called “unprecedented for any country in recent memory.” Science and technology have a respect and status among the Chinese people that is enviable in the U.S. They realize that their transformation has been propelled by—in addition to the unleashing of market economic forces—scientific and technological progress. But, as in Western societies, the results of science are understood and appreciated far more than the underlying methods and principles of science (including critical thinking and free, open inquiry) that account for its great success.

Barry Karr, Paul Kurtz, Wang Jianguo, deputy director of the China Science Museum, and David Koepsell at the construction site of the museum’s huge, new building on the grounds of the 2008 Beijing Olympics park.

It was in this remarkable set of circumstances—a society with an ancient cultural heritage rapidly transforming and re-creating itself—that the Center for Inquiry/Transnational’s world congress on Scientific Inquiry and Human Well-Being was held in Beijing October 13–15, 2007. Co-sponsored by the China Research Institute for Science Popularization (CRISP, CFI/
China) and supported by the China Association for Science and Technology (CAST), both nongovernmental science organizations, the three-day conference addressed the problems facing scientific inquiry and the public understanding of science in the modern world. About a dozen other Chinese academic and scientific institutions also co-sponsored.

Held in the Science Hall of the Beijing Friendship Hotel in the northwest part of the city, the congress enjoyed the hotel’s appealing, newly modernized, eight-building, 1,600-room garden complex. Its staff jubilantly celebrated becoming a five-star hotel while we were there.

The conference focused on seven topics: science and the public, the scientific method and scientific ethos, scientific inquiry and the paranormal, science communication and the media, scientific inquiry and secular humanism, and science culture and morality.

CRISP executive director Ren Fujun, CAST executive secretary Cheng Donghong, and CFI/Transnational founder and Chairman Paul Kurtz welcomed the five hundred participants, including seventy speakers (about four-fifths from China, one-fifth from the West).

One of the early conference themes was environmental degradation and climate change. It was fitting that this discussion was initiated by Lin Zixin, a far-sighted Chinese leader and science editor who was the host for our 1988 CSICOP visit (which he fondly recalled) investigating then-rampant paranormal claimants in China. His attention has now turned to broader issues. He led off with a summary of his most recent concerns about climate change, the environment, and sustainable development. His view is global. Pollution, fresh water, weather extremes, sea levels, and melting of the Earth’s ice are, he said, “common interests of humanity.”

He cited the Stern report’s warning of “severe damage to social systems,” a December 2006 Chinese national report on climate change’s expected negative impact on China’s agriculture, and the World Wildlife Federation’s Living Planet of 2006 report stating that the productivity of the environment will decrease. He noted that China’s president attaches great importance to sustainable development in China and said a five-year pollution-control plan is essential.

A report on “The Crisis of the Yellow River Source” decried the displacement of the torrential waters of the Yellow River of the past by vast sandy areas. China must become a “water-conservation and energy-conservation society,” Lin said. “We have a great responsibility for protecting Earth’s ecosystems.”

The noted Chinese geography professor and climatologist/glaciologist (and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences) Qin Dahe described in detail, with numerous charts and graphs, the concerns and conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He included a new report issued the day before on human and natural drivers of climate change, referring to “very positive evidence of human causes of global warming.”

Daniel C. Dennett calls for an end to indoctrination of children.

Professor Qin is a member of IPCC Working Group I on the physical science basis of climate change. It is perhaps a mark of Chinese modesty that he left until the very end of his talk a newly prepared slide. It announced that the night before, the Nobel Committee had awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize jointly to the IPCC and former U.S. vice president Al Gore “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

“I am very proud,” Qin said. “I am one small member of IPCC.”

Nobel laureate physicist Murray Gell-Mann had come straight to the China conference from a symposium in Potsdam, Germany. There, he said at the beginning of his China presentation (see sidebar on page 34), a group of fifteen Nobel Prize winners, himself included, had issued a declaration on global climate change: the scientific facts of global warming are a settled matter.

I opened my own remarks on climate change (and the recent controversy about it in the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer) by noting that when my wife and I visited the Summer Palace on the northwestern outskirts of Beijing before the conference, the atmosphere was so thick that the beautiful gate towers and other features, some with poetic, sky-invoking names like Gate of Dispelling Clouds and Hall of Embracing the Universe, could scarcely be seen across the corner of the lake. I worried that Beijing and other large cities are rapidly losing a precious heritage—a direct and emotional connection with the sky, which has driven both astronomy and public wonder about the cosmos and much poetry and literature. My temerity was immediately punished: The next three days in Beijing were glorious—crystal clear, blue skies. I hope it was not an anomaly, but fear that it was. The following week, everywhere we went the sky was hazy and smog-filled.

Paul Kurtz, in his opening plenary session talk, issued a ringing call for what he called planetary humanism to address the world’s biggest problems. “A viable new planetary humanism” to achieve “a safe, secure, and better world should be our overriding obligation.” He praised aspects of science that need to be better communicated, especially its objective methods of inquiry. In referring to a scientific worldview, he said he prefers the term “scientific naturalism” to “scientific materialism.” Kurtz said science has succeeded because of the use of scientific methods, an essential component of which is skepticism—placing in the cross hairs its own most cherished principles. Skepticism is continuous with common sense, he said, and he called for greater efforts in teaching critical thinkers “how to think.”

After the morning plenary session, the conference broke into two lines of concurrent sessions covering virtually every aspect of the conference’s stated themes and more.

I’ll give just a few examples.

Oxford University chemistry professor and writer Peter Atkins (Galileo’s Finger: The Ten Great Ideas of Science) spoke on “Science as Culture.” Science, as the epitome of rational thought, is a part of human culture, he emphasized. “Science enriches culture.”

Enjoyment of science goes hand in hand with understanding science. Atkins advocated that scientists give much greater emphasis to visual information when dealing with the public. “Pictures are the way of propagandizing ideas to the populace,” he said, launching into a display of a hundred images. Some chemical ideas can best be conveyed with images—the whole point, he said, is to share with the public the pleasure and deep intellectual satisfaction scientists gain from science by better using visual materials to aid people’s comprehension.

Nobel laureate chemist Sir Harold Kroto (co-discoverer of “buckyballs,” carbon-60) echoed similar themes with an Internet video presentation on “Science, the Enlightenment, and the Internet.” The Periodic Table, Kroto demonstrated, is based on the numbers 1, 2, and 3. “Those three numbers explain all chemistry, all of life,” he said. He, like Atkins and others, spoke of the “aesthetic beauty of science.” Examples he cited were buckyballs, the hemoglobin molecule, and DNA. Important practical applications can come out of that beauty, he pointed out. Examples are the doping of plastic solar cells with C-60 to increase electricity production and possible future supercomputers based on molecular biology.

French physicist Jean-Claude Pecker, currently general secretary of the International Astronomical Union (who early in the conference spoke on Creationism in Astronomy), discussed science’s role in culture in the concluding plenary session. The beauty of science is “not only in its flamboyant properties but in the deeper meaning,” he said. Science is everywhere, but that doesn’t necessarily mean much.

“We are awash in science. We are confronted with the facts, but the facts only,” Pecker said. As a result, “We ignore the logic of the scientific and technical achievements. We ignore the real scientific knowledge. We ignore the real scientific culture. How then can people distinguish science from pseudoscience, cranks, and charlatans?” Scientists must not just report the facts, they must explain, he urged.

“Debunking the pseudosciences is a task of science communicators wherever they are,” Pecker said. “Explain. Explain. Explain.”

Whereas the Internet “is a paradise for cranks,” he said, museums are one of the crossroads of teaching and information and “are generally very good.” He recommends building more museums, planetariums, botanical gardens, and zoos.

“Science has changed everything,” said physicist and writer Lawrence Krauss (The Physics of Star Trek, Hiding in the Mirror). He paused: “. . . except how we think and act!” In a lively, fast-paced talk to avoid stringent time limits, Krauss discussed some key aspects of the scientific ethos: honesty, full disclosure (citing evidence for and against one’s theory), anti-authoritarianism, egalitarianism, and creativity. He also cited two noted cases of fraud in science (one at Bell Labs, the other at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab) as especially painful examples of when scientists fail to follow that ethos.

Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann with a portrait of Isaac Newton at the Beijing Science Hall (conference hall).

But in the public sphere, he said, the greater problem is the continuing governmental interference in science, where science gets distorted in the political process. He cited cases related to stem cells, cancer research, birth control, the environment, the claims of WMDs in Iraq, and others.

Journalists also often have serious problems in dealing properly with scientific controversies, he noted. The journalistic tradition is to believe there are two sides to every story and to write accordingly. Science is different, Krauss said. “Most times one side is simply wrong.”

Restoring scientific integrity is essential, Krauss emphasized. Judging by their actions, many people in government seem to take an almost perverse pride in misunderstanding scientific information, allowing themselves to distort it for political ends, Krauss said. “The purpose of education is not to validate ignorance but to overcome it. Ignorance is the enemy.”

The noted Russian physicist Edward Kruglyakov, deputy director of the Budker Institute of Nuclear Physics in Novosibirsk, the largest Russian scientific institute, gave a detailed chronicle of the rapid growth of pseudoscience in Russia in the 1990s. As he did in an article for Skeptical Inquirer (“Why Is Pseudoscience Dangerous?” July/August 2002), Kruglyakov described vivid examples of cases in which pseudoscience has penetrated into high levels of government and society. Russian leader Boris Yeltsin asked Kruglyakov, for instance, if high energy can be released from stone. He had been told that it was possible. Kruglyakov tried to warn him off, but “Yeltsin later allocated 200 million dollars” to the energy-from-stone project.

“Energy” and “informational therapy” are often commonly used as pseudoscientific terms in Russia, usually tied to so-called “torsion fields.” Other frequent problems are, in Kruglyakov’s words, “preposterous patents” (a patent was granted for the “sympathetic treatment of illnesses with the aid of an aspen stick at the moment of full moon”); “pyramidology” (fifteen large pyramids have been built to “solve mankind’s problems” and to “guarantee against cancer”); and fraudulent labels (a $50 label that its sellers claim protects against microwave radiation).

Scott Atran (University of Michigan and National Center for Scientific Research in Paris), Lionel Tiger (Rutgers University), and David Koepsell (Council for Secular Humanism) were among the other Western speakers.

Many of the Chinese scholars and researchers gave talks on the public understanding of science, the popularization of science, and the history of science. It is clear these are all lively fields of academic research in China.

For example, Zeng Guoping of Tsinghua University in Beijing, in his remarks on the public understanding of science at the closing plenary session, described the results of surveys in China. Superstition is “fairly high toward folk matters,” he said, but China’s people “are enthusiastic and interested in science.” He said the level of interest is higher than in Europe, the U.S., or Japan. Nevertheless, although the interest in science is high, the level of scientific literacy is low, a complaint heard in the U.S. as well.

Television is the main source of science information for the Chinese public, he said. Newspapers are another. Because Internet availability in China is still lower than in the West, it is not a primary source of science news. As for evolution, “The people believe in evolution, not creationism,” Guoping said. Atheism is linked to evolution, but, he said atheism doesn’t have the same negative connotations in China as in the U.S. And in China there is great interest and support for “post-academic science,” or industrial science, because of its role in increasing the gross domestic product, or GDP.

Sun Xian of the Chinese Association for Science and Technology and the China Science and Technology Museum (who has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst) spoke of the difficulty of promoting scientific rationality among Chinese young people. She said many Chinese experts and scholars in recent years have been studying that problem. Among their observations: Young people are intrigued but puzzled by “stupid superstition” (her words) and “extraordinary natural occurrences.” They lack approaches in rational thinking that would enable them to make rational judgments on such mystical phenomena, and schools and society are short in giving such education. Despite devoting several years to the promotion of the scientific attitude in China, she said, researchers “found it still a heavy responsibility and an arduous task to fulfill.”

Conference co-chair Ren Fujan, in his remarks at the closing plenary session, said “China is now in a great flourish of development in science popularization.” He is a professor at three Chinese universities, executive director of CRISP, and editor-in-chief of the Chinese academic Journal of Science Popularization, besides chairing the Center for Inquiry/China group. In China, a 2002 law encourages science popularization, and he said the Center for Inquiry’s China branch intends to push even more in that direction. He said CFI will promote science and science education, encourage the integration of science and the humanities, study science literacy, spread scientific knowledge in science, study the theory of science popularization, form volunteer teams to serve local science popularization, and enter into broader cooperation with CFI/Transnational.

“Scientific Inquiry and Human Well-Being” was truly the world congress’s theme, and CFI founder Paul Kurtz concluded the three-day affair by broadening the discussion even more—to moral and ethical concerns. “Science must transcend any political boundaries,” he said. “We want to develop the appreciation of science, its methodology, its outlook.” And, he said, we are interested in “the practical application of scientific methodology to ethics and moral principles.” Our moral systems are too often based on ancient dogmas, he said. They must instead be informed by modern scientific knowledge. Just as science must transcend political concerns, “A number of ethical principles and moral values transcend culture,” he said.

Kurtz, always a philosopher in the best sense, spoke movingly of “the common moral decencies.” Among his examples were integrity, trustworthiness, benevolence, and fairness. He also referred to the rights of the individual and certain “excellences” that should be pursued: good health, self control and moderation, self respect and self-esteem, high motivation, the capacity for love, caring for other sentient beings, a commitment to beloved causes, a sense of joi de vivre, a quest to achieve and to create, a generalized goodwill toward others and oneself, the use of reason, courage (“the audacity to succeed”), altruism, the mitigation of suffering and sorrow, and empathy for others.

He seemed almost to be willing these characteristics and values onto a planet that sorely needs them. And on that high-toned plane, an invigorating conference in a dynamic, rapidly changing part of the world came to an end.

The Physics of Christianity by Frank Tipler, a mathematical physicist at Tulane University, is a sequel to The Physics of Immortality, a bestseller in Germany before it was published here in 1994 by Doubleday. In that book, Tipler argued that anyone who understands modern physics will be compelled to believe that at a far-off future date, which Tipler calls the Omega Point (borrowing the term from the Jesuit paleontologist Tielhard de Chardin), God will resurrect every person who lived, as well as every person who could have lived! Our brains will be preserved as computer simulations and given new spiritual bodies to live happily forever in the paradise described in the New Testament.

In his new book, published in 2007 by Doubleday, Tipler goes far beyond his previous one. He claims that modern physics also provides reasonable explanations for the historical accuracy of all the central miracles of Christian faith, as well as the many alleged miracles that continue to take place, notably those associated with Catholic saints. “From the perspective of the latest physical theories,” Tipler writes in his introduction, “Christianity is not a mere religion but an experimentally testable science.” Roll over, Mary Baker Eddy!

It is no surprise that Tipler has become a conservative, orthodox Catholic. On page 217 he attributes his conversion to the influence of the German Lutheran theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg.1 “[He] spent fifteen years in a finally successful attempt to persuade an American physicist (me) that Christianity, undiluted Chalcedonian Christianity, might in fact be true and might even be proved to be true by science.”

There are two ways, Tipler writes, to regard miracles:

1. They are, as David Hume famously maintained, supernatural events that violate laws of science.
2. They are highly improbable events performed by God, but without violating any natural laws.

The second view is the heart of Tipler’s new book.

One can think of Tipler as a Christian version of Immanuel Velikovsky. A devout orthodox Jew, Velikovsky explained the great miracles of the Old Testament by invoking the laws of physics (see “Creationism, Catastrophism, and Velikovsky,” SI January/February 2008). Thus, Joshua was able to make the sun and moon stand still in the sky because a giant comet erupted from Jupiter and passed close to Earth causing it momentarily to stop rotating. It also caused the Red Sea to part precisely at the moment Moses commanded it. The comet showered edible manna on Israel before it settled down to become Venus.
Velikovsky had no interest in New Testament miracles, unlike Tipler who is concerned with New Testament miracles but is silent on Old Testament ones. It would be interesting to know what he thinks about the dreadful fate of Lot’s wife or the agony of Jonah in the belly of a whale. Tipler has a natural explanation for every miracle of Christianity, including those not in the Bible but infallibly validated by the Roman Church. All are caused by God, though “never ever” by abrogating any law of physics.

Tipler devotes chapter six to the Star of Bethlehem. The accuracy of Matthew’s account is never questioned. The star was not a supernatural event, nor was it a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn as some Bible commentators surmise. It was, Tipler assures us, a supernova bursting in the galaxy of Andromeda. God cleverly timed the nova so it would signal the birth in Bethlehem of his only begotten son.
Chapter seven reveals for the first time the dark secret of the Virgin Birth. It was a rare case of parthenogenesis! This is the technical term for births that lack male fertilization of a female egg. The phenomenon is fairly common among certain vertebrates such as snakes, lizards, and turkeys; Tipler sees no reason why it can’t occur in humans, and he suspects it actually does occur. He is convinced this happened with Mary. Moreover, he thinks Mary’s parthenogenesis could be confirmed by careful analysis of Jesus’s blood on the Shroud of Turin!

Tipler has no doubts about the genuineness of the Shroud. Two microphotographs of the blood are introduced, and Tipler claims that its DNA is consistent with Mary’s virginity. True, the Holy Spirit played a mysterious role in the Virgin Birth, but the birth broke no biological laws. The Bible, Tipler reminds us, implies that Joseph did not believe his young wife when she denied that any man was involved in her being with child.

All conservative Christians believe Jesus was free of the original sin that resulted from the Fall, which has been passed on to all descendants of Adam and Eve. Catholics think that Mary, too, escaped original sin. (It is a Catholic heresy to reject the Immaculate Conception.) How does Tipler explain the way Jesus and Mary differ in this manner from all other humans?

Tipler’s answer is wonderful. There must be genes that carry original sin! This could be verified some day, he writes, by first identifying the gene. Thus, failing to find evidence of the gene on the Shroud of Turin would explain the sinlessness of both Jesus and his mother.

(I am, dear reader, doing my best to keep a straight face while I summarize Tipler’s convictions.)

Chapter seven is about Jesus’s resurrection. Here Tipler plunges into technical regions of quantum mechanics (QM). He is a firm believer in what is called the “many worlds interpretation” of QM. All I need say here about this fantastic view is that it assumes the reality of a “multiverse” that contains an infinity of universes similar to our own. Millions of these parallel worlds contain exact duplicates of you and me. Tipler quotes Stephen Hawking as saying to him that the many worlds interpretation of QM is “trivially true.”

If Hawking said this I think he meant that the many worlds interpretation is a useful language for talking about QM, but its infinity of parallel worlds are not “real” in the same way our universe is real. However, for Tipler they are very real. Denying the multiverse, he says “is the same as denying that 2+2=4” (Tipler 16).

Here is a typical paragraph about Jesus’s Resurrection:

I am proposing that the Son and Father Singularities guided the worlds of the multiverse to concentrate the energy of the particles constituting Jesus in our universe into the Jesus of our universe. In effect, Jesus’ dead body, lying in the tomb, would have been enveloped in a sphaleron field. This field would have dematerialized Jesus’ body into neutrinos and antineutrinos in a fraction of a second, after which the energy transferred to this world would have been transferred back to the other worlds from whence it came. Reversing this process (by having neutrinos and antineutrinos—almost certainly not the original neutrinos and antineutrinos dematerialized from Jesus’ body—materialize into another body) would generate Jesus’ Resurrection body.

Although Tipler has nothing to say about the resurrection of Lazarus and other revivals of the dead mentioned in the New Testament, presumably they have similar explanations.

Tipler also reveals, so help me, exactly how Jesus managed to walk on water. He performed this great magical feat by “directing a neutrino beam” downward from his feet. Similar neutrino beams account for his ascension into the clouds, as well as how his resurrected body was able to dematerialize and rematerialize. Mary’s assumption is similarly explained: Tipler recommends checking her tomb for tracks of nuclear particles that would have been generated by her assumption. Apparently, Tipler thinks her corpse floated into heaven from her tomb rather than from a funeral procession as legend has it.

Chapter nine describes how physics explains the Incarnation, and how it also can account for the real presence of the Lord’s body and blood in the bread and wine of the Catholic Eucharist.

I will spare the reader accounts of Tipler’s belief that within fifty years computers will surpass human intelligence, and how our organic brains will be replaced by computer emulations as the universe moves inexorably toward the Omega Point. When that point is reached, an evolving God will become omniscient in the sense of knowing everything that can be known and omnipotent in the sense of being able to do everything that can be done. As Thomas Aquinas taught, there are things God cannot do, such as create a world that contains logically impossible things like a triangle with four sides or a creature that is both a perfect human and a perfect horse. It is best, Aquinas adds, not to say there are things God can’t do, but that there are things that can’t be done.

Before fifty years have ended, Tipler warns us, Armageddon will be fought with weapons that will make nuclear bombs seem like “spitballs” (254). There will be mass conversions of Jews to Christianity. Tipler dedicates his book “To God’s Chosen People, the Jews, who for the first time in 2000 years are advancing Christianity.” After Armageddon, Jesus will return in glory to reign over a new Earth. How does Tipler know all this? Biblical prophecy says so! “Before the Second Coming,” he writes (369), I would expect to see a Jewish Pope.”

For a few moments, after finishing The Physics of Christianity, I began to wonder if the book could be a subtle, hilarious hoax. Sadly, it is not.

Note:

1. Pannenberg was born in 1928 in what now is Poland. His best known works are Jesus: God and Man (1968) and a three-volume Systematic Theology (1994), both heavily influenced by Karl Barth. At sixteen he had an experience similar to Paul’s on the Road to Damascus. He and Tipler are good friends.

The Eleventh World Congress of Centers for Inquiry/Transnational convened in Beijing in October 2007, the culmination of almost twenty years of interchange between the Center for Inquiry and Chinese scientists. Inasmuch as Ken Frazier has so eloquently depicted the highlights of the Congress in this issue of Skeptical Inquirer, I will focus on the reasons for the Congress and what we hope will ensue from it. Like Frazier, I was fascinated by the remarkable changes that have occurred in China since our first visit in 1988. Lin Zixin, former editor of Science and Technology Daily, the largest-circulation scientific newspaper in the world, had invited the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) to visit China. Chinese scientists at that time, he said, were concerned about the growth of paranormal and occult beliefs. They wished to critically examine paranormal claims and assess the validity of external Qigong and the reality of Chi, psychokinesis, and alleged psychic diagnoses of medical ailments.

We gladly accepted the invitation and gathered a delegation of six well-known skeptics from North America, including Frazier, James Randi, James Alcock, Barry Karr, Philip Klass, and myself. We did not find any evidence of “extraordinary” paranormal powers and issued a report to that effect (see SI’s Summer and Fall issues, 1988).

We noted the chutzpah displayed by psychics, whether adults or children (much had been made at that time about so-called gifted children), who tried but didn’t succeed in hoodwinking us. Intrigued by our methods of testing, our Chinese hosts wanted to remain in contact with us. Actually, the Chinese Association for Science and Technology (CAST), a coalition of over 180 science organizations, sponsored the exchange program. CAST, a nongovernmental organization, is somewhat equivalent to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The Chinese were especially interested in how they could raise the public’s appreciation and understanding of science, combat superstition, and improve scientific illiteracy. In time they created a new organization, the Chinese Research Institute for the Popularization of Science (CRISP), which overlapped with CSICOP in its concern with the prevalence of antiscientific attitudes and the public’s captivation with parapsychology, UFO abductions, astrology, alternative healing, and pseudoscience in general.

In the early 1990s, CSICOP became an integral part of the Center for Inquiry/Transnational. It has since changed its name to the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI) and broadened its agenda to defend science, reason, and free inquiry in every area of human interest. The Council for Secular Humanism (CSH) also became part of the Center for Inquiry. It was especially interested in responding to fundamentalist attacks on evolution and naturalistic methodology. CFI added to its agenda the defense of secularism and advanced humanist values not rooted in religion but secular in nature. The Chinese became interested in questions concerning individual morality and happiness, which were similar to the moral virtues of Confucianism, so they found this aspect of our work useful.

The agenda of CFI continued to interest Chinese scientists, who sent delegations to each of our Skeptics World Congresses (held in Heidelberg, Germany; Sydney, Australia; Padua, Italy; and Burbank and Amherst in the United States). More explicitly, they began to send dozens of students, scholars, and officials every year to the Summer Institute of the Center for Inquiry in Amherst, New York, and they translated many of our articles and books. CFI responded by sending two additional teams to lecture in China, and this eventually led to the establishment of a new Center for Inquiry in Beijing and the co-sponsorship of the Eleventh World Congress by the Centers for Inquiry (co-hosted by CAST, CRISP, CFI/Beijing, the Chinese Academy of Science, and many top universities and scientific institutes). CFI/Transnational was pleased to send a delegation of twenty distinguished scientists and philosophers from several countries to the Eleventh World Congress.

The basic theme of the World Congress was development of the public’s understanding of science—its methods of inquiry, its naturalistic worldview, and the relationship of science to ethics. These topics are relevant to many societies, but also to the planetary community. The Chinese are concerned with maintaining internal harmony within China and especially expressed worry about global warming and environmental pollution of the atmosphere and water resources. Although there is a preponderance of evidence about the reality of global warming, Ken Frazier pointed out in his paper, a minority of readers of Skeptical Inquirer adamantly claim there isn’t a problem.

All told, some seventy papers—many provocative—were delivered at the Congress, including those by eminent Chinese scientists, such as Professor Qin Dahe, renowned climatologist and meteorologist and Chinese representative to the world agency concerned with global warming (that had just received a Nobel Prize), Cheng Donghong, executive secretary of CAST, and Ren Fujun, the energetic head of CRISP. Ren and I co-chaired the Congress.

Ren said that they wished to expand the role of the Center for Inquiry in China; the enterprise of science popularization has reached an opportune moment as the country grapples with an incredible development boom. It is important, he said, to continue research cooperation between CRISP, CFI/Beijing, and CFI/Transnational to increase the number of Chinese researchers who will participate in summer training classes at the CFI Institute in Amherst, New York, and to co-sponsor international conferences. Many of our Chinese counterparts expressed a desire to establish CFIs in other cities in China. On our trip to Shanghai we met Wang Xin, director of the Shanghai Association for Science and Technology in their new building, and he affirmed that they would like to establish a CFI/Shanghai.

Thus, the Eleventh World Congress ratified and solidified twenty years of interchange and pledged the continued cooperation in furthering the public’s understanding of science.

China’s Soaring Economy

The entire world community is vitally interested in the Chinese economy, and many international conglomerates have opened branch offices and invested heavily in China. Friendly governments have supported this. The world is eager to trade with the Chinese, and many countries are importing their goods and services at an increasing rate. This has led to complaints about displaced workers at home, because large companies have discovered that they can manufacture products in China and ship them back cheaper than they can produce them in their own countries, sparking tremendous economic expansion in China. Encouraged by its economic vitality, foreign capital investment in China is increasing. This is similar to what happened historically elsewhere when foreign capital enabled countries to develop.

The opening of China to the free market in the past two decades has led to its explosive economic growth. As Frazier notes, of the leading twenty companies in the world, in terms of stock valuation, eight of them are Chinese (including China Mobile, China Telecom, PetroChina, etc.). The sudden emergence of a new class of billionaires in China is an astounding development. Indeed, there are an estimated 100 billionaires living in mainland China (according to the Hurun Report and Forbes). Most of the wealth comes from real estate, construction, and manufacturing. The wealthiest person on the list is Yang Huiyan, who received a $17.5 billion gift of stock from her father, a real estate developer. Zhang Yin is worth $10 billion due to a surge in the share prices of his Nine Dragons Paper holdings (he owns 72 percent); Yu Rongman, owner of Shimao Property holdings, has $7.5 billion in wealth. And Huang Guangyu, founder of Gome Electrical Appliances, is worth $6 billion according to estimates. Most of this wealth comes from a real estate boom and soaring prices on the Shanghai and Hong Kong exchanges (similar to Google). The Shanghai and Hong Kong stock markets made more money last year from public offerings than the New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ combined. China is now the chief engine of economic growth in the world—projections place it second to the U.S. by 2015.

This indicates, perhaps, that China is hardly a Communist country; it has a mixed economy—the private sector continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Official Chinese statistics indicate that privately owned companies comprise one-third of the total economy, but I think that this figure is too low. Chinese capitalism is now the dominant force accelerating the economy. What China is able to do on top of that, which other capitalist countries cannot, is use the power of the State to plan large projects and harness both private and public companies to achieve them—such as the vast effort to reconstruct a large section of Beijing for the Olympic Games.

Environmental, Societal Challenges

Like Frazier, I was stunned by the evident progress that China had made in the nineteen years since we were there. Everywhere we went new construction was bustling—factories and stores, highway systems, skyscrapers and apartment houses, and entire new towns and cities. China uses one-third of the cranes in the world, according to estimates. The four cities we visited—Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai, and Guilin (we had visited the first three on our last trip)—are being transformed at a breakneck pace. The Chinese we met on the streets in restaurants and stores seemed proud of these accomplishments, which led to a noticeable improvement in the standard of living, at least in the major cities. This was especially the case in Shanghai, which is truly breathtaking. Daniel Dennett cajoled us into taking a boat ride around the Pudong part of Shanghai. At night the city is dazzling—almost nothing had been constructed when we were there in 1988. It was as if two new Manhattans had sprung up out of nowhere. There are dramatic plans to continue new construction, we were informed by a director of Shanghai’s Urban Planning Exhibition Center where a model city of the future was on display.

We enjoyed royal treatment by our Chinese hosts, first in Beijing, where we were chauffeured by limousine to see the massive preparations for the upcoming 2008 Olympic Games. It appeared to us that they had a long way to go if they are to complete the Olympic facilities on time. But the construction manager assured us that they were working three shifts around the clock and that it would be finished. We didn’t doubt that; China has a vast pool of cheap labor that they can apply to such projects. The rest of the world has discovered the availability of this skilled labor force, transferring vast new industries to China and abandoning their own industrial bases for the allure of Chinese productivity.

Incredibly, the rate of growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has been 10 to 11 percent over the last four years. In gross terms, it reached $2.7 trillion U.S. dollars in 2006—this is one-fourth that of the U.S., though China has four times the U.S. population. The Chinese hope to quadruple their economy by 2020, despite unforeseen obstacles that may slow it down.

We found the streets of China choked with automobile congestion. Surprisingly, many of the cars in Beijing and Shanghai are four-door, replacing the ubiquitous bicycles that we saw on our earlier trip. As Frazier observed, the air pollution was thick, far worse than Los Angeles on its bad days. One Chinese official told me that a recent public poll asked the Chinese what they most wanted: a huge majority responded that their main interest was to own a large four-door automobile! Given the vast increase in energy consumption, the environmental problems that China faces are awesome. The Chinese government is aware of the need to reach sustainable development without pollution. By all accounts, 85 percent of the streams and rivers are fouled or rancid, depleting fresh water supplies. China produces 70 percent of the world’s farmed fish in coastal cities and in the mighty Yangtze River, frequently contaminated by mercury, lead, and other toxic chemicals. Murray Gell-Mann reported that Chinese officials said that China is constructing two new power plants per week, fired by polluting coal, but they cannot get provincial leaders to reduce emissions. Moreover, we did not see any great emphasis on the conservation of energy by producing smaller cars (they seemed to have followed Detroit) or dimming their bright lights (much like Las Vegas and Broadway). In this sense, they seem to be emulating America in wasteful, conspicuous consumption, though the government has recently issued guidelines to radically alter how they grow.

No doubt the chief cause of China’s energy/resource/environmental problem is the fact that the population keeps growing. The streets are teeming with pedestrians. Many years ago China instituted a stringent one child per/family policy to restrain population growth. Criticized by the Western world for its restraint on freedom of choice, the Chinese nevertheless felt it was an urgent necessity. This has had unexpected consequences, however, for there may not be enough workers to support their aging parents, the custom in ancient China. The growth of the population is due primarily to the decline of the death rate because of better nutrition and sanitary conditions. The average lifespan has risen from thirty-five years to seventy-two years in the past four decades. Were China to catch up with Japan (where the average lifespan is now over eighty), this would place still greater strains on natural resources. Demographic projections indicate that China will add 300,000,000 people by the year 2030—equivalent to the entire U.S. population! The most likely place they can migrate to is Western China—even then, will China have enough resources to feed and satisfy its vast population?

Another urgent problem confronting them is the great disparity in wealth, which could lead to intense internal conflicts. Hence, the Chinese government has focused on harmony as a central social goal. “Harmony” is Confucian in origin and a moral norm. Traditional Confucian thought emphasizes the cultivation of a virtuous and happy life. One way to do this is to fulfill your station and its duties; another is to reach personal fulfillment. Presumably, in a socialist society, it is to strive for the common good. In any case, there is now interest in classical China, something spurned by Mao.

Overcoming poverty is now a focus of Chinese leadership. The per-capita income in 2006, according to government statistics (which may or may not be reliable), was approximately $2,042, up nearly 20 percent from the previous year, yet still much lower than other industrial countries of Europe, the U.S., and Japan. In major cities such as Shanghai, the per-capita income is approximately $4,000 per person, but in the countryside (we visited model farms outside of Guilin) the peasants only earn $300 per year, barely enough for food and shelter. They live at a subsistence level and use farming methods that go back millennia. Large numbers of people are leaving rural areas for the cities—but there are not enough jobs for everyone. Hence, rising levels of affluence will no doubt lead to a comparative rise in aspirations. Demands from poorer regions point to an explosive powder keg. There are already reports of tens of thousands of protests throughout the country. Perhaps that is why, although the Chinese leadership is strenuously attempting to expand the GDP, it is now emphasizing the need for distribution of consumer goods in poorer areas to achieve social harmony.

One thing is clear: China is not a “Cold War” Communist country. Although its government may be authoritarian, it is not totalitarian; it encourages innovation and enterprise and tolerates some diversity. It has a pluralistic economy with a strong capitalist sector and a great number of privately held stores and restaurants. Former premier Deng Xiaoping’s policies are heralded as the salvation of China. The leadership plans to quadruple its GDP by 2020, and thereby increase the per-capita income and standard of living. There is a growing middle class in major industrial centers and cities of perhaps 15 to 20 million people and a large underclass longing to share in the good life. For these reasons, the Chinese continue to keep the throttles on “high” in order to increase production, enabling a wider distribution of consumer goods and services to vast numbers of the indigent population.

China’s Political Future

While we were in Beijing, the Seventeenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party (73 million members) was in session. Some 2,200 delegates attended. Viewing the meetings on television news each evening (on an English-translation channel) seemed like an anachronism. Two-thousand Communist Party (CPC) officials were shown in the People’s Hall—the men were dressed in somber, dark suits or uniforms and the women in staid attire. The Congress opened with a statement of allegiance to Marxism/Leninism. There seemed almost no dissent in the sessions of the Congress, at least none was broadcast. A Central Committee (Politburo) and a standing committee of seven run China. They call it collective leadership. Hu Jinatao, head of the Communist Party, laid out the new party line at the Congress. He pointed out that China had not yet reached socialism and that their goal was to move toward “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The aim, he said, would be to strive for “a moderately prosperous society,” which they hoped to reach by 2020. The agenda sounded—at least on paper—worthy: it recognized the need of the people to “exercise democratic rights” and to act only under “the constitution and by the rule of law.” According to China Daily (Oct. 28, 2007), Chinese democracy will seek “to guarantee freedom, equality, and other rights of citizens.” Yu Keping of the CPC Central Committee declared that “universal values serve to bolster political reforms,” and these include freedom, justice, democracy, equality, and human rights. Presumably, this will contribute to a harmonious society.

Hu promised to appoint more noncommunists as cabinet ministers to governmental positions. The CPC announced on the eve of the Congress the appointment of two noncommunists, Wan Gang, the new Minister of Science and Technology, and Chen Zu, the new Minster of Health, the first such appointees since the 1970s.

Hu also said that although China will continue its rapid growth, it needs to be balanced and sustainable—the Chinese press hailed this as a new “conservation culture.” Reducing the depletion of natural resources and providing environmental protection is the only way to do this. China also plans, he said, to reduce absolute poverty with a reasonable system of income distribution and a growing middle class, guaranteeing everyone a basic standard of living. Thus, they hope to reverse the growing disparity in income. China does not have universal health care, a system of social security, or universal education—services which virtually all of the industrialized democracies of the world have. Compulsory education, where it exists in China, is only for nine years, and large sectors of the country have not even implemented that. One member of the cadre said to me plaintively that the glamour of Beijing and Shanghai do not reflect the massive catch-up that China needs to achieve in the countryside if it is to fulfill its ambitious goals.

The provision of the Communist Party’s Congress that I found most surprising is the supremacy it accords science and technology in its future plans. The Party Congress—it is perhaps the only major power in the world to do so—supports as its highest priority the “scientific outlook on development,” a goal adopted as an amendment to the CPC Constitution. China is now the fastest-growing sustainer of scientific research and development in the world with a growth rate of 18 percent per year over the past five years. It is now in third place behind the U.S. and Japan and moving up fast. The U.S., Japan, and Europe had an overall growth rate in research and development of only 2.9 percent per year. By all reports, the equipment in its laboratories is equal in quality to the rest of the world. Moreover, the Chinese are seeking to attract the brightest researchers to China, and they are eager for partnerships. (See the lead editorial in Science, “Chinese Science on the Move,” by Alan I. Leshner and Vaughan Turekian, December 7, 2007.)

Hu, trained as an engineer, was quoted as saying: “Uphold science; don’t be ignorant and unenlightened.” What a contrast with the current U.S. administration where “intelligent design” theorists oppose evolution and stem-cell research is effectively thwarted. Traditional Marxist theory emphasizes that the expansion of “the forces of production” is essential to economic growth—the Chinese have recognized that increased expenditures for science and technology are crucial to their effective development.

What role does socialism play in China’s future? China is supposed to be in the preliminary stages of socialism. According to Hu, the first aspect is that China should be “people-oriented,” and second, its development should be “sustainable and contribute to social harmony.” They now recognize that basing policies on economic GDP indexes alone is insufficient. They need to pay attention to wasted resources, social unrest, environmental degradation, and regional imbalances. China has vowed to reduce its per-capita energy consumption 20 percent by 2010 and emission of pollutants by 10 percent in the same period. Are these mere ideological slogans, or will China embrace these challenges as it continues to lunge ahead?

More important perhaps for the future is whether there will be conflict within the “relationships of production” between two powerful forces—the free market/capitalist system and its powerful billionaires and thriving middle class versus the Communist Party cadre. Castrating the private sector could halt Chinese productive power as part of the global economy. On the other hand, if its power grows, would it in time dislodge the Communist bureaucracy and lead to a collapse of the system or the emergence of an outright military dictatorship? Will the diplomatic policies of the current regime be supplanted by hostile confrontations in the future? All of these possible scenarios are disturbing, for it may lead to China’s decline, and given the interdependence of the entire global economy, could lead to the unraveling of the world economic-political system as we know it.

Prudence suggests that we should continue to work closely with the Chinese and encourage the democratization of the political system, the growth of other parties besides the Communist Party, the right of dissent, a free press, respect for human rights, and widespread participation and grassroots involvement in the policies of the country.

China is perhaps the oldest continuous culture on the planet with strong family traditions, a set of moral virtues with deep roots in its past, and resourceful, intelligent, and hard-working people. Skilled in business, artful in negotiation, we should not push them—backs to the wall—into a classical confrontation of national power-politics. We should continue to welcome them into the new planetary civilization emerging in this age of instantaneous electronic communication where cultural, scientific, philosophical, artistic, and economic exchange is vital for everyone.

I should add that our contacts with the Chinese people over the years, whether scientists, professors, students, or ordinary folks, have been most gratifying. The Chinese invariably bestow gifts when people visit them or when they travel abroad. They are generous hosts. Everywhere we went we were feted with sumptuous banquets overflowing with savory dishes, and of course hot tea. The Chinese people we met were invariably polite and well spoken and sought not to offend. They display the refined manners that their ancient civilization and rich culture have cultivated for so long.

In its small way, the Center for Inquiry intends to embrace continuous dialogue, intercommunication, and interchange with the Chinese people. Hopefully, this will lead in a modest way not only to the development of a more peaceful and humanistic world, but one that recognizes the mutual interests and needs of everyone in the planetary community as we try to work out values that we share.

When it comes to climate change, we need to cool our dialogue and consider the arguments for and against different policy options. In the heat of a loud and obnoxious debate, facts and reason lose out.

There is a kind of choreographed screaming about climate change from both sides of the debate. Discussion would be on much firmer ground if we could actually hear the arguments and the facts and then sensibly debate long-term solutions.

Man-made climate change is certainly a problem, but it is categorically not the end of the world. Take the rise in sea levels as one example of how the volume of the screaming is unmatched by the facts. In its 2007 report, the United Nations estimates that sea levels will rise about a foot over the remainder of the century.¹ While this is not a trivial amount, it is also important to realize that it is not unknown to mankind: since 1860, we have experienced a sea level rise of about a foot without major disruptions.² It is also important to realize that the new prediction is lower than previous Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates and much lower than the expectations from the 1990s of more than two feet and the 1980s, when the Environmental Protection Agency projected more than six feet.³

We dealt with rising sea levels in the past century, and we will continue to do so in this century. It will be problematic, but it is incorrect to posit the rise as the end of civilization.

We will actually lose very little dry land to the rise in sea levels. It is estimated that almost all nations in the world will establish maximal coastal protection almost everywhere, simply because doing so is fairly cheap. For more than 180 of the world’s 192 nations, coastal protection will cost less than 0.1 percent GDP and approach 100 percent protection.⁴

The rise in sea level will be a much bigger problem for poor countries. The most affected nation will be Micronesia, a federation of 607 small islands in the West Pacific with a total land area only four times larger than Washington, D.C.⁵ If nothing were done, Micronesia would lose some 21 percent of its area by the end of the century (Tol 2004, 5). With coastal protection, it will lose just 0.18 percent of its land area. However, if we instead opt for cuts in carbon emissions and thus reduce both the sea level rise and economic growth, Micronesia will end up losing a larger land area. The increase in wealth for poor nations is more important than sea levels: poorer nations will be less able to defend themselves against rising waters, even if they rise more slowly. This is the same for other vulnerable nations: Tuvalu, the Maldives, Vietnam, and Bangladesh.

The point is that we cannot just talk about CO2 when we talk about climate change. The dialogue needs to include both considerations about carbon emissions and economics for the benefit of humans and the environment. Presumably, our goal is not just to cut carbon emissions, but to do the best we can for people and the environment.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair appeared at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York City. Photo credit: Janet Mayer/Splash News. [Photo via Newscom]

We should take action on climate change, but we need to be realistic. The U.K has arguably engaged in the most aggressive rhetoric about climate change. Since the Labour government promised in 1997 to cut emissions by a further 15 percent by 2010, emissions have increased 3 percent.⁶ American emissions during the Clinton/Gore administration increased 28 percent.

Look at our past behavior: at the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, nations promised to cut emissions back to 1990 levels by 2000 (UNFCCC 1992, 4.2a). The member countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) overshot their target in 2000 by more than 12 percent.

Many believe that dramatic political action will follow if people only knew better and elected better politicians.⁷ Despite the European Union’s enthusiasm for the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change—and a greater awareness and concern over global warming in Europe than in the United States—emissions per person since 1990 have remained stable in the U.S. while E.U. emissions have increased 4 percent (EIA 2006).

Even if the wealthy nations managed to reign in their emissions, the majority of this century’s emissions will come from developing countries—which are responsible for about 40 percent of annual carbon emissions; this is likely to increase to 75 percent by the end of the century.⁸

In a surprisingly candid statement from Tony Blair at the Clinton Global Initiative, he pointed out:

I think if we are going to get action on this, we have got to start from the brutal honesty about the politics of how we deal with it. The truth is no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in the light of a long-term environmental problem. What countries are prepared to do is to try to work together cooperatively to deal with this problem in a way that allows us to develop the science and technology in a beneficial way. (Clinton Global Initiative 2005, 15)

Similarly, one of the top economic researchers tells us: “Deep cuts in emissions will only be achieved if alternative energy technologies become available at reasonable prices” (Tol 2007, 430). We need to engage in a sensible debate about how to tax CO2. If we set the tax too low, we emit too much. If we set it too high, we end up much poorer without doing enough to reduce warming.

In the largest review of all of the literature’s 103 estimates, climate economist Richard Tol makes two important points. First, the really scary, high estimates typically have not been subjected to peer review and published. In his words: “studies with better methods yield lower estimates with smaller uncertainties.” Second, with reasonable assumptions, the cost is very unlikely to be higher than $14 per ton of CO2 and likely to be much smaller (Tol 2005).⁹ When I specifically asked him for his best guess, he wasn’t too enthusiastic about shedding his cautiousness—as few true researchers invariably are—but gave the estimate of $2 per ton of CO2.¹⁰

Therefore, I believe that we should tax CO2 at the economically feasible level of about $2/ton, or maximally $14/ton. Yet, let us not expect this will make any major difference. Such a tax would cut emissions by 5 percent and reduce temperatures by 0.16?F. And before we scoff at 5 percent, let us remember that the Kyoto protocol, at the cost of 10 years of political and economic toil, will reduce emissions by just 0.4 percent by 2010.¹¹

Neither a tax nor Kyoto nor draconian proposals for future cuts move us closer toward finding better options for the future. Research and development in renewable energy and energy efficiency is at its lowest for twenty-five years. Instead, we need to find a way that allows us to “develop the science and technology in a beneficial way,” a way that enables us to provide alternative energy technologies at reasonable prices. It will take the better part of a century and will need a political will spanning parties, continents, and generations. We need to be in for the long haul and develop cost-effective strategies that won’t splinter regardless of overarching ambitions or false directions.

This is why one of our generational challenges should be for all nations to commit themselves to spending 0.05 percent of GDP in research and development of noncarbon emitting energy technologies. This is a tenfold increase on current expenditures yet would cost a relatively minor $25 billion per year (seven times cheaper than Kyoto and many more times cheaper than Kyoto II). Such a commitment could include all nations, with wealthier nations paying the larger share, and would let each country focus on its own future vision of energy needs, whether that means concentrating on renewable sources, nuclear energy, fusion, carbon storage, conservation, or searching for new and more exotic opportunities.

Funding research and development globally would create a momentum that could recapture the vision of delivering both a low-carbon and high-income world. Lower energy costs and high spin-off innovation are potential benefits that possibly avoid ever stronger temptations to free-riding and the ever tougher negotiations over increasingly restrictive Kyoto Protocol-style treaties. A global financial commitment makes it plausible to envision stabilizing climate changes at reasonable levels.

I believe it would be the way to bridge a century of parties, continents, and generations, creating a sustainable, low-cost opportunity to create the alternative energy technologies that will power the future.

To move toward this goal we need to create sensible policy dialogue. This requires us to talk openly about priorities. Often there is strong sentiment in any public discussion that we should do anything required to make a situation better. But clearly we don’t actually do that. When we talk about schools, we know that more teachers would likely provide our children with a better education.¹² Yet we do not hire more teachers simply because we also have to spend money in other areas. When we talk about hospitals, we know that access to better equipment is likely to provide better treatment, yet we don’t supply an infinite amount of resources.¹³ When we talk about the environment, we know tougher restrictions will mean better protection, but this also comes with higher costs.

Consider traffic fatalities, which are one of the ten leading causes of deaths in the world. In the U.S., 42,600 people die in traffic accidents and 2.8 million people are injured each year (USCB, 2006, 672). Globally, it is estimated that 1.2 million people die from traffic accidents and 50 million are injured every year (Lopez, Mathers, Ezzati, Jamison, and Murray 2006, 1751; WHO 2002, 72; 2004, 3, 172).

About 2 percent of all deaths in the world are traffic-related and about 90 percent of the traffic deaths occur in third world countries (WHO 2004, 172). The total cost is a phenomenal $512 billion a year (WHO 2004, 5). Due to increasing traffic (especially in the third world) and due to ever better health conditions, the World Heath Organization estimates that by 2020, traffic fatalities will be the second leading cause of death in the world, after heart disease.¹⁴

Amazingly, we have the technology to make all of this go away. We could instantly save 1.2 million humans and eliminate $500 billion worth of damage. We would particularly help the third world. The answer is simply lowering speed limits to 5 mph. We could avoid almost all of the 50 million injuries each year. But of course we will not do this. Why? The simple answer that almost all of us would offer is that the benefits from driving moderately fast far outweigh the costs. While the cost is obvious in terms of those killed and maimed, the benefits are much more prosaic and dispersed but nonetheless important—traffic interconnects our society by bringing goods at competitive prices to where we live and bringing people together to where we work, and lets us live where we like while allowing us to visit and meet with many others. A world moving only at 5 mph is a world gone medieval.

This is not meant to be flippant. We really could solve one of the world’s top problems if we wanted. We know traffic deaths are almost entirely caused by man. We have the technology to reduce deaths to zero. Yet we persist in exacerbating the problem each year, making traffic an ever-bigger killer.

I suggest that the comparison with global warming is insightful; we have the technology to reduce it to zero, yet we seem to persist in going ahead and exacerbating the problem each year, causing temperatures to continue to increase to new heights by 2020. Why? Because the benefits from moderately using fossil fuels far outweigh the costs. Yes, the costs are obvious in the “fear, terror, and disaster” we read about in the papers every day.

But the benefits of fossil fuels, though much more prosaic, are nonetheless important. Fossil fuels provide us with low-cost electricity, heat, food, communication, and travel.¹⁵ Electrical air conditioning means that people in the U.S. no longer die in droves during heat waves (Davis, Knappenberger, Michaels, and Novicoff 2003). Cheaper fuels would have avoided a significant number of the 150,000 people that have died in the UK since 2000 due to cold winters.¹⁶

Because of fossil fuels, food can be grown cheaply, giving us access to fruits and vegetables year round, which has probably reduced cancer rates by at least 25 percent.¹⁷ Cars allow us to commute to city centers for work while living in areas that provide us with space and nature around our homes, whereas communication and cheap flights have given ever more people the opportunity to experience other cultures and forge friendships globally (Schäfer 2006).

In the third world, access to fossil fuels is crucial. About 1.6 billion people don’t have access to electricity, which seriously impedes human development (IEA 2004, 338–40). Worldwide, about 2.5 billion people rely on biomass such as wood and waste (including dung) to cook and keep warm (IEA 2006, 419ff). For many Indian women, searching for wood takes about three hours each day, and sometimes they walk more than 10 kilometers a day. All of this causes excessive deforestation (IEA 2006, 428; Kammen 1995; Kelkar 2006). About 1.3 million people—mostly women and children—die each year due to heavy indoor air pollution. A switch from biomass to fossil fuels would dramatically improve 2.5 billion lives; the cost of $1.5 billion annually would be greatly superseded by benefits of about $90 billion.¹⁸ Both for the developed and the developing world, a world without fossil fuels—in the short or medium term—is, again, a lot like reverting back to the middle ages.

This does not mean that we should not talk about how to reduce the impact of traffic and global warming. Most countries have strict regulation on speed limits—if they didn’t, fatalities would be much higher. Yet, studies also show that lowering the average speed in Western Europe by just 5 kilometers per hour could reduce fatalities by 25 percent—with about 10,000 fewer people killed each year (WHO, 2002, 72; 2004, 172). Apparently, democracies in Europe are not willing to give up on the extra benefits from faster driving to save 10,000 people.

This is parallel to the debate we are having about global warming. We can realistically talk about $2 or even a $14 CO2 tax. But suggesting a $140 tax, as Al Gore does, seems to be far outside the envelope. Suggesting a 96 percent carbon reduction for the OECD by 2030 seems a bit like suggesting a 5 mph speed limit in the traffic debate. It is technically doable, but it is very unlikely to happen.

One of the most important issues when it comes to climate change is that we cool our dialogue and consider the arguments for and against different policies. In the heat of a loud and obnoxious debate, facts and reason lose out.

Notes

1. (IPCC, 2007b:10.6.5). Notice that the available report (IPCC 2007a) has a midpoint of 38.5cm.
2. Using (Jevrejeva, Grinsted, Moore, and Holgate 2006), 11.4 inches since 1860.
3. 1996: 38–35cm (IPCC and Houghton, 1996:364), 1992 and 1983 EPA from Yohe and Neumann 1997, 243; 250.
4. (Nicholls and Tol 2006, 1088), estimated for 2085. Notice, low-lying undeveloped coasts in places such as Arctic Russia, Canada and Alaska are expected to be undefended. Notice that the numbers presented are for loss of dry-land, whereas up to 18 percent of global wetlands will be lost.
5. “Micronesia” (CIA 2006).
6. Labour has urged a 20 percent CO2 emission cut from 1990 in 2010 in three election manifestos (BBC Annon., 2006a); this translates into a 14.6 percent reduction from 1997-levels. From 1997 to 2004, CO2 emissions increased 3.4 percent (EIA, 2006).
7. Take, for instance, both Gore’s “we have to find a way to communicate the direness of the situation” and Hansen’s “scientists have not done a good job communicating with the public” (Fischer 2006).
8. Developing countries emitted 10.171Gt of the global 26Gt in 2004 (IEA, 2006, 513, 493) (OECD countries 51 percent in 2003 (OECD 2006, 148), Weyant estimates 29 percent from industrialized countries (1998, 2286), IPCC emission scenarios from 23 in the business-as-usual A1 to 36 percent (Nakicenovic and IPCC WG III 2000).
9. Based on a cost of $50 per ton of carbon (Tol 2005:2071).
10. From the Environmental Assessment Institute we asked him in July 2005: “Would you still stick by the conclusion that $15/tC seems justified or would you rather only present an upper limit of the estimate?” He answered: “I’d prefer not to present a central estimate, but if you put a gun to my head I would say $7/tC, the median estimate with a 3 percent pure rate of time preference” ($7/tC = $1.9/tCO2). This is comparable with Pearce’s estimate of $1–2.5/tCO2 ($4–9/tC) (2003:369).
11. There are many advantages to taxes over emission caps, mainly that with taxes, authorities have an interest in collecting them (because it funds the government), whereas with caps, individual countries have much less interest in achieving goals with such an effort, because the benefits are dispersed (global) and the damages localized (to local industries).
12. (Akerhielm 1995; Angrist and Lavy 1999; Graddy and Stevens 2005). Of course, this could be modified in many ways, such as by focusing on paying teachers better, more resources for books, computers, etc. It is also important that we should be saying “more teachers will at least not make schools worse and will likely make them better,” as most studies show some or no effect from extra resources but very few show negative results.
13. E.g., (Fleitas et al. 2006; Gebhardt and Norris 2006). On the other hand, it is less clear that (after a certain limit) more doctors and bed space is the answer, since they may just make for more visits and increase the possibility of infections and harm (Weinberger, Oddone, and Henderson 1996; Wennberg et al. 2004).
14. (WHO 2002, 129) puts it second, whereas (WHO 2004, 5) puts it third.
15. This only looks at the marginal benefit of fossil fuels—which is the relevant one for our discussion. On a basic level, though, it is important to remember that they have fundamentally changed our lives. Before fossil fuels, we would spend hours gathering wood, contributing to deforestation and soil erosion—as billions in the third world still do today (Kammen 1995). We have electric washing machines that have cut domestic work dramatically. The historical economist Stanley Lebergott wrote only semi-jokingly: “From 1620 to 1920 the American washing machine was a housewife” (Lebergott 1993, 112). In 1900, a housewife spent seven hours a week laundering, carrying 200 gallons of water into the house and using a scrub board. Today, she spends 84 minutes with much less strain (Robinson and Godbey 1997, 327). We have a fridge that has both given us more spare time and allowed us to avoid rotten food and eat a more healthy diet of fruit and vegetables (Lebergott 1995, 155). By the end of the nineteenth century human labor made up 94 percent of all industrial work in the U.S. Today, it constitutes only 8 percent (Berry, Conkling, Ray, and Berry 1993, 131). If we think for a moment of the energy we use in terms of “servants,” each with the same work power as a human being, each person in Western Europe has access to 150 servants, in the U.S. about 300, and even in India each person has 15 servants to help (Craig, Vaughan, and Skinner 1996:103).
16. Steve Jones, “Help the Aged,” said: “Many pensioners still agonize about whether or not to heat their homes in the cold weather. In the world’s fourth richest country, this is simply shameful” (BBC Annon. 2006b).
17. The World Cancer Research Fund study estimates that increasing the intake of fruit and vegetables from an average of about 250 g/day to 400 g/day would reduce, the overall frequency of cancer by around 23 percent (WCRF 1997:540).
18. Mainly from fewer deaths and less time use.

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