There are two Oprah Winfreys. One is the African-American woman who struggled against incredible odds in abject poverty to become the wealthiest, most admired woman in America. No one has summarized this Winfrey better than Ken Frazier in a letter to me that I quote with permission:

"She has done some enormous good, it seems to me. She has, among other things, strongly empowered women, instilled a love of reading books through her book club program, taken on a number of very difficult issues with a seriousness and directness not usually associated with daytime TV, funded and built schools in South Africa, and otherwise served as a successful role model for millions of women worldwide."

The other Oprah Winfrey is an attractive, intelligent woman with a heart of gold, but who has only a pale understanding of modern science. On her daily television show (which, she announced in November to stunned viewers, will end after its twenty-fifth season, 2010–11) she promotes, as frequent guests, men and women who preach views and opinions that are medically worthless and in a few cases can even lead to death. This naïve Winfrey is the topic of this article.

You may have noticed that in every photograph you see of Win­frey, either on the cover of her magazine O (and she’s on every cover) or elsewhere, she looks young and gorgeous. Not so on the cover of the June 8, 2009, issue of Newsweek. In large white letters across her hair are the words “Crazy Talk. Oprah, Wacky Cures & You.”

The cover story by Weston Kosova and Pat Wingert is a bombshell. For the first time in a mass-circulation magazine, the Queen of Television is pummeled for her constant praise of dubious medical opinions and other forms of bogus science. But before covering Newsweek’s hatchet job, let’s take a quick look at Winfrey’s amazing life.

Oprah Gail Winfrey was born in Kos­ciusko, Mississippi, in 1954 to two unmarried teenagers who separated soon after. Winfrey was raised by a grandmother in such poverty that her dresses were literally made of potato sacks. She was raped at age nine and molested by an uncle, a cousin, and a family friend. She became pregnant at fourteen and gave birth to a son, her only child, who died in infancy.

Winfrey was an honor student at a Nashville high school, obtaining a scholarship to Tennessee State University. After two years of college, she began working in radio and television, which eventually led to a career on the highest rated daytime TV show in the world.

Today Winfrey is said to be the most powerful woman in America. She is a billionaire two times over. Although her show is based in Chicago, her main home (she owns several here and there) is on a huge estate in Montecito, California.

In addition to O (circulation two million), she publishes a magazine called O at Home. Winfrey also owns a corporation called Harpo (Oprah backwards), which handles a variety of products, and created Oprah’s Book Club, which can propel a book into an instant best seller. Her power even stretches to the political realm: her support of Barack Obama is said to have won him a million votes.

Now for a look at the explosive Newsweek article.

The piece opens with lurid accounts of actress Suzanne Sommers’s many appearances on Winfrey’s show. Every morning, Sommers rubs estrogen cream on one arm and injects estrogen into her vagina; two weeks a month, she smears progesterone on her other arm. She also swallows a bewildering variety of vitamin supplements, gives herself injections of growth hormones, and wears a nanotechnology patch to lose weight and promote sleep. Sommers claims to use only “natural products” and criticizes all the big drug companies that make billions, she is convinced, by hawking dangerous products.

Winfrey’s enthusiasm for Sommers’s wild medical opinions is boundless. She urges her viewers to buy the actress’s treat-yourself books. After following Sommers’s advice about taking estrogen, Winfrey wrote in O, “I felt the veil lift. After three days the skies were bluer, my brain no longer fuzzy, my memory was sharper. I was literally singing and had a skip in my step.”

Mainstream doctors hold contrary views. They scoff at the notion that Som­mers needs all this medication. Exces­sive use of hormones, they say, can increase the risk of heart attacks and strokes and even cause cancer.

“It completely blew me away,” said Cynthia Parsons, executive director of the nonprofit National Women’s Health Net­work, “that Oprah would go to [Som­mers] for advice. I have to say it diminishes my respect [for her].”

Another frequent guest on Winfrey’s show is Jenny McCarthy, actress and star of numerous films and TV shows. She first became famous for modeling in Playboy and later became better known for her outrageous humor.

McCarthy is in the Newsweek article because of her vigorous efforts to convince the world that autism is caused by vaccinations. She has an autistic son, Evan, who she insists became autistic after he was vaccinated for measles and other diseases. In her book Louder Than Words: A Mother’s Journey in Healing, she claims that chelation therapy has helped her son. This therapy, considered quackery by almost all doctors, blames autism on mercury that was once used in vaccines.

The notion that vaccinations cause autism has been thoroughly discredited by dozens of studies, yet it continues to flourish among ignorant parents. Win­frey buys the myth hook, line, and sinker. She has promoted McCarthy’s absurd views on numerous shows. In May 2009, Winfrey announced that her production company had signed McCarthy for her own talk show. Like the healing myths of Christian Science, McCarthy’s crusade is likely to result in needless deaths of children who succumb to diseases that could have been prevented by vaccinations.

Dr. Christine Northrop, a physician who opposes vaccinations, is also a frequent guest on Winfrey’s show. Her medical views are closely linked to New Age mysticism that treats the soul as well as the body. Northrop uses tarot cards to help diagnose illnesses and even sells a set of her own called Women’s Wisdom Health Cards.

Northrop’s advice to women with thyroid problems is to take iodine supplements. According to David Cooper, professor of endocrinology at Johns Hop­kins, taking iodine will make the thyroid condition worse. Cooper calls the notion that iodine will help “utter hogwash.”

In 2004, Winfrey praised a new type of plastic surgery called thread lift. In the procedure, a threaded needle is punched through the skin and used to tighten it. Winfrey played a video showing the procedure, followed by before-and-after photographs. According to Newsweek, the before picture showed the woman without makeup and in an unflattering light. The after photo showed her face covered with pancake makeup. Winfrey then called the woman to come up from the audience, her face plastered with makeup. The audience burst into applause. The thread-lift fad has since waned, mainly because it has no lasting effect and can even cause scarring.

Winfrey is still touting alternatives to plastic surgery. The latest craze, called thermage, uses radio waves to tighten the skin. The machine that produces the waves sells for $30,000. Sales soared after Winfrey’s endorsement, but she had little to say about the therapy’s dangers and its risks of scarring, which angered even the firms selling the machines.

One frequent guest who offers good advice on how to lose weight and stay healthy is Dr. Mehmet Oz, a Turkish-Amer­ican surgeon at Columbia Uni­versity. However, Oz, who now has his own spin-off show, promotes a variety of high-priced food supplements, such as acai berry, MonaVie, and Roserv­atol, which have no more benefit than a well-balanced diet. He also promotes alternative medicines, notably acu­punc­ture, which he has praised on Win­frey’s show, ignoring the fact that the vast majority of doctors consider it worthless beyond its placebo effect. He can be faulted further for sitting silently while Winfrey spouts what he must know is balderdash.

Oz is said to be a disciple of the Swed­ish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Swe­d­en­borg wrote at length about his out-of-body visits to other planets whose inhabitants and cultures he describes in his writing. 

Oz’s best-known book is Healing From the Heart. He is the coauthor of YOU: Being Beautiful, which is the last of five YOU volumes.

Winfrey’s enthusiasm for New Age books reached its apex when she promoted the monumental idiocy of The Secret. It can be described as a hilarious parody of books by Norman Vincent Peale. Instead of God working miracles, the universe itself does it. The Secret teaches that the universe consists of a vibrating energy that can be tapped into with positive thoughts, allowing you to obtain anything you desire—happiness, love, and of course fabulous wealth. Want to lose weight? Then stop having fat thoughts and think thin! Want to become wealthy? Stop thinking poor thoughts. Think rich!

“I’ve been talking about this for years,” Winfrey said. “I just never called it the secret.”

The Secret was first a film produced in Australia in 2006 by New Age author Rhonda Byrne. Two years later, the book version was issued in the U.S. by Astria, an imprint of Simon and Schuster. The editors at Simon and Schuster can smell a best seller as soon as they read a manuscript’s first page. Move over Mary Baker Eddy! Thanks to Winfrey, The Secret has sold over seven million copies in the U.S. alone. Time published a recent issue featuring one hundred of the world’s most influential people. In a fit of poor judgment, they included Byrne on the list. She now lives in California not far from Winfrey’s estate. Her newfound wealth, of course, is proof the secret works (for more, see “Secrets and Lies,” SI, May/June 2007).

Let Dr. David Gorski, a surgeon at Wayne State University School of Medicine, have the last word: “The bottom line is that, when it comes to medicine and science, [Winfrey] is a force for ill.”

Maher was born in New York City in 1956 to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother but grew up in New Jersey. After graduating from Cornell, he began a highly successful career as a comedian.

In his first television show, Politically Incorrect, Maher exchanged banter with various celebrities. After carelessly remarking on the show that the September 11 terrorists were brave men (meaning that they were courageous to die for their cause), ABC canceled the show’s contract. Maher soon began a new show called Real Time with Bill Maher, which is still doing well on HBO. He was also a writer for the Roseanne television series and has appeared in numerous films.

Politically, Maher is an outspoken liberal with many libertarian views, such as favoring legalization of prostitution and marijuana. His attacks on conservative Republicans are merciless (e.g., he called Sarah Palin a “category 5 moron”). Philosophically, he prefers to call himself an agnostic rather than an atheist because he accepts the possibility of some sort of transcendental force or intelligence superior to our own.

In addition to his well-known disbelief in God, Maher also rejects modern medical science. He is firmly persuaded that almost all ills, including diseases, are the result of bad eating habits. “We eat shit,” he likes to say. As for germs, he believes they play no role in our illnesses. As a result, Maher is strongly opposed to all vaccines. He even denies that the Salk vaccine played any role in the decline of polio! Here is what he said in an interview:

[Germ theory] is another theory I think is flawed. And that we go by the Louis Pasteur theory even though Pasteur renounced it on his death bed and said Beauchamp is right. It’s not the invading germs. It’s the terrain. It’s not the mosquitoes. It’s the swamp that they’re breeding in.

Maher is referring to Antoine Beauchamp, a French biologist who opposed Pasteur’s germ theory. The claim that Pasteur renounced his theory on his death bed is pure mythology. A surgeon who posts remarks on the Internet under the pseudonym Orac referred to this myth as one “routinely parroted by credulous idiots like Bill Maher.”

Maher told Larry King that he never takes aspirin because, like all other drugs, he thinks it’s harmful. Owners of the big drug companies are evil men because they bilk the public with expensive and worthless drugs. On the Late Show with David Letterman he advised Letterman, then recovering from quadruple bypass surgery, to stop taking the “harmful” pills his doctor had prescribed.

Too bad Mary Baker Eddy believed in both God and Christ; otherwise, Bill Maher might have become a Christian Scientist. Fortunately, he has no children he could let die because of his refusal to vaccinate or because he would not accept medicine from a doctor in cahoots with those dreadful pharmaceutical companies that make and sell worthless products.

Let Orac have the final word: “I used to kind of like Maher,” he wrote, “but I really think that as he gets older he’s getting flakier and flakier.”

Is it possible for someone to be extremely intelligent and creative in a certain field and at the same time, in other respects, to be simple minded? The answer is yes.

Consider Isaac Newton. He was certainly a genius in the fields of mathematics and physics. On the other hand he devoted most of his life to studying the prophecies of the Bible, calculating the year in which God created the entire universe in six days, and determining the probable year that Jesus would return!

Consider Arthur Conan Doyle. He was a brilliant writer, creator of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, yet he firmly believed in the reality of fairies. He even wrote an entire book defending the authenticity of several crude photographs of the tiny winged fairies taken by two little girls.

My third example is Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess player of all time, certainly the best known. I have written elsewhere about Newton and Doyle. Here I will tell briefly the sad story of Fischer.

Robert James Fischer was born in Chicago in 1943 the illegitimate son of Jewish parents. His Polish mother, Regina, was an active Communist and a great admirer of the Soviet Union. She had a brief affair with Bobby’s German father.

Bobby grew up in Brooklyn. At age six he became captivated by chess. At fourteen he was the U.S. chess champion. The following year he was declared a grandmaster. In 1972 he became world champion by defeating Boris Spassky at a tournament in Iceland. There is not the slightest doubt that Bobby was a genius, with a mind that could have made him a great mathematician had events in his childhood taken a different turn.

Aside from chess, Fischer came close to being a moron. I once thought his refusal to play chess on Saturday was because he was Jewish. No, it was because he had become a convert to the Worldwide Church of God, a strange sect founded by former Seventh-day Adventist Herbert W. Armstrong. Like the Adventists, Armstrong believed that Saturday is still the God-appointed Sabbath. In 1972 Bobby gave $61,000 to Armstrong, part of the prize money he had won by defeating Spassky.

The Worldwide Church of God was soon scandalized by the womanizing of Herbert’s son Garner Ted. After being excommunicated by his father, Ted moved to Tyler, Texas, where he continued to preach his father’s doctrines. Disenchanted by this rift in the Worldwide Church—and on one occasion physically assaulting a lady official of the church—Fischer left the fold to become an ardent admirer of Hitler and the Nazis!

Fischer’s hatred of Jews turned paranoid. Pictures of Hitler decorated his lodgings. He denied the Holocaust. America, he was convinced, had fallen into the hands of “stinking Jews.” When the September 11, 2001, attacks occurred, he called it “wonderful news.” Wanted by the U.S. government for violating an order not to play a return match with Spassky in Yugoslavia, Fischer renounced his U.S. citizenship and settled in Iceland.

In 1972, in Helsinki, Bobby Fischer broke twenty-four years of Soviet dominance by defeating Boris Spassky.

Fischer died of kidney failure in 2008. His Japanese wife, Myoko Wakai, flew to Iceland for the funeral. A devout Buddhist and the woman’s chess champion of Japan, she and Fischer were legally married after living together for a short period. Presumably she will inherit Fischer’s sizeable fortune.

John Carlin, in an article titled “The End Game of Bobby Fischer” in the Observer/Guardian (February 10, 2008), described Fischer, during his final years, as looking like a homeless bum. “His teeth were rotten, and his white hair and beard were long and unkempt.” Bobby had a low opinion of doctors and dentists. He had all the metal fillings in his teeth removed because he thought radiation from them was injuring his health, or perhaps American or Russian enemies were causing the harmful radiation from his molars. Fischer seldom changed his clothes or removed his baseball cap. After his death in 2008 at age sixty-four, he was buried late one night near a tiny church in Iceland. A brief, shabby funeral was attended by a Catholic priest he had never known.

Fischer had an older sister, Joan, who died a few years earlier. She was the wife of Russell Targ, the physicist and parapsychologist whose chief claim to fame is having validated the psychic powers of Uri Geller.

And of course I am equally honored and grateful to Ray Hyman for his account of this year’s gathering. I wish I could have been there and renewed acquaintances with so many good friends in the worlds of mathematics and magic. Ray mentions that several mathematicians gave proofs of unusual theorems. Allow me to cite one—an unexpected proof that was of special interest to me.

In one of my early Scientific American columns I reported on the famous discovery by England’s great puzzle maker Henry E. Dudeney of a way to slice a square into as few as four pieces such that if made of wood they could be hinged to form a chain that could be unfolded then folded a different way to make an equilateral triangle! Greg Frederickson, a mathematician at Purdue, is the world’s top expert on geometric dissections. His latest book, Plano Hinged Dissections: Time to Fold! (A.K. Peters 2006), deals entirely with his discoveries of beautiful hinged dissections.

At the last gathering, Erik Demaine, a young computer scientist at MIT, explained his remarkable proof, yet to be published, that any polygon of any shape can be cut into a finite number of pieces that can be hinged to form a chain that will fold to make any other given polygon of the same area! It is a great breakthrough in hinged dissection theory. Of course the task, far from easy, is to find a way to make the chain with a minimum number of pieces. I’m told that Demaine’s presentation produced prolonged applause.

Thanks, Ray, for bringing back so many happy memories.

My acquaintance with Arthur, and my correspondence with him, arose from a mutual interest in recreational mathematics. The wall in Clarke’s early story “The Wall of Darkness” is a one-sided Moebius band. He was so intrigued by my Scientific American column on pentominoes that he wrote an article titled “Help! I’m a Pentomino Addict!” The twelve shapes played a role in one of his novels as a model of life’s endless combinatorial possibilities.

Sir Arthur not only will be remembered for his popular science fiction but also for the accuracy of his many predictions and for two memorable remarks:

“A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” and, “When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

Less well known, but my favorite, is the following: “I sometimes think that the universe is a machine designed for the perpetual astonishment of astronomers.”

Ann Coulter is an attractive writer with green eyes and lopsided, long, blonde hair, whose trademark is insulting liberals with remarks so outrageous that they make Rush Limbaugh sound like a Sunday school teacher. This is one reason why all six of her books have made The New York Times best seller list and earned her fame and fortune.

Coulter’s fifth book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, has just been issued in paperback to provide an excuse for this review. Here are some of the book’s mean, below-the-belt punches:

• Monica Lewinski is a “fat Jewish girl” (Coulter 4).
• Julia Roberts and George Clooney are “airheads” (8).
• Ted Kennedy is “Senator Drunkennedy” (90).
• The four Jersey “weeping widows” (289) of men who died in the September 11 attacks are “rabid” (103), “self-obsessed” (103), and “harpies” (112). “I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much” (103).
• Diplomat Joseph Wilson, whose wife was outed from the CIA, is a “nut and liar” (119) and a “pompous jerk” (121). He is likened to a “crazy aunt up in the attic” (295).
• Cindy Sheehan, the vocal war widow, is a “poor imbecile” (102) with an “itsy-bitsy, squeeky voice” (103).
• Katie Couric is a “shopworn sweetheart” (295).

Liberals are repeatedly called pathetic nuts and crackpots. “[They] are more upset when a tree is chopped down than when a child is aborted” (5). Apparently Coulter expects God to send most liberals to hell, because she writes, “I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven” (22).

Coulter has nothing good to say about any Democrat. They are all crazy liberals who are socialists in disguise. Her latest book is titled If Democrats Had Any Brains They’d Be Republicans. Here are a few other folks who get pummeled in Godless:

• All defenders of abortions.
• All defenders of gay marriages and those who think homosexuality is genetic.
• “Hysterical” and “ugly” feminists.
• Scientists who deny there could be subtle differences between the mental abilities of men and women and between different races.
• College professors who teach students to hate God and America.
• Opponents of capital punishment.
• Scientists who fear global warming.
• Scientists who once were afraid that AIDS would spread to heterosexuals.
• Educators who want to teach small children how to use condoms and engage in oral and anal sex.
• Opponents of nuclear power.
• The staff of The New York Times.
• Those who favor embryonic stem-cell research.
• Senator John Edwards. Coulter has never apologized for her slander against him. Speaking at a political action conference she implied (falsely, of course) that Edwards is a “faggot.” (See Wikipedia’s article on Coulter for the shameful details.)

And so on.

In the last four chapters of Godless, Coulter suddenly morphs into a science writer. The chapters are blistering attacks on Darwinian evolution—the notion that life evolved gradually from simple, one-celled forms to humans by a process that consisted of random mutations combined with the survival of the fittest. Darwin of course knew nothing about mutations, but Coulter is concerned with modern Darwinism, which she is convinced requires some sort of superior intelligence to guide evolution.

In brief, Coulter is a dedicated believer in intelligent design, or ID for short. Among promoters of ID, mathematician and Baptist William Dembski and Catholic Michael Behe are Coulter’s main heroes. Dembski, who has a degree in divinity from The Princeton Theological Seminary, was Coulter’s principal adviser on the last four chapters.

Like all IDers, nowhere does Coulter hint at how God, or a pantheistic sort of intelligence, guided evolution. There are two leading possibilities:

1. God manipulated mutations so that new species arose, culminating finally in humans.
2. God may have allowed mutations and survival of the fittest to produce different breeds of a species, such as dogs and cats, but new species were created out of whole cloth, just as it says in the Book of Genesis. Like Behe and other IDers, Coulter is silent on how God directed evolution and what sort of evidence would confirm or disconfirm the role of an intelligent designer.

This is not the place to defend in detail what Coulter likes to call the “Darwinocranks.” It has been admirably done in scores of books by top scientists, all of whom Coulter considers cranks. Peter Olofson, writing tongue in cheek on “The Coulter Hoax,” in the Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 2007), accuses Coulter of perpetrating a brilliant satire on ID rhetoric.

Let me focus instead on the transition from apelike mammals to humans. Coulter repeatedly accuses the Darwinocranks of being embarrassed by a lack of fossils that show transitional forms from one species to another. Such paucity is easily explained by the rarity of conditions for fossilization and by the fact that transitional forms can evolve rapidly. (By “rapidly” geologists mean tens of thousands of years.) Moreover, transitional fossils keep piling up as the search for them continues.

Nowhere are transitional forms more abundant than in the fossils of early human skeletons and the skeletons of their apelike ancestors. Consider the hundreds of fossils of Neanderthals. H.G. Wells, in a forgotten little book titled Mr. Belloc Objects, defends evolution against ignorant attacks by the Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc. In Chapter 4, Wells has this to say about Neanderthals:

When I heard that Mr. Belloc was going to explain and answer the Outline of History, my thought went at once to this creature. What would Mr. Belloc say of it? Would he put it before or after the Fall? Would he correct its anatomy by wonderful new science out of his safe? Would he treat it like a brother and say it held by the most exalted monotheism, or treat it as a monster made to mislead wicked men?

He says nothing! He just walks away whenever it comes near him.

But I am sure it does not leave him. In the night, if not by day, it must be asking him: “Have I a soul to save, Mr. Belloc? Is that Heidelberg jawbone one of us, Mr. Belloc, or not? You’ve forgotten me, Mr. Belloc. For four-fifths of the Paleolithic age I was ‘man.’ There was no other. I shamble and I cannot walk erect and look up at heaven as you do, Mr. Belloc, but dare you cast me to the dogs?”

No reply.

Coulter is as silent as Mr. Belloc about Neanderthals and about the even earlier, more apelike skeletons. I doubt if they trouble her sleep; I doubt if anything troubles Coulter’s sleep. Does she think there was a slow, incremental transition from apelike creatures to Cro-Magnons and other humans? Or does she believe there was a first pair of humans?

Let’s assume there was a first pair. Does Coulter think God created Adam out of the dust of the earth, as Genesis describes, then fabricated Eve from one of Adam’s ribs? Or does she accept the fact that the first humans were the outcome of slow, small changes over many centuries? If the transition was sudden, then Adam and Eve were raised and suckled by a mother who was a soulless beast!

This is a bothersome dilemma for all Christians who believe in the crossing of a sharp line from beast to human. It is a dilemma about which I once wrote a short story called “The Horrible Horns.” If interested, you can find it in my book The No-sided Professor and Other Tales of Fantasy, Humor, Mystery, and Philosophy.

We know from a footnote on page 3 of Godless that Coulter considers herself a Christian. But what sort of Christian? The word has become enormously vague. Today one can call oneself a Christian and hold beliefs that range from the fundamentalism of Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham, through the liberal views of mainline Protestant ministers and Catholic liberals such as Hans Kung and Gary Wills, to the atheism of Paul Tillich. Tillich did not believe in a personal God or an afterlife, the two central doctrines of Christ’s teachings, yet he is considered by many Protestants to be one of the world’s greatest Christian theologians!

Wikipedia’s article on Coulter quotes her as saying “Christ died for my sins. . . . Christianity fuels everything I write.” This sounds like something an evangelical Protestant would say. On the other hand, in Godless Coulter quotes a remark by G.K. Chesterton (10), who is almost never quoted today except by Catholics. Is Coulter a Protestant or Catholic? Or some other kind of Christian?

Although I am not a Catholic, allow me to cite a famous passage from Chesterton’s introduction to his book Heretics:

But there are some people, nevertheless—and I am one of them—who think that the most practical and important thing about a man is still his view of the universe. We think that for a landlady considering a lodger, it is important to know his income, but still more important to know his philosophy. We think that for a general about to fight an an enemy, it is important to know the enemy’s numbers, but still more important to know the enemy’s philosophy. We think the question is not whether the theory of the cosmos affects matters, but whether, in the long run, anything else affects them.

Coulter, you are merciless in bashing liberals and atheists, so please let us know what church you attend. It would clear the air and shed light on the background for all your insults, especially your blasts at Darwinians.

Here’s another simple question to ponder:

Why do you suppose god provided men with nipples?

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.

“Dr.” Bearden is fond of putting PhD after his name. An Internet check revealed that his doctorate was given, in his own words, for “life experience and life accomplishment.” It was purchased from a diploma mill called Trinity College and University—a British institution with no building, campus, faculty, or president, and run from a post office box in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The institution’s owner, one Albert Wainwright, calls himself the college “registrant.”

Bearden’s central message is clear and simple. He is persuaded that it is possible to extract unlimited free energy from the vacuum of space-time. Indeed, he believes the world is on the brink of its greatest technological revolution. Forget about nuclear reactors. Vacuum energy will rescue us from global warming, eliminate poverty, and provide boundless clean energy for humanity’s glorious future. All that is needed now is for the scientific community to abandon its “ostrich position” and allow adequate funding to Bearden and his associates.

To almost all physicists this quest for what is called “zero-point energy” (ZPE) is as hopeless as past efforts to build perpetual motion machines. Such skepticism drives Bearden up a wall. Only monumental ignorance, he writes, could prompt such criticism.

The nation’s number two drumbeater for ZPE is none other than Harold Puthoff, who runs a think tank in Austin, Texas, where efforts to tap ZPE have been underway for years. In December 1997, to its shame, Scientific American ran an article praising Puthoff for his efforts. Nowhere did this article mention his dreary past.

Puthoff began his career as a dedicated Scientologist. He had been de¬clared a “clear”—a person free of malicious “engrams” recorded on his brain while he was an embryo. At Stanford Research International, Puthoff and his then-friend Russell Targ claimed to have validated “remote viewing” (a new name for distant clairvoyance), and also the great psi powers of Uri Geller. (See my chapter on Puthoff’s search for ZPE in Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?, Norton 2000.)

Bearden sprinkles his massive volume with admirable quotations from top physicists, past and present, occasionally correcting mistakes made by Einstein and others. For example, Bearden be¬lieves that the graviton moves much faster than the speed of light. He praises the work of almost every counterculture physicist of recent decades. He admires David Bohm’s “quantum potential” and Mendel Sach’s unified field theory. Oliver Heaviside and Nikola Tesla are two of his heroes.

Bearden devotes several chapters to antigravity machines. Here is a sample of his views:

In our approach to antigravity, one way to approach the problem is to have the mechanical apparatus also the source of an intense negative energy EM field, producing an intense flux of Dirac sea holes into and in the local surrounding space-time. The excess charge removed from the Dirac holes can in fact be used in the electrical powering of the physical system, as was demonstrated in the Sweet VTA antigravity test. Then movements of the mechanical parts could involve movement of strong negative energy fields, hence strong curves of local space-time that are local strong negative gravity fields. Or, better yet, movement of the charges themselves will also produce field-induced movement of the Dirac sea hole negative energy. This appears to be a practical method to manipulate the metric itself, along the lines proposed by Puthoff et al. [217]

The 217 superscript refers to a footnote about a 2002 paper by Puthoff and two friends on how to use the vacuum field to power spacecraft. Bearden’s anti-gravity pro¬pulsion system is neatly diagrammed on page 319. “Negatively charged local space-time,” says the diagram, “acts back upon source vehicle producing anti-gravity and unilateral thrust.”

In the 1950s, numerous distinguished writers, artists, and even philosophers (e.g., Paul Goodman, William Steig, and Paul Edwards) sat nude in Wilhelm Reich’s “orgone accumulators” to absorb the healing rays of “orgone energy” coming from outer space. Bearden suspects (in footnote 78) that orgone energy “is really the transduction of the time-polarized photon energy into normal photon energy. We are assured by quantum field theory and the great negentropy solution to the source charge problem that the instantaneous scalar potential in¬volves this process.” I doubt if the Reichians, who are still around, will find this illuminating.

To my amazement Bearden has good things to say about the notorious “Dean drive”—a rotary motion device designed to propel spaceships by inertia. It was promoted by John Campbell when he edited Astounding Science Fiction, a magazine that unleashed L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics on a gullible public and made Hubbard a millionaire. Only elementary physics is needed to show that no inertial drive can move a spaceship in frictionless space. On pages 448—453 Bearden lists eighty patents for inertial drives. They have one feature in common: none of them works.

Counterculture scientists tend to be bitter over the “establishment’s” inability to recognize their genius. Was not Galileo, they like to repeat, persecuted for his great discoveries? This bitterness is sometimes accompanied by paranoid fears, not just of conspiracies to silence them, but also fears of being murdered. Bearden’s pages 406—453 are devoted to just such delusions.

Several kinds of “shooters” are described that induce fatal heart attacks. He himself, Bearden writes, has been hit by such devices. An associate, Stan Meyer, died after a “possible” hit by a close-range shooter. Another ZPE researcher was killed by a bazooka-size shooter. Steve Marikov, still another researcher, was assaulted by a sophisticated shooter and his body thrown off a rooftop to make it appear a suicide. When his body was removed, the pavement “glowed.”

One day at a Texas airport a person three feet from Bearden was killed with symptoms suggesting he was murdered by an ice-dart dipped in curare! “That was apparently just to teach me ‘they’ were serious.” The colonel goes on to explain that “they” refers to a “High Cabal” who were offended by a friend’s “successful transmutation of copper (and other things) into gold. . . . We have had numerous other assassination attempts, too numerous to reiterate. . . . Over the years probably as many as fifty or more overunity researchers and inventors have been assassinated . . . some have simply disappeared abruptly and never have been heard from since.” Overunity is Bearden’s term for machines with energy outputs that exceed energy inputs.

Any significant researcher should be wary of “meeting with a sudden suicide” on the way to the supermarket. Another thing to beware of, is a calibrated auto accident where your car is rammed from the rear, and you are shaken up considerably. An ambulance just happens to be passing by moments later, and it will take you to the hospital. If still conscious, the researcher must not get in the ambulance unless accompanied by a watchful friend who understands the situation and the danger. Otherwise, he can easily get a syringe of air into his veins, which will effectively turn him into a human vegetable. If he goes to the hospital safely, he must be guarded by friends day and night, for the same reason, else he runs a high risk of the “air syringe” assassination during the night.

Simply trying to do scientific work, I find it necessary to often carry (legally) a hidden weapon. Both my wife and I have gun permits, and we frequently and legally carry concealed weapons.

As early as the 1930s, T. Henry Moray—who built a successful COp<1.0 power system outputting 50kW from a 55 lb power unit—had to ride in a bulletproof car in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was repeatedly fired at by snipers from the buildings or sidewalk, with the bullets sometimes sticking in the glass. He was also shot by a would-be assassin in his own laboratory, but overpowered his assassin and recovered.

Obviously, I’m not competent to wade through Bearden’s almost a thousand pages to point out what physicists tell me are howlers. I leave that task to experts, though I suspect very few will consider it worth their time even to read the book. To me, a mere science journalist, the book’s dense, pompous jargon sounds like hilarious technical double-talk. The book’s annotated glossary runs to more than 120 pages. There are 305 footnotes, 754 endnotes, and a valuable seventy-three-page index.

The back cover calls the book “the definitive energy book of the twenty-first century.” In my opinion it is destined to be the greatest work of outlandish science in both this and the previous century. It is much funnier, for instance, than Frank Tipler’s best-seller of a few decades ago, The Physics of Immortality.

There be nothing so absurd but that some philosopher [or cosmologist? -M.G.] has said it.

—Cicero

The American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce somewhere remarked that unfortunately universes are not as plentiful as blackberries. One of the most astonishing of recent trends in science is that many top physicists and cosmologists now defend the wild notion that not only are universes as common as blackberries, but even more common. Indeed, there may be an infinity of them!

It all began seriously with an approach to quantum mechanics (QM) called “The Many Worlds Interpretation” (MWI). In this view, widely defended by such eminent physicists as Murray Gell-Mann, Stephen Hawking, and Steven Weinberg, at every instant when a quantum measurement is made that has more than one possible outcome, the number specified by what is called the Schrödinger equation, the universe splits into two or more universes, each corresponding to a possible future. Everything that can happen at each juncture happens. Time is no longer linear. It is a rapidly branching tree. Obviously the number of separate universes increases at a prodigious rate.

If all these countless billions of parallel universes are taken as no more than abstract mathematical entities-worlds that could have formed but didn't-then the only “real” world is the one we are in. In this interpretation of the MWI the theory becomes little more than a new and whimsical language for talking about QM. It has the same mathematical formalism, makes the same predictions. This is how Hawking and many others who favor the MWI interpret it. They prefer it because they believe it is a language that simplifies QM talk, and also sidesteps many of its paradoxes.

There is, however, a more bizarre way to interpret the MWI. Those holding what I call the realist view actually believe that the endlessly sprouting new universes are “out there,” in some sort of vast super-space-time, just as “real” as the universe we know! Of course at every instant a split occurs each of us becomes one or more close duplicates, each traveling a new universe. We have no awareness of this happening because the many universes are not causally connected. We simply travel along the endless branches of time’s monstrous tree in a series of universes, never aware that billions upon billions of our replicas are springing into existence somewhere out there. “When you come to a fork in the road,” Yogi Berra once said, “take it.”

It is true that the MWI, in this realist form, avoids some of the paradoxes of QM. The so-called “measurement problem,” for example, is no longer a problem because whenever a measurement occurs, there is no “collapse of the wave function” (or rotation of the state vector in a different terminology). All possible outcomes take place. Schrödinger’s notorious cat is never in a mixed state of alive and dead. It lives in one universe, dies in another. But what a fantastic price is paid for these seeming simplicities! It is hard to imagine a more radical violation of Occam’s razor, the law of parsimony which urges scientists to keep entities to a minimum.

The MWI was first put forth by Hugh Everett III in a Princeton doctoral thesis written for John Wheeler in 1956. It was soon taken up and elaborated by Bryce DeWitt. For several years John Wheeler defended his student’s theory, but finally decided it was “on the wrong track,” no more than a bizarre language for QM and one that carried “too much metaphysical baggage.” However, recent polls show that about half of all QM experts now favor the theory, though it is seldom clear whether they think the other worlds are physically real or just abstractions such as numbers and triangles. Apparently both Everett and DeWitt took the realist approach. Roger Penrose is among many famous physicists who find the MWI appalling. The late Irish physicist John S. Bell called the MWI “grotesque” and just plain “silly.” Most working physicists simply ignore the theory as nonsense.

In an article on “Quantum Mechanics and Reality” (in Physics Today, September 1970), DeWitt wrote with vast understatement about his first reaction to Everett’s thesis: “I still recall vividly the shock I experienced on first encountering the multiworld concept. The idea of 10¹⁰⁰⁺ slightly imperfect copies of oneself all constantly splitting into further copies, which ultimately become unrecognizable, is not easy to reconcile with common sense. This is schizophrenia with a vengeance!”

In the MWI, most of its defenders agree, there is no room for free will. The multiverse, the universe of all universes, develops strictly along determinist lines, always obeying the deterministically evolving Schrödinger equation. This equation is a monstrous wave function which never collapses unless it is observed and collapsed by an intelligence outside the multiverse, namely God.

In recent years David Deutsch, a quantum physicist at Oxford University, has become the top booster of the MWI in its realist form. He believes that quantum computers, using atoms or photons and operating in parallel with computers in nearby parallel worlds, can be trillions of times faster than today’s computers. He is convinced that many famous QM paradoxes, such as the double slit experiment and a similar one involving two half-silvered mirrors, are best explained by assuming an interaction with twin particles in a parallel world almost identical with our own. For example, in the double slit experiment, when both slits are open, our particle goes through one slit while its twin from the other world goes through the other slit to produce the interference pattern on the screen.

Deutsch calls our particle the “tangible” one, and the particle coming from the other world a “shadow” particle. Of course in the adjacent universe our particle is the shadow of their tangible particle. Because communication between universes is impossible, it is hard to imagine why a particle would bother to jump from one universe to another just to produce interference.

Deutsch believes that the results of calculating simultaneously in parallel worlds can somehow be brought back here to coalesce. Critics argue that QM paradoxes, as well as quantum computers, are just as easily explained by conventional theory or by such rivals as the pilot wave theory of David Bohm. In any case, Deutsch’s 1997 book The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes-and Its Implications is the most vigorous defense yet of a realistic MWI.

Deutsch is fully aware that the MWI forces him to accept the reality of endless copies of himself out there in the infinity of other worlds. “I may feel subjectively,” he writes (p. 53), “that I am distinguished among the copies as the 'tangible' one, because I can directly perceive myself and not the others, but I must come to terms with the fact that all the others feel the same about themselves. Many of those Davids are at this moment writing these very words. Some are putting it better. Others have gone for a cup of tea.” And he is puzzled by the fact that so few physicists are as enthralled as he about the MWI!

Theoretical and experimental work on quantum computers is now a complex, controversial, rapidly growing field with Deutsch as its pioneer and leading theoretician. You can keep up with this research by clicking on Oxford’s Centre for Quantum Computation’s Web site www.qubit.org.

The MWI should not be confused with a more recent concept of a multiverse proposed by Andrei Linde, a Russian physicist now at Stanford University, as well as by a few other cosmologists such as England’s Martin Rees. This multiverse is essentially a response to the anthropic argument that there must be a Creator because our universe has so many basic physical constants so finely tuned that, if any one deviated by a tiny fraction, stars and planets could not form-let alone life appear on a planet. The implication is that such fine tuning implies an intelligent tuner.

Linde’s multiverse goes like this. Every now and then, whatever that means, a quantum fluctuation precipitates a Big Bang. A universe with its own space-time springs into existence with randomly selected values for its constants. In most of these universes those values will not permit the formation of stars and life. They simply drift aimlessly down their rivers of time. However, in a very small set of universes the constants will be just right to allow creatures like you and me to evolve. We are here not because of any overhead intelligent planning but simply because we happen by chance to be one of the universes properly tuned to allow life to get started.

David Lewis

We come now to a third kind of multiverse, by far the wildest of the three. It has been set forth not by a scientist but by a peculiar philosopher, now at Princeton University, named David Lewis. In his best-known book, The Plurality of Worlds (Oxford, 1986), and other writings, Lewis seriously maintains that every logically possible universe-that is, one with no logical contradictions such as square circles-is somewhere out there. The notion of logical possible worlds, by the way, goes back to Leibniz’s Theodicy. He speculated that God considered all logically possible worlds, then created the one He deemed best for His purposes.

Both the MWI and Lewis’s possible worlds allow time travel into the past. You need never encounter the paradox of killing yourself, yet you are still alive, because as soon as you enter your past the universe splits into a new one in which you and your duplicate coexist.

Most of Lewis’s worlds do not contain any replicas of you, but if they do they can be as weird as you please. You can't, of course, simultaneously have five fingers on each hand and seven on each hand because that would be logically contradictory. But you could have a hundred fingers, and a dozen arms, or seven heads. Any world you can think of without contradiction is real. Can pigs fly? Certainly. There is nothing contradictory about pigs with wings. In an infinity of possible worlds there are lands of Oz, Greek gods on Mount Olympus, anything you can imagine. Every novel is a possible world. Somewhere millions of Ahabs are chasing whales. Somewhere millions of Huckleberry Finns are floating down rivers. Every kind of universe exists if it is logically consistent.

David Lewis’s mad multiverse was anticipated by hordes of science-fiction writers long before the MWI of QM came from Everett’s brain. More recent examples include Larry Nivens’s 1969 story “All the Myriad Ways” and Frederick Pohl’s 1986 novel The Coming of the Quantum Cats. Jorge Luis Borges played with the theme in his story ”The Garden of Forking Paths.” There is a quotation from this tale at the front of The Many Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (1973), a standard reference by DeWitt and Neill Graham. For other examples of multiverses in science fiction and fantasy see the entry on “Parallel Worlds” in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1995) by John Clute and Peter Nichols.

Fredric Brown, in What Mad Universe (1950), described Lewis’s multiverse this way:

There are, then, an infinite number of coexistent universes.

“They include this one and the one you came from. They are equally real, and equally true. But do you conceive what an infinity of universes means, Keith Winton?”

“Well-yes and no.”

“It means that, out of infinity, all conceivable universes exist.

“There is, for instance, a universe in which this exact scene is being repeated except that you-or the equivalent of you-are wearing brown shoes instead of black ones.

“There are an infinite number of permutations of that variation, such as one in which you have a slight scratch on your left forefinger and one in which you have purple horns and-”

“But are they all me?”

Mekky said, “No, none of them is you-any more than the Keith Winton in this universe is you. I should not have used that pronoun. They are separate individual entities. As the Keith Winton here is; in this particular variation, there is a wide physical difference-no resemblance, in fact.”

Keith said thoughtfully, “If there are infinite universes, then all possible combinations must exist. Then, somewhere, everything must be true.”

“And there are an infinite number of universes, of course, in which we don't exist at all-that is, no creatures similar to us exist at all. In which the human race doesn't exist at all. There are an infinite number of universes, for instance, in which flowers are the predominant form of life-or in which no form of life has ever developed or will develop.

“And infinite universes in which the states of existence are such that we would have no words or thoughts to describe them or to imagine them.”

I have here looked at only the three most important versions of a multiverse. There are others, less well known, such as Penn State’s Lee Smolin’s universes which breed and evolve in a manner similar to Darwinian theory. For a good look at all the multiverses now being proposed, see British philosopher John Leslie’s excellent book Universes (1989).

I find it hard to believe that so many academics take Lewis’s possible worlds seriously. As poet Armand T. Ringer has put it in a clerihew:

David Lewis
Is a philosopher who is
Crazy enough to insist
That all logically possible worlds actually exist.

Alex Oliver, reviewing Lewis’s Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology, in The London Times Literary Supplement (January 7, 2000), closes by calling Lewis “the leading metaphysician at the start of this century, head and beard above his contemporaries.”

The stark truth is that there is not the slightest shred of reliable evidence that there is any universe other than the one we are in. No multiverse theory has so far provided a prediction that can be tested. In my layman’s opinion they are all frivolous fantasies. As far as we can tell, universes are not as plentiful as even two blackberries. Surely the conjecture that there is just one universe and its Creator is infinitely simpler and easier to believe than that there are countless billions upon billions of worlds, constantly increasing in number and created by nobody. I can only marvel at the low state to which today’s philosophy of science has fallen.

I never cease to be amazed by how easily a set of beliefs, no matter how bizarre, will pass from parents to children, and on to grandchildren. I suspect that the vast majority of true believers in every major religion have parents and grandparents of the same faith. It is rare indeed when sons and daughters make a clean break with strongly held fundamental beliefs of their parents.

This was brought home to me recently when E. Patrick Curry, a retired computer engineer, now a consumer health advocate in Pittsburgh, sent me a batch of material about Elisabeth Targ, daughter of the paraphysicist Russell Targ. Readers of SI will recall how the team of Targ and his paraphysicist friend Harold Puthoff made a big splash in parapsychological circles in the 1970s. They claimed to have established beyond any doubt that almost everybody is capable of “remote viewing,” their term for what used to be called clairvoyance. In addition, they claimed they had validated Uri Geller’s psychic ability to remote-view pictures, and his ability to control the fall of dice by PK (psychokinesis). They sat on the fence about Uri’s ability to bend spoons and keys because they were never able to capture the actual bending on film. Some parapsychologists called this a “shyness effect.”

Russell inherited his psi beliefs from his father, William Targ. When I lived in Chicago I used to visit the father’s bookstore on North Clark Street, a store he opened when he was twenty-two. It had a large section devoted to books about the paranormal and the occult. After working for a time as an editor for World Publishing Company, in Cleveland, Targ moved to Putnam in Manhattan where he rose to editor-in-chief. His entertaining autobiography, Indecent Pleasures, was published in 1975. At Putnam Targ was responsible for many best-sellers, including Erich von Däniken’s notorious Chariots of the Gods. (In his autobiography Targ calls it a “quasi-scientific” work on archaeology.) Under his editorship Putnam also published a raft of books about psychic phenomena, such as Susy Smith’s Book of James in which she reports on channeled messages from the spirit of William James. Targ died in 1999, at age ninety-two. His original name was William Torgownic, taken from his parents when they came from Russia to settle in Chicago where he was born.

William Targ’s beliefs in the paranormal trickled down to his son Russell, and now they have descended on Russell’s attractive and energetic daughter Elisabeth. Her mother Joan, by the way, is the sister of chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer. Elisabeth is a practicing psychiatrist with an M.D. from Stanford University, and psychiatric training at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. Ms. Targ is firmly convinced that persons have the power to use psi energy to heal the sick over long distances even when they don't know the sick but only see their photographs and are given their names.

Elisabeth first participated in psi experiments when she was a teenager. On page ninety-six of The Mind Race (1984), a book by Russell Targ and his former psychic friend Keith Harary, Elisabeth is identified as a medical student at Stanford, and an “experienced psi-experimenter and remote viewer.” In 1970 she took part in a series of what the authors call successful experiments with a psi-teaching machine. She is said to have recently obtained degrees in biology and Russian.

The authors describe a curious experiment in which Elisabeth correctly predicted in September 1980 that Reagan would win the November election for president. Here is how the test worked.

Ms. Targ’s friend Janice Boughton selected four objects to represent the four possible outcomes of the election: Carter wins, Reagan wins, Anderson wins, or none of the above. Each object, its identity unknown to Elisabeth, was put in a small wooden box. Boughton then asked Ms. Targ, “What object will I hand to you at twelve o'clock on election night?”

Elisabeth then predicted the election’s outcome by remote-viewing the object she would be given. Her description of the object was white, hollow, conical, with a string attached to the cone’s apex. The object that correlated with Reagan’s victory was a conical shaped whistle with a string attached to one end.

Of course six weeks later Ms. Targ had to be handed the box with the whistle. Otherwise, as the book’s authors put it, the initial question would have been meaningless.

A similar test of Elisabeth’s ability to remote-view a future event involved a horse race at Bay Meadows. On the night before the race, six objects, unknown to Ms. Targ, were assigned numbers that corresponded with numbers on the six horses in the race. As before, Elisabeth was told that at the end of the race she would be given the object that correlated with the winning horse.

Ms. Targ predicted the race’s outcome by visualizing something hard and spherical that reminded her of an apple and was transparent. One of the objects was an apple juice bottle. It had been assigned the number on a horse named Shamgo. Shamgo won. Naturally, after the race Elisabeth had to be handed the apple juice bottle to make sense of the experiment.

What a skeptic would like to see would be a transcript of everything Elisabeth said when she was describing the target. Did she say much more than the remarks quoted by her father and his coauthor? If so, there may have been a selection of just those remarks that seemed to describe the target. But I'm only guessing. Also, were there similar tests that failed? One in four, and one in six, are not low probabilities.

There is more about Elisabeth in the book. In May 1982 she and her father conducted a workshop at the Esalen Institute during which successful remote vision tests were carried out with Ms. Targ participating.

Elizabeth Targ is now the acting director of the Complementary Medicine Research Institute (CMRI). It is part of the California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC), in turn part of the University of California School of Medicine. Her institute is devoted to investigating such alternative forms of healing as acupuncture, acupressure, remote healing, therapeutic touch, herbal remedies, meditation, yoga, chi gong, guided imagery, and prayer. The institute’s literature does not mention homeopathy, reflexology, iridology, urine therapy, magnet therapy, and other extreme forms of alternative healing. Apparently they are too outlandish to merit investigation.

In 1998 Ms. Targ received $15,000 from the Templeton Foundation, an organization established by billionaire John Templeton, an evangelical Presbyterian who showers cash on persons and organizations he thinks are promoting religion. His interest in Ms. Targ’s institute springs from her research supporting the healing power of prayer.

In a speech on distant healing that Ms. Targ gave at the Second Annual International Conference on Science and Consciousness, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, April 29-May 3, 2000, she reported that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) now provides funds for research on “distant mental influence on biological organisms.” Of more than 135 studies of distant healing on biological organisms, she said, about two-thirds reported significant results. One fascinating study, she added, concerned remote healing of tumors on mice. The study showed that the healers who were farthest from the mice had the greatest influence in shrinking the tumors!

Ms. Targ has received $800,000 from the Department of Defense to head a four-year study of the effects of alternative healings on patients with breast cancer. The complementary healings include yoga, guided imagery, movement and art therapy, and others. “We are getting told that we can't study this,” she said, “but the beauty of the scientific method is that we can. We can determine if it works-and if so, for whom and how.”

CRMI’s main achievement so far is a six-month double-blind study of the effects of remote healing on forty patients in the San Francisco Bay area who had advanced AIDS. Forty practicing healers were recruited for the study from healing traditions that included Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Native American shamans, and graduates of “bioenergetic” schools. They were given photographs of the AIDS victims, their first names, and their blood counts.

For an hour every day, over a ten-week period, the healers directed their psi energy to the patients by using prayer or meditation. The experiment was supported by the Institute of Noetic Studies, founded by astronaut Edgar Mitchell, a true believer in all varieties of psychic phenomena, including the powers of Uri Geller, and by New York City’s Parapsychology Foundation.

Ms. Targ and three associates reported the results of the experiment in a paper titled “A Randomized Double-Blind Study of the Effects of Distant Healing in a Population with Advanced AIDS.” It was published in the prestigious Western Journal of Medicine (December 1998). The authors claim that the twenty AIDS patients who received the healing energy (without knowing they had been selected for such treatment), showed significantly better improvement than the twenty patients in the control group who did not receive the energy. As one report summarized the progress of the group receiving the energy, they had “fewer and less severe new illnesses, fewer doctor visits, fewer hospitalizations, and improved mood.”

The NIH, through its National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), has provided funding for Ms. Targ to conduct a three-year study of distant healing on 150 HIV patients. The funding for the first year alone is $243,228, with a starting date of July 1, 2000. The NCCAM has also funded a four-year project to study the effect of distant healing on persons with a brain tumor called glioblastoma. The starting date was September 18, 2000, with a first-year grant of $202,596. Both studies, Ms. Targ said, will be double blind. It looks as though Ms. Targ, over the next few years, will be receiving more than two million dollars of government funds for her research on remote healing, the cash coming from our taxes.

Ms. Targ is the author of “Evaluating Distant Healing: A Research Review,” published in Alternative Therapies (Vol. 3, November 1997), and in the same issue, “Research in Distant Healing Intentionality Is Feasible and Deserves a Place in Our Healing Research Agenda.” The executive editor of Alternative Therapies is Dr. Larry Dossey, who started the distant healing research with his 1993 book Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine.

Although Ms. Targ is firmly persuaded that distant healing works, she confesses that no one has any notion of how a healer and healee can be connected over long distances. She closes the second paper just cited with these words: “The connection could be through the agency of God, consciousness, love, electrons, or a combination. The answers to such questions await future research.”

Russell Targ’s first book, Mind Reach, coauthored by Puthoff, is about their tests of remote viewing when they worked for SRI International (then called the Stanford Research Institute). Margaret Mead wrote the book’s introduction. Targ’s second book, Mind Race, was written, as I said earlier, with psychic Keith Harary. His third book Miracles of Mind: Exploring Nonlocal Consciousness and Spiritual Healing, published in 1998 by World Library, is coauthored with Jane Katra, a psychic healer.

The first half of Miracles of Mind covers the history of remote viewing, including high praise for Upton Sinclair’s book Mental Radio about his wife’s ability to remote view his drawings. The second half of Miracles of Mind is about psychic healing. Targ believes that such healing, especially healing at a distance, is related to the “interconnectedness” of all things by a quantum field such as the nonlocal field of David Bohm’s guided wave theory of quantum mechanics.

Miracles of Mind is a strange book. Some chapters are written by Targ, others by Jane Katra. In a few chapters it is hard to tell who is writing. Almost every person engaged in parapsychological research is favorably mentioned, including such far-out paranormalists as Jule Eisenbud, Andrija Puharich, Jeffrey Mishlove, Joe McMoneagle, and many others.

Katra owes an enormous debt to theosophy. She speaks admiringly of Madame Blavatsky, theosophy’s founder, as well as England’s leading theosophists Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater. I could hardly believe it, but the book cites (page 94) Occult Chemistry, a weird 1898 book by Besant and Leadbeater which describes Leadbeater’s clairvoyant probing of the interior of atoms. He is actually credited with having first discovered by clairvoyance that hydrogen has three isotopes!

Miracles of Mind takes seriously such paranormal phenomena as out-of-body travel, near-death experiences, chakras (imaginary energy points in the human body), the Akashik Records (on which all Earthly events are recorded), the visions of Edgar Cayce, and the paranormal powers of Philippine psychic surgeons (to which Katra devotes an entire chapter). There are favorable references to The Course in Miracles, a monstrous, vapid tome said to have been dictated by Jesus. Also mentioned without criticism are the powers of Arigo, Brazil’s famous psychic surgeon who operated with his “rusty knife” on thousands of patients, following instructions whispered in his left ear by a dead German physician.

Targ credits Jane with having stimulated a seemingly miraculous remission of what had been diagnosed (by whom?) as metastic cancer. “I have been well for the five years since Jane did healing treatments with me,” Targ writes. “We will never know if I actually had metastic cancer, or if it was a misdiagnosis. What we do know for sure is that Jane’s interactions with me saved me from chemotherapy, which quite likely would have killed me. . . . Did they [his doctors] tell a well man that he had a terminal disease, or did a man with a terminal disease recover through the ministrations of a spiritual healer?” Targ has no doubt that it was Jane Katra who healed him.

The following paragraphs from one of Patrick Curry’s letters sum up well the distant healing trend in which Ms. Targ is playing so prominent a role:

The rise of Elisabeth Targ’s distant healing studies is not a mere example of defective science leaking into medicine . . . it is a leading wedge of a nascent mystical movement that has been gathering tremendous steam in recent years. The parapsychological enterprise has taken on a new life in its alliance with alternative medicine and the consciousness movement. What we have is a very productive alliance of parapsychologists, old-fashioned mystics, new-fashioned mystics, and psychedelic mystics that has gotten a major foothold in medicine.

Their presence is extraordinarily strong within NCCAM (National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine) and other alternative-oriented sections of NIH (National Institutes of Health). There is a growing presence at dozens of major medical schools, especially Harvard. . . . They have primary devotion not to the ethics of science but to their own belief that they have a mission in serving the New Consciousness. Distortion, and exaggeration of all sorts, are ignored in devotion to their belief in the new paradigm.