I’ve never considered myself to be a skeptic. While not big on labels, when push comes to shove, I usually call myself an atheist or a bright. Since I never cared about the possible existence of Bigfoot or the reasons people believe they’ve been abducted by aliens, I’d never read any of Michael Shermer’s books about skepticism.

A few weeks ago, as I was just getting into Why People Believe Weird Things for the SkepLit discussion, a friend of mine told me that her mother has been having visitations from spirits during the night. She wakes up, often after having heard her doorbell or phone ring, she sometimes can't move, and sees a person or being standing over her or near the foot of her bed. She is elderly and lives alone, and has been so terrified that she was afraid to sleep in her own bed and was considering consulting a psychic for help.

I remembered reading about something like this in Shermer's book, so I flipped through until I found the information. In the section on pseudo-science, Shermer discusses a phenomena called sleep paralysis, that is often associated with hallucinations that sound just like the apparitions my friends mother has been seeing. (It seems that these hallucinations are most often interpreted as alien abductions.)

I posted a question about this in the Skepchick forum, did a Google search, and sent the information I found to my friend. She replied almost immediately and said, “Thank you so much!!! I am really indebted to you for looking up this information. I just now got a chance to read this email and I haven't yet read the links. I will foreward them to my mother immediately... This is such a huge relief to know that other people suffer the same experience and that it even has a medical diagnosis.”

It was a lesson to me about how having esoteric information at your fingertips is more than just a hobby, it can actually help people.

Last month, when we started discussing Why People Believe Weird Things, I sent a few questions to Michael Shermer via email. In this interview, he explains why these seemingly trivial issues are important, gives some insights into his thoughts about science and religion, and talks about how we can make skepticism fun and fulfilling.

SKEPLIT: The School Library Journal rates Why People Believe Weird Things as a young-adult book. In the first paragraph of chapter one you wrote, “In their early years, children are knowledge junkies, questioning everything in their purview, though exhibiting little skepticism. Most never learn to distinguish between skepticism and credulity. It took me a long time.” Did you intentionally write Why People Believe Weird Things with young people in mind?

SHERMER: No, but I’m thrilled to death (or at least into a near-death experience) to know that the School Library Journal rates my book as a young-adult book, since that means we’ll be reaching the next generation of critical thinkers, which is sorely needed. When I got involved in the skeptics movement in the mid-1980s it was mostly populated by old white guys complaining about the irrationality of the world (they did, admittedly, have a lot of data to support their views). Since then we have worked hard to bring in new people, young people, people of color, people of gender, people…

SKEPLIT: What do you see as the biggest challenges to teaching science and critical thinking to young people today?

SHERMER: Making it interesting and fun and sexy and cool. I don’t even like the label “critical thinking.” Sounds boring. This is why using skeptical materials on all the goofy stuff, like UFOs and aliens, big foot and Loch Ness, ESP and PSI, OBEs and NDEs, conspiracy theories and government cover-ups, and the like grabs people’s attention and gets them thinking about what is real and what is not, and then that allows us to talk about what tools we have to tell the difference between science and…pseudoscience, junk science, bad science, voodoo science, pathological science, non-science, and plane old nonsense. That tool is science, the greatest instrument ever devised for baloney detection.

SKEPLIT: Stephen Jay Gould wrote the foreward to Why People Believe Weird Things. Gould was one of my favorite writers and I’ve missed hearing his voice on the page since he died in 2002. Did you know him personally?

SHERMER: Yes, Steve was a good friend and long-time supporter of the skeptical movement in general and Skeptic magazine in particular. He was warm and witty and brilliant, the smartest guy I ever met. A remarkable memory, incredible vocabulary, and the ability to grasp the most difficult concepts seemingly instantly and then push beyond them with his own original contributions. I think the best chapter in Why People Believe Weird Things is his foreword!

SKEPLIT: In his book, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, Gould claimed that science and religion addressed two completely separate realms of knowledge, or “non-overlapping magesteria”, and that the two could exist in peace. Do you agree with this idea?

SHERMER: It depends on what claim is being made. For the most part, science and religion are about as related to one another as baseball and plumbing. Science is a verb, a thing that you do in order to figure something out about the world, in order to answer a question or solve a problem. It is a method, not a thing. Religion isn’t anything like this. Theology, maybe, on certain questions, but theology has no methods by which to get at answers to questions, other than philosophic disputation. But the idea of hypothesis testing is foreign to religion and theology, whereas it is central to science. So as long as religious people and theologians do not make any testable claims, there can be no conflict between science and religion; but when claims are made like prayer and healing, or that the Bible proves that the world was created within the last 10,000 years, or that the structure of DNA or bacteria flagellum proves that there is a god, then that is fair game for science to investigate. And so far, whenever religion has been put to the test in this manner, it has failed the test. So, from a religious perspective, it is best to stay clear of science altogether

SKEPLIT: How do you think science and religion can work together in modern society with positive results?

SHERMER: Religion does a lot of good with regard to helping people in need. Science does not do that because it is not designed to do that; religion is, and so it should be free to do so. However, with that freedom religion cannot be allowed to receive public/government help. They can solicit all the private funds they like to help their various causes, but not public money. If I were religious, I would embrace the findings of science as revealing the glory of God’s creation in a manner the likes of which have never been seen in history. If God created the universe, stars, galaxies, planets, etc., what could be more spiritually enlightening and uplifting than the photographs taken by the Hubble space telescope? Awe-inspiring indeed. Science should not be thought of as a threat to religion.

SKEPLIT: The second edition of Why People Believe Weird Things includes a new chapter called “Why Smart People Believe Weird Things.” As a skeptic and a bright, it’s very easy for me to fall into the trap of thinking that I’m smart and that people who believe in the supernatural are either dumb or ignorant. But I was brought up as a born-again Christian and have believed many different weird things myself over the course of my lifetime. I read that you were once a fundamentalist Christian as well. Is that true?

SHERMER: It is true, although I was not raised religious. I became a born-again Christian in 1971, in High School, mainly because several of my close friends were caught up in what was called the “Jesus movement.” We are called “Jesus freaks” (by no less than my sister!). My parents were nonreligious (but not atheists, just not theists). I gave up my religion in 1977. Here is what I wrote about that period in my life, from the Prologue to my next book, Why Darwin Matters, which will be published in September:
I was a creationist from the time I became a born-again Christian in high school in 1971, through graduate school in 1977. The evangelical movement was just gathering momentum in the 1970s, and one of the central dogmas I took from it was that the biblical story of creation was to be taken literally; ergo, the theory of evolution had to be wrong.

Knowing next to nothing about evolution other than what I gleaned from reading creationist literature, I absorbed the arguments against the theory and practiced them on my undergraduate science and philosophy teachers. At Glendale College, where I attended for the first two years for General Education requirements, my debating skills were honed as my creationist arguments were met with firm evolutionist counterarguments. At Pepperdine University, a Church of Christ institution where I finished my undergraduate degree, evolution was a nonentity as I witnessed for Christ and studied the theological underpinnings of the Christian faith. When I arrived at Pepperdine, in fact, I considered theology as a profession, but when I discovered that a doctorate required proficiency in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and Aramaic, and knowing that foreign languages were not my strong suit (I struggled through two years of high school Spanish), I switched to psychology and mastered one of the languages of science: statistics. By the time I matriculated at the California State University at Fullerton for graduate training in experimental psychology, I was ensconced in the ways of science.

In science, there are ways to get at solutions to problems for which we can establish parameters to determine whether a hypothesis is probably right (such as rejecting the null hypothesis at the 0.01 level of significance) or definitely wrong (not statistically significant). Instead of the rhetoric and disputation of theology, there was the logic and probabilities of science. What a difference this difference in thinking makes. In graduate school, I took a bevy of courses in research methods and statistics, and for recreation I signed up for a Tuesday evening course in evolution, just to see what creationists were up in arms about. The course was taught by an eccentrically charismatic biologist named Bayard Brattstrom, who from 7-10 pm regaled us with breathtaking discoveries from the science of evolutionary biology, and who from 10pm to closing time at the 301 Club just down the street, held forth on science and religion, Darwin and Genesis, and all manner of related topics, accompanied by appropriate libations.

The scales fell from my eyes! It turns out that the creationist literature I was reading presented a Darwinian cardboard cutout that a child could knock down. What I discovered was that the preponderance of evidence from numerous converging lines of scientific inquiry—geology, paleontology, zoology, botany, comparative anatomy, molecular biology, population genetics, biogeography, embryology, and others—all independently converge to the same conclusion: evolution happened. Why Darwin Matters is about how we know evolution happened, in the context of challenges to the theory mounted by creationists and Intelligent Design theorists.

SKEPLIT: At the end of the book you say, “If there were only one thing skeptics, scientists, philosophers, and humanists could do to address the overall problem of belief in weird things, constructing a meaningful and satisfying system of morality and meaning would be a good place to start.” Atheists today are reported to be the most distrusted minority in America. Do you think explaining a non-supernatural basis for morality and meaning-making will help reduce the fear of and prejudice against non-believers? How can we as skeptics work to make this happen?

SHERMER: Well, I sure hope that we can turn this around, or else I wouldn’t be writing my books! My book, The Science of Good an Evil, attempts to do just that: explain the basis for morality and meaning-making. It is hard to say what sort of influence I’ve had—not much compared to the likes of people like Pastor Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, which has sold over 40 million copies. My book sold slightly fewer than that—39.9 million fewer to be exact. So who knows? But, hey, we’ve all got to be true to ourselves and live lives that are meaningful to us. And if in the process of so doing we can show other people that this is a good way to live a life, then all the better.

SKEPLIT: What are your thoughts as to why religiosity is so widespread in America while atheism has spread to the majority of the population in many Europe nations?

SHERMER: My preferred theory is an economic one: that is, religions and churches in America are like corporations competing for limited customers and dollars in the free market of religious ideas and churches. Competition leads to change and “improvement” in the services and products offered to customers, and the marketing and sales skills of those employed in these “corporations.” Thus, American religions have perfected telemarketing, televangelism, fundraising letters and phone campaigns, religious rock and roll music, mega-churches that sponsor rock-concert-like religious shows, etc. It is very exciting to attend one of these mega churches; by contrast, European churches are as dull as dishwater.

SKEPLIT: In your new pamphlet, The Soul of Science, you took a stab at explaining a non-supernatural source of spirituality. After you read the essay at TAM4 in Las Vegas in January, I was challenged to think about this topic myself when the woman sitting behind me said, “I would never use the word spiritual to describe myself.” After I came home, I wrote a short essay about my thoughts for the February Skepchick ‘zine. When writing your pamphlet, did you ever find yourself wondering if you were unintentionally empowering religious extremists by giving credibility to their beliefs when you used words like “spiritual,” “soul,” and “purpose-driven life”?

SHERMER: I purposefully chose those words because they have deep meaning to everyone and I don’t want to relinquish them to religious people alone, and I don’t want to invent some lame new word to describe myself (e.g., “agnoatheispiritualist”). But more importantly, I want to show to religious and nonreligious people alike, that when we are talking about being “spiritual” we are actually talking about the same thing—transcending ourselves and finding awe in things that are bigger and beyond us. And that it is no threat to religion and, on the contrary, it is complementary to religion to find spirituality in science. Science can be transcendently spiritual for religious people as well. If God created the universe, what difference does it make whether he did it 10,000 years ago or 10,000,000,000 years ago? To an eternal being, an extra six zeros is meaningless. And if God created the universe, what difference does it make how she did it? A quantum foam fluctuation or the spoken word?

SKEPLIT: How do you think we can let people know that spirituality without superstition is possible and a socially acceptable alternative to traditional religions?

SHERMER: By saying so and living so.

SKEPLIT: Is the rumor that you’ll be in the 2007 Skepdude calendar true?

SHERMER: Sure, why not?

SKEPLIT: Will you be fully clothed?

SHERMER: That depends. Do socks count?

SKEPLIT: What else do you have coming up?

SHERMER: My latest thing is global warming and the environment. I've long been a skeptical environmentalist; that is, I've been skeptical about many claims in the environmental movement after being burned by their flawed and mistaken predictions of doom and gloom for so long. But the evidence is now overwhelming and converging on certain unmistakable conclusions, such as anthropogenic (human caused) global warming, peak oil, and deforestation. So I am doing what any good scientist would do: organizing a conference with the world's leading experts to hash out the details of our environmental problems, which we are doing the first weekend in June, June 2-4, at Caltech, a conference sponsored by the Skeptics Society and open to the public. Here is the link where people can sign up: www.environmentalwars.org

Coming up next month: Jennifer Ouelette! Get involved in SkepLit, going on now in the Skepchick forum >>

ISSUE 5 CREDITS

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Rebecca Watson

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Diane Perry

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Chani Overli

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Lynette Davidson, Donna Druchunas, Chris Blohm, Jamila Bey-Greenhouse, Jesús Pineda, Benjamin Radford, Mike McRae, Ed Rabin

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