The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (16 page)

‘And what was your PhD in?’ I ask.

‘Nuclear physics.’

Rob, meanwhile, was a schoolboy magician who became entranced by an individual who, like him, also began his journey into scepticism by performing simple magic tricks and marvelling at the ease by which you can fool a human. The man who inspired him, however, was to become a hero to rationalist campaigners all over the world. Now in his eighties, he has spent a long and celebrated life committing spectacular debunkings of psychics, spoonbenders and peddlers in ‘woo woo’ – a phrase that he invented. He is James Randi, king of the Skeptics, a near-legend in these circles. One of the many actions
that Randi is celebrated for is his long-standing offer, made through his James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), of one million dollars to any individual that can prove any aspect of the supernatural. That includes homeopathy. Indeed, one of his latest triumphs involves a high-profile Greek homeopath named George Vithoulkas, whose own ‘Million Dollar Challenge’ broke down just as his test was approaching.
It is said that Vithoulkas dodged his judgement day
by suddenly refusing to fill out the standard JREF application form, thereby triggering the collapse of the process. In a
typically merciless statement that was published on Randi’s personal blog
(in which he also found room to call Vithoulkas a ‘strange man,’ ‘self-deluded’ and a ‘naif’) he said, ‘Many would-be applicants have considered themselves above such a simple requirement, but no exception has ever been made, nor will it be made.’

I meet another software engineer, named Colin, who credits Randi’s debunking of Uri Geller – famous for his psychic spoon-bending – for his interest in critical thinking. ‘He’s a really big hero,’ says Colin, who calls homeopathy a ‘medical scam’ and describes it as his principal interest. When I ask which homeopathy studies he has read, he dodges the question. ‘I’m not a scientist so I can’t really comment on the studies. But I’m fascinated by the absurdity of the whole thing.’

Conventioneer Dominic, meanwhile, is equally scathing. ‘Homeopathy really is silly,’ he chuckles. ‘I look forward to taking part in the overdose.’

What is it, I wonder, that he wants to achieve with his campaigning?

‘Just getting an awareness out there of how silly homeopathy is,’ he says.

‘Have you read any scientific studies into homeopathy?’

‘Not personally.’

‘I’m not sure I understand the point of it all,’ I say. ‘Isn’t it just harassing a load of old ladies?’

‘It isn’t just a load of old ladies,’ he says. ‘Lots of people, if they take homeopathy and think it’s real medicine, they might avoid going to an actual doctor.’

He makes a good point.

‘Do you know anyone that that’s happened to?’

‘Not personally.’ A moment passes, as he ponders the sceptical ramifications of this admission. ‘Being sceptical, unless I know someone who has done this, I can’t say for sure it has happened. But I have heard stories.’

‘If you don’t know anyone personally who has come to harm, then what makes you so angry about it?’

‘Simply from a consumer-protection point of view.’

‘You’re interested in consumer-protection issues?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what other consumer-protection issues are you involved with?’

‘I buy
Which?
magazine,’ he says. ‘And things like that.’

Finally, I settle down with Mark, who explains his interest in scepticism thus: ‘It’s incredibly important that people maintain a rational mindset, a sceptical mindset, with everything they approach in life and that they never get carried away with wishful thinking, with stuff they would
like
to be true.’

I sigh, my gaze emptying and slipping in the direction of the ugly carpet. I feel unaccountably depressed.

We talk on, and Mark says that his principal sceptical interest is in evolution, so I tell him about my time in Gympie with John Mackay, and about his opposite, the scientist Nathan Lo, who told me that much of the peril lay in the fact that the creationist story is simple to understand, whereas the science can be hard. But Mark, a twenty-five-year-old cinema employee, does not agree with what the doctor of molecular evolution had to say.

‘I don’t think it’s difficult,’ he says. ‘In fact, the beauty of evolution is that it’s incredibly easy to understand.’

I present the argument that, in essence, it is
all
faith – most of us do not look at the raw evidence for ourselves, but rely on charismatic leaders who reinforce our prejudices to do it for us. Mark nods approvingly.

‘If you truly want the truth, you have to do it yourself,’ he says.

‘But who’s got time?’ I say.

‘It’s not about who’s got time,’ he says. ‘It’s about not trying to
make reality fit what you want it to fit. We need to tell people to come to their own conclusions rather than what someone else tells them.’

‘So, what evidence have you personally studied regarding evolution?’ I ask.

‘Well, there’s
such
a mound of evidence with something like evolution,’ he sighs. ‘There are fossils in the ground that show a step by step picture of how we got to be how we are.’

‘Fossils?’ I ask.

‘Fossils,’ he nods.

‘So you’ve studied fossils?’

‘No, not personally,’ he says. ‘But, um, the fact that I’ve not studied fossils personally – the vast majority of people haven’t studied fossils personally. Has anyone studied God personally?’

I don’t understand exactly what Mark means, but as the glumness that has come over me is apparently not lifting, I decide that it is time for bed.

*

I don’t know if there is any way back from the revelation that you are wrong and there is nothing you can do about it. But that, it seems to me, is the principal lesson of experimental psychology. We are blind to the effects of our own cognitive traps. You could even argue that it is these very traps – their unique patterns – that make us who we are. These days, when pondering matters of personal belief, the most appropriate question we can ask of ourselves is no longer ‘Am I right?’ but ‘How mistaken am I, how biased?’

We have designed a system of knowledge to combat all this. Science is the opposite of religion. Its laws are not sensed in visions or divined by charismatics claiming access to a supernatural being. They are the result of sweat and fight and genius. Everything it knows, it has earned. The scientific process is what happens when you gather enough
Homo sapiens
brains together and give them time to think. It is astonishing: the greatest achievement of our species. The people gathered for this conference know this. They want to promote it; to celebrate it. As I keep having to remind myself mournfully, the Skeptics are
right
.

Why ‘mournfully’? Why this gloomy sense? Why the defensive
feeling when I walked into the bar downstairs? Why are my instincts, in all their kneejerk ignorance, telling me that I should be on the attack, that these men and women are not of my tribe?

These are questions that journalists are not well practised in asking. We are similar to the Skeptics, in that we like to imagine ourselves as professional seekers of truth. We are led by facts, not prejudice or childish interpersonal likes and dislikes. I lie back on my hotel bed, recalling my behaviour earlier on – wandering about the place, speaking to Skeptics one by one and asking impertinently, ‘What studies into homeopathy have you read? What studies into homeopathy have
you
read?’

Urgh
.

When I was familiarising myself with the sceptical literature, I came across a book that contained an enlightening passage on John Mack, the Harvard heretic who had to go to war with his dean in order to defend his right to study alien abduction.
Written by Dr Michael Shermer
– founding publisher of the magazine
Skeptic
and director of the Skeptics Society –
Why People Believe Weird Things
closes with a devastating analysis of his beliefs.

Mack’s cognitive journey reads like a perfect study in how the brain likes to rearrange the evidence of the outside world in order to match its inner models. (Not that Shermer doubts that Mack’s patients were sincere: ‘Knowing what we do about the fantastic imagery that the brain is capable of producing,’ he writes, ‘experiencer’s experiences are nothing more than mental representations of strictly internal brain phenomena.’) Mack had some tricky cognitive dissonance to deal with: the lack of physical evidence that they had actually been taken aboard an alien craft. He acknowledged this was a problem, admitting, ‘there is no firm proof that abduction was the cause of their absence,’ but then soothed the dissonance away by
dismissing the entire notion of physical evidenc
e. In an interview with
Time
magazine he complained, ‘I don’t know why there’s such a zeal to find a conventional physical explanation. We’ve lost all that ability to know a world beyond the physical. I am a bridge between the two worlds.’

Here was a man as intelligent as you could hope for, who found re-imagining the nature of reality itself easier than admitting the obvious
possibility that his patients were simply delusional. In his book, Shermer did a superb job on Mack. He was knowledgeable, sceptical, credible and wise. He was fantastic.

I found the whole thing really annoying.

Over the last few months, Mack has become a kind of hero to me. Despite his earlier caution, he ended up believing in amazing things: intergalactic space travel and terrifying encounters in alien craft that travelled seamlessly through non-physical dimensions. And when his bosses tried to silence him, he hired a
lawyer
. He fought back against the dean and his dreary minions. He battled hard in the name of craziness. He was a heretic, an enemy of reason. He told a journalist from
Time
magazine, ‘I am a bridge between the two worlds.’ And I
loved
him.

But there it was – the miserable truth. I heard it downstairs, less than an hour ago: ‘
It’s incredibly important that people never get carried away with wishful thinking, with stuff they would
like
to be true.
’

Mark the Skeptic was right, of course. And now that I have learned to mistrust myself, to realise that ‘instinct’ is merely ego-bolstering bias prancing about in the robes of wisdom, I am compelled to question why I would like so much for Mark to be wrong. I wonder if it relates to the truth hinted at by the university students who were asked to read the essay about Rasputin. The readers preferred him when his birthday matched their own. Without even being conscious of what was happening, something in their brains recognised a similarity and hugged the diabolical monk just a little bit closer. It seems to me that we spend our lives hunting for ourselves: we are moved by a novel when we recognise our experiences in those of the hero, just as we delight in the constellation of similarities that we discover in a new romantic partner. Perhaps we never really fall in love with someone else after all, and when we gaze into the eyes of our other half we are actually admiring our own reflection.

If all this is true, and my biases throb warmly when I detect pieces of myself, then why, on meeting the Skeptics, did I feel drawn to the defence of the homeopaths? What is the Rasputin trace that I sense in them, and in John Mack? I wonder if it has to do with the various madnesses that I once suffered. The delusional jealousy, the vandalism,
the pathological drinking and theft. I wonder if it has to do with the fact that I was unhappy at school, that I made war with my teachers and that I had little in common with the kind of students who were good at science and mathematics. Am I, by instinct, with the irrationals? Are they my tribe? If so, that makes me an unreliable narrator. Which is not a good look for a journalist.

*

I am up on the balcony watching the three hundred assembled conventioneers enjoying a presentation about ghosts. A good proportion of them have come dressed in the white T-shirts that are being sold to promote tomorrow’s homeopathic overdose. An even larger number have screens of various sizes in their laps and are managing to be sceptical about ghosts while interacting fitfully with their illuminated computer-extensions.

I recognise one of the panellists. Professor Chris French, a former editor of the UK’s
The Skeptic
magazine and a professor of psychology who heads the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at the University of London. I once interviewed him, for the
Financial Time
s.

The conventioneers laugh, as one, at a joke that French has made. I coldly survey the endless rows of chuckling white-shirted forms beneath me.
There they are
, I think.
All the Skeptics, all gathered together, all thinking for themselves
.

I have got to stop this.

I sit alone and try to rearrange my thoughts into something that resembles impartiality, but my biases are flexing madly. I am surprised, for a start, that so few of these disciples of empirical evidence seem to be familiar with the scientific literature on the subject that impassions them so. I am suspicious, too, about the real source of their rage. If they are motivated, as they frequently insist, by altruistic concern over the dangers of supernatural belief, why do they not obsess over jihadist Muslims, homophobic Christians or racist Jewish settlers? Why this focus on stage psychics, ghost-hunters and alt-med hippies? And isn’t the scene before me precisely the kind of thing that the Stanford Professor Philip Zimbardo warns against? The first two steps in his recipe for evil – assign yourself a role, and become a
member of a group. ‘Groups can have powerful influences on individual behaviour,’ he said. Weren’t his doomed prison guards just like this: bonded by their fight, and their perceived superiority, in opposition to a common enemy?

One of the convention’s organisers, Michael ‘Marsh’ Marshall, arrives. Charismatic, confident and eloquent, the twenty-seven-year-old marketing executive in the crisply ironed shirt seems at ease both on stage addressing the conventioneers and on television news shows, on which he has recently been in demand on account of his campaign against the homeopaths.