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About three in four Americans profess at least one paranormal belief, according to a recent Gallup survey. The most popular is extrasensory perception (ESP), mentioned by 41%, followed closely by belief in haunted houses (37%).

THREE IN FOUR AMERICANS? I was very shocked to find this result, which is only from a year ago. It is simply unacceptable that in this day in age, more than 75% of people in the most industrialized nation in the world believe in paranormal crap. We live in a world where almost all natural phenomena are explained by scientific principles, and we enjoy the products of technological innovations grounded in scientific knowledge. All one needs to do is employ some common sense and see the world as it is – there are no paranormal phenomena!

I suppose the 41% of Americans who supposedly belive in ESP are the ones driving the psychic industry in this country. What a disappointment. The US government should have prosecuted these people by now for false advertising and the failure to deliver promised services.

And if you are one of the three in four people who still believe that there are paranormal pheonomena, consider this: a world in which these inexplicable events occured would be one that is profoundly different from a world where everything happened via scientific principles. And especially given the power of the Internet and other modern innovations, statistics tells us that we should be seeing these events captured on tape, film, or audio all the time.

The mathematician J.E. Littlewood has calculated the probability that a “miracle” would occur to a person given that there are no paranormal pheonoma. Taking into account the world population and assuming that a “miracle” is any event that only has one in a million chance of occuring, Littlewood has calculated that an average person can expect to experience about one miracle a month. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27s_law) Remember, this is assuming that there are no paranormal phenomena. If there were indeed paranormal phenomena, we can expect that this proability would rise dramatically.

But what we observe in reality is that the so-called psychic pheonomena are extremely rare. So, based purely on the immutable laws of probability, we must conclude that there are no paranomal phenomena. And if you are going to question mathematics (not Science, by the way), then you must realize that all of mathematics is based on pure logic. And if you question logic, you have just shot your own foot.

There will always be stupid people in the world, but three in four is way too many. This suggests to me that something is missing from how we educate people. We tend to agree that patience, love, forgiveness and the like are virtues. We emphasize them in grade school and every parent teaches them to their kids. But what about skepticism, the virtue of requiring evidence before belief? This should be a very important virtue, but is rather passed off as a negative trait in the minds of most people. For some inexplicable reason, faith, which is belief without evidence, has been accepted as a virtue. America needs to wake up. Faith is dangerous. Skepticism is on par with forgiveness and patience.

 Believe in
 %
Extrasensory perception, or ESP
 41
That houses can be haunted
 37
Ghosts/that spirits of dead people can come back in certain places/situations
 32
Telepathy/communication between minds without using traditional senses
 31
Clairvoyance/the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future
 26
Astrology, or that the position of the stars and planets can affect people’s lives
 25
That people can communicate mentally with someone who has died
 21
Reincarnation, that is, the rebirth of the soul in a new body after death
 20

from http://home.sandiego.edu/~baber/logic/gallup.html

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 29th, 2007 at 4:06 pm and is filed under Skepticism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.