50 Popular Beliefs That People Think Are True Part 2

It is difficult, if not impossible, to read through the Bible and find numerous disparate words that can be linked together in a semisensible way to make predictions about the future. However, thanks to computers, it is possible to plug in an extraction formula and let it run through the text to produce "hidden messages." The way it's done is by using something called the "equidistance letter search." First you choose a letter-let's say B, for example. Next you choose a number-5, for example. Then you plug this sequence into a computer program that will find every fifth letter that falls after every B throughout the text (also before, above, or below the letter, if you wish). Some of the letters generated will spell out words. Some of the words will have meaning. How much meaning is in the eye of the beholder, as we shall see.

Using this technique, say believers, the Bible accurately predicted historical events such as the Holocaust, the a.s.sa.s.sination of John F. Kennedy, and the a.s.sa.s.sination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin thousands of years before they happened. Wow, if true, this would appear to be very strong evidence that the Bible really is much more than a mere book written by humans. This code might even be proof for the existence of the Judeo-Christian G.o.d. Once again, however, a claim for the miraculous and the supernatural has a rather simple down-to-earth explanation.

It is not difficult to explain how Bible-code proponents come up with names like "Kennedy" and "Rabin." The Bible contains many thousands of letters. Given enough chances, the creation of words that can be strung together so that they seem to have meaning is bound to happen. There certainly are plenty of chances, as one can pick different letters for starting points as well as choose different number sequences to select letters after, before, above, below, and diagonal from the starting-point letters. Dave Thomas, a physicist and mathematician, found "Roswell" and "UFO" in just one verse of Genesis using the same sort of extraction process Bible-code believers rely on.1 Thomas doesn't see anything magical in the Bible code: "The promoters of hidden-message claims say, 'How could such amazing coincidences be the product of random chance?' I think the real question should be, 'How could such coincidences not be the inevitable product of a huge sequence of trials on a large, essentially random database?'"2 Bible-and Torah-code claims have been around for many years. However, the claim surged in popularity and gained widespread media attention in the 1990s when Michael Drosnin's book The Bible Code hit the New York Times bestseller list. In response, skeptics explained repeatedly that names and "predictions" can be found "encoded" in any book. Drosnin fired back, promising he would believe the critics if they found the a.s.sa.s.sination of a world leader encrypted in Moby d.i.c.k. So some skeptics did just that, multiple times: "Lincoln" and "killed" turned up in one pa.s.sage of the 1851 novel. "Prepare for death" and "M L King to be killed by them" were also decoded in Moby d.i.c.k. So too was "Kennedy," "shot," and "head" in close proximity to one another.3 Sadly, the professors responsible for this demonstration had to issue disclaimers because some people took their demonstration as evidence that Herman Melville, the author of Moby d.i.c.k, must have had supernatural powers too.

Experienced skeptics know to be on the lookout for postdictions. These are predictions that are discovered and lauded after an event occurs. Nostradamus believers love them. It's much harder, of course, to go on record predicting something before it happens. Drosnin tried it using his Bible-code method, and it didn't work out too well for him. He wrote in his 2002 follow-up book, Bible Code II, "The Bible Code clearly states the final danger in modern terms-'atomic holocaust' and 'World War' are both encoded in the Bible. And both are encoded with the same year, 2006."4 Clearly that was a miss. Drosnin's code-breaking efforts also came up with phrases in the Bible that seemed to describe the a.s.sa.s.sination of Ya.s.ser Arafat, the former leader of Palestine. "a.s.sa.s.sin will a.s.sa.s.sinate," "the ambushers will kill him" and "shooters of Yasir [sic] Arafat."5 Missed again. Arafat died of illness at age seventy-five. Bible-code believers must ask themselves why a G.o.d would encode incorrect predictions.

Jews and Christians who believe that the Bible code proves something significant about the Bible/Torah might give some thought as to why the Koran code doesn't prove that the claims of Islam are correct. Yes, that's right, there is a Koran code, and, according to many Muslims around the world, it proves once and for all that the Koran is divinely inspired and Islam is the one true religion.6 For some reason, however, Jews and Christians do not seem to be very impressed by the Koran code. It seems that they're just too skeptical to fall for something like that.

GO DEEPER...

Dunning, Brian. Skeptoid: A Critical a.n.a.lysis of Pop Phenomena. Laguna Niguel, CA: Skeptoid Media, 2007.

Wheen, Francis. How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions. New York: Public Affairs, 2004.

Within your aura is all the information needed for life, including your genetic and ancestral lineage, a record of your past lives, and the karmic contract and lessons that you intend to resolve in this lifetime.

-James van Praagh, Heaven and Earth This would be a strange afternoon, even by my standards. A small group of transvest.i.tes surrounded me on a Mumbai sidewalk. They were an impressive sight in their colorful saris, each of them adorned with a pound or two of gleaming jewelry. The one who did most of the talking was a dead ringer for the late Charles Bronson, only she was slightly more masculine than the late Hollywood action star. Squinting in the afternoon sun, she politely explained that she and her friends felt that I was a "most handsome man" and that it would be "most wonderful" if I would spend the day with them. As she spoke, one of her comrades squeezed my arm and purred. Yes, I swear, she purred. I couldn't be sure if this encounter was a sincere grasp at a love connection or just another routine attempt to extract money from a stupid tourist. As interesting as a date with the Magnificent Seven may have been, I looked deep into the leader's yellow eyes and respectfully declined. I smiled and retreated back into the herd of pedestrians. And then the day became weird.

India is the most intense, irritating, colorful, exhausting, stimulating, bizarre, and beautiful country I have ever experienced. During my time there I saw an amazing a.s.sortment of juxtaposed images. On one side of a street I see stunningly gorgeous women strutting, while on the other side my eyes find hideously deformed beggars scurrying about on crooked limbs and twisted spines. One moment I'm entranced by the breathtaking architecture of the Taj Mahal. A brief walk later, I'm staring at human corpses rotting in the mud of the adjacent riverbank. One of the biggest surprises for me during my visit was that India inspired me to think deeply about life, death, and even reincarnation. At times I even felt close to what many might describe as spiritual-minus the actual spirit, of course. Something about confronting extreme beauty and ugliness side by side led me to think of things other than what I would have for dinner later. One thing I allowed myself the freedom to wonder about was what it would be like to have lived previous lives and to experience more lives after this one ends. I don't remember anything from before my birth, but I do feel oddly comfortable when I wander through faraway lands for the first time. Could it be because I have been there before? I also seem to have a knack for getting along with people in societies very different from the one that spat me out. Could it be that I once lived in that culture long ago? I doubt it, but it is a fascinating idea. Hundreds of millions of people today, mostly Hindus and Buddhists, believe it is more than an idea. They think it is reality.

A central belief in Hinduism, one of the world's oldest and most popular religions, is that we all experience many lives in succession. It varies depending on which Hindu you ask, but the general claim is that these lives are opportunities to learn and improve. Eventually, if all goes well, our soul attains perfection and we can finally relax. Belief in reincarnation is not exclusive to Hindus, of course. Many millions of non-Hindus around the world think it is true as well. This includes many Christians, which is interesting given the contradiction with Christian dogma. A 2005 Gallup poll found that 20 percent of Americans believe in "the rebirth of the soul into a new body after death."1 That's at least fifty million American believers in reincarnation. One can certainly understand the attraction. Death is scary. Believing that it's not final and that we all get a few more turns at it can be comforting. But appeals to emotion aside, is there anything to it?

Whenever I think of reincarnation, I recall a basic law from physics cla.s.s: energy cannot be created nor can it be destroyed. It may change form or location, but it never vanishes. Certainly there is energy in my body and my brain. Many people think of that energy as the soul. So when I die my energy (soul?) may change form and relocate, but it won't vanish from the universe entirely. Interesting, but this is where we run into the critical problem with reincarnation belief. No one has ever been able to show that human energy equates to a soul with thoughts, personality, and memories. There simply is no good evidence to support the claim that something containing our thoughts and memories survives our physical death. This is the gigantic obstacle looming in front of reincarnation claims. Shouldn't the basic question of the existence of souls be answered first before we even consider accepting the claim that these souls leave dying or dead bodies and enter new bodies?

Some who believe in multiple lives have told me that they think reincarnation is true because it "makes sense" or "feels right." But every reincarnation believer I have ever spoken with brings up stories of people knowing things about their past lives, things they could not possibly have known if they had not been reincarnated. Strangely, however, believers never seem to know many key details, or if these stories were a.n.a.lyzed and verified by credible researchers. Nonetheless, they cite them as proof anyway. Is this good enough? Are vague stories enough to confirm reincarnation belief? Of course not.

Another interesting aspect to this is that n.o.body seems curious or concerned about how souls maintain themselves through physical death or how they power their way through the air when seeking the next body to inhabit. Some reincarnation believers say that human souls only inhabit human bodies. If so, does one soul inhabit millions of bodies across millennia? Or do many souls share each body? I suppose they would have to share because it is estimated that more than one hundred billion people have lived, but there are only about seven billion people alive today.2 That's a lot of souls with relatively few bodies to accommodate them. In fairness, I suppose some believers would say that the animal kingdom accommodates those excess human souls. Or maybe the success rate for soul progression is high and all those extra souls have achieved nirvana and escaped the cycle.

ANECDOTES ARE NOT SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE.

If stories of past lives are the best evidence of reincarnation, then what are the best stories? Reports of children who "remember" past lives probably offer the most compelling evidence of reincarnation. The reason child stories are so appealing is that people don't think a child would know compelling details about some historical setting and they would be less likely to perpetrate a hoax. But why should anyone think that? Just like adults, children can fantasize, misinterpret, perform as coached, and lie. They can also learn things and repeat them. Take the case of James Leininger, a boy some believe is a reincarnated pilot who was shot down over the Pacific during World War II. On the surface, the story seems like iron-clad proof of reincarnation. But is it?

According to a Primetime report, James showed an interest in airplanes very early and knew things about them that most people are unaware of. For example, his mother said he knew the difference between a bomb and a drop tank. He also began having nightmares about a plane crash. The concerned parents sought help for the boy, not from a psychologist or psychiatrist, however, but from a "past-life therapist" who specializes in helping people "remember" their past lives. Not surprisingly, it was determined soon after his sessions began that James is indeed a reincarnated fighter pilot. According to the Primetime story, the boy also named a specific pilot and s.h.i.+p that he flew off of.3 Is this conclusive proof that reincarnation is real? Not even close.

It turns out that the boy's father took him to an aviation museum when he was around two years old and that James was fascinated with the World War II planes on display there. Shortly after that museum visit, James began having nightmares about planes cras.h.i.+ng. He also wanted to play with planes and look at books about them, an interest his parents indulged.4 It seems far more reasonable that the planes in the museum made an impression on James and this inspired his deep interest in aviation. Thinking a lot about military airplanes and then having nightmares about a plane crash is not so strange, nor is it odd for a child to pick up a lot of information about planes or anything else if he or she is deeply interested in them. I happen to have gone through a childhood phase of World War II-aviation obsession myself. I knew much more about WWII fighters and bombers than 99.9 percent of adults. Researching and retaining information can be effortless and fun when the subject fascinates you. Just like James, I knew the difference between a bomb and a drop tank when I was a child. As far as James naming a pilot and a s.h.i.+p, we can't be sure about that either because the name he gave was "James," his own name and a common one at that. Naming the s.h.i.+p is interesting, but isn't it possible that he saw the name in a book, at the museum, or on TV? Kids pick stuff up everywhere. Maybe he simply said something out of the blue that the adults matched to a s.h.i.+p by chance. After all, there were many US Navy s.h.i.+ps with many names in that war. However, when parents and a "past-life therapist" attach meaning to it, another reincarnation story is born.

I have no reason to suspect that the Leiningers taught their son about WWII aviation in order to intentionally fool people, but that sort of thing is always a possibility with these kinds of stories. Reincarnation proponent J. Allen Danelek suggests in his book, The Case for Reincarnation, that children can't easily be coached to say and do things that might convince people they had past lives.5 Oh really? I saw a tiny child in China transform herself into a living pretzel while balancing spinning plates on three sticks. Have you ever seen one of those toddler beauty pageants on television? If parents want their children to do something badly enough, they will find a way to squeeze just about any desired performance out of a kid. Getting a child to describe a fict.i.tious past life would be easy. There is also the possibility that parents or some other adult could innocently and unconsciously plant the idea of a past life and then supply supporting information to the child in order to make it seem real. All these possible explanations are much more likely to be true than the extraordinary claim that an old soul inhabits the body of a child.

There are also interesting stories about people speaking a language they never learned. When you first hear this, it sounds like proof too. How could it be possible unless the person had a previous life? It turns out, however, that whenever somebody takes the time to investigate such claims, they always seem to fall apart. For example, a person who was said to be able to speak Bulgarian under hypnosis, despite not knowing Bulgarian, was not speaking that language at all. The person apparently just made up words with an accent that the hypnotherapist guessed was Bulgarian.6 Despite the stories, there are no confirmed cases of a person speaking a language unknown to him or her. Everyone, including skeptics, would sit up and pay attention if a four-year-old living in Detroit suddenly spoke a tribal New Guinea language that went extinct last century. But nothing like that has ever been confirmed by credible investigators.

Whether I am feeling "spiritual" during a solo journey across India or reading about various claims of past lives, I always end up sensing an abundance of hope amid the absence of evidence. I cannot fault people for desiring more than one life. Optimism and dreams of something better are positive human traits. But hope alone is not proof.

Reincarnation defender Danelek writes, "Reincarnation is the mechanism through which we may live the very life we've always wanted-or relive the one we've always loved-upon a stage from which we may act out a million possibilities, dream a billion dreams, and live on throughout eternity."7 I agree. The claim of reincarnation is exciting to imagine and a wonderful thing to hope for. Unfortunately, however, nothing suggests that it is true.

GO DEEPER...

Baker, Robert A. Hidden Memories: Voices and Visions from Within. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996.

Edwards, Paul. Reincarnation: A Critical Examination. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996.

Harris, Melvin. Investigating the Unexplained. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2003.

Numerous ESP studies conducted over the years point to one overriding conclusion. Studies supporting ESP consistently lack proper controls, and studies with proper controls consistently find no support for ESP.

-Thomas Kida, Don't Believe Everything You Think You are reading this book right now thanks to the most magnificent and amazing three-pounds of matter in the known universe. Your brain is made up of about one hundred billion nerve cells called neurons that keep you alive by doing things like telling your body to breathe while making love and to duck when someone throws a brick at you. These tiny cells also work together to produce complex thoughts and new ideas. They can imagine both possible and impossible things. For example, my brain has taken me on journeys far beyond our galaxy, through a spectacular nebula, and even inside a terrifying black hole-and I didn't even have to drink or use drugs before departure. All I did was close my eyes and imagine.

For all its flaws that often trip us up when trying to distinguish reality from make-believe, the human brain is undeniably special, very special. Obviously far apart in form and function from hearts, lungs, kidneys, and other organs, your brain is you-everything else is basically Tinker Toys and plumbing. Human brains are big too. You know those giant-headed aliens we see in old science-fiction movies? Well ours are more impressive than you might think because what we have is essentially a size-9 brain that evolutionary pressures over time have creased, folded, and layered in order to fit inside a size-3 skull. This is necessary because of restrictive birth-ca.n.a.l issues that come with bipedalism. If baby heads were any larger, I suspect very few women would be willing to get pregnant.

Far more interesting and important than physical dimensions, however, is the brain's ability to think, to a.n.a.lyze difficult problems and come up with novel solutions, to dream in great detail of things we cannot touch or see. I certainly can't say I think that the human brain is beautiful because, after seeing one up close, I know better. But I am in awe of it and drawn to it nonetheless. I have a plastic model of a brain on my desk, and I often imagine my own brain humming away inside my skull, doing its thing. Yes, I think about my brain thinking.

Measured by its creative potential, the human brain is larger than the universe itself. By that I mean we can imagine and think about the limits of our universe and beyond. Grand ideas, such as string theory and multiverses, come from our brains. Given the admiration and strong feelings I have for the brain, why don't I believe in extrasensory perception, or ESP? If the brain is so complex, so wonderful, and capable of so much, isn't it possible that it could communicate with other minds without need of sight, touch, or sound, and perhaps even know the future?

Yes, it is possible that the human mind is capable of feats that could only be thought of as magical or paranormal by today's standards. But ESP, or "psi" as researchers often call it, has been studied for many years now, and still no researchers have managed to produce an experiment that can be replicated by others and confirmed. A small body of enticing data is overshadowed by mountains of negative results. While this doesn't disprove ESP, it certainly means it remains unproven. We can't ignore the fact that mind readers, card readers, and every other kind of ESP pract.i.tioner has failed to survive scientific scrutiny.

"Many parapsychologists have adopted a 'heads I win, tails you lose' approach to their work, viewing positive results as supportive of the psi hypothesis while ensuring that null results do not count as evidence against it," explains UK psychology professor Richard Wiseman.1 The lack of positive experiments and good evidence should trouble ESP believers deeply, for if there were something to this, how hard could it be to have somebody consistently identify cards they can't see at a better-than-chance rate? If ESP is real, then why can't test subjects consistently tell when people are staring at them or accurately report what another person is thinking? I'm willing to believe, but not until somebody proves it. Not everyone is as picky I am, however.

A Gallup survey of Americans found that ESP is very popular, with 41 percent of adults professing to believe in it. ESP topped Gallup's list on that survey of paranormal beliefs that did not include traditional religious claims. Belief in haunted houses was second with 37 percent.2 The US government apparently believed as well, having spent many millions of dollars on efforts designed to exploit paranormal powers like telepathy and remote viewing during the Cold War to spy on the Soviet Union.3 Despite claims of success by some, nothing came of it and the project was cancelled after being reviewed by the American Inst.i.tutes for Research in the 1990s. It was finally recognized to be a waste of time and money. "In no case had the information provided ever been used to guide intelligence operations," states the report. "Thus, remote viewing failed to produce actionable intelligence."4 Like most other paranormal and pseudoscientific claims, ESP's popularity depends largely on anecdotes, nothing more than stories about a vision that correctly predicted a future event, a sense of impending doom just before something bad happened, a phone call from someone who was just thought of, and so on. These kinds of stories may be compelling to people, "but the only way to find out if the anecdotes represent a real phenomenon or not is controlled experimental tests," warns scientist and Skeptic magazine publisher Michael Shermer. "Psi phenomena have now been subjected to rigorous scientific experiments for over a century...and the results are unequivocal: psychic power is a chimera."5 Shermer adds that good evidence is not all that is needed to make the case for ESP: "The deeper reason scientists remain skeptical of psi-and will even if more significant data are published-is that there is no explanatory theory for how psi works. Until psi proponents can explain how thoughts generated by neurons in the sender's brain can pa.s.s through the skull and into the brain of the receiver, skepticism is the appropriate response. If the data shows that there is such a phenomena as psi that needs explaining (and I am not convinced that it does), then we still need a causal mechanism."6 BUT WHAT ABOUT PSYCHIC DETECTIVES?.

Believers often cite the success of psychic detectives as proof of ESP. The problem, however, is that psychic detectives aren't any good. Their track record is abysmal. There have been many claims made by psychics and their fans, of course, but look closer and one finds little or nothing of significance. Virtually every case can be explained as coincidence, the exaggerated value of vague tips, or the gullibility of a law enforcement person who gave undeserved credit to a psychic. For example, saying things like, "the victim knew the killer" or "the victim was killed with a knife and buried in the woods" are just guesses. And, thanks to confirmation bias, ESP believers will latch onto the rare hits and forget the numerous misses. Skeptics have a.n.a.lyzed many claims over the years, and they always find problems. Regardless of what you may have heard, there is no great number of cases out there somewhere that were solved by psychics. It's a lie.

A typical example of how people are misled would be a psychic predicting that the body of a missing crime victim would be found "in the woods," "near water," or "near a highway." These are smart guesses, because the bodies of missing persons who were murdered are often found in rural areas near a pond, lake, river, or ocean because almost everywhere is "near" water. "Near a highway" is also an excellent guess because many places are "near a highway." Certainly more missing bodies are found in the woods near a highway than, say, in a telephone booth or in a theater. It is a standard cold-reading technique to make vague predictions that can easily be spun to look like direct hits. Psychics have an even better chance to claim success if they throw out multiple predictions, which they almost always do because they know people will remember and focus on the "correct" prediction while forgetting all the wrong ones.

Here is the most telling fact of all to consider when a.s.sessing the validity of psychic detectives: the police don't use them. Some misguided law enforcement people somewhere may call on these people sometimes, but the vast majority of police departments and detectives do not bother with psychics because they know they are a waste of time. Detectives may listen to a tip from a psychic because they have to listen to all tips. But that doesn't mean they pin their hopes on these people. If psychic detectives really could "see" crimes that have already occurred and find missing people, this would be well known to all by now. Word would spread very fast and criminal investigators would jump to exploit their powers. There would be a full-time psychic on the payroll of every police department in the world. But this is not the case, which says a lot about the real abilities of psychics as crime solvers.

KEEPING AN OPEN MIND ABOUT THE MIND.

Those who are skeptical of ESP are often accused by believers of having closed minds. Jefferson M. Fish, professor emeritus of psychology at Saint John's University in New York, is unconvinced but says he is open to accept it if new evidence ever justifies it. "I think it is possible, though unlikely, that there is something there." He says that there has not yet been a convincing case made for ESP, but neither has it been completely discredited. Fish explains that there are two lines of evidence for ESP claims: (1) Many experiments showing a slight but statistically significant deviation from chance, and additional results that make sense in terms of psychological principles-e.g., believers scoring above chance and disbelievers scoring below, when everyone should score at chance. Unfortunately, there are objections to all these experiments, and while some have been replicated, none are consistently reproducible.

(2) Many isolated instances of amazing unexplained individual or shared experiences. There are, of course, alternative possible explanations for all of these events.

As a result, I'm inclined to be skeptical, but don't consider the case closed.7 It appears that an open mind is typical of many ESP skeptics, despite what ESP believers often charge. I certainly am open-minded on the issue, and no serious skeptic I know would turn away from compelling evidence if it were produced. Terrence Hines, a professor of psychology and neurology, reviewed a batch of studies and found a pattern of paranormal believers being "rigid and unchanging" in their beliefs compared with skeptical nonbelievers, who are more willing to revise their conclusions when shown contrary evidence.8 I think I understand why some people would want to maintain a tight grip on their belief in ESP. I feel some of what they feel because I too believe in a magical mind. The only difference is that the kind of "magical mind" that I believe in is the one that has been revealed by science. This mind doesn't require supernatural or paranormal elements to impress and excite. The mind I am in awe of has no need for unproven claims and gross exaggerations of its power and value. The real mind is impressive enough.

GO DEEPER...

Blackmore, Susan. In Search of the Light: The Adventures of a Parapsychologist. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996.

Charpak, Georges, and Henri Broch. Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, and Other Pseudoscience. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.

Horstman, Judith. The Scientific American: Brave New Brain. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Ba.s.s, 2010.

Horstman, Judith. The Scientific American: Day in the Life of Your Brain. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Ba.s.s, 2009.

Hyman, Ray. The Elusive Quarry. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1989.

Nickell, Joe. Psychic Sleuths: ESP and Sensational Cases. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1994.

Van Hecke, Madeleine. Blind Spots: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997.

Credulous France, what are you doing, hanging on the words of Nostradamus?...Don't you understand that this dirty rascal offers you only nonsense?...One must ask, in the end, who is sillier, this evil charlatan or you, who accept his impostures?

-From a letter written by a Nostradamus critic in the year 1555 It's not difficult to understand why many people are drawn to Michel de Notredame, the sixteenth-century French medical doctor, poet, and astrologer. Who doesn't want to know the future? If the world is going to end tomorrow, for example, then I would love to know because it would mean I can skip taking out the trash this evening. What is difficult to understand, however, is how Nostradamus ever became history's undisputed champion of supernatural predictions. It's not like there isn't plenty of compet.i.tion for the t.i.tle.

There was no shortage of astrologers and soothsayers around in Nostradamus's day, and there are still many around today who claim to be able to predict the future. So how has Nostradamus remained king of the hill, more than four hundred years after his death? He must have some amazing predictions to his credit, right? One might think so, but in fact he does not. His record is no better than the astrologers and TV preachers of our time. The popular image of Nostradamus as a mysterious man who had the ability to see far into the future rests entirely with the vague nature of his prophecies that can be loosely interpreted and twisted to mean just about anything anyone wants them to. Nostradamus only continues to be a popular and convincing prognosticator because those who believe in him don't think critically about the predictions.

In addition to being a renowned skeptic and elite magician, James Randi is a Nostradamus scholar. He looked deep into the extraordinary claims and found no extraordinary evidence to back them up. He couldn't even find any weak evidence to back up the Nostradamus phenomenon. Randi's book The Mask of Nostradamus: The Prophecies of the World's Most Famous Seer is a brilliant a.n.a.lysis and critique of the Nostradamus prophecies. It clearly shows that there is nothing substantial to be found in the hype. Nostradamus left behind no remarkable, uncanny, or spooky predictions that defy explanation. The only thing that happened is that five centuries ago, a European astrologer wrote a bunch of poetic gibberish that others have rewritten, reinterpreted, and spun to appear like accurate predictions of future events.

Some beliefs, no matter how hollow, are difficult to kill. Especially when some people put so much effort into selling the lie. It seems that scarcely a month goes by, for example, without the History Channel pus.h.i.+ng Nostradamus belief on a new generation of unsuspecting innocents with yet another slick pseudodoc.u.mentary. These days they include impressive special effects as well as compelling soundbites from Nostradamus and paranormal experts who lay out "overwhelming evidence" to make the case.

Before we pull the curtain back and expose Nostradamus's legacy for what it really is, let's review who the man was. He was born in Saint Remey de Provence, France, in 1503. According to Randi, Nostradamus was a bright student who graduated from school early and went on to have a successful medical practice. He specialized in treating the plague, the disease that killed his first wife and two of his children.1 Nostradamus's astrology and prophecy work was no great stretch for a doctor at the time, as medicine during the sixteenth century was more a mix of art and hocus-pocus than science.

The Nostradamus prophecies that continue to impress people today are contained in quatrains (four-verse poems). In my opinion, this in an important element to the attraction because it seems that many people are far more impressed by predictions embedded in ambiguous collections of obscure wording than a straight, no-nonsense message. The Bible code is another example of this. If Nostradamus simply wrote, "The world will end at noon on December 1, 1927," it would not be as dramatic or mysterious. It would also hurt his chances to impress multiple generations, because then it would be easy for everyone to know exactly what he meant and it would be clear when he was wrong. The Nostradamus industry would sink fast if his predictions could be given an unambiguous pa.s.s/fail a.s.sessment.

Before we go further, we need to acknowledge that it's not really fair to judge Nostradamus based on his quatrains. Maybe he really did know the future and maybe he really did write down accurate predictions of major events to come. The fact is, we can't know for sure because there are no original Nostradamus ma.n.u.scripts! Yes, that's correct. All the noise coming from Nostradamus believers is based on their interpretations of original writings that no longer exist.

"The very first editions of his prophetic writings are lost and we must depend upon the accuracy and integrity of those who transcribed them [whomever that may have been more than four centuries ago]," explains Randi. "Numerous known forgeries have been published, some to prove points not originally intended by the seer and others merely to take financial advantage of a public hungry for anything in any form bearing the Nostradamus name. Typographical errors, transpositions, changed italicization, punctuation, and capitalization, altered spellings and 'improvements' on his writings have b.a.s.t.a.r.dized his works to the point where proper scholars.h.i.+p is difficult."2 There is also the colossal problem of meaning. Even if we were to a.s.sume that existing versions of Nostradamus's predictions are somewhat fair representations of his original work, it is clear that the wording is too imprecise to be useful. Colorful language might be great for poetry, but it is terrible for a.s.sessing predictions. Like any well-written horoscope, his quatrains can be interpreted in multiple ways which, of course, increase the chances of them being "correct." Randi shows this by identifying four very different interpretations of the same quatrain (1-57) from four Nostradamians. One believer said the quatrain predicted a political revolution and dead king. A second said the same quatrain was a "clear and forthright prediction" of the attack on Pearl Harbor. A third expert claimed it was a warning about the rise of Adolph Hitler. Finally, a fourth said it foretold an earthquake.3 Could the interpretations of one small batch of words be any more different? This is the same way horoscopes in newspapers are able to impress so many people. No matter what happens, they are seen as accurate by true believers.

In his book The Mask of Nostradamus, James Randi provides a helpful list of guidelines for anyone who would like to become a great prophet:

Make lots of predictions, and hope that some come true. If they do, point to them with pride. Ignore the others; Be very vague and ambiguous. Definite statements can be wrong but "possible" items can always be reinterpreted; Use a lot of symbolism. Be metaphorical, using images of animals, names, initials. They can be fitted to many situations by the believers; Cover the situation both ways and select the winner as the "real" intent of your statement; Credit G.o.d with your success, and blame yourself for any incorrect interpretations of His Divine messages; No matter how often you're wrong, plow ahead. The believers won't notice your mistakes and will continue to follow your every word; Predict catastrophes; they are more easily remembered and more popular by far; When predicting after the fact, but representing that the prophecy preceded the event, be wrong a few times, just enough to appear uncertain about the exact details; too good a prophecy is suspect.4 WILL THE REAL ANTI-CHRIST PLEASE STAND UP.

One of the more amusing flaws within the Nostradamus industry is the repeated naming of the Anti-Christ. The biblical villain was Napoleon, according to confident Nostradamus scholars in the nineteenth century. When the French emperor failed to deliver the end of the world, however, new predictions were "discovered" that clearly and obviously pointed to Adolph Hitler as the man destined to bring down the final curtain.

If you read a book or watch a pseudodoc.u.mentary that promotes the Nostradamus myth, you are likely to encounter the name "Hister." Hmmm, sounds a little like "Hitler," right? Sure, but "Hister" also sounds exactly like "Hister," which was the name given for the lower portion of the Danube River on maps at the time Nostradamus lived. That, as well as the fact that the line immediately preceding the line containing "Hister" mentions "swimming," would seem to indicate that Nostradamus was referring to a river and not the twentieth century German dictator.5 I am old enough to remember when Ayatollah Khomeini, Muammar Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein were each at various times declared to be the Anti-Christ that Nostradamus had warned about. Of course, none of them worked out too well, so believers were quick to embrace Osama bin Laden as the guy Nostradamus really meant when the 9/11 attacks occurred in 2001. But when Bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALS in 2011, another Anti-Christ candidate bit the dust.

An interesting example of how Nostradamus nonsense can spread occurred in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Millions of people around the world, myself included, received this Nostradamus quatrain in a chain e-mail shortly after the World Trade Center towers fell: In the City of G.o.d there will be a great thunder,

Two Brothers torn apart by Chaos,

While the fortress endures, the great leader will succ.u.mb.

The third big war will begin when the big city is burning.

Wow, that's an attention grabber. "Two brothers torn apart by chaos" sounds like it could be the World Trade Center towers, right? And during the tense days after 9/11, who could ignore this line: "The third big war will begin when the big city is burning"? There is, however, a problem with this Nostradamus prophecy-Nostradamus didn't write it. I mean he really didn't write it this time, not even in a fake way. It was the work of a university student in Canada. The prediction was included in the student's 1997 essay as an example of a vague prediction that could later be applied to a wide variety of events. The student points out in his pre-9/11 essay that "city of G.o.d" could be attributed to many cities; "a great thunder" could mean anything from war to a storm to an earthquake; and "brothers torn apart" could apply to many things (a split between nations, a government, two populations, two former friends or allies, or two actual brothers). The funny part of the story is that this wise student asks readers of the essay to imagine how this brief 1997 prediction might be viewed if it were put aside for centuries and then matched with some event that it seemed to predict. The kid was right on the mark about everything except the time frame. His prediction was just vague enough to be tied to the 9/11 attacks only four years later. By the way, just as it has been the case with Nostradamus's writings, someone dishonestly added "The third big war will begin when the big city is burning," to give it even more punch. As this non-Nostradamus quatrain circulated throughout the world via e-mails, other lines were added as well. Sadly, millions of people were probably influenced by this bogus e-mail to believe that there must really be something to the Nostradamus claim. Four days after the 9/11 attacks, Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies, was the number one bestselling book on Amazon. Five other Nostradamus books made the top twenty-five list.6 As irrational beliefs go, this is not one of the more dangerous ones. Believing that a sixteenth-century astrologer accurately saw the distant future is, however, a symptom of a greater problem that is risky indeed. Where one irrational belief creeps in, others may follow. People in a democracy, for example, who can't recognize the utter emptiness and failure of Nostradamus claims are probably at greater risk of being fooled by corrupt politicians, dishonest marketing efforts, and bogus medical treatments. I think it's important to confront irrational beliefs, both superficial and serious. One doesn't have to be rude or overly aggressive about it, of course, but we shouldn't silently accept any of them in a society that places any value on reason.

James Randi certainly never surrendered to nonsense, but he does seem resigned to accept the enduring popularity of the great seer of France. "The legend of Nostradamus, silly as it is, will survive us all," he writes. "Not because of its worth but because of its seductive attraction, the idea that the Prophet of Salon could see into the future will persist. An ever-abundant number of interpreters will pop up to renew the shabby exterior of his image, and that gloss will serve to entice more unwary fans into acceptance of the false predictions that have enthralled millions in the centuries since his death. Shameless rationalizations will be made, ugly facts will be ignored, and common sense will continue to be submerged in enthusiasm."7 Unfortunately, that's one prediction I can believe.

GO DEEPER...

Randi, James. The Mask of Nostradamus. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993.

The supernatural is a failure of human imagination and an insult to the majesty of the real.

-Edward Abbey, Confessions of a Barbarian It is likely that unlikely things should happen.

-Aristotle On August 5, 2010, a cave-in trapped thirty-three Chilean miners more than two thousand feet deep in the earth. Many observers a.s.sumed that death was likely, if not certain, for the men. However, after a $20 million, sixty-nine-day, round-the-clock rescue effort, all of them were saved. An estimated one billion people watched as the men were pulled up, one by one, in a slim metal cylinder. It was not surprising, of course, that the word miracle was immediately attached to the event and repeated often whenever people spoke about the rescue. Was it a miracle? That depends on how miracles are defined.

Traditionally a miracle has been, for most people, an unusual event that seems to violate or transcend the normal workings of the natural world. Most people who believe in these kinds of miracles link them to their religion's specific G.o.d or G.o.ds. They never seem to credit the G.o.d or G.o.ds of a rival religion. In this way, miracles are seen as verification of one religion or another, determined by who is claiming the miracle. But it's even more complicated these days because in common, everyday speech, people toss the word miracle around without much thought. The bar has never been lower. A late comeback by a sports team is sure to be called a miracle. A winning hand in black jack might qualify too. By that standard, I believe in miracles. Every time my son eats all his vegetables at dinner, for example, I feel that I have witnessed a profound miracle. But do I believe in the kind of miracles that are supposed to contradict the laws of nature? No, and here's why.

Miracles that cannot be explained as naturally occurring events depend on ignorance. I don't mean "ignorance" in a mean-spirited or condescending way. Let's take myself as an example. There are so many things I don't know about the universe that it would be ludicrous for me to witness something that I can't explain and, because it stumps me, declare that it must be a magical or miraculous event. Wouldn't it be far more likely that I simply don't know enough to explain what is going on by natural means? The only sensible and honest way to react to something you do not understand is to admit that you do not understand it. Filling in a blank with a made-up answer is intellectually shallow and dishonest. It seems to me that we all would do better to simply admit that many so-called supernatural miracles are mysteries. Sometimes things happen that we cannot explain. Of course some people can't stand to leave loose strings dangling so they pretend to know by saying it was the act of a G.o.d. I suggest we embrace the phrase, "I don't know." It seems to get a bad rap, but "I don't know" is a respectable answer when one doesn't know.

My travels and encounters with diverse cultures taught me an important thing about miracles. I learned that the less people know about basic science, the more they talk about miracles. In places where there is little awareness of astronomy and medical science, for example, one hears much talk of miracle eclipses and healings from minor illnesses and injuries that most people recover from. In societies with higher levels of science literacy, I still heard claims of miracles, but it was less frequent and almost always limited to unusual events, such as people surviving a plane crash or the rescue of some lost hiker. The correlation is clear: more understanding of the natural world means less reliance on miracles to explain events. This can be seen in history as well. Centuries ago, things we now understand were thought to be unexplainable and therefore supernatural. It is likely that this trend will hold true in the future. Today's miraculous occurrence will probably be tomorrow's routine occurrence, thanks to future generations' greater understanding of how the universe works.

A 2009 Harris Poll found that 76 percent of Americans believe in miracles.1 I think they believe for three primary reasons. The first is that miracles are closely a.s.sociated with religious belief. Claims of miracles are abundant and important within Christianity, and most Americans are Christians. Therefore, it should be expected that most Americans would be heavily predisposed to believe in miracles.

The second reason so many believe in miracles is that few people ever slow down and think critically about miracles. Even a tiny bit of skeptical thinking can easily bring the concept of miracles down to Earth. Just because an event is rare, conveniently timed, or can't readily be explained is no justification to jump to the conclusion that there must be something supernatural going on. Many miracles are almost certainly nothing more than random events and coincidences that must occur in a busy world filled with seven billion people.

The third reason miracle belief is reported by so many people is that referring to unusual (but clearly nonmagical) events as miraculous has become entrenched in our culture. To say the Chilean miners were saved by a miracle in the supernatural sense is clearly not a fair a.s.sessment of what really happened-unless one somehow defines a miracle as the efforts of hundreds of rescue workers, many tons of heavy machinery, sixty-nine days of intense and nonstop hard work, and $20 million spent. The loose way in which the word miracle is applied to almost any event makes believing in miracles a default position for many people.

Let's a.n.a.lyze events that seem too unlikely to happen naturally and for this reason alone are often called miracles. Imagine an unusual occurrence that is so rare it only happens to one person out of one million in the entire world during an entire twenty-four-hour period. Most people would agree that hitting one-in-a-million odds is special, many would even say miraculous. But wait, there are approximately seven billion people alive on Earth today. This means that our one-in-a-million event would happen seven thousand times per day! That's 2,555,000 times per year. Even a once-in-a-billion event would still happen seven times every day. Suddenly long shots don't seem quite so miraculous, do they? It's a numbers game; if something can happen, it will happen at some appropriate rate. Thinking in realistic ways about statistics and probabilities does not come naturally to us. This is how casinos are able to drain billions of dollars from their customers year after year.

British mathematician John Littlewood had some fun by crunching some numbers to show just how common "miracles" can be. He proposed that a typical person experiences one thing per second while awake, say twelve hours per day. These "things" experienced would include everything from driving a car to looking at a table to feeling an itch on your toe. According to Littlewood, it adds up to more than one million experiences every thirty-five days. This means every person on Earth should experience those rare, one-in-a-million "miracle" events roughly once every month.2 There also is something called the "gambler's fallacy" that leads most of us to miscalculate the chances of a particular thing happening. For example, imagine if you flipped a coin five times and got heads every time. Would the odds favor tails coming up on the next flip? Many people would say yes, but the correct answer is no. The odds would still be even at fifty-fifty because all the flips before have nothing to do with the next flip. Coins do not have an internal memory system that is linked to a guidance control mechanism that allows them to adjust their landing positions based on previous flips. Las Vegas was built with money from people who didn't understand this.

It can be a challenge, but when faced with something that feels like it could not possibly have been a coincidence, try to think of the big picture. If the dream you had last night perfectly predicted something unusual that actually happened today, put it in proper context. How many dreams have you had in your lifetime that failed to predict events accurately? You also have to think of all the other people on Earth who had a dream last night that didn't come true. The odds are that somebody's dream would hit the mark just by chance. It's like the lottery: the odds of winning may be low, but somebody does win. So, if billions of people are having dreams every night, shouldn't it be expected that some of them will "come true" just by chance? If millions of people buy lottery tickets, don't we expect that someone out of the crowd will pick the winning numbers? If we want to think clearly, we have to accept the fact that coincidences happen all the time. In isolation, many of them can seem eerie and supernatural. Placed into proper context, however, they usually seem inevitable more than anything else. If enough things are going on all the time-like seven billion people scurrying about on this planet-then unusual and unexpected coincidences will occur. They have to occur. I've had several weird things happen over the course of my lifetime, but I don't think magic or G.o.ds were involved. I once ran into an acquaintance from the Cayman Islands on a sidewalk in New York City where both of us just happened to be visiting at the same time. What are the odds of running into each other in a city that big? Even weirder, I ran into the same guy on a crowded day at Disney World while on vacation the following year. The longer you live, the more weird things should happen to you-must happen to you. If I went my whole life without experiencing a few unusual and unexpected events, then I would have reason to be suspicious that something very strange is going on in the universe.

The primary reason people have long believed in miracles is that sometimes things happen that people can't explain. By this reasoning, the unknown is defined as a miracle. But that makes no sense because our ignorance is not proof of anything. It's unreasonable to expect that we can explain everything. We are a young species, and it was only very recently that we started using the scientific method to figure out the world and universe around us. We have come far, but there is still a long way to go. It's laughable to imagine that we should have an answer for everything that happens, so anything we can't readily figure out must be supernatural. What if an uneducated person from the year 900 somehow visited our time, sat down in front of a laptop with voice-recognition technology, and started asking random questions to Google. What if she were filmed and then shown the footage of herself on TV? What if this visitor from the Middle Ages were given a cell phone and talked to someone on the other side of the world? It likely would be very difficult to convince her that she was seeing anything other than magic and miracles. We know, given our location in history, that none of those experiences are supernatural. But she would not know this immediately, and her first temptation likely would be to call them miracles. Many people today do the same thing when confronted with the unknown.

Regardless of what you may have been led to believe, it's OK to say, "I don't know" when faced with a genuine mystery. Ignorance should be embraced openly as motivation to learn and discover. When we come up short and don't have answers for something, admitting ignorance while continuing to seek answers is far more productive than pretending to know. It's also honest.

GO DEEPER...

Gardner, Martin. Did Adam and Eve Have Navels: Debunking Pseudoscience. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.

Gardner, Martin. The New Age: Notes of a Fringe-Watcher. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991.