Read Online Beyond Coincidence by Martin Plimmer - Free Book Online
Authors: Martin Plimmer
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superstition and the value it attributes to random signs, portents, and things that go bump in space.
On the face of it modern society would appear to have moved away from such destructive superstition. Rational scientific analysis is the modern means of measuring and interpreting cosmic debris. In fact in 1996 a newly discovered asteroid was named Skepticus in honor of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (which publishes the magazine The Skeptical Inquirer ) and a second rock after CSICOPâs founder Paul Kurtz.
Yet only a year after that ceremony, when the comet Hale-Bopp appeared in the night skies in 1997, thirty-nine members of a religious mission called Heavenâs Gate cleaned their communal house at Rancho Santa Fe, California, donned identical black running shoes and tracksuits bearing comet swoosh badges and âAWAY TEAMâ patches, attached identification to themselves, dosed each other with a cocktail of apple sauce, vodka, and phenobarbital, placed plastic bags over their heads and lay patiently on their beds to die. In videos they made before their suicide they recorded their belief that the comet was the marker they had awaited for so long and that they were ready to shed their âcontainersâ and leave the planet in a spacecraft sent by beings in the âlevel above humans.â No use telling them it was all just coincidence.
Commenting on the tragedy, University of Southern California professor of religion Robert S. Ellwood said, âThese people come from a nineties kind of culture, with all its hardware and world views, but they have hewed to the traditional apocalyptic scenario: that radical changes are imminent and foretold by signs in the heavens.â
In a society that reckons itself to be founded on rational scientific notions, 17 percent of Americans claim they have seen a ghost, 10 percent say they have communicated with the devil, and four million claim to have been abducted by aliens. Evidence that the paranormal is not only alive and well, but doing big business, can be easily found in the astrology columns in every magazine, in the psychic consultation ads in newspapers, in the popularity of creationism (which holds that the Earth was made in seven days), in the hiring by big business of consultants in dowsing and feng shui.⦠Skeptical Americans were shocked in 1986 when a Philadelphia jury awarded more than $900,000 in damages to a woman who claimed her psychic powers had been damaged during a CAT scan at a University Medical School. Her complaint was supported by the âexpertâ testimony of a doctor.
Our obstinate attraction to paranormal explanations is explained by psychologist Susan Blackmore as a natural tendency to try to understand the world by making connections between things such as dreams and events, or star formations and our love lives. Coincidences are ready-made connections; all that remains is for us to label them prophetic.
Psychologists call the attempt to link random events with our own thought processes the âillusion of control.â Dr. Blackmore gives a simple example that we have all experiencedâwilling traffic lights to change as we approach them. If the lights do change we get a pleasant lift, but people often report such coincidental events as evidence of psychokinesis, or mind over matter. In other words, physical objects have somehow reordered themselves in accordance with a thought in someoneâs mind. Investigations have revealed that people who report such powers routinely ignore those occasions when the lights do not change, if they notice them at all.
âWe like to think we can control the world around us by observing coincidences between our own actions and the things that happen,â says Dr. Blackmore. âBelief in psychic events may be an illusion of causality.â
Psychics respond to such criticisms by asserting that human intuition is a greater force
On the face of it modern society would appear to have moved away from such destructive superstition. Rational scientific analysis is the modern means of measuring and interpreting cosmic debris. In fact in 1996 a newly discovered asteroid was named Skepticus in honor of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (which publishes the magazine The Skeptical Inquirer ) and a second rock after CSICOPâs founder Paul Kurtz.
Yet only a year after that ceremony, when the comet Hale-Bopp appeared in the night skies in 1997, thirty-nine members of a religious mission called Heavenâs Gate cleaned their communal house at Rancho Santa Fe, California, donned identical black running shoes and tracksuits bearing comet swoosh badges and âAWAY TEAMâ patches, attached identification to themselves, dosed each other with a cocktail of apple sauce, vodka, and phenobarbital, placed plastic bags over their heads and lay patiently on their beds to die. In videos they made before their suicide they recorded their belief that the comet was the marker they had awaited for so long and that they were ready to shed their âcontainersâ and leave the planet in a spacecraft sent by beings in the âlevel above humans.â No use telling them it was all just coincidence.
Commenting on the tragedy, University of Southern California professor of religion Robert S. Ellwood said, âThese people come from a nineties kind of culture, with all its hardware and world views, but they have hewed to the traditional apocalyptic scenario: that radical changes are imminent and foretold by signs in the heavens.â
In a society that reckons itself to be founded on rational scientific notions, 17 percent of Americans claim they have seen a ghost, 10 percent say they have communicated with the devil, and four million claim to have been abducted by aliens. Evidence that the paranormal is not only alive and well, but doing big business, can be easily found in the astrology columns in every magazine, in the psychic consultation ads in newspapers, in the popularity of creationism (which holds that the Earth was made in seven days), in the hiring by big business of consultants in dowsing and feng shui.⦠Skeptical Americans were shocked in 1986 when a Philadelphia jury awarded more than $900,000 in damages to a woman who claimed her psychic powers had been damaged during a CAT scan at a University Medical School. Her complaint was supported by the âexpertâ testimony of a doctor.
Our obstinate attraction to paranormal explanations is explained by psychologist Susan Blackmore as a natural tendency to try to understand the world by making connections between things such as dreams and events, or star formations and our love lives. Coincidences are ready-made connections; all that remains is for us to label them prophetic.
Psychologists call the attempt to link random events with our own thought processes the âillusion of control.â Dr. Blackmore gives a simple example that we have all experiencedâwilling traffic lights to change as we approach them. If the lights do change we get a pleasant lift, but people often report such coincidental events as evidence of psychokinesis, or mind over matter. In other words, physical objects have somehow reordered themselves in accordance with a thought in someoneâs mind. Investigations have revealed that people who report such powers routinely ignore those occasions when the lights do not change, if they notice them at all.
âWe like to think we can control the world around us by observing coincidences between our own actions and the things that happen,â says Dr. Blackmore. âBelief in psychic events may be an illusion of causality.â
Psychics respond to such criticisms by asserting that human intuition is a greater force
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