Most adults believe that when they learn something new that contradicts what they previously thought, they abandon their earlier misconceptions and mistaken ideas. However, it is not clear that this happens entirely: childish notions can linger on in the mature mind. Consider an example from the world of objects. Imagine two cannonballs of exactly the same size. One is made of light wood and the other one is solid iron that is one hundred times heavier. If you were to drop them both at the same time from the leaning Tower of Pisa, what would happen?28 Children think that heavier objects fall much faster than lighter ones. Heavier objects do land before lighter ones, but only just, and that’s because of air resistance. If you dropped the cannonballs in a vacuum where there was no air resistance, they would land exactly at the same time. As a child, I did not believe this until a physics teacher demonstrated that a feather and a coin fall at exactly the same speed in a vacuum. Most college students make the same mistake.29 The amazing thing is not that adult students get it wrong, but rather that these are students who have been taught Newton’s Laws of Object Motion and should know better. They should know the correct answer. Somehow the scientific knowledge they have so painstakingly learned loses out to their natural intuition about weight and falling objects.
The example of the falling cannonballs is important because it reveals that we may never truly abandon our childhood misconceptions when we become adults and learn new facts about the world. Some of us are more vulnerable to these misconceptions than others. Now imagine how difficult it is for us to abandon beliefs that include the supernatural. Here there is precious little evidence to dissuade us of our beliefs. If we hold childish notions about the unseen mechanisms of reality, then the difference between believers and nonbelievers may have less to do with what we have been told and more to do with our susceptibility to our own childish misconceptions. If you are someone who is inclined to believe that there are supernatural forces operating in the world, then you will interpret all manner of events in light of this way of thinking. There will be no chance occurrences. Fate and luck will explain why things happen. You will infer the presence of supernatural agents, and evil and good will become tangible forces.
WHAT NEXT?
Our lives are punctuated by bizarre occurrences. How do we make sense of them? All too often we appeal to explanations that evoke some supernatural activity even though the evidence for such activity cannot be directly observed or studied. So we are left with belief. Where do these beliefs come from? One account is based on the idea that supernatural beliefs are spread by what other people tell us. Certainly this may be true for the content of a belief – the name of a spirit or the nature of the rituals that need to be performed – but what about the basis of the belief? And why are so many of us so willingly gullible? One reason may be that it is our natural way of thinking to assume that there is a supernatural dimension to reality – the ‘something there’ that William James talked about.
Religion is the most familiar face of such supernatural belief: most religions have deities and other supernatural beings that are not restricted to natural laws. Even many people who do not believe in God are nevertheless willing to entertain the notion that there are phenomena, patterns, energies, and forces operating in the world that cannot be explained by natural laws. God may require supernatural belief, but supernatural beliefs do not require God.
In the next chapter, I want to develop this idea further by demonstrating that most of us can hold supernatural beliefs even when we are not fully aware that we do.
And, for that, I need an old cardigan.
CHAPTER TWO
COULD YOU WEAR A KILLER’S CARDIGAN?
WHEN IT COMES to making choices, most of us feel confident that we evaluate the evidence objectively, weigh the pros and cons, and act according to reason. Otherwise, we would have to concede that our decisions are unreasonable, and few individuals are willing to acknowledge this. But the truth is that human psychology is littered with many examples of faulty reasoning. This is why scientists are so interested in studying the mistakes we make and our biases and logical errors. They seem to fly in the face of reason and suggest that there must be underlying mechanisms responsible for controlling our thought processes. This is the mind design that I talked about in the last chapter. The aspect of mind design that interests me is the one that leads us to infer the presence of patterns, forces, and energies operating in the world where there may be none. This is what I mean by a supersense. Even if you deny having a supersense, you may still be susceptible to its influence, because the processes that lead to supernatural thinking are not necessarily under conscious or willful control. And, as you will see later in the book, some researchers even question whether there is such a thing as conscious willful control.
I like to illustrate this point in the public lectures I give on the origins of supernatural thinking by talking about our reactions to memorabilia. These objects are the best examples because most audiences immediately recognize what I am talking about when it comes to considering the hidden power of simple inanimate objects. To demonstrate the psychological impression created by objects I hand out a black fountain pen dating from the 1930s that once belonged to Albert Einstein. Okay, I lie to the audience about the provenance of the pen, but the belief is sufficient. The reverence and awe towards this object is palpable. Everyone wants to hold it. Touching the pen makes them feel good. Then I ask the audience if they would be willing to wear the cardigan I brought along. Given the oddity of the question and the tattered state of the woollen garment, the audience is understandably suspicious. After a moment’s consideration, usually around one-third of the audience raise their hand. So I offer a prize. More hands are raised. I then tell them about Cromwell Street as an image of Fred West rises menacingly from the bottom of the PowerPoint display. Once they are told that the cardigan belonged to Fred West, most hands usually shoot down, followed by a ripple of nervous laughter. People recognize that their change of heart reflects something odd.
There are always the exceptions, of course. Some people resolutely keep their hand raised. Typically, they are male and determined to demonstrate their rational control. Or they suspect, rightly, that I was lying about the owner of the cardigan. What is remarkable is that other audience members sitting next to one of these individuals visibly recoil from their neighbour who is willing to wear a killer’s cardigan. How could someone even consider touching such an appalling garment? It’s a stunt, of course – a deliberate ploy set up to create a sense of revulsion in an unsuspecting audience.
Last year, this stunt earned me some notoriety in Norwich, England.1 I was presenting my theory on the origin of the supersense and why science and rationality will not get people to abandon such beliefs easily. The presentation took place at a major British science festival, and the world’s science press was there. Since every quality paper had a science correspondent present, I circulated an article outlining my ideas so that there would be a good turnout at the press conference. I argued that humans are born with brains that infer hidden forces and structures in the real world, and that some of these inferences naturally lead us to believe in the supernatural. Therefore, we cannot put sole responsibility for spreading supernatural belief on religions and cultures, which simply capitalize on our supersense.