What do you believe?
There’s an article in today’s “Education Guardian” about why people believe in alien abduction based on the work of psychology professor Chris French whom I have heard speak [see posting here]. The piece includes figures from an opinion poll on the beliefs of a representative sample of 1,000 British adults (the figures in square brackets indicate those reporting direct personal experience of the phenomenon in question):
• 64% believe that some people have powers that cannot be explained by science [16%]
• 63% believe in God [14%]
• 52% believe in life after death [11%]
• 49% believe in ghosts [13%]
• 49% believe in precognitive dreams [19%]
• 49% believe in heaven (only 28% believe in hell) [2%, 2%]
• 47% believe in thought reading [14%]
• 41% believe in communication with the dead [9%]
• 34% believe in psychokinesis [4%]
• 26% believe in angels [ 3%]
• 25% believe in reincarnation [-]
Am I weird or something because I don’t believe in any of these things. Why? Because there is no convincing evidence to support any of them. Does evidence matter? I think it does as I explain in this short essay.
So why do people believe in alien abduction? The “Guardian” article offers some possible answers. More generally why do people believe weird things? Michael Shermer has actually written a whole book on the subject which I have reviewed here.
October 15th, 2008 at 11:08 am
Interesting that 2% of respondents claim to have personal experience of heaven/hell, yet nobody claims to be reincarnated — do near death experiences account for the discrepancy?
The phrase “cannot be explained by science” seems ambiguous: should it be interpreted as “cannot be explained at present“, or “cannot be explained in principle by science”? If the former, then of course many things cannot currently be explained by science, but might one day be understood. I wonder how the poll question was phrased.