{"id":1140,"date":"2008-10-14T18:17:38","date_gmt":"2008-10-14T17:17:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=1140"},"modified":"2008-10-14T18:17:38","modified_gmt":"2008-10-14T17:17:38","slug":"what-do-you-believe-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=1140","title":{"rendered":"What do you believe?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/education\/2008\/oct\/14\/research-highereducation\">an article<\/a> in today&#8217;s &#8220;Education Guardian&#8221; about why people believe in alien abduction based on the work of psychology professor Chris French whom I have heard speak [see posting <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/2008\/04\/an_evening_with_james_randi.html\">here<\/a>]. 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):<br \/>\n\u2022 64% believe that some people have powers that cannot be explained by science [16%]<br \/>\n\u2022 63% believe in God [14%]<br \/>\n\u2022 52% believe in life after death [11%]<br \/>\n\u2022 49% believe in ghosts [13%]<br \/>\n\u2022 49% believe in precognitive dreams [19%]<br \/>\n\u2022 49% believe in heaven (only 28% believe in hell) [2%, 2%]<br \/>\n\u2022 47% believe in thought reading [14%]<br \/>\n\u2022 41% believe in communication with the dead [9%]<br \/>\n\u2022 34% believe in psychokinesis [4%]<br \/>\n\u2022 26% believe in angels [ 3%]<br \/>\n\u2022 25% believe in reincarnation [-]<br \/>\nAm I weird or something because I don&#8217;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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/truth.html\">this short essay<\/a>.<br \/>\nSo why do people believe in alien abduction? The &#8220;Guardian&#8221; 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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/science.html#Weird\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s an article in today&#8217;s &#8220;Education Guardian&#8221; 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1140"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}