Why People Believe Weird Things summary

Since the dawn of humanity, scientific knowledge has been growing – and growing rapidly. Over the millennia, people have researched, tested and improved scientific ideas, so that our understanding of science is always increasing.

Each new scientific theory is based on the current body of knowledge. If a theory gets replaced by a newer one, we can still retain the useful information from it.

If you watch a mind reader or psychic at work you might be surprised at the accuracy of their information. Accurate readings, however, don’t mean that divination is real. Psychics use tricks to fool their audience into believing them, just like magicians.

There are two methods that psychics or other mystical people use to fool people into believing them.

It’s a marvel of modern medicine that many people survive severe accidents or life-threatening comas where they technically “die,” but there’s still some mystery: many of these survivors report the same experience. They say they felt they were leaving their body, and moving through a tunnel toward a light.

The similarities between these testimonies are one of the driving forces behind religions, mysticism and spiritualism. But while believers view the accounts as proof of life after death, scientists have found rational explanations for them.

Stories of alien abductions are very widespread. How can so many witnesses be lying? Actually, they aren’t, it’s just that certain experiences can cause hallucinations that are so real that the affected person confuses reality and fantasy.

Many alien encounters are actually caused by not getting enough sleep. “White-line fever” is a sleep disorder that’s often experienced by truck drivers. Lack of sleep combined with the monotony of driving (and seeing the endless white lines on the road) leads to hallucinations, which can be quite extreme.

In the Dark Ages, “witches” were hunted down and various cults were founded in the name of religion. We don’t call people witches any more, but people still go on witch hunts today for no rational reason.

In fact, medieval witch hunts have the same characteristics as certain modern crazes. From time to time, some kind of mass hysteria is triggered. People get falsely accused of a crime, the media goes wild and people become convinced that an innocent person is guilty.

In 1994, Frank J. Tipler released a book called The Physics of Immortality, which initially received a lot of attention. It might be tempting to believe we have proof that immortality is real, but Tipler’s pseudoscientific theory is untenable.

Tipler believed that by the far distant time when the universe collapsed on itself, humans would have invented a computer that could use the energy thrown up by that catastrophe to virtually recreate every human being from data stored in their memories. Mankind would be saved in a new virtual universe by a godlike computer.

Creationists believe that the Earth and all its living creatures were created by God. They reject Darwin, and view his theory of evolution as an attack on religion.

In reality, creationism is an attack on science. If creationists wanted to prove that God created everything, they’d have to first disprove much of our knowledge about biology, geology or paleontology. Needless to say, they haven’t had any success with this.

Holocaust deniers acknowledge there was anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, but insist that there was no planned extermination of Jews in Europe during World War II. They’re emphatic: they just want to know “the truth.”

According to them, Hitler’s final solution for the Jews was actually deportation out of the Reich, not extermination. They believe the main causes of death at the time were disease and starvation. Moreover, they assert that between 300,000 and two million Jews died, rather than five or six million as most historians believe.