What is going on in our culture and thinking that leads to such beliefs ? Theories proffered by skeptics and scientists abound: no education, miseducation, lack of critical thinking, rise of religion, decline of religion, displacement of traditional religion by cults, fear of science, the New Age, the Dark Ages revisited, too much television, not enough reading, reading the wrong books, poor parenting, lousy teachers, and plain old ignorance and stupidity. A correspondent from Ontario, Canada, sent me what he called "the vilest embodiment of what you are up against." It was a Day- Glo orange cardboard sign from his local bookstore on which was scrawled: NEW AGE SECTION MOVED TO SCIENCE SECTION. "I am truly frightened by the ease with which society is substituting voodoo and superstition for inquiry and critical examination," he wrote. "If there was ever to be an icon showing how far this phenomenon has ingrained itself into our culture, then this sign would surely be it." As a culture we seem to have trouble distinguishing science from pseudoscience, history from pseudohistory, and sense from nonsense. But I think the problem lies deeper than this. To get to it we must dig through the layers of culture and society into the individual human mind and heart. There is not a single answer to the question of why people believe weird things, but we can glean some underlying motivations, all linked to one another, from the diverse examples I have discussed in this book: Credo Consolans. More than any other, the reason people believe weird things is because they want to. It feels good. It is comforting. It is consoling. According to a 1996 Gallup poll, 96 percent of American adults believe in God, 90 percent in heaven, 79 percent in miracles, and 72 percent in angels (Wall Street journal, January 30, p. A8). Skeptics, atheists, and militant antireligionists , in their attempts to undermine belief in a higher power, life after death, and divine providence, are butting up against ten thousand years of history and possibly one hundred thousand years of evolution (if religion and belief in God have a biological basis, which some anthropologists believe they do). Throughout all of recorded history, everywhere on the globe, such beliefs and similar percentages are common. Until a suitable secular substitute surfaces, these figures are unlikely to change significantly….
