On the flight back from my honeymoon, I noticed an ad on my airplane promoting this sweepstakes - and my attention was drawn to the grand prize:

Win a one-on-one meeting with the renowned author and mind-body expert, Deepak Chopra, M.D. and rejuvenate your spirit with his Seduction of Spirit Retreat at the Chopra Center. Dr. Chopra is a global force in the field of human empowerment and the prolific author of fourteen bestsellers on mind-body health, quantum mechanics, spirituality and peace. Time Magazine heralds Dr. Chopra as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century and credits him as "the poet-prophet of alternative medicine."

If you're not familiar with Deepak Chopra, there's a detailed summary at the Skeptic's Dictionary. Suffice it to say that he's a physician who realized that peddling pseudoscience was much easier and more profitable than actually curing sick people. His repertoire includes generous doses of garbled nonsense that tries to connect quantum mechanics with ancient Indian superstitions, plenty of woo-woo New Age creationism, a healthy disdain for atheists, and most bizarrely of all, the claim that one can reverse the aging process by an effort of will.

So much for Chopra. But it occurred to me, why should one of his many credulous, worshipful followers win this award? Wouldn't it be great if the one-on-one meeting was with a knowledgeable skeptic who could take this pompous fraud to task? Granted, it probably wouldn't accomplish much; but the chance to prick Chopra's bliss bubble, to force him for once in his life to face genuine criticism, is too good to pass up. And the public embarrassment it would cause him could provide some welcome, entertaining press for the skeptic movement.

So, I'm seriously considering entering this sweepstakes. The contest is open until June 25, so there's plenty of time for skeptics to get on the bandwagon. Anyone else who'd relish the chance to confront Chopra want to throw their hat into the ring along with me?

I'm happy to report that there's quite a lot of good news this week:

• The U.K. government recommends that primary school religious education classes should teach about "secular beliefs such as humanism and atheism", in addition to learning about major world religions like Christianity, Buddhism and Islam. This is just one more symptom of how far ahead of us our European friends are in some respects - can you imagine the religious right frenzy that would ensue if a U.S. politician recommended teaching about atheism in public high schools?

• In a story that made me especially happy, Andrew Wakefield, the pseudoscientific doctor who's almost single-handedly responsible for the anti-vaccination movement, was found to have seriously abused his trust as a medical practitioner by a U.K. ethics panel. According to the ruling, Wakefield ordered unnecessary and invasive tests on autistic children (including spinal taps and colonoscopies), without securing proper ethical approval, in the paper that claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. He also failed to disclose major conflicts of interest (he was being paid by trial lawyers looking to file claims against vaccine manufacturers). The General Medical Council ruled that Wakefield was "dishonest, irresponsible and showed callous disregard for the distress and pain" of the children, and is still evaluating a charge of professional misconduct that could lead to Wakefield's losing his license to practice medicine.

• And lastly, I'm glad to report that Scott Roeder, the Christian terrorist who shot and killed Dr. George Tiller, was convicted of first-degree murder by a Kansas jury this week. The judge rejected the defense's ludicrous request that the jury be allowed to consider voluntary manslaughter, and they returned the verdict after just 37 minutes of deliberation. Roeder faces a mandatory sentence of life in prison, the most fitting punishment for a cold-blooded and vicious killer like himself.

Although the cause of justice was served, this verdict can't undo the damage; Dr. Tiller's clinic will be closing for good, which means in a way that Roeder got exactly what he wanted. Still, the verdict sends a message that anti-choice zealots cannot commit these crimes with impunity. It may not be enough to discourage future acts of terrorism against abortion providers, but at least we have assurance that the rule of law is still operative in America.

Most of you have probably heard the name of William Dembski, one of the prominent advocates of intelligent-design creationism. Like all ID advocates, Dembski claims vehemently that his work is scientific and not in any way motivated by his religious beliefs, which is why he's currently a professor of philosophy at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas.

But never mind that; today, somewhat surprisingly, I come to praise Dembski rather than bury him. That's because I've come across this very interesting essay of his about his family's experience visiting a faith healer.

You may not have known that Dembski has a severely autistic son - as he describes it, "largely nonverbal, still not fully toilet trained, serious developmental delays" - who was 7 years old at the time he wrote this essay. This, of course, is not a fate I would wish on anyone, regardless of their political or religious views. And while most cases of autism can be treated to an extent with intensive therapy, the paucity of good options and the daily struggles would be enough to drive any parent to despair and frustration. Thus, it's probably not surprising that Dembski felt he had little to lose when his fellow evangelical Christians recommended he attend an "impartation service" held in July 2008 by the faith healer Todd Bentley.

As Dembski tells it, the hyping and manipulation started early. Though the service began at 7 PM (in a basketball arena north of Dallas), the organizers urged them to arrive by 3 PM to be sure of getting a seat, citing expected overflow crowds:

At 6:30, after sitting for two hours, the arena was about three-quarters full. One of the organizers then announced that traffic was backed up for miles around Denton and that several thousand were trying to get into the meeting, most of whom would have to be turned away. This was sheer hype. A significant block of seats (at least 20 percent) were cordoned off and never used throughout the whole night. We could have arrived anytime and still gotten seats.

The service began at 7 with two hours (!) of "music ministry" (terrible, repetitive music, according to Dembski). Bentley himself finally took the stage at 9 PM, and spent most of the time talking about the astonishing miracles he claims to have performed. Dembski shows a welcome measure of skepticism toward these extraordinary claims in a passage that made me laugh:

Bentley told stories of remarkable healings. In fact, he claims that in his ministry 30 people have now been raised from the dead. Are these stories credible? A common pattern in his accounts of healing was an absence of specificity. Bentley claims that one man, unembalmed, had been dead for 48 hours and was in a coffin. When the family gathered around at a funeral home, the man knocked from inside the coffin to be let out.

But what are the specifics? Who was this man? What's his name? Where's the death certificate? And why not parade the man at Bentley's meetings? If I am ever raised from the dead through anyone's ministry, you can be sure I'll put in a guest appearance.

Bentley claimed that he would "soon go public with the evidence" of these dramatic healings. This, presumably, is the same sense of "soon" used by Christian evangelicals who claim that Jesus' 2000-year-overdue second coming is sure to happen any day now.

When the "healings" finally began, I'm sure it will surprise no one to hear that Bentley's focus was mainly on milking the gullible and the desperate for as much money as possible.

After preaching, Bentley took the offering. During the offering he asked "How much anointing do you want to receive?" Thus he linked the blessing we should receive with the amount of money we gave.

After a "general prayer for mass healing", Bentley then indicated that people who needed the most help should come forward to receive special prayer. Dembski's wife attempted to take their autistic son down to the altar, but was repeatedly prevented by the ushers:

Over an hour later my son with autism was still not able to get to the main floor for prayer. Ushers twice prevented that from happening. They noted that he was not in a wheelchair. Wheelchair cases clearly had priority — presumably they provided better opportunities for the cameras, which filmed everything.

...Our son was refused prayer twice because he didn't look the part, and he was told to wait still longer for a prayer that would never have been offered. And even those who looked the part seemed to look no better after Bentley's prayer — the exodus from the arena of people bound in wheelchairs was poignant.

My son's situation was not unique — a man with bone cancer and his wife traveled a long distance, were likewise refused prayer, and left in tears.

After waiting for over an hour, the Dembski family gave up and left. He describes the experience as "an education... about how easily religion can be abused, in this case to exploit our family" - a welcome conclusion from a person who's spent so much of his career encouraging belief in superstition and religious pseudoscience.

Todd Bentley isn't the only faith-healing charlatan out there. There are plenty of others working this highly profitable circuit - I recall my brush in 2006 with Jaerock Lee, a Korean evangelist whose fliers made similarly grandiose, but detail-free, claims about curing blindness, cancer, paralysis and even raising the dead. Interestingly, as I noted in my post at the time, William Dembski endorsed that con man. One wonders if this experience has done anything to disillusion him about faith healers in general.

Dave Schmeltzer's book Not the Religious Type has many examples of what he calls "napkin stories" (i.e., short enough to write on a napkin), brief anecdotes from people who claim to have experienced miraculous events in their lives when they trusted in God. Here's a typical one:

I found out that my aunt and uncle's marriage was unraveling due to an affair. I fasted and prayed for them. After thirty-eight days, I was contacted by my uncle. He was about to sign a lease on an apartment to move in with his lover. Before he could sign, he felt an almost audible voice in his head say "stop." He went back to my aunt and started to see how their marriage could be saved. She found a way to forgive him.

I've observed in the past that evangelical religious belief is sustained by a kind of natural selection among ideas. Stories and personal testimonies that fit neatly into Christian narrative prototypes - stories that resonate with what Christians already believe - stir interest and excitement among believers who hear them, are repeated and passed on from person to person, and soon become common in the apologetic literature. But stories that can't be fitted into these templates don't draw interest or excitement from believers, are not repeated or passed on, and tend to be forgotten. Because of this tendency to count the hits and forget the misses, Christians uneducated in critical thinking tend to believe that answers to prayer are common.

But if you look at all the evidence, a different picture emerges. We hear stories about faithful Christians who are stricken ill, pray for healing, and then recover; we hear stories about evangelists who founded a ministry and saw it flourish and grow; we hear stories about nonbelievers who pray for God to reveal himself and then mysteriously receive aid from a helpful Christian stranger at just the right time. However, unless you're looking for them specifically, you probably don't hear stories about Christians who are stricken ill, pray for healing, and then die. You don't hear stories about churches and ministries that fail to attract members and fall apart, despite the hard work of their founders. You don't hear stories about nonbelievers who pray to God to reveal himself and then nothing out of the ordinary happens. It's not that these stories never get written - they do, and I'll give some examples - it's just that they don't take root and spread through the Christian community like the other kind.

In this post, I'll try to counteract that tendency by presenting some stories of when prayer fails. The first two examples are from Philip Yancey's book The Jesus I Never Knew:

One terrible week two people called me on successive days to talk about one of my books. The first, a youth pastor in Colorado, had just learned his wife and baby daughter were dying of AIDS. "How can I possibly talk to my youth group about a loving God after what has happened to me?" he asked. The next day I heard from a blind man who, several months before, had invited a recovering drug addict into his home as an act of mercy. Recently he had discovered that the recovering addict was carrying on an affair with his wife, under his own roof. "Why is God punishing me for trying to serve him?" he asked. Just then he ran out of quarters, the phone went dead, and I never heard from the man again. [p.159-160]

Even the "answers to prayer" confused me. Sometimes, after all, parking places did not open up and fountain pens stayed lost. Sometimes church people lost their jobs. Sometimes they died. A great shadow darkened my own life: my father had died of polio just after my first birthday, despite a round-the-clock prayer vigil involving hundreds of dedicated Christians. Where was God then? [p.165]

Or this tragic story of a young mother dying of cancer, who prayed with a hospital chaplain that God would give her the time to finish a needlepoint project she was making for her children:

I was totally hooked. We prayed. We believed. Jesus, this was the kind of prayer you could believe in. We were like idiots and fools.

A couple of days later I went to see her only to find the room filled with doctors and nurses. She was having violent convulsions and terrible pain. I watched while she died hard. Real hard.

As the door shut, the last thing I saw was the unfinished needlepoint lying on the floor.

Or Paul Barnes, former pastor of a 2,000-member evangelical megachurch, who resigned after admitting that he was homosexual:

"I have struggled with homosexuality since I was a 5-year-old boy... I can't tell you the number of nights I have cried myself to sleep, begging God to take this away."

Or this sad story of an injured man, unable to afford a doctor, who waited months on end for a miracle until he died:

"He read his Bible daily, he spent his full focus on God," said Webb. "And he was literally waiting and praying for a Job miracle. If anybody knows the Bible and knows Job, he really and fully believed that God was going to heal him just like he did Job, because he said he couldn't think of a better testimony to go out and to tell people."

And Dave Schmeltzer himself, though he repeatedly claims to be happy and blessed, admits that his life too has times of depression and darkness:

"...it's not as though my life is consistently such a powerful case for connection with this super-duper God. For someone who talks as much as I do about joy... why is it that a few times over the years I've mentioned to my wife that I feel as if my life has been squeezed out of me like water from a sponge, like I relate to Woody Allen's working title for Annie Hall (Anhedonia - the clinical inability to feel joy)."

This quote highlights an important point that shows how miracle stories get started. Every life, regardless of which religion you belong to or whether you believe in God, has its high points and low points. Every person experiences both favorable and unfavorable coincidences. Evangelicals are doing nothing more clever than giving God the credit for the good times, while ignoring or downplaying the bad ones - save for the rare glimpses of honesty like the ones cited above.

But whatever theological embellishments that evangelicals put on them, these ups and downs happen to everyone. Atheists, too, experience them; the only difference is that we recognize them for what they are, the inevitable working of chance, and don't claim them as evidence of some supernatural creature's favor or disfavor. And atheists, too, experience the same kind of favorable coincidences that Christians unhesitatingly ascribe to miracles; again, the difference is that we recognize that occasional striking coincidences are bound to happen in the course of any normal life.

Here are a few edifying, inspiring, or (alas) infuriating stories that are making the rounds this week:

• First up, this truly outstanding piece from Wired on the anti-vaccination movement, An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All. This is what journalism is supposed to do: listen to the experts, survey the facts and adjudicate the truth, without the false-equivalency tactics that are the breath of life to kooks and advocates of pseudoscience. Here are a few samples:

In the center of the fray is Paul Offit. "People describe me as a vaccine advocate," he says. "I see myself as a science advocate." But in this battle — and make no mistake, he says, it's a pitched and heated battle — "science alone isn't enough ... People are getting hurt. The parent who reads what Jenny McCarthy says and thinks, 'Well, maybe I shouldn't get this vaccine,' and their child dies of Hib meningitis," he says, shaking his head. "It's such a fundamental failure on our part that we haven't convinced that parent."

To be clear, there is no credible evidence to indicate that any of this is true. None. Twelve epidemiological studies have found no data that links the MMR (measles/mumps/rubella) vaccine to autism; six studies have found no trace of an association between thimerosal (a preservative containing ethylmercury that has largely been removed from vaccines since 2001) and autism, and three other studies have found no indication that thimerosal causes even subtle neurological problems.

...Kaiser Permanente reported that unvaccinated children were 23 times more likely to get pertussis, a highly contagious bacterial disease that causes violent coughing and is potentially lethal to infants. In the June issue of the journal Pediatrics, Jason Glanz, an epidemiologist at Kaiser's Institute for Health Research, revealed that the number of reported pertussis cases jumped from 1,000 in 1976 to 26,000 in 2004. A disease that vaccines made rare, in other words, is making a comeback.

• From the Times, an article on how cancerous tumors can spontaneously disappear, for reasons that are not yet fully understood. Think of this one the next time a faith-healing zealot claims that supernatural fetishism cured them of an incurable disease.

• Also, this superb editorial from the normally mediocre Maureen Dowd about the Vatican's increasingly archaic and misogynist attitude toward nuns (and women in general).

• And lastly, check out this piece from the Financial Times about the degree to which Muslim immigrants are assimilating into European society. Sarah Braasch, Daylight Atheism's correspondent from France (she actually lives in the area described by the article) tells me that some of this is overly optimistic and doesn't fully do justice to the serious problems of abuse and subjugation that some immigrants, especially women, still face. On the other hand, the doomsday "Islamofascists are taking over Europe!" scenarios so often pushed by right-wingers go too far in the opposite direction, ignoring relevant facts (such as the plunging birthrate among increasingly well-educated immigrant families) that tend to undermine their scare tactics.

During World War II, American forces fighting in the Pacific set up bases on remote islands whose people had had very little prior contact with other civilizations. These people, with technology at a Stone Age level, were amazed by the strange visitors and the almost miraculous cargo they brought with them - chocolate, cigarettes, radio, steel tools. When the war ended and the soldiers left, some tribes went to desperate measures to summon them back, forming religions - cargo cults - which tried to induce the soldiers to return through sympathetic magic. Some of them went so far as to make mock military uniforms, cut "runways" in the jungle, or build "control towers" out of bamboo. The most famous surviving cargo cult is the following of John Frum, which I've written about before.

I mention all this because a friend sent me this bizarre article from a group calling itself the Spiritual Science Research Foundation, "How does prayer work? A spiritual perspective". It's an excellent example of what (to borrow a phrase from Richard Feynman) we might call "cargo cult science".

This article is clearly intended to mimic the form of a peer-reviewed scientific paper. It has an abstract, a section discussing the "mechanism" of prayer, plenty of colorful graphics and charts, and plenty of technical-sounding talk about which postures increase the efficacy of one's prayers by what percentage:

But for all its glitzy graphics and pseudotechnical jargon, this article is no more science than a cargo cult's bamboo control tower will attract real airplanes. It imitates the form while completely misunderstanding the essence of what it's trying to recreate.

The essence of science lies in answering two questions: how do you know that? and how can I test it? Both these answers are missing from the SSRF's prayer article, which spews forth assertion after ludicrous assertion without making the slightest effort to explain how its author came by any of this knowledge. Just take a few examples:

A person at the 50% spiritual level will more often than not pray for his spiritual progress... a person who prays for the death of another person will be helped by a negative subtle entity from the 4th Region of Hell... The subtlest frequencies are generated when one pays gratitude along with the prayer... Prayer increases the particles of the subtle basic sattva component in the vital body sheath... In our life, 65% of events happen as per destiny... Prayers of people who are below the 30% spiritual level lack potency... By touching the wrists to the chest, the Anaahat chakra is activated and it helps in absorbing more sattva frequencies... In some cases people hold hands and pray. This is also a spiritually incorrect practice... All other things being equal, using the recommended mudraa (posture) for prayer helps to improve the chances of one’s prayer being answered by 20%.

The article goes on and on, throwing out these statistics as if they were well-established facts, never attempting to explain how any of this knowledge was acquired. Nor does it make any effort to explain how an interested person might test any of this to confirm for themselves that it's true.

What seems clear is that groups like this (and others) are envious of science - of its precision, of its demonstrated success, of the esteem it enjoys from the public. They want to claim some of that authority for themselves, which is why they ape the form and language of a scientific paper, hoping that the credulous will be deceived by the resemblance into thinking that their beliefs are scientifically verified as well. Yet despite its pretense of scientific language, this article is essentially no different from any other religious book, making bald assertions which the believer is required to take on faith.

(Editor's Note: This review was solicited and is written in accordance with this site's policy for such reviews.)

If you've been around the atheist blogosphere, you probably know the name Christopher Hallquist, author of the blog The Uncredible Hallq (I've always wondered, does he get more skeptical when he gets angry?).

Well, it seems he's come into his own, because last month in the mail I got a copy of his new book, UFOs, Ghosts, and a Rising God: Debunking the Resurrection of Jesus, which was published earlier this year by Reasonable Press. Here follows a short summary of the book and my review.

The book begins with a brief history of skepticism, from the Roman con-artist Alexander and his nemesis the satirist Lucian, to Franz Mesmer and the spiritualism craze of the 18th century, complete with mediums who could levitate, summon ghosts on command, or communicate using psychic powers. Since most of us rightly consider these claims to be dubious, Hallquist argues, we should apply David Hume's criteria for judging miracle tales and conclude that the Christian resurrection story, which is much longer ago and even less well documented, is even less likely to be true.

There are some great nuggets of information in here, particularly Hallquist's account of an e-mail conversation with Craig Blomberg, one of the experts interviewed in Lee Strobel's The Case for Christ. Blomberg complains that Strobel's book "heavily paraphrased" [p.50] and oversimplified their actual conversation, and that he ultimately gave up on trying to correct all the inaccuracies that Strobel introduced. There follow discussions of textual evolution in the New Testament, of the way legends tend to grow and mutate in the retelling, and the general lack of skepticism or a tradition of critical inquiry in the ancient world. Another bit I particularly liked: to drive the point home, Hallquist quotes a Christian magician, Andre Kole, who defends the historicity of Jesus' miracles even while complaining that people tend to misremember his shows and believe he performed far more impressive tricks than he actually did! [p.75]

Building on this argument, Hallquist argues that Jesus may have been similar to a modern faith healer, performing "miracles" that relied mainly on the placebo effect and his devotees' faith in him. These stories then grew in the telling, becoming far more impressive than they originally were.

As for the alleged resurrection and post-death experiences, Hallquist notes that even the Gospels portray the risen Jesus as a strangely ethereal phenomenon, appearing and disappearing without warning depending on who seems to be looking, and often describes his glorified body in mystical, visionary terms. He discusses the modern parallel of UFO abductions, pointing out their similar dreamlike and hallucinatory qualities, and brings up the nice point that stress - such as at the death of a loved one - can make such visions more likely to occur. The closing chapters ably dismantle some common apologist arguments relating to biblical prophecy, the Shroud of Turin, and religious attitudes toward skepticism and doubt.

Having finished the book, I have just two complaints, one small, one large. First, the minor: There were a lot of typos in this book - grammatical missteps, missing letters, missing words or incorrect punctuation. On average, I counted one such every few pages at least. It obviously doesn't detract from the soundness of the arguments, but it was distracting. I imagine Reasonable Press, a fairly small printing house by the look of it, doesn't have a great deal of money to invest in proofreading, but still.

Second: The one hypothesis that this book doesn't consider, and that I found conspicuous by its absence, was that Jesus was an entirely mythical figure who was gradually "historicized" into a real human being. All the arguments Hallquist presents about legendary development, exaggeration of rumors and the like would apply equally well, maybe even better, to this hypothesis. This is an alternative that I think deserves serious consideration, and if there's a future edition, perhaps it will address it.

With those caveats, this is a short, smart book, one that's worth your while to pick up and read. Most of the skeptical material on Jesus' resurrection was not new to me, but if you haven't read extensively on the topic, it's a useful and fairly comprehensive primer on how an atheist can best respond to these apologetic claims. What I personally found most illuminating was actually the background material - the mediums and spiritualists of past eras who claimed supernatural powers, and the skeptics, like Harry Houdini, who took them on. This is material that I think will be new to most readers, and there are some powerful lessons to draw on here. Hallquist cleverly points out that plenty of spiritualist "miracles", like the alleged levitation of one D.D. Home (which was supported by three signed eyewitness testimonies) are backed by evidence as good as or better than the evidence for anything in the Bible.

Last month, the U.S. government-funded National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine released a study which found that Americans spent $34 billion annually on alternative medicine. Although this is just 1.5% of total health care spending in the country, it represents over 11% of all out-of-pocket expenditures. The report estimates that about 38 million adults visited alternative practitioners in 2007.

Unusually for a mainstream media outlet, the Boston Globe offers a much-welcomed skeptical perspective on this news, via a quote from Public Citizen which points out the important fact that most of these therapies are untested and largely unregulated:

Dr. Sidney Wolfe, who leads Public Citizen's health research, has long criticized the government for what he considers lax regulation of prescription drugs and mainstream medicine. Yet, he also sees problems with the widespread use of dietary supplements.

"People think they are cleared" by the Food and Drug Administration, he said, when in fact they do not need proof of safety or effectiveness to go on the market.

"Mainly, they're ineffective," he said.

According to the NCCAM study, most alternative medicine spending goes to dietary supplements. Though supplements like fish oil and echinacea are massively popular, few of them have any clinically demonstrated effect, and even the ones that do contain active ingredients can vary dramatically in dosage and potency - which is, after all, what you'd expect from raw natural ingredients. The ability to isolate and purify the active ingredients found in nature, to deliver controlled doses at known potency, is the entire point of scientific medicine.

After supplements, some of the other alternative treatments mentioned in the study include acupuncture and homeopathy, both of which are useless placebos based on sympathetic magic and pseudoscientific theories about how the human body works. Another kind is massage therapy and chiropractic, which can be useful for some kinds of physical ailments but have nothing like the universal efficacy claimed by their more fanatical practitioners. Other therapies mentioned by the study include chelation, ayurvedic medicine, and "energy-healing therapy".

I can only view these figures as a massive missed opportunity. Not just a missed opportunity to educate the public about why we should rely on evidence-based medicine, although it's certainly that. But more than that, it's a societal failure: a misallocation of society's resources on an enormous scale. Just think what that $34 billion could have done if it were put toward genuine scientific and medical research - how many promising studies could have been funded, how many discoveries made, how many diseases potentially cured! (For comparison, the entire 2010 budget request of the National Science Foundation is only $7 billion.)

Obviously, there's no direct tradeoff here. Even if all Americans decided to reject alternative medicine, these funds wouldn't necessarily have gone to scientific research. Much spending on alternative medicine is for conditions that are still poorly understood or that have no effective treatment, since these are always the areas where pseudoscience springs up. What we're seeing here is an opportunity cost: the price we, as a society, pay for the decisions we collectively make about how to allocate our resources. Money that we spend on alternative medicine and other pseudosciences is money that we can't spend on areas that might genuinely improve our lives.

While we're on the topic of science and the public, I came across another opinion poll worth mentioning: a survey released this month by Pew, Public Praises Science; Scientists Fault Public, Media, which analyzes how the public views scientific achievement and what professional scientists think of how their work is covered in the media (HT: Obsidian Wings). There's lots to chew over in this report, but I want to focus on this section, which shows how many ideas that are accepted by an overwhelming majority of scientists do not enjoy similar levels of support from the public:

There are a couple of things we can take away from this, but here's the first one: The media is not doing its job. Just as we lambaste the food industry when people come down with mass E. coli infection from tainted meat or contaminated greens, so too do media outlets deserve criticism when the public whom they serve believes demonstrably false things about the nature of our country or our world. This, like outbreaks of food poisoning, is a sign that there's been a failure of quality control somewhere along the line.

The media is supposed to inform the public and communicate the truth about important issues. Instead, in their pursuit of the illusion of balance, many media outlets have taken the stance that their job is to be stenographers to the powerful - writing down opposing views in he-said-she-said fashion, without making any effort to adjudicate between them or to point out which viewpoint finds support in the facts. This intellectual laziness too often masquerades as "fairness". In fact, it's a victory for ideologues who oppose the scientific consensus - creationists, climate-change deniers, and others - and who can win a debate merely by creating an artificial controversy and preventing the truth from becoming widely known.

But scientists aren't entirely blameless either. Although they're right to complain about sloppy or sensationalistic news coverage, scientists themselves should be doing more to convey their views to the public. Our goal should be a culture where public communication - writing books, giving talks and interviews, blogging, and furthering science-themed media outlets - is viewed as an important part of a scientist's career, not as a frivolous adjunct or a distraction from the really important work. Pushing back against pseudoscience, and creating an educated, scientifically literate public, is by far the best solution to the problem that scientists mention the most: the chronic lack of funding and support for basic research.

To close the science gap, we need a competent media and an active, engaged scientific community. Where either of these is lacking, fundamentalism and other forms of antiscience sprout like weeds. As a society, we've made tremendous progress in coming to understand the world we live in; that's the legacy of the Enlightenment. Now we need to see that those discoveries are communicated to the public as a whole, and are not just the domain of professional scientists.

Most religious people believe in the soul, an ethereal locus of consciousness that separates from the body upon physical death and travels elsewhere to receive its reward. To people who hold this belief, it's a natural next step to guess that the soul or spirit could sometimes leave a person's body while they're still alive and travel to distant places on its own initiative. Such is the belief in out-of-body experiences, the subject of today's Popular Delusions post.

Belief in OBEs is probably as old as humanity. The Bible alludes to a man who was "caught up to the third heaven", "whether in the body... or whether out of the body, I cannot tell" (2 Corinthians 12:2-3), and the apocryphal Ascension of Isaiah claims to describe that famous prophet caught up out of his body and taken to heaven to witness prefigurements of Christianity. However, OBEs today are mostly the province of New Age believers, who usually refer to them as "astral projection".

Although many purported OBEs involve voyages to dreamlike, conveniently unverifiable "spiritual realms" (where meetings with Jesus, guardian angels, and other religious figures are guaranteed crowd-pleasers), the existence of the phenomenon is an eminently testable claim. All that would be needed is for a person having an OBE to travel to some distant location, view it, and then give accurate details of their experience that could not have been obtained through normal sensory channels. Alas, all such attempts have come up short.

One of the most famous was the planetary voyage of the psychic Ingo Swann, who was enlisted by ESP researchers Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff to take an astral voyage to Jupiter. As reported by Swann, Jupiter was an eerie and compellingly beautiful place, with a surface of shifting sand dunes, enormous mountain ranges, and lakes or oceans in which icebergs floated. These marvelous discoveries were only slightly tarnished by the fact that none of them turned out to be true; Jupiter is a gas giant with no solid surface. Not to be deterred, Swann later claimed that he must have accidentally overshot Jupiter and traveled into another solar system entirely, and was describing a different planet which he saw there.

Other tests of OBEs, though more modest, proved equally flawed. The best-known were carried out by Charles Tart, such as this one on a subject who claimed she had experiences in which she left her sleeping body and floated up to the ceiling or through the walls of the room. Tart claims that his subject correctly perceived a remote target consisting of a five-digit random number during an OBE, but his methodology was less than rigorous:

The sleep laboratory consisted of two rooms... A large window was between the rooms for viewing, but in this experiment it was covered with a Venetian blind in order that the subject's room could be reasonably dark for sleeping. An intercom system allowed hearing anything the subject said. I monitored the recording equipment throughout the night while the subject slept and kept notes of anything she said or did. Occasionally I dozed during the night, beside the equipment, so possible instances of sleep talking might have been missed.

...The subject slept on a comfortable bed just below the observation window.... Immediately above the observation window (about five and a half feet above the level of the subject's head) was a small shelf (about ten inches by five inches)... This five-digit random number constituted the parapsychological target for the evening. I then slipped it into an opaque folder, entered the subject's room, and slipped the piece of paper onto the shelf without at any time exposing it to the subject.

So, to review: the number the subject was supposed to be psychically viewing was on a shelf five feet above her head throughout the night. She was neither recorded nor observed; the window into her room was covered by a blind, and Tart, who was sitting in the next room, helpfully notes that he dozed off several times during the night. Readers are invited to imagine a non-supernatural means by which the result could have been achieved.

This sloppy methodology, subjective judging, and flat-out inaccuracy pervades parapsychological research in general and on OBEs specifically. It shouldn't be a surprise that all the most striking claims of people gaining true information through OBEs are completely anecdotal, even hearsay - as in the famous case of the woman named Maria who allegedly saw a tennis shoe on a window ledge outside the hospital where she was having one. We have only the word of one person, a social worker named Kimberly Clark Sharp, that this OBE happened at all or that the shoe was there as described. Anecdotal accounts like this are impossible to test or verify. And so far, no rigorous, well-designed experiment has proven that people can acquire information this way at rates significantly greater than chance, much less that they can use it to do something genuinely useful, such as sending or receiving messages.

As with many other popular delusions, belief in OBEs is probably sustained in part by natural psychological phenomena which true believers have misunderstood (such as the role of sleep paralysis in alien abduction and haunting claims). The truth is, many people do have out-of-body experiences - that is to say, they have the experience of being outside their body. But that is not the same thing as saying that something actually leaves the body. Instead, these experiences appear to be nothing more than elaborate hallucinations caused by the brain misfiring.

I wrote on Ebon Musings about the brain's superior parietal lobe, also called the "orientation association area". Among its other functions, this part of the brain orients a person in three-dimensional space and calculates how to move through the world. In deep meditative states and other circumstances, the superior parietal lobe ceases its activity, causing a person to feel as if the physical boundaries of their self have been dissolved - they can no longer tell where their body ends and the world begins. It's easy to see how such an event could be implicated in an OBE. Another brain area, the angular gyrus, is involved in OBEs more directly. In at least one experiment, when electrically stimulated, it repeatedly caused them to occur in the patient.

No matter how impressive they may feel, out-of-body experiences are just tricks of the brain, and do not contain any sensory information not accessible to a person through normal means. A well-designed, repeatable experiment could prove otherwise, but an endless string of unverifiable anecdotes does not.

Other posts in this series:

• Popular Delusions