Stephen Jay Gould's Preface - We Believe in the Positive Power of Skepticism
Prologue - Unscientific and Magical Take Over Television

Part 1: Science and Conferences
1.
Skeptic's Declaration
What is a skeptic? | The skeptical attitude that constitutes the scientific method | Is it really so? | I exist, therefore I think
2.
What is the difference between science and pseudoscience?
Persick's Paradox | Unraveling Pseudoscience and Pseudohistory | Accumulation and Progress | Humanity's Most Precious Tool
3.
Twenty-Five Thinking Errors That Make Us Believe Weird Things
Hume's Axioms | Problems with Scientific Thinking | Problems with Pseudoscientific Thinking | Logical Problems with Thinking | Psychological Problems with Thinking | Spinoza's Statement

Part 2: Pseudoscience and Superstition
4.
Edgar Cayce's psychic powers explained by statistics and probability
5.
To a world that cannot be seen
What is an altered state of consciousness? | Experiencing death | The desire to live forever | Human cloning and cryonics | Is it possible to live forever throughout history?
6.
Abducted by aliens!
The Alien I Met | Roswell Incident 4 | People Abducted by Aliens
7.
Witchcraft crazes of the Middle Ages and modern times
Why do witch crazes keep happening? | The Satanic Fears That Swept America in the 1980s | Between Truth and Lies: The Perils of the Memory Recovery Movement
8.
Ayn Rand, author of "Atlas," and the cult of personality

Part 3: Evolution and Creationism
9.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
10.
Twenty-Five Answers from Evolutionists to Put Creationists to Sleep
What is Evolution? | Arguments and Answers Based on Philosophy | Arguments and Answers Based on Science | What to Remember When Debating Creationists
11.
Evolution and Creationism Clash at the Supreme Court
What Percentage of Americans Believe in Evolution? | Ban Evolution from Public School Textbooks | Give Equal Time to Genesis and Darwin | Creationism vs. Evolution | The Evolution Debate Goes to the Supreme Court | The Scientific Community Unites | Defining Science | The Creationist Response | Judges Siding with Evolutionists | The Lawsuit of the Century

Part 4: History and Pseudohistory
12.
Holocaust deniers I met on a talk show
13.
Who says the Holocaust didn't happen and why?
The Institute for Historical Criticism, a stronghold of Holocaust deniers | The History of the Denial Movement: Mark Weber | David Irving, a non-mainstream historian | Robert Faurisson, the Pope of Revisionism | Ernst Zündel, the neo-Nazi | David Cole, the troublemaker | Are Jews behind world history? | Holocaust denial and conspiracy theories | The core of Holocaust denial and a small number of radicals
14.
How do we know the Holocaust happened?
The Holocaust Denier's Methodology | Who Bears the Burden of Proof? | Was the Extermination of the Jews Intentional? | Gas Chambers and Crematoriums | How Many Jews Died? | Extreme Conspiracy Theories | To Those Who Say the Holocaust Was Inevitable
15.
The myth of a pure race
Flattening the Bell Curve | The Kinsey Report Reveals the Myth of Racism

Part 5: A Hope That Never Fade
16.
Can science find the best of all possible worlds?
17.
Why believe in strange things?

The Faith Engine, a product of text evolution in the revised edition
Translator's Note
References
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A scathing critique of the pseudoscience of our time!

Since the dawn of the new millennium, there has been a strong movement within the scientific community to confront the forces that threaten science, reason, and, by extension, humanity.
Representative works include Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation, Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great, and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, which was translated into Korean and received great response.
However, these movements were possible because there were warriors in the scientific community who took the lead in spreading the scientific spirit to the public before them.
A representative figure is Michael Shermer, a psychologist and historian of science well known to us for his book, “The Frontiers of Science.”
He founded the Skeptic Society and has been fighting all the “strange beliefs” that humans have through scientific journals.
"Why People Believe Weird Things" compiles all the pseudoscience of our time, including New Age science, intelligent design, superstitions, and spiritualism, and provides an evolutionary explanation for the emergence of these "weird" beliefs.
Shermer goes beyond simple critique and exposure to offer a scientific methodology to counter these beliefs.


In the century of science, why do people still believe in strange things?

52 percent of American adults believe in astrology.
42 percent said they could communicate with the dead.
Thirty-five percent believe in the existence of ghosts, and 67 percent say they have actually experienced psychic phenomena.
When it comes to religion, 96 percent of American adults said they believe in God, 90 percent in heaven, 79 percent in miracles, and 72 percent in angels.
Many media outlets, including the , expressed surprise and question at the results of these polls, but these figures do not change significantly year after year.

This book deals with all the “weird things” that are taking over our society, schools, and mass media.
People who believe they have been abducted by aliens, psychics who claim to read minds and predict the future, creationists disguised as science, people who claim the Holocaust never happened, or believe in racial superiority…

Michael Shermer presents reason as the only weapon against these strange beliefs.
He says that the key to saving us from the historical tragedy brought about by irrationalism and blind faith is the spirit of skepticism using science as a tool.
Through Shermer's masterpiece, which has been at the forefront of leading the way, the American public will gain the best weapon to protect what is most precious to humanity.


What's strange?

This book distinguishes between science and pseudoscience, history and pseudohistory, and addresses the differences between them.
Psychics and extrasensory perception (ESP), UFOs and alien abductions, ghosts and haunted houses all haunt the minds of anxious people.
Social moral panic and mass hysteria give rise to witchcraft fever.
It's chilling to think that the witch crazes of the 17th century, which accused the powerless and poor of devil worship and child sexual abuse, are recurring today.
Creationists, seeking to invoke the authority of science, argue that so-called “creation science” and evolutionary science should be taught equally in public schools.
These claims, along with those from Holocaust deniers who claim Hitler had no intention of mass murdering Jews and racist scholars who believe that white Americans have IQs 15 points higher than black Americans, are damaging to society.

In this book, Shermer presents specific examples of these “strange beliefs,” along with scientific principles that can be learned from testing them.


Strange Thing #1: Did Noah's Flood Really Happen?
Some people claim that “Noah’s Flood” was a historical event.
They are creationists.
Heavy rains fell for 40 days, flooding the entire world.
Noah took all the animals into the ark, male and female.
All living things on Earth today are descendants of humans and animals who survived the great flood on the ark.
Is this really true?
Michael Shermer criticizes them for their foolish attempts to turn myth or religion into science.
Is it even possible to cram millions of species, each paired off, into a single ship measuring approximately 137 meters long, 23 meters wide, and 14 meters high? How can we prevent the animals from cannibalizing each other? Did they even build a dedicated predator deck?

Strange Thing #2 Do psychics have the psychic ability to talk to the dead?
The first psychic appeared in .
As Oprah Winfrey watches, the psychic begins asking questions to the audience of 250.
And the psychic figures out that a middle-aged woman lost her husband in a boating accident.
“My husband wants me to tell you that he still loves you very much,” the woman says, bursting into tears and the audience starts to stir in awe.
How is this possible? Could this psychic really have the "spiritual ability" to communicate with the dead?
Michael Shermer says the principle behind this “cold-reading” used by psychics is actually simple.
You start by asking vague questions until someone in the audience responds, and then once you find your target, you start asking specific questions.
It's something anyone can do with training.
Psychics and astrologers delve into the minds of the unfortunate, seeking solace and hope, and paralyze their critical capacity.

Strange Thing #3 Selling Lucky Chicken Poop!
The president of a skeptical society took out an advertisement in the newspaper as a test.
It was an advertisement selling “lucky chicken poop.”
He claimed in the commercial that his chickens would sit on his shoulder and occasionally "poop", and that the chicken droppings would bring him good luck.
“In the past few weeks, I’ve won the lottery, gotten back money I lent and completely forgot about, and my latest book is selling like hotcakes.” The man plucked a few chicken feathers and showed them to the fortune teller.
The fortune teller said, “Based on its birth horoscope, that chicken was a hawk in its past life, so it should spread good luck by selling chicken droppings.”
What was the result of this experiment? He earned $20 for selling chicken droppings! Shermer says that belief in fate and the supernatural, as well as superstition, often leads to such ridiculous phenomena.


Belief in strange things is an old product of evolution!

Michael Shermer argues that humans believe such strange things because we evolved to follow patterns and find cause-and-effect relationships in a world full of chance and uncertainty.
He coined the term “Belief Engine” to describe this brain mechanism.
When hunting, if you stand with your back to the wind, your hunt will fail because the prey will smell you.
When we spread cow dung on the field, the harvest increased.
Our ancestors, who discovered meaningful patterns through this “belief engine,” gained an advantageous position in evolution.
Unfortunately, our brains don't always find meaningful patterns.
A representative example is the false belief that performing a rain-making ritual will cause the drought to go away.
Michael Shermer argues that this kind of magical thinking is an inevitable byproduct of the evolution of causal thought mechanisms.
We have inherited even these by-products as a legacy of evolution.
This is why hallucinations you see when you wake up become ghosts or aliens, sounds in empty houses become the presence of spirits and poltergeists, the shadows of trees look like the face of the Virgin Mary, and the shadows cast by mountains on the surface of Mars look like human faces created by aliens.

The "strange things" in this book are examples of magical thinking still operating in fully modern humans. Those who believe in UFOs, alien abductions, and psychic phenomena demonstrate the misdirection of the "belief engine."
Even in this age of science, the reason why humans cannot abandon the magical thinking of the hunting and gathering era is because the history of scientific thinking is still relatively short in the long history of mankind.


Twenty-Five Fallacies of Thinking That Make Us Believe Weird Things

Are people who believe in miracles, monsters, and mysteries somehow abnormal? Michael Shermer argues that most of these people are normal and sane, but for some reason, they are unable to think clearly. He points out twenty-five thinking errors that can lead anyone to believe in something bizarre.



· Problems with scientific thinking: 1. Theory influences observation 2. Observers change what is observed 3. Equipment shapes results · Problems with pseudoscientific thinking: 4. Anecdotes do not make science 5. Using the language of science does not make science 6. Boldly stating a claim does not make it true 7. Not all heresies are proven correct 8. Burden of proof 9. Rumors and reality are not the same 10. Unexplained does not mean unexplainable 11. Rationalizing failure 12. Post hoc inference 13. Coincidence 14. Representativeness · Logical problems in thinking: 15. Emotional language and false analogies 16. Appeal to ignorance 17. Fallacies of ad hominem and long-winded arguments 18. Fallacies of hasty generalization 19. Overreliance on authority 20. Either/or fallacies 21. Circular reasoning 22. Reductio ad absurdum and slippery slopes ? Psychological Problems of Thinking: 23 Poor Effort and the Need for Certainty, Control, and Simplicity 24 Poor Problem Solving 25 Ideological Immunity, or Planck's Problem

Even after Columbus discovered the New World, he could not abandon the idea that it was Asia because his “Asia” theory influenced his observations.
Since the act of observation influences the behavior of the observed, science always tries to minimize this influence, but pseudoscience does not.

Even if you dress it up as science by borrowing technical terms used in science, such as “creation science,” which is always proven correct in later generations, it is meaningless if there is no evidence or experiments to support it.
Bold statements are not always true, nor are they always laughed at.
People laughed at Copernicus and the Wright brothers, but just because they were laughed at doesn't mean they were right.
Creationists always tell evolutionists to show them the evidence.
However, since evolution is currently the accepted belief of all experts and the entire community, it is creationists who bear the “burden of proof.”
What I've said so far are the problems with pseudoscientific thinking.

The claim that “if we can’t prove that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, then he must exist” commits the fallacy of “appeal to ignorance.”
These are logical problems with thinking.


* Just because you tell an anecdote doesn't mean it's science.
Let's say someone claims that watching a comedy movie cured them of cancer.
But this anecdote has nothing to do with science.
Let's say we conduct an experiment where we gather 100 cancer patients and show 25 of them a comedy film, 25 of them an Alfred Hitchcock film, 25 of them the news, and 25 of them nothing.
Then, we need to analyze whether there are significant differences in the average cancer remission rates between the experimental groups.
After that, it must be confirmed by other scientists who have conducted independent experiments separate from this experiment.
Only then will we be able to declare that “comedy movies are effective in treating cancer.”


* Coincidence
I was about to pick up the phone to call my boyfriend when he called me.
'This can't be a coincidence.
"Maybe there's telepathy between us." Is that really the case? Shermer says this is a result of people's misunderstanding of the laws of probability.
This person forgets how many times she called her boyfriend and he didn't call, or someone else called, or he called when she wasn't thinking about him.
As psychologist Skinner demonstrated in his experiments, the human mind often perceives a connection between events even when there is no such connection.


* The desire to get a clear and simple answer without effort
Shermer argues that in a capitalist society, as markets, or life in general, become more uncertain, people seek to explain away this volatility and randomness, and this leads to a state where people are easily deceived by pseudoscience, superstition, and delusion.
Can untrained individuals become excellent carpenters, golfers, or pianists? Shermer argues that scientific and critical thinking skills can also be acquired through training, experience, and effort.
We must be wary of the tendency to seek easy, simple answers that can quickly shed light on complex realities.
Because simple answers don't exist so easily.