TruthBook Religious News Blog

Monday, 18 August 2008,

Monsters are everywhere these days, and belief in them is as strong as ever. What's harder to believe is why so many people buy into hazy evidence, shady schemes and downright false reports that perpetuate myths that often have just one ultimate truth: They put money in the pockets of their purveyors.

A related question: Does belief in the paranormal have anything to do with religious belief?

The answer to that question is decidedly nuanced, but studies point to an interesting conclusion: People who practice religion are typically encouraged not to believe in the paranormal, but rather to put their faith in one deity, whereas those who aren't particularly active in religion are more free to believe in Bigfoot or consult a psychic.

Tall tales

A tale last week by three men who said they have remains of Bigfoot in a freezer was reported by many Web sites as anywhere from final proof of the creature to at least a very compelling case to keep the fantasy ball rolling and cash registers ringing for Bigfoot trinkets and tourism (all three men involved make money off the belief in this creature). Even mainstream media treated a Friday press conference about the "finding" as news.

Reactions by the public ranged from skeptical curiosity to blind faith.

In a 2006 study, researchers found a surprising number of college students believe in psychics, witches, telepathy, channeling and a host of other questionable ideas. A full 40 percent said they believe houses can be haunted.

Why are people so eager to accept flimsy and fabricated evidence in support of unlikely and even outlandish creatures and ideas? Why is the paranormal realm, from psychic predictions to UFO sightings, so alluring to so many?

The gods must be crazy

Since people have been people, experts figure, they have believed in the supernatural, from gods to ghosts and now every sort of monster in between.

Figuring out why people are this way is a little trickier.

"It is an artifact of our brain's desire to find cause and effect," Cronk, the psychology professor, said in an email interview. "That ability to predict the future is what makes humans &39; but it also has side effects like superstitions [and] belief in the paranormal."

"Humans first started believing in the supernatural because they were trying to understand things they couldn't explain," says Benjamin Radford, a book author, paranormal investigator and managing editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine. "It's basically the same process as mythology: At one point people didn't understand why the sun rose and set each day, so they suggested that a chariot pulled the sun across the heavens."

Before modern scientific explanations of germ theory, explained Radford, who writes the "Bad Science" column for LiveScience, people didn't understand how diseases could travel from one person to another. "They didn't understand why a child was stillborn, or why a drought occurred, so they came to believe that such events had supernatural causes," he said.

"All societies have invoked the supernatural to explain things beyond their control and understanding, especially good and bad events," Radford said. "In many places - even today - people believe that disasters or bad luck is caused by witches or curses."

Which raises the bigger question: With science having answered so many questions in the past couple centuries, why do paranormal beliefs remain so strong?

Related to religion?

Sometimes the belief in curses crosses paths with religion, as was the case in 2005 when televangelist John Hagee (whose endorsement was solicited and received by presidential hopeful John McCain) blamed Hurricane Katrina on God's wrath for a gay parade that had been scheduled for the Monday of the storm's arrival.

That might lead one to assume religion and paranormal beliefs are intertwined.

But in a 2004 survey, at the researchers at Baylor found just the opposite.

"Paranormal beliefs are very strongly negatively related to religious belief," study team member Rod Stark said this week.

Another study, of 391 U.S. college students done in 2000, found that participants who did not believe in Protestant doctrine were most likely to believe in reincarnation, contact with the dead, UFOs, telepathy, prophecy, psychokinesis, or healing. Believers were the least likely to buy into the paranormal. "This may partly reflect opinions of Christians in the samples who take biblical sanctions against many &39; activities seriously," the Wheaton College researchers wrote.

Cronk, the psychologist, did a small survey of 80 college students and found no connection between religiosity and paranormal belief.

But a 2002 study in Canada did find a correlation between religious beliefs and paranormal beliefs, Cronk notes. He figures that among other explanations, Canadians may not have the same belief systems as U.S. residents.

Religion vs. paranormal

Mencken, the Baylor sociologist, says sacrifice and stigma (for holding ideas outside the group norm) keep the paranormal at bay among the highly religious. He has two papers forthcoming that are based on a national survey of 1,700 people.

The first, to be published in the journal Sociology of Religion in 2009, reveals this:

"Among Christians, those who attend church very often (and are exposed to stigma and sacrifice within their congregations) are least likely to believe in the paranormal," Mencken told LiveScience. "Conversely, those Christians who do not attend church very often (maybe once or twice a year) are the most likely to hold paranormal beliefs."

A third group, which he calls naturalists, do not hold supernatural views, Christian or paranormal.

Another study to published in December in the Review of Religious Research, shows that those who go to church "are much less likely to consult horoscopes, visit psychics, purchase New Age items," and so on, Mencken said. "However, among those Christians who do not attend church, there is a much higher level of participation in these phenomena."

Educated to believe

Belief in the paranormal - from astrology to communicating with the dead - increases during college, rising from 23 percent among freshmen to 31 percent in seniors and 34 percent among graduate students.

Bader, the sociologist at Baylor, and his colleagues teamed up with the Gallup organization to conduct a national survey of 1,721 people in 2005 and found nearly 30 percent think it is possible to influence the physical world through the mind alone (another 30 percent were undecided on that point). More than 20 percent figure it's possible to communicate with the dead. Nearly 40 percent believe in haunted houses.

Media madness

Today's ubiquitous and often one-sided, promotional coverage of the paranormal, both on the Internet and TV, perpetuate myths and folklore as well or better than any ancient storyteller. Fiction and belief masquerade as fact and news, feeding the 24/7 appetite of the easily swayed.

Scientists are left with an impossible task: proving something does not exist. You can prove a rock is there. You can't prove that Bigfoot or a ghost or the god of thunder is not there. Bigfoot paraphernalia purveyors and cash-cow psychics know this well.

"Many paranormalists claim that their powers only work sometimes, or that they don't work if there is a &39; in the room," Cronk points out.

Or, in the case of the unsupportive DNA testing on Bigfoot last week, the top proponent, Tom Biscardi (who recently produced a film about Bigfoot and might be said to have an interest in garnering press coverage), simply dodged the mythbusting bullet by claiming the DNA samples might have been contaminated.

Labels: belief, Bigfoot, faith, paranormal, religion, supernatural