Our new millennium was supposed to be an age of progress and knowledge brought about by science, wasn't it? Instead it often seems to be a throwback to times when most people wallowed in ignorance. Oh sure, the delivery method may be modern enough - cable TV or the internet - but we might as well be walking through a village marketplace from a century or two ago, filled with slick pitchmen selling snake oil and superstition to an ever-credulous crowd.

Case in point: self-proclaimed psychic John Edward. He wows the marks in the crowd... sorry, the studio audience of Crossing Over, his TV show, telling them facts about loved ones who've passed away. Edward claims the dead communicate to him information the living need to know and he is just passing along the messages. Many people take his claim at face value; they sit in the audience or watch at home and believe he has a paranormal power. After all, how could he know all those facts when he has never met the people before?

It makes for entertaining television but what's really going on here? Are there other explanations? What's the truth behind his performances? Who you gonna call?

There are people who are more than willing to tackle questions like these, who still celebrate truth and do not rely on faith for answers. They investigate and research, filtering out the best answer they can from the available facts. They call themselves skeptics and they have a long history dating back to the birth of science in ancient Greece. Often confused with cynics, who doubt any claim out of hand, a skeptic says, "Maybe," and seeks the real truth of the matter, applying the scientific method and a bit of reasoning to see what theory best fits the facts.

Enter Michael Shermer, a modern skeptic. A born-again Christian in his youth, during his years of professional bicycle racing he tried dozens of radical diets, alternative medicine and other performance enhancing regimes. When most of the wild claims he heard didn't pan out, eventually he stopped believing on faith and started using the scientific method to separate fact from fiction. Today he holds a doctorate in psychology (though he rarely puts "Dr." in front of his name) and is not only the publisher of Skeptic magazine but also Director of the Skeptics Society. In these roles he appears on radio, TV and at conferences as much as 200 times a year, debunking bogus claims on everything from Edward's paranormal powers to Holocaust denial, from biblical creationism to alien visitations. He's also a prolific writer, authoring books like Denying History (with Alex Grobman), Why People Believe Weird Things and his latest, The Borderlands of Science.

The occasion for this interview is the publication of his article on John Edward's supposedly paranormal powers in Scientific American ( www.skeptic.com/newsworthy13.html), a story which was broken earlier this year in the pages of Skeptic. The verdict? Edward uses a classic technique called "cold reading," a process where a performer uses vague guesses to prompt a "hit," and then runs with it. It's really not that surprising he can get a positive response for the opening gambit; for example in an audience of a hundred or so people, it's a high probability there's someone connected with a tragic death like a car accident or cancer and whose name begins with a "G." If he doesn't hit with the G, it becomes a "C," and so on. Once he gets a hit, he gradually narrows it down to specifics for a particular person. He seems to pull facts from thin air, but actually he's just pulling the facts from the people themselves and making his guesses fit.

And speaking of fitting, just how does this fit in our humble webzine? It's fitting because we are named after a song that celebrates skepticism. So read on and see if Michael Shermer can finally answer, "Who you jiving with that Cosmik Debris?"

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Cosmik: I guess it's only too fitting that John Edward is on Sci-Fi, the Science fiction channel, but exactly how do you know he's a fake?

Shermer: All you can do is observe what he does and compare it to what other people do. To me, I think the way I phrased it in the Scientific American article, was that his techniques are indistinguishable from those used by mentalists. It looks like the same thing. That doesn't prove that he's using the same techniques but then we have to ask ourselves what's more likely: that he's using the same technique and we are sort of being fooled [into believing that he can do] this really wonderful warm fuzzy thing, that he can talk to dead people? Or is it that he really can, and it's just coincidence that it looks like the tricks that the mentalists use?

Cosmik: And what he's doing is what the mentalists call cold reading, right? You've written up what the technique of cold reading is several times. I guess I first became aware of it when you debunked James Van Praag.

Shermer: What's so striking is that [John Edward] is exactly like that. The same lines.

Cosmik: And in your Why People Believe Weird Things book there's another cold reading psychic, Rosemary Altea.

Shermer: And the same thing there, too! It's like they all got together. And they did! What happens is they watch each other. Comedians do this, magicians do this; they go see other magicians and they adopt their routine, the practice, the patter beforehand.

Cosmik: In the article you charge him with creative editing of the videotape too.

Shermer: The show does do that, for sure. Now, how overt the cheating is I don't know. It's pretty easy to have him say something to the studio audience member and [cut to] them nodding yes, but that's not the question they were nodding yes to. This is what the guy who was on the show [Michael O'Neill, a New York City marketing manager], observed...They showed him nodding yes, but to that particular question he had nodded no.

Cosmik: That's pretty blatant.

Shermer: That's pretty blatant, yeah!

Cosmik: I remember reading the story of how you became a skeptic. In seems like you really went in for a lot of New Age kind of fads, and then you had a sort of reverse epiphany on the road while in a bike race?

Shermer: (Laughs) Yeah, right! Well I was always an open-minded fella and I tried a lot of different things [to enhance my bike racing]. When you're younger you're more suggestible and willing to try things that you haven't had a lot of experience with and test new ideas against. But basically because there was some scientific training that I'd had, I really just kind of realized that there was no way to know that any of this stuff was working. In fact it probably wasn't working and it was just all in my head. Yeah, I became a skeptic on the road.

Cosmik: These miracle cures, are they just creating a positive mental attitude and that's it?

Shermer: It depends on which ones. The alternative medicine field is a tricky one because there are literally hundreds and hundreds of claims and you can't just blanketly say all of them are false. Some might be good, there's no way to know until you test it. But you can't just use the anecdotes. They all have anecdotes and they all claim to have peer-reviews, experiments, tests and so on. You have to actually look at the research.

Cosmik: Do you think that in this day and age, maybe because of lousy schools, that there has been a general breakdown in common sense, or has it always been like that?

Shermer: Oh, I think it's always been that way. I don't know that it's really worse than it used to be. I think it is to the extent that there's more mass communication and more channels, more cable stations that have this kind of stuff on, so people hear about it more. You can actually measure some of that. The [alien] abduction movement, it's like a mass contagion, mass hysteria as they filter through culture. That you can track. Whether it's worse than, say, a century ago or five hundred years ago, we don't have any data on that. Overall I'd say that compared to the Middle Ages we are less superstitious than we were as a society, but most of the polling data, over the last, say, thirty years, on belief in these things, do show them going up.

Cosmik: When I was growing up and attending Sunday School, our particular church seemed to concentrate on God and Jesus' Love. The resurrection and all that stuff was there too, but we often went down the street to the Natural History Museum and looked at the statues of dinosaurs right after church. We would have said, "It wasn't really seven days to create the universe; maybe God's responsible for the Big Bang." Nobody took it so damn literally. I guess that's what I'm talking about, the breakdown of common sense. Especially in matters of Biblical truth, it just seems like there's a big contingent in the population lately that's just become very, very credulous.

Shermer: I think it's always been that way.

Cosmik: Is there anything that you would do to the school system to change that for the better?

Shermer: Well yeah, part of it is the education that kids are getting. We need balance between rote memorization of facts, data and knowledge and how to think about those things. It's called critical thinking. The progressive, so-called liberal education, they went too far in the other direction, away from the so-called "kill and drill" style of education. You do need facts, you do need to know things right at the tip of your brain. They had this idea that, "well, you could just look it up." But that's really not good enough, because most people don't take the time to go look it up. You really need to have that and then know how to process it, how science works, not just science factoids because then you hear a new fact, ESP or whatever, and you don't know how to compare it to other facts. You do need a process to know how to think about those things as well.

Cosmik: I think that's part of the reason why something like Holocaust denial works. People rarely do their own detective work. And they say, "oh yeah, no cyanide on the walls, that must be true!"

Shermer: That's right.

Cosmik: I read through your book Denying History recently and it was a very scholarly work. You didn't pull any punches in a blow-by-blow refutation of the deniers' arguments. It was nice to find all of it in one place. Do you feel any personal crusade against those guys in particular?

Shermer: No, I don't. In fact I feel kind of bad about slamming them reasonably hard. Most of them are kind of decent fellows. Yeah, there's a little bit of the anti-Semitism stuff, but they're not Nazis though. They're just misguided. I don't really hope to change them but, no, it's not a crusade. They're still trying to engage me in debate. [David] Irving called me the other day and wanted me to come lecture at his Real History conference in Cincinnati next month and I said no... I didn't want to give him credibility. He didn't want me to debate there or anything, he wanted me to speak there on whatever I wanted, but it was too weird.

Cosmik: Not that many people realize it but Hitler may be in second or third place as far as genocide in the last century. One of the things that you touched on at the end of that book is The Rape Of Nanking. The Japanese government has been successfully denying it took place for years, at least to their own people, and that seems to be as big a problem as the Holocaust. Plus there's all the Russian atrocities in the 20's and 30's. Have you ever looked at any of the history of the Stalin era?

Shermer: [Compared to what the Japanese and Stalin did] Hitler was a boy scout... Stalin was the worst. Yeah, I have read some of that. I haven't done any work in that area, but the more you learn about the Stalin era the worse it gets. It was pretty horrendous.

Cosmik: Do you ever apply skepticism to politics at all?

Shermer: Umm, yeah. We haven't done anything officially on that, but we probably should because it's a lively controversial subject. Most political science is in measuring peoples' beliefs and not in [answering the question] "What is the best system that we should live under?" When you do that it's really political philosophy... the philosophers do that. But scientists can do it and they should.

Cosmik: I think one of the biggest proposals that George Bush has made this year has been on National Missile Defense, which to me seems wacko as far as the likely return on investment. He seems to be saying, "I don't care if this is effective or not, I'm going to build it!" Would facts from a good skeptical inquiry help people decide whether NMD would be a good thing to build?

Shermer: One of the reasons we don't do anything on that is because [it's] so well covered in the media. You don't need ME to critique Bush with the entire Democratic party and the left wing; they hammer him every day! And many scientists have already come out with statements against missile defense. I am not sure I would have that much to add to the debate.

Cosmik: What about the stem cell controversy?

Shermer: Well that's different because that's directly related to science. In that case I'm grateful that he seems to have pushed it in the right direction. The thing is that it's unnecessary for them to be cautious at this early stage. The only argument they have are these religious arguments based on whether the embryos are living humans or not. Science can answer that question. Really the only business they should have is defending the rights of actual living individuals. It seems to me that the line would have to be drawn at birth for political action to have anything to do with it, but that's just my opinion. Because [people will ask], "wait a minute, what about the day before birth, is it okay to kill?" So where are you going to draw the line? Well, I don't know, because there is no good place to draw the line.

Cosmik: Speaking of religious arguments, why do you think fundamentalists need miracles?

Shermer: I think that the idea of faith is believing without any facts. That's never quite enough for people. People, they really do want to know. And KNOW that they know, not just taking a wild guess. Theirs really is the one true religion and they have proof of it! Not just that they believe, but there's reasons why other people should believe, and that there's actually EVIDENCE for why they should believe. Miracles then are a form of evidentiary support for your belief. I don't think anyone actually believes because of a miracle, although maybe if you're close [then maybe you] need it to push you over the edge into the religion. I think people believe for other deeper psychological reasons and that's just the icing on the cake.

Cosmik: It seems to me that they know the Bible will break down if they analyze it in a logical way, so they need these things to prop up their faith. This is an aside but sometimes I'll tune into one of the praise channels for a little bit as they're doing faith healings as such and the preacher will touch the people, then they will always fall down because of all the Holy Force that they've received. I watch this stuff and I always find myself wondering, "Why doesn't all this force ever affect the cameramen who is standing right there too?"

Shermer: (Laughs out loud) Hahaha! That's actually a good point, yeah! "Well, cause God didn't want it that way," will probably be what they'll say. But that's a clever question to ask. I wish I had thought of that when I was at my buddy's faith healing thing a couple months ago.

Cosmik: Tell us more about that.

Shermer: It was a friend I grew up with. We went to high school and college. When I was in my born again days, he was in his, but he kept going. So every once in awhile we get together...and he invited me to this thing in Pasadena with this Korean faith healer guy. The guy was going down the line and people were dropping like flies. But of course as you point out, the people around the people dropping like flies weren't dropping like flies and neither was the guy filming it. Obviously there is a psychology there, but to him you actually had to be touched and the energy flows from God through this guy into my buddy's body. That would be his explanation for why the cameraman doesn't fall over.

Cosmik: You mentioned that at one point you were also born again, did that come at a particular point in your life? Were you raised religiously?

Shermer: Ah no, not at all. My parents were pretty secular. I think actually like most people that they didn't think about it all that much... So no, there was no influence that way, but this was the early 1970's and the Jesus cults were really big, everybody was totally into that in my high school years... A lot of my friends went and did it and wanted me to do it, in a friendly way, a very nice way. But once I got into it I was really into it. It's all in my How We Believe book. It's what you believe and your confirmation bias. You then start seeing evidence for it and so on, but once you're out of it then you realize that all that evidence is a tissue of illusions.

Cosmik: My older brother got saved about fifteen years ago. He used to drink a lot and now he's really a much better person, in control of his life. He's an elder in his church and reads the Bible with other members of his church. He's also come to the view that the world is only 6000 years old, but we still talk to each other!

Shermer: Yeah! It's perfectly okay as long as you're not trying to force views on the other one or whatever.

Cosmik: When I was at the American Humanist Association Conference in May of this year, I found a lot of the members that were there seemed to be rabid atheists, whereas I would definitely call myself an agnostic. Basically I think there's a lot of mystery in the Universe. Some things about Reality will never be penetrated by humans. But fundamentalists can't question anything like that, they seem to see other world views in terms of you're either with us or you're against us.

Shermer: They get mad about any kind of conciliatory position toward religion. It's like you're spineless and have no character.

Cosmik: I guess that's what makes me kind of angry about them in turn. I try not to rise to the bait, but the implication of what they say is that I cannot be a good person if I don't believe as they do. I have to take that personally!

Shermer: (Laughs) Yeah you should, absolutely!

Cosmik: One of the other things that I found interesting when I was there at the AHA conference, I picked up a back issue of Skeptic, The God Question issue. But actually the article that I found most provocative was Susan Blackmore's article on the propagation of memes, the natural selection of ideas. It lead me to a whole new train of thought about how religions construct their creed so it multiplies outward.

Shermer: That's right, there would be a natural selection for ideas like that. That's the religion that shapes themselves to be the most, ah, efficient at spreading their doctrines are of course going to get bigger with more people spreading the doctrine, the farther it will go.

Cosmik: I guess the underlying question I'm driving at is how do we try and propagate skeptical thinking and analysis. How do we construct it as a meme that is better able to survive the natural selection of ideas, to get people to think for themselves?

Shermer: Right, well that's the hard question.

Cosmik: (Laughingly) Not to put you on the spot here!

Shermer: That's the question we're getting at here, what can you actually do about all this stuff in terms of actually effecting social change.

Cosmik: I know, you can start a magazine!

Shermer: We do have the magazine, the books, the videos. I do television shows, radio shows, lots and lots of interviews. I don't know what else to do. I mean, it's a free society, you can't, ah, I'm kind of a Libertarian anyway and I don't want to go to my local Congressman and demand that he start prohibiting psychics. It's just not what I want to do. The alternative is to, instead of complaining about bad television shows, to produce your own good ones!

Cosmik: I understand you do have a show on cable.

Shermer: The Fox network one, no. At the moment I'm in between. The Fox Family show was 13 hours and it's aired umpteen times and it's not airing anymore. But I've got three other new shows in the works. I have hopes that out of the three one will come through. Television is a very fickle business; it's hard to get anyone to do anything.

Cosmik: Any dates for any of these?

Shermer: It's not even in that stage...We're trying to find the right production company, so that when we pitch the show to the networks we get the best team working for us, so they're more likely to buy the show. You just have to sell it to them. TV people have no scruples. They're not for promoting the paranormal, they're not against promoting the paranormal... Whatever sells. They really don't care. Now maybe personally some of them like it and some of them hate it, that's true, but for the most part, they don't care. Then the onus is on me to just sell them on it. You just have to put some effort into it and show them why this would be a good fun entertaining show that would get good ratings and make them money.

Cosmik: Do you have any books in process?

Shermer: The Borderlands of Science is out now. That's about the gray area between science and pseudo-science. The next book is actually a biography of Alfred Russell Wallace, who was the subject of my doctoral dissertation. That's going to be published by Oxford University Press; it'll be out next spring.

Cosmik: Who was Wallace?

Shermer: He was the guy who co-discovered the Theory of Natural Selection. He's a very interesting fellow. It's really a good study in how science works and how it doesn't work, because he was really on the borderlands there, dealing with a lot of wacky subjects. I'm also working on an Encyclopedia of Pseudo-Science. It's being published by ABC Cleo in conjunction with Skeptic magazine. It's the ultimate reference source for media and students and anybody. People are always calling me [asking,] "What have you got on this, What have you got on that?" So we're producing an Encyclopedia and that will be kind of cool.

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These days a skeptic's work is never done and at this point Michael had to rush off to another meeting. For more on Skeptic magazine and the Skeptic Society go to www.skeptic.com.

(C) 2001 - Rusty Pipes