Making a Case for Skepticism in a Culture of Crystals

we survive each day by the tangible evidence of science’s intangible truths. Airplanes take off, lights switch on, microwaves and microchips and microscopes do their tasks. And yet, in the still-ancient reaches of our brains, we cannot always credit these marvels of our minds’ own making.

Our old brains saw a face in the moon and mythologized it. Our old brains still see a savior on a tortilla and sacralize it.

Maybe we do it in part because knowing is hard and believing isn’t. Maybe we do it because we love a mystery, love to be scared and flummoxed, and science is the spoiler that insists on telling us the secret to the magic trick. We don’t get mad at the magician for fooling us. We get mad at the fellow who told us the trick, and destroyed the illusion.

*

what seems to get under the skin of Michael Shermer’s critics most is that he has stood in their shoes, or, more precisely, their baptismal robes. He has rounded the bases from Jesus freak and theology student to a grad student in psychology to where he is now, publisher of Skeptic magazine and founder of the Skeptics Society, one of the foremost debunkers of spoon-benders and alien abductions and tortilla Jesuses.

The cycles amuse Shermer, who remembers himself as a Pepperdine student “into all the God stuff,” sporting that 1970s Christian disco look, half-buttoned shirt and, on a neck chain, a silver ichthus, the fish symbol of Jesus.

And now here he is, co-hosting a new weekly Fox cable show with an “X-Files” actor, a show equivocally called “Exploring the Unknown.” It comes on right before “The 700 Club,” a religious program with Pat Robertson, who says prayer diverted a hurricane from his broadcasting outlet. God, whom Einstein said does not play dice with the universe, evidently believes in punch lines.

Never one for half-measures, Shermer’s ardor then took him into graduate psychology studies, astronomy and cosmology at Cal State Fullerton, where he found that science--even social science--”had actual methods to answer questions, statistics and control groups.” After his one-answer-fits-all faith, “I thought this was pretty exciting.”

But what really yanked the scales from his eyes, and the fish emblem from his neck, was evolutionary biology. A herpetologist named Bayard Brattstrom taught the course that started at 7 p.m. in a classroom and continued at a bar called the 301 Club. “We just sat there until they kicked us out at 2, talking about God and science and philosophy. Judaeo-Christianity has one answer--this was a whole potpourri of interesting ideas. Science was so liberating and open!”

With his shiny new master’s degree, Shermer found a job at Cycling magazine, and soon took to both cycling and publishing. He founded the Race Across America competition, started a cycling magazine, and like clockwork for five years, the cycling world and everyone else saw him on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.”

In time he was drawn back to academia, to Claremont’s PhD program in the history of science. The degree led him to teaching at Glendale College and then to Occidental College, where he still is an adjunct professor in the hours left unfilled by his Skeptical duties.

The 7-year-old quarterly magazine has a circulation of 40,000. The Skeptic Society, which maintains a Web page at https://www.skeptic.com, sponsors monthly Caltech lectures, and Shermer, afloat from the success of his book, “Why People Believe Weird Things,” now has “How We Believe: the Search for God in an Age of Science,” on the nature of American religion.

While skepticism is a method, not a belief, its reach has some of religion’s resonance: “In teaching, you reach 25, 50 students a year. Here I can reach millions with the message that science is a wonderful method for understanding the world.”

*

in 1983, Shermer was abducted by aliens, stopped on a lonely rural highway by a large craft with bright lights and cajoled aboard by creatures who looked almost human. When he found himself back on the road, 90 unaccounted-for minutes had passed.

He likes to tell that story because it proves to him how suggestible humans are. He had been riding for 83 hours in a nonstop bike race, so exhausted that he hallucinated that his crew (the aliens) forced him into the motor home (the spacecraft), which his mind morphed into an alien abduction.

Everything Shermer has challenged--crystals and conspiracy cranks, cults, fire walking, pyramids, the Bible Code, recovered memory syndrome, silly science left and right--it’s all harmless fun, except when, like Gresham’s law, bad thinking crowds out good in an increasingly credulous, and thus defenseless, world.

His scariest example is from a reader who saw, in a Canadian bookstore, a sign reading, “New Age section moved to science section.” If nothing else, this reassures me that L.A., ground zero for necromancers, crackpots and cranks, the place historian Carey McWilliams called “a circus without a tent,” is not the only such show under the world’s canvas.

*

Patt Morrison’s e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com