What on earth has happened to the New York Times? I can’t imagine that it’s suffering from a dearth of contributors, as America is full of good journalists and writers with lots to say and no place to say it. Instead, the paper hires Tanya Luhrmann to write regular pieces on its Op-Ed page, pieces that are becoming increasingly full of woo and superstition-coddling.
Luhrmann, an anthropologist at Stanford University, did respected work on an anthropological analysis of psychiatry. But right about when her 2012 book came out—When God Talks back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God, an anthropologist’s look at a Christian evangelical sect—she began slipping off the rails. To me, she now seems to be going down the track built by Deepak Chopra: making nebulous statements about spirituality—statements whose meaning is hard to pin down—to corral the many people in this country who, even though disaffected by traditional religion, want there to be Something More than Reality. And, like Chopra, Luhrmann uses her cachet as “scientist” to sell the woo.
If you read When God Talks Back, as I did, you’d see that she vehemently claims “objectivity,” passing no judgment on whether the members of the Vineyard sect, who practice talking to God, actually heard back from the old guy. In other words, she said nothing about her own beliefs, although there were subtle hints that she was sympathetic to religion. (Her work on that book, by the way, was sponsored by the Templeton Foundation.)
That sympathy seems to have gotten stronger and stronger over the past few years, and I’ve pointed it out in my many posts on Luhrmann’s enabling of religion. At one point one of her friends emailed me, chewing me out for saying that she was a faith-enabler, which he adamantly maintained she was not. Well, I wonder what her friend would say about her new NYT op-ed, “When things happen that you can’t explain.” The piece is not only embarrassing in its sycophancy towards All Things Numinous, but makes some elementary errors of inference.
Luhrmann’s thesis is that spooky things sometimes happen—one happened to her, in fact—and when they do we just don’t know whether there’s a rational scientific explanation or one that involves Something Beyond Our Ken. She recounts an incident that occurred when she was riding a British train and reading a book about Buddhist mysticism:
The author wrote that all these were just names for forces that flowed from a higher spiritual reality into this one, through the vehicle of the trained mind. And as I strained to imagine what the author thought it would be like to be that vehicle, I began to feel power in my veins — to really feel it, not to imagine it. I grew hot. I became completely alert, more awake than I usually am, and I felt so alive. It seemed that power coursed through me like water through a chute. I wanted to sing. And then wisps of smoke came out of my backpack, in which I had tossed my bicycle lights. One of them was melting.
People believe what they believe for a range of reasons, but one of the most puzzling — at least for those who have not had events like these — is an explanation from personal experience. Such moments have cherished roles in conversion narratives, of course.
She then recounts similar experiences from other people—people who feel “electricity” course through them when worshipping God, or an Englishman who, waiting to bat at cricket, felt that “[s]omething invisible seemed to be drawn across the sky, transforming the world about me into a kind of tent of concentrated and enhanced significance.” In other words, she reprises all the experiences of the spiritual, numinous, and divine that fill William James’s book The Varieties of Religious Experience. In that book, James argues that such personal experiences are the main reason why people turn to God, though he was careful not to say whether he thought they were genuine evidence for the divine.
Luhrmann is equally careful, but in a bad way, for she simply characterizes such experiences as if there were a roughly equal probability of their having either a natural or a supernatural explanation:
I walked off that train with a new respect for why people believed in magic, not a new understanding of reality. Sometimes people have remarkable experiences, and then tuck them away as events they can’t explain.
. . . I’ve talked to hundreds of people who have had remarkable, unexpected experiences that startled them profoundly. Some see them as clear evidence of the supernatural and others do not. And there are those who come to a conclusive view of what these events mean, and those who hold them as evidence of the mystery of the human imagination itself.
As for me, I never did figure out what was going on with those bicycle lights.
But of course Luhrmann didn’t really try to figure out what was going on with the bicycle lights! Did she take them to an electrician, or even open up the lights and see what happened?
And so Dr. Luhrmann dangles before us the tantalizing possibility that maybe Something We Don’t Understand melted her lights. Was it her imagination? Was it God, sending her a message? We don’t know, and so everything is on the table.
But what was probable? Maybe there was an electrical short, maybe one of the batteries malfunctioned: there are many non-supernatural possibilities. But she doesn’t want to know, for by holding out the possibility that it could have been something numinous, she caters to the audience she wants to retain: New Age spiritualists and Seekers, as well as the Templeton Foundation, which loves this kind of ambiguous take on the supernatural. But possiblities aren’t the same as probabilities or likelihoods, as Greg Mayer points out below (and which philosopher David Hume realized in 1748 in his discussion of the likelihood of miracles).
When Greg Mayer sent me this link, along with a lot of words like “charlatan” and “loon,” he added his own take:
She seems to think that her anecdote makes it plausible that the batteries were melted by the power of her spiritual experience, and that this hypothesis is to be accorded as much deference as any other (some of the others being 1. she’s misrecalling the whole thing; 2. there was a natural explanation, like an electrical problem; 3. invisible Wellsian Martians used a very concentrated heat ray on the batteries; 4. Cthulhu was attempting to reenter the world of the living, but failed, giving off a puff of smoke and heat in the process; or 5. any other crackpot idea you might have). Since she has no evidence for her spiritual hypothesis, but no evidence for any of the others (in her estimation), she regards that as a warrant for believing her hypothesis.
Because she can’t explain the melting, then we are entitled to believe anything we want about it. It’s a “believe-anything-you-damn-well-please-of-the-gaps” argument. In her epistemology, a gap in knowledge is filled not by God, but by whatever the hell you want.
From a Bayesian perspective (and I’m not a Bayesian), my hypotheses 1) and 2) have substantial prior probabilities, while the others (including hers) have a prior probability near 0; and if you regard the data as uninformative (as she apparently does), then misrecalling the incident or electrical problems win the Bayesian analysis by a landslide.
Her whole argument seems like a potpourri of the elemental errors of reasoning in a book like Schick and Vaughn’s “How to Think about Weird Things”.
Greg teaches a course at his university called “Science and Pseudoscience,” and added some information he gleaned from the material he assigns his students, including the book cited above:
Here are some of Schick and Vaughn’s (Schick, T. and L. Vaughn. 2014. How to Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age. 7th ed. McGraw-Hill, New York) principles of reasoning that Luhrmann violates:
Just because a claim hasn’t been conclusively refuted doesn’t mean that it’s true.
Just because you can’t explain something doesn’t mean that it’s supernatural.
There is good reason to doubt a proposition if it conflicts with other propositions we have good reason to believe.
The more background information a proposition conflicts with, the more reason there is to doubt it.
When there is good reason to doubt a proposition, we should proportion our belief to the evidence.
Just because something seems (feels, appears) real doesn’t mean that it is.
It’s reasonable to accept personal experience as reliable evidence only if there’s no reason to doubt its reliability.
(And the book details why there’s much reason to doubt it’s reliability: selective memory, confirmation bias, errors in perception, etc. Much of the above is explicitly Humean.)
I could go on– the book really does demolish the “Appeal to Mystical Experience”. And it’s an undergraduate freshman general education text! Her piece is the sort of thing you assign to students in a critical thinking class and say, “OK, list as many errors of reasoning found here as you can.” Normally you have to use back issues of the Weekly World News to find so rich a lode of intellectual malfeasance! And she’s got a Ph.D. herself, and slipped this by the editors of the NY Times—there’s a lot of shame to go around!
I won’t psychologize Luhrmann here, for the possibilities are many: she could actually believe that a paranormal/goddy explanation is likely or at least has a substantial likelihood; she could simply be catering to an audience she wants to get; she could be saying what she thinks Templeton wants to hear, and so on. But whatever the explanation, it doesn’t speak well for her objectivity and rationality as an analyst of human behavior.
I would love to ask the Times‘s op-ed editor why the hell he put this piece on the page. I surely agree with Greg, though, that this is a black mark for the newspaper: a slice of tripe masquerading as informed opinion.
