Faith in science

I was asked an interesting question by a loyal reader of Skeptophilia yesterday: Are people who say they "believe in science" admitting that for them, it's a religion?

I think that a good place to start is with the definitions of "religion" and "belief."  So here you are, courtesy of Merriam-Webster:

• religion: the belief in and worship of a superhuman controlling power, especially a personal God or gods; a particular system of faith and worship.
• belief: a state or habit of mind in which trust or confidence is placed in some person or thing; conviction of the truth of some statement or the reality of some being or phenomenon especially when based on examination of evidence

I think you can see that in its most literal sense, science isn't a religion given that it has nothing to do with any superhuman controlling powers, but it does involve belief by the second half of the definition -- becoming convinced of the truth of a statement because of examination of the evidence.

However, I think this is a fairly shallow analysis.  People have come to use the word "religion" to mean "any set of beliefs arrived at by faith, or that cannot be arrived at by rational analysis."  The belief in reincarnation, therefore, would qualify as a religion in that sense, because there's bugger-all evidence that it happens, and yet people believe it fervently.

My own perception of things -- and I'm no philosopher, so take this with a grain of salt and feel free to argue with me if you like -- is that the only sense in which science is like a religion is at its very basis, i.e., the assumption that the universe obeys certain physical laws, and is knowable through examination of evidence.  Belief systems that reject the reality of the external world -- such as the stricter forms of Buddhism -- would also reject that science is telling you anything valid, because in their view, there's nothing relevant about the external world to study.  But we do have the fact that science has a pretty damn good track record of producing results consistent with what we observe.  If you reject the basic assumption that the scientific method is a valid way of getting to the truth, you're also rejecting just about every technological advance humanity has made since our distant ancestors left their caves.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But once you've accepted the baseline assumption that the method works, the rest doesn't rely on belief at all.  Anyone with access to the data can do the evaluation themselves; anyone with the equipment can replicate the experiments that generated the data.  Science is, in that sense, the most egalitarian of pursuits.  It's open to anyone with sufficient brainpower, and even the most set-in-stone law of science can be challenged if the data contradict it.

It's why this video, that appeared on YouTube last week, pissed me off so much.

This is a woman speaking to a class at the University of Cape Town (South Africa), claiming that science needs to be "decolonized" -- i.e., that it is the province of rich white males, and therefore the results are suspect.  It's inarguable that the pursuit of science has for years been accessible only to rich white males; the fact that our society has for centuries been male-dominated and white-European-dominated is hardly in question.  And she's right that it's a tragedy.  The idea that we have for generations wasted the talent, brains, and creativity of anyone but the privileged few is dreadful.

But the claim that because of that, the results generated are probably wrong is idiotic.  Again, once you accept the methods of science -- and that does not appear to be what she's arguing against -- you are driven to your conclusions by the evidence, not by what gender or ethnicity you are.  Further, anyone, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or any other personal or social criterion, is able to challenge your claim if they have better or different evidence.

So science does share some things in common with religion and belief, but it is only at its most basic assumptions, which hardly anyone questions.  After that, logic and evidence take over -- no faith, trust, or blind belief necessary.

Gay demon infestation

In support of my recent contention that the world has gone completely batshit crazy, today we have: exorcising gay demons that are infesting the White House.

This is the demand of one Julio Severo, a fundamentalist Christian blogger who writes over at Last Days Watchman, which has as its raison d'être proving that liberals and atheists (and worst still, liberal atheists) are bringing us ever closer to the End Times, as hath been foretold in the scripture.  Severo feels it is his duty to warn us all about how the aforementioned bad guys are going to usher in the appearance of the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons, not to mention the breaking of the Seven Seals and the blowing of the Seven Trumpets and the pouring out of the Seven Bowls and the flushing of the Seven Toilets.

Okay, I made the last one up.  But it's not so much weirder than the rest of the Book of Revelation, which in my opinion reads like a bad acid trip.  But to Severo, it's all literally true, and therefore is a serious cause for concern.

Which is why Severo had a conniption when he found out that there was a briefing at the White House wherein Victor Raymond, a member of the Rosebud Sioux tribe who is an out bisexual, spoke on matters of addressing the treatment of bisexual individuals in our culture.  To make it worse, Raymond began with a prayer addressing his tribe's supreme deity, calling on "the Great Spirit, Wakan Tanka, to guide our words and thoughts so that we can speak true and strong."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Well, that was enough to send Severo into near apoplexy.  Raymond had "invoked homosexual demons," and stern measures needed to be taken:

An interaction between spirits of homosexuality and Indian religions is not uncommon. 

In Brazil, the most prominent homosexualists are adherents of African and Indian religions, very similar to voodoo. These religions embrace all forms of homosexuality as a gift from their “gods.” Such deities are considered demons in the Christian worldview. 

In Christianity and Judaism, homosexuality is accepted only when there is apostasy in those religions. But in Indian religions, heavily affected by witchcraft, no apostasy is necessary for a homosexual presence in their practices, because homosexuality is active among their witchdoctors and other adherents. 

A homosexual culture is a culture of demon possession. 

Has the White House turned into a haunt of demons? 

The first step for a “visitation” of such spirits is invocation — which was made at the White House. Homosexual spirits heard. Their presence is in the place where they were invoked, until their expelling, which can be done only by people who know and use the authority of Jesus’ name. 

The Bisexual Community Briefing focused on “policy and cultural issues of significance for the American bisexual community.” Spirits focused on the invisible, lethal and destructive.

All of which would be the rantings of a single wacko, and an opportunity for the rest of us to say, "Aww, isn't it cute when you try to make sense?" if it hadn't been for the fact that the story was picked up by Matt Barber in his site Barb Wire.  Barber is a virulently anti-LGBT commentator who got his degree in law from Pat Robertson's Regent University, and is Associate Dean for Career and Professional Development at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University (so he's a twofer, higher-education-wise), and whose site is a go-to place for anyone who is trying to find the latest in hatred, homophobia, and institutional discrimination.

But he also has a huge readership.  So his (perhaps unsurprising) pickup of Servero's Gay Demon Infestation story is giving it much more visibility than it otherwise would have had.  And worse still, the comments section indicates that there are people...

... who believe the whole shebang.

Okay, the readers of Barb Wire are a biased sample.  I get that.  But take a look at what some of the commenters said:

• A demented and confused native American calling upon demons?  That is consistent.
• Isn't it simply amazing how many weird, abnormal, sick groups of people the White House can manage to find to honor & expose the world to in a sordid attempt to make us think they are normal & even to be cherished?  What a Satanically inspired regime our current administration is &, with Hillary, the Evil, in charge, it will only get worse.  Batten down the hatches, my friends. May God help us!
• The word "bisexual" is another word used by the homosexual movement to take away the stigma of homosexual perversion and make it seem more normal.  There is no such thing as a "bisexual", only a homosexual who is capable of having sex with a woman, or an animal, or anything that walks. 
• And rest assured that it is no coincidence that it is "the first black president" who tarnished and demeaned the office of the president forever by introducing and glorifying homosexuality inside the white house, making it spirtually[sic] unclean.  I hope people have learned their lesson from making the mistake of electing someone like him because he was actually worse than our worst fears come true.  He used the White House to openly worship the devil. It's stunning.

All of which leaves me torn between screaming, crying, and spending the rest of the day hiding under a blanket and pretending that the rest of the world doesn't exist.

So just what you needed to cheer you up: further evidence that a significant fraction of humanity is insane.  I live in hope that some of this sturm und drang is because of the fact that the election is in three weeks, and it's brought out high emotions in everyone.  Maybe after the dust settles, the lunatic fringe will go back to quietly chewing on the straps of their straitjackets and stop feeling like they need to spew their vitriol all over the place.

If not, it's going to be an ugly, ugly winter.

Inventing reality

It's understandable that people get upset when the world turns out to work differently than they wanted or expected.  We all have our preconceived notions and our biases, and it can be jarring when those turn out to be false.

This only becomes a problem, however, when we look at the facts and evidence, plug our ears, and say "La la la la la la la, not listening."

It will come as no surprise that I'm once again talking about climate change, a topic on which I have rung the changes so many times that I've lost count.  But I was more or less forced to return to the subject by not one, nor two, but three news stories that appeared one after another over at the r/skeptic subreddit, and which left me seeing red to the extent that I have to pass along the anger to all of my readers.

You're welcome.

The first article comes from the Orlando Sentinel, and is called, "Voters Need Truth About 'Clean Coal.'"  Those of you who watched the second presidential debate will no doubt recall that the topic came up with respect to energy policy.  We need to restore mining jobs in places like West Virginia and Pennsylvania, because there's "clean coal" which is environmentally friendly and won't cause all sorts of ecological havoc.

Well, the article calls that out for the nonsense it is in no uncertain terms:

Back in this circumstance called reality, what's actually happened in the energy sector is that much of the world has been moving away from coal for decades. U.S. mining jobs have been mostly in decline since the 1980s...  [T]he U.S. needs to take the threat from air pollution and climate change seriously. If we artificially boost demand for coal simply to put miners back to work, the country will pay through the nose — not only in higher energy costs but in human health and lives.  The toxins produced by burning coal, such as sulfur dioxide, ground-level ozone, heavy metals and particulates, contribute to four out of the five leading causes of death, including heart disease and cancer. 

And climate change could prove just as life-threatening as rising sea levels, record-breaking heatwaves, droughts, floods, declining food production and other related effects take hold. 

None of those problems go away if we simply refuse to believe in them.  Coal's decline isn't a product of politics; it's a function of chemistry.

Then we had an article in The Guardian entitled "Climate Scientists Publish a Paper Debunking Ted Cruz," responding to a presentation in a hearing run by Senator Ted Cruz in the Senate Committee on Commerce last year.  Cruz had invited climate change denier John Christy to testify (speaking of having an agenda).  And Christy told the senators two things; that mid-tropospheric temperatures were rising three times slower than climate models predicted, and (more damning still) there had been no measurable warming of the troposphere for the past 18 years.

Well, it would be damning if it were true.  Which it isn't.  The study just released was unequivocal:

[T]his recent paper did a few things. First, they took the contrarian argument that the mid-troposphere temperatures have been rising at only 1/3 the rate predicted by models. They found that Christy’s team neglected the contamination of the cooling in the upper stratosphere. When they applied this correction, they found that Christy’s claim was incorrect. Differences between modeled and observed warming rates were much smaller, and had known explanations.

Next, the authors asked whether it is true that there has been no warming in the lower atmosphere (troposphere) in the past 18 years. They found that for five of the six groups that provide satellite temperature analysis, this claim was also incorrect. 

Finally, they asked whether it is true that the temperature changes in different layers of the atmosphere are in disagreement in models and measurements. Their result is that when temperature changes in different layers of the atmosphere are compared, one of three satellite records is in close agreement with the climate models.

Last, we had Representative Ken Buck of Colorado making the statement that talk of climate change was endangering Americans by deflecting their attention away from more important stuff.  "When we distract our military with a radical climate change agenda," Buck said, "we detract from their main purpose of defending America from enemies like ISIS."  He was explaining why he had introduced an amendment to the Defense Appropriation Bill, asking them to cut funding for a directive called "Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience."

The only problem with this, according to an article in the Denver Post, is that Buck's claim is directly contradicting statements issued from the Department of Defense.  Who would, you'd think, know what they were talking about on the topic.  The DoD has said outright that climate change would lead to "prominent military vulnerabilities," that the Department would "need to adjust to the impacts of climate change on our facilities and military capabilities," and that 18 military installations in the United States are directly threatened by sea level rise.

Worse still -- for Buck's claims, anyhow -- is the statement from James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, who said that climate change is "an underlying meta-driver of unpredictable instability."

[image courtesy of NOAA]

Which is it exactly.  We're perturbing the climate at a rate higher than anything we find in the geological record, and it's no particular surprise that it is responding erratically, and from a human viewpoint, catastrophically.  While no one day of bad weather can be directly attributable to climate change, the pattern we've seen lately of larger storms (and storms taking different tracks than usual), droughts, floods, and other climatic weirdness all adds up to something the climate models have been telling us for years -- that dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in the amounts we've been doing for the past hundred years is causing huge climatic changes that may already be beyond our powers to mitigate.

But back to my original point.  I can understand the desire by Cruz, Buck, Trump, and others for the world to be other than it is.  Hell, I get why the coal miners are upset; their jobs are vanishing.  But there are bigger issues at stake here, like the long-term habitability of the planet, and (in the short term) environmental devastation that could compromise the living space and agricultural production for millions of people.

So very sorry that the world doesn't conform to your desires.  That's true for many of us, and the appropriate response is, "Tough shit."  Part of being an adult is facing up to it when things aren't the way we want them to be, not stomping our feet, clinging to our invented version of reality, and saying, "But I want it this way!"  Climate change exists, whether we want it to or not, and the effects are increasingly looking catastrophic.  Best we stop trying to push an agenda based on our desires and tackle the problem head-on.

Speak of the devil

Just because I keep hoisting the banner of rationalism here at Skeptophilia doesn't mean I don't get pretty freakin' discouraged at times.

I suppose it's an occupational hazard.  My spending hours daily seeking out the most bizarre examples of irrational behavior I can find, so I have something to write about, means that inevitably I'm going to come to the conclusion that humanity is pretty much screwed.  It's like people who become addicted to shows like CSI and Cops and Law and Order.  At some point, you're pretty certain to decide that the world is full of criminals who are trying to kill you and get away with it.

So it's an effort at times to remain optimistic.  Especially given stories like the one over at Fusion a couple of days ago describing a poll taken in North Carolina wherein 41% of Donald Trump supporters said that Hillary Clinton is literally the devil.

As I've said before, I'm not here to discuss whether or not you agree with Clinton's politics.  But the idea that 41% of Trump supporters think that his opponent is the incarnation of Satan on Earth is troubling, to say the least.

That, however, is not the strangest thing about the poll.  Apparently, of the currently undecided voters, 15% thought Clinton was the devil.  So I'm thinking: You believe one of the candidates is literally the Prince of Hell (or Princess, in this case), and you're undecided?  What are you planning to do, stand there in the voting booth and say, "Let's see: candidate who is Satan, candidate who is not Satan... how to choose, how to choose?"

The weirdest thing, though, is that on the poll there were three choices: (1) Clinton is the devil; (2) Clinton is not the devil; and (3) Not sure.  And of the people who say they're voting for Hillary Clinton, 6% of them said they were not sure if she was the devil or not.

Now, I realize that this may be because 6% of the respondents thought the question was funny enough that they decided to fuck around with the results.  Or, perhaps, that this represents the 6% of respondents who are actual practicing Satanists, who think that Clinton might be the devil and are happy about it.  But if you look at the results, you will find that 33% of undecided voters are also undecided about whether Clinton is Satan.

So there are people in North Carolina (a lot of them, apparently) who when asked, "Who are you voting for?" said, "I dunno," and when asked, "Is Hillary Clinton the devil?" said, "Um... I dunno about that either."

Some days I feel like I've side-slipped into a bizarro world where this kind of stuff is normal.  Because this isn't the only insane thing that's happened lately.  When a map came out showing that if only men voted, Donald Trump would win, his followers immediately started calling for repealing the 19th Amendment, with one woman saying she would "give up [her] right to vote to make this happen."  Then we had a completely surreal video of Alex Jones making the rounds, wherein he bursts into tears on air and says that not only is Clinton a demon, so is Obama, adding that if you vote for Clinton you're "electing President Linda Blair."

I dunno, President Linda Blair could probably get stuff done, don't you think?  If Mitch McConnell stonewalled President Linda Blair, she could just puke up some pea soup on him.  "Oh, you won't give my Supreme Court nominee a fair hearing?  Well, take this!"  *BARRRRRFFFFF*

At least it would make C-Span more interesting.

So I guess we rationalists have a way to go, and it's an uphill battle.  I'm not ready to give up any time soon, so if you are a loyal reader, no worries: I still have a few posts left in me.  But it'd be nice if we could make more headway in convincing people not to engage in insane magical thinking.

Although it would make it harder for me to find material.  So I suppose I should be glad, in a backhanded way, that these people are keeping me in business.

Send in the clowns

According to an article last week in the Boston Globe, Loren Coleman, the founder and director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine, has been called into investigate the recent rash of clown sightings in the United States.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commona]

I'm not entirely sure what to think about this.  First, despite the fact that the museum has been in operation since 2003, in that time they have demonstrated conclusive evidence of the existence of almost one Sasquatch.  The same goes for all of the other cryptids they study, such as the Loch Ness Monster, the latest sighting of which turned out to be a bunch of seals.

So their track record isn't that great.  Also, I question that scary clowns actually qualify as cryptids, given that no one is really doubting they exist.  Most of us think they're pranksters (or possibly loonies) dressed up in clown suits to scare the piss out of the unsuspecting, and as such are more a concern for local law enforcement than they are for the crew of Finding Bigfoot.

That hasn't stopped people from seeking out Coleman's help. "Everybody [has] jumped on the phantom clown bandwagon," he said in an interview with the Globe.  "I’m always prepared for the next new thing.  It’s a very crisis-oriented field that I [work] in — it could be a new animal discovery, a new Bigfoot report, a new giant snake report... That’s just the way life is."

So I guess he's saying if it wasn't clowns, it would be something else.  Which I can't really argue with.

Me, I'm tired of the whole clown thing already, but unfortunately Coleman says he expects the number of sightings to "increase until Halloween and diminish thereafter."  Part of my annoyance with the phenomenon stems from the fact that our school got put on lockout last week because of a threatening clown-related Instagram page.  The whole thing was completely exasperating, mostly because I spent the day answering clown-related questions instead of talking about aerobic cellular respiration, which (trust me on this) is way more interesting.  So far, there have been no actual clown sightings in our village, at least that I've heard of, but as Coleman correctly points out we still have almost three weeks till Halloween, so there's lots of time for them to make an appearance.

So it's all generated quite a stir.  The Twitter hashtag #IfISeeAClown has been trending for days, and the account @ClownSightingsOnTwitter has gained 335,000 followers in three weeks.  (Which made me say, and I quote, "What the fuck?", as I have struggled for three years to get 2,600 followers over @TalesOfWhoa.  Maybe I need to dress in a funny costume or put on enormous shoes or something.)

The police are taking the phenomenon seriously, in spite of the fact that there hasn't been a verified case of a clown actually attacking anyone.  Mostly they seem to just stand around looking sketchy.  (The clowns, not the police.)  That's enough, though, for Wayne County (New Jersey) Police Chief Laurence Martin.  "If anything is suspicious," Martin told Reuters, "anything, be it somebody verbally or physically acting menacing in any type of costume, notify the police right away."

Which, I suppose, makes sense.  Better safe than sorry.  So perhaps enlisting Loren Coleman is the right idea.  If in 13 years he's yet to find one Bigfoot, maybe he'll be equally adept at making sure no one sees any clowns.

Bee all, end all

That a lot of people would prefer it if the world was simple is hardly an earthshattering claim.  You see it all over, especially in political debates -- the single-cause fallacy, attributing complex phenomena to one ultimate origin.  The mess in the Middle East?  George W. Bush, of course.  The loss of jobs to outsourcing?  Thanks, Obama.  Yesterday's unusually hot afternoon?  Has to be climate change.

Oh, but wait.  Climate change doesn't actually exist.  Almost forgot there for a moment.

I suppose it's understandable enough.  Figuring out complicated cause-and-effect relationships is hard work.  Sometimes even with lots of data, the answers are unclear.  We humans don't tend to like uncertainty, especially when we hear that the experts themselves are uncertain.  Much easier to fall back on the simple explanation and stop thinking about it.

Which, I think, explains the reactions I saw to the Washington Post article entitled "Bees Were Just Added to the U.S. Endangered Species List for the First Time."  Most of the comments I saw fell into one of the following categories:

• We're ruining the Earth and we're all gonna die.
• Farms are going to fold for lack of pollinators and we're going to run out of food.
• It's what we deserve for spraying pesticides all over the place.
• Monsanto sucks.

Never mind that when you actually read the article, it turns out that the additions to the ESL were seven rare species of endemic yellow-faced bees native to Hawaii, and the probable reason for their decline is habitat loss and destruction of native wildflowers, not pesticides or the rest of it.  There are actually an estimated 20,000 species of bees worldwide, so assuming that all bees are going extinct because seven uncommon island endemics are endangered is a little like using the near-extinction of the California condor to conclude that pigeons and starlings are about to go the way of the dinosaurs.  (Actually, it's worse; according to the most recent tallies, there are a few more than 10,000 species of birds in the world, so there's actually twice the biodiversity in bee species than in bird species.)

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

That's not to say that there haven't been problems with declining numbers of more common bee species recently, but as I alluded to in the first paragraphs, it's not as simple as it sounds.  The still-unexplained colony collapse disorder has reduced the populations of western honeybees, the most common bee species in North America -- particularly among captive hives.  But the truth of the matter is, CCD seems to be declining itself, and honeybee numbers are on the rise in most places.

As far as wild bee species, the situation is even less clear.  A study by Insu Koh et al. last year suggested that in some places, wild bee populations had declined by 23%, but if you look at the study itself, you find that there is a huge amount of uncertainty in the data, mostly due to the difficulty of estimating bee populations in the wild.  The numbers Koh et al. used were developed from spatial-habitat models, using subjective information such as the "quality of nesting sites," and generated numbers that sounded alarming.  A review of the study in Science 2.0 was scathing:

How did they count wild bees when no one else has been able to do so? They didn't, which means it adds to the list of PNAS papers that can't possibly have been peer-reviewed.  The team instead identified forty-five land-use types from two federal land databases and asked fourteen hand-picked experts about each type of land and how suitable it was for providing wild bees with nesting and food resources.  They then averaged the experts' input and levels of certainty (no, really) and built a computer model that they think predicts the relative abundance of wild bees for every area of the contiguous United States, based on their quality for nesting and feeding from flowers.  Lastly, they validated their model against bee collections and field observations they also hand-picked.

In other words, they created an academic model that would get them fired from every single company in existence for being wildly suspect and based on too many assumptions. 

The authors then claim the decline they don't know is happening must be due to pesticides, global warming and farmers.

In fact, a study (this one peer-reviewed) in Nature last year suggested that populations of the dominant (and therefore most agriculturally relevant) species of wild bees are actually doing okay:

Across crops, years and biogeographical regions, crop-visiting wild bee communities are dominated by a small number of common species, and threatened species are rarely observed on crops. Dominant crop pollinators persist under agricultural expansion and many are easily enhanced by simple conservation measures, suggesting that cost-effective management strategies to promote crop pollination should target a different set of species than management strategies to promote threatened bees.

So the bottom line is: colony collapse disorder still exists, but seems to be declining in frequency, and we're still not entirely sure what causes it (neonicotinoid pesticides are one possibility, but there are others).  The western honeybee, the most common and important pollinator species in North America, is actually increasing in numbers.  There are a few species (out of the 20,000) of bees that are threatened or endangered, some because of human activities, but the same is true for any taxon you pick.

In short: the situation is complicated, whether you like it or not.  It'd be convenient to have a clearly-outlined problem with a certain culprit and an obvious solution, but the world seldom works that way.  And as far as "Beemageddon" goes; there are a lot of other ways we could self-destruct that are far more likely than the loss of honeybees.

Maybe it's not justified to be an optimist, but at least be a pessimist about the right things.

Hardwired superstition

Despite my frequent railing against superstition and magical thinking, it's not that I don't see its attractions.  As a teenager and twenty-something I was fascinated with such things as Tarot cards (I still own three decks, actually, that I haven't been willing to part with), numerology, astrology, and a host of other kinds of woo.  That I eventually threw it all aside (well, figuratively, in the case of the Tarot cards) I attribute to my commitment to a rationalistic view of the world.  I decided in my mid-twenties that I had to establish some criterion for finding what I considered to be the truth, and that logic and evidence seemed a lot more solid than "I fervently wish this was so."

Since my conversion to skepticism, I've found myself looking at True Believers and wondering how they never made the same transition.  We apply the rules of the scientific method in scores of other ways -- "show me how you know this" isn't some kind of odd, esoteric rule only known to Ph.D. candidates (not that I've ever been one of those, but you get my drift).  So how can a person look at the extremely slim evidence for (say) astrology, and not say, "Okay, this makes no sense whatsoever?"

A study in Applied Cognitive Psychology has given us at least a hint of why some people never leave behind their unsupported beliefs in the paranormal.  Its title -- which breaks the general rule that articles whose titles are questions always should be answered "No" -- is, "Does Poor Understanding of Physical World Predict Religious and Paranormal Beliefs?"  The researchers who conducted the study, Marjaana Lindeman and Annika M. Svedholm-Häkkinen of the Institute of Behavioral Studies at the University of Helsinki, looked at a group of 258 people and examined how real-world knowledge of science correlated with belief in the supernatural.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers found a series of strong correlations:

The results showed that supernatural beliefs correlated with all variables that were included, namely, with low systemizing, poor intuitive physics skills, poor mechanical ability, poor mental rotation, low school grades in mathematics and physics, poor common knowledge about physical and biological phenomena, intuitive and analytical thinking styles, and in particular, with assigning mentality to non-mental phenomena.  Regression analyses indicated that the strongest predictors of the beliefs were overall physical capability (a factor representing most physical skills, interests, and knowledge) and intuitive thinking style.

Note, of course, that correlation does not imply causation; it is by no means certain that the lack of scientific knowledge caused the belief in the supernatural.  In fact, if that were true, one of the other findings of the study would be less likely:

Nonscientific ways of thinking are resistant to formal instruction… which can affect individuals’ ability to act as informed citizens to make reasoned judgments in a world that is increasingly governed by technology and scientific knowledge.

If superstitious beliefs were as simple as stemming from a lack of knowledge of the world around us, you'd think that you could eradicate magical thinking simply by enrolling people in a college-level physics course.  The fact that this isn't so makes me wonder if there is something else underlying a tendency toward belief in the supernatural -- perhaps something in the brain wiring -- that both makes a person likely to have less aptitude at science and technical subjects, and also results in a stronger likelihood of belief in the supernatural.  A previous study by Lindeman et al. suggests that this may be so:

We examined with functional magnetic resonance imaging the brain activity of 12 supernatural believers and 11 skeptics who first imagined themselves in critical life situations (e.g. problems in intimate relationships) and then watched emotionally charged pictures of lifeless objects and scenery (e.g. two red cherries bound together).  Supernatural believers reported seeing signs of how the situations were going to turn out in the pictures more often than skeptics did.  Viewing the pictures activated the same brain regions among all participants (e.g. the left inferior frontal gyrus, IFG).  However, the right IFG, previously associated with cognitive inhibition, was activated more strongly in skeptics than in supernatural believers, and its activation was negatively correlated to sign seeing in both participant groups.

So once again, we have some evidence that what we think and believe might not entirely be a choice -- it might be hardwired into our brains.  If so, despite my toying with paranormal woo as a young person, I might have been destined all along to become the hard-headed skeptic you all know and (I hope) love.

But I'm still not throwing away the Tarot cards.  They're kinda pretty, even if they're almost certainly useless for predicting the future.