Ross Douthat and Michael Shermer alike are completely unable to provide any reason to believe that dead people can turn on radios to communicate with living people. Douthat once again cannot justify his belief in religion.
In chapter three of Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious, Ross Douthat once again plays the dishonest debater’s game of pointing out that his opponents lack absolutely complete information supporting a materialist explanation for events, and claiming that a supernatural explanation is therefore the only choice available. Douthat’s argument fails Logic 101.
Podcast Transcript:
Welcome back to Not Everyone Believes, Ross Douthat.
We are in chapter three of Ross Douthat’s book Believe. This chapter has the title The Myth of Disenchantment. The essence of this chapter is to say that gosh, a lot of people think that there's just no evidence for religion, but in fact, there is, there are tons of evidence for a religious perspective. The supposed evidence provided in this chapter is that supernatural experiences, magic, appears in the form of things happen that cannot be explained rationally. That's where we get into the rub of it.
“Cannot be explained rationally” means you haven't found the explanation of what happened rationally. It means that you lack information.
When you say that something has not been explained rationally, that doesn't mean that it lacks a rational basis, a factual basis. It doesn't mean that it's supernatural. It just means that you haven't found an explanation yet.
It's like, going back to an idea from a couple of episodes ago, kind of like thinking about a murder mystery. If someone is killed, and it's certainly a murder, and you find a murder weapon, like a knife in the chest of a person, and they're dead on the floor, but they're in a room that was locked from the inside, that’s a classic thing in murder mysteries, right?
The reader is meant to ask: How could it possibly have been done? Who can explain what was going on?
You can say there is no logical explanation. There is no rational explanation. That doesn't mean that ghosts did it. That doesn't mean that magic was involved. It means that you haven't found an explanation yet.
Ross Douthat is falling for the mistake of failing to understand that distinction in this chapter 3. In a story that he uses to frame this chapter, I said in the last episode that I would get to this and now I am, the story has to do with an experience that was had by Michael Shermer, who has been the editor of Skeptical Enquirer and a very public prominent skeptical writer for a long time.
In 2014, Shermer wrote a short article about something that happened when he got married. Earlier that year, in June, he met a woman. He fell in love with her and she agreed to marry him.
Her name was Jennifer. She was from Germany, and she grew up being raised partially by her grandfather because her father was not in the picture. I don't know the details of that, but that's not really the important part.
The important thing is that her grandfather was very important to her, but he died when she was sixteen yers old, and this story that Shermer relates took place many, many years after that.
So, Jennifer is preparing to move in with Michael Shermer. They're going to get married, and a lot of her stuff is shipped over to his house and is damaged in the process.
Let me begin to read this to you, word for word from the article Shermer wrote: “She had been raised by her mom, her grandfather, Walter, was the closest father figure she had growing up, but he died when she was 16. In shipping her belongings to my home before the wedding, most of the boxes were damaged, and several precious heirlooms lost. Including her grandfather's binoculars.”
I want you to remember that part about the binoculars, and that a lot of stuff was damaged in the shipping process. Now we're going to go to the radio part.
The radio part of this story is where Shermer wants to put the emphasis, and that's pretty important, that he makes that emphasis, instead of, you know, he could have emphasized something else.
Anyway, Shermer continues:
“His 1978 Phillips 070 transistor radio arrived safely, so I set to bring it back to life after decades of muteness. I put in new batteries and opened it up to see if there were any loose connections to solder. I even tried percussive maintenance, said to work on such devices, smacking it sharply against a hard surface. Silence. We gave up and put it at the back of a desk drawer in our bedroom. Three months later, after affixing the necessary signatures to our marriage license at the Beverly Hills courthouse, we returned home. And in the presence of my family said our vows and exchanged rings.”
Now, I’m skipping forward a couple of lines. His new wife says, can we go talk in the back of the house, because I have something I want to say to you?
“She whispered that she wanted to say something to me alone, so we excused ourselves to the back of the house where we could hear music playing in the bedroom. We don't have a music system there, so we searched for laptops and iPhones and even opened the back door to check if neighbors were playing music. We followed the sound to the printer on the desk, wondering absurdly if this combined printer scanner fax machine had also include a radio. Nope. At that moment, Jennifer shot me a look. I haven't seen since the supernatural thriller, the exorcist startled audiences. ‘That can't be what I think it is, can it?’ she said. She opened the desk drawer and pulled out her grandfather's transistor radio out of which a romantic love song wafted. We sat in stunned silence for minutes.”
Then Shermer’s article quotes Jennifer as saying, “My grandfather is here with us. I'm not alone,” as she cries.
Here's something that I really think is pretty important in what's going on in this story: Michael Shermer made a series of efforts to repair this radio. He got new power source and he worked with the electrical connections. He also did the thing of whapping a radio, hitting it against something to try to get it to work.
That detail is really important in what we're considering here because that's a common practice with electronic communication devices at this time, things like hitting a TV on the side, slapping it to get it to work again. That would often work.
That tells you something about the very fragile nature of electronic communication equipment at that time. It was very arbitrary, that sometimes a radio or a television set would work. and then mysteriously, which just means you don't understand what's going on, it would stop working.
That doesn't mean that there are demons or ghosts or supernatural elements causing the radio to work or not to work.
It simply means that mysteriously, these things stopped working, but then, somehow, you would do something like hit them, and then, sometimes that would work, and sometimes that wouldn't work. It would get the device to work again, which certainly is pretty bizarre. It means you don't know what you're doing, but kind of you jiggle things around and stuff happens and sometimes that would actually work.
A lot of the times it would work. And then a lot of times the radio or TV would just stop working again. What that should tell you, as you're reading this story, is that it's actually very common for these electronic communications devices like radios and TVs to go through periods of working and not working that you don't quite understand. It happens in odd ways.
So that's the story that Michael Shermer is talking about: There was a radio, and Shermer did at least a partial, maybe a complete repair of that radio.
Then, later on, the radio worked. So he fixed a radio and then it worked.
The mysterious part is that the radio didn't seem to work for a long time in between, three months in between. However, Shermer had shoved the radio in the back of a desk drawer. He shoved the radio so far back that when the music was heard, Shermer and his new wife actually went to their next door neighbors to ask them, “Are you guys playing music? What's going on?”
The radio was playing so softly, they had trouble hearing it. So, it's actually quite plausible that during the three months in question, that radio was playing at different times when they couldn't hear it. It’s also possible that the radio was playing, but Shermer and Jennifer would just presume that somebody else was playing something somewhere else, like the at the nextdoor neighbors’ house or in another part of their own house. It just so happens that they looked for the source of the music this time.
That's actually a really rational explanation for the experience Shermer described, in which they had just been through a wedding, and Michael Shermer's new wife felt as if the radio was her grandfather talking to her from the dead.
So we have, on the one hand, a pretty plausible explanation for the experience, which is that a piece of 1970s communication electronic equipment was highly unpredictable and would start working and stop working at odd times.
On the other side, we have something else. Ross Douthat is willing to accept a weird idea: That the radio playing a love song, after Michael Shermer's wedding ceremony is proof that his wife's grandfather was using the radio, coming back from the dead, to try to communicate with his granddaughter.
Here’s what Ross Douthat is overlooking: The weird supernatural explanation actually requires evidence. It requires evidence apart from merely not understanding how the radio could have turned on.
Radios, after all, when you put batteries in them and you repair them, often work. It’s quite normal for old radios will work unpredictably. So, we have a very clear, plausible scenario, with clear lines of evidence.
We know that radios work. We know that radios work better when you put batteries in them. We know that radios work better when you try to fix them, which Michael Shermer did. We also know that radios from the 1970s were unpredictable. Thus slapping it up the side of the radio to try to make it to work could be effective
So we have a very clear set of evidence there for a rational materialist explanation. What do we have on the other side, for the argument that Michael Shermer's wife's grandfather, who had been dead for many years, somehow was able to come back to life, and was able to use a radio to communicate with his granddaughter?
Well, first of all, we have to ask this question: Why would we think that the grandfather was using the radio to communicate with his granddaughter from beyond the dead, the grave, from the dead?
Are we supposed to presume a person who was long dead came back to life just because a love song was playing? We have to ask: What are the chances of a love song playing on the radio, randomly?
The chances of that are actually huge. Music is the most common content of radio transmission, and of all the kinds of music, love songs are the most common type of music on the radio. So if you happen to randomly tune a radio on at any moment, it’s very likely that a love song is going to be there.
Michael Shermer doesn't mention that this was a specific love song that his wife's grandfather knew in particular playing on the radio. If that were true, it would make the supernatural explanation a little more plausible, but that's not what happened.
So, some plausibility of the supernatural explanation is lost because of that. It reminds that the fact that there’s a love song on the radio doesn't in itself mean very much.
Another thing is that we know that dead people don't come back and do things. There is no evidence that it’s ever happened. That's pretty strong reason not to believe the supernatural argument.
We do know that people need to be in physical proximity to a radio in order to get it to work. Usually, they turn the knobs. Every now and then a person can walk by a radio that's on, but it's not getting a clear signal, and the electromagnetism of the person's body will enhance the antenna reception and bring a signal into tune. That definitely happened with 1970s radios and televisions.
That's something significant in itself, the fact that the radio got into tune, when Michael Shermer and his wife got close to it. It could just be that they enhanced its antenna’s reception.
More important than that, of course, is that we don't have any knowledge of any dead spirits actually making radios work. There's never been any evidence that that happens at all.
Then we have to figure, well, wait a minute, if there is a dead person and they're trying to get a radio to play a certain tune at a certain time, how would they do that?
We don't know. There is no understanding of how that could be possible, zero evidence in support of that side of the theory.
Also, if dead people had the supernatural ability to make music play or to do things to affect the physical world, why would they choose a radio in particular to do that?Why couldn't they make music play in other ways?
If invisible spirits of dead people have supernatural powers that are magical, why couldn't Jennifer's grandfather simply have appeared and started singing a love song during the time of the wedding ceremony?
Why would Jennifer's grandfather wait until after the wedding ceremony? I mean, that doesn't really link up, does it?
Furthermore, why didn't the radio come on and have Jennifer's grandfather's voice saying, “Hi there, Jennifer,” “It's me, your granddad.”
I mean, a generic love song that her grandfather didn’t know is not really a great message. Why should we believe that the radio playing a love song was somehow a vague, inapt message somebody who's coming back from the dead, trying to get in touch with his granddaughter supposedly, without even being able to use his own words? It doesn't seem really plausible.
Perhaps you can come up with some kind of rationale, a justification, if you wanted to. Maybe something happened that makes you want to believe that something unusual happened, but really all you have is the fact that Michael Shermer fixed a radio, and then the radio worked.
The only mystery is that the radio didn't work perfectly. Sometimes it played, and sometimes it didn't. Michael Shermer is not a professional electrician or radio repairman.
Is that really weird that his radio repair was only partly successful? No, it’s not so weird at all.
Nonetheless have Ross Douthat using Michael Shermer's story and saying that it is clear, rational evidence that God exists, and we should believe in religion and that there are dead people who come back and make radios play songs.
In fact, no dead person was seen in this incident. If Jennifer’s grandfather really was there, why didn’t anyone see him? That’s a pretty big gap in the story. Why should we presume that if people could come back from the dead, they would be invisible?
There is another obvious flaw in Ross Douthat’s interpretation of this story. Michael Shermer's new wife, Jennifer, said that the radio playing music was is a message from my grandfather. She said her grandfather was there with her, just because she heard music coming out of a radio. Did she see her grandfather, though? No. She didn’t.
There are billions of people who have died, which means that if ghosts are real, if spirits survive death and can turn on radios, it could have been any one of those billions of spirits of dead people who turned on the radio. What are the chances that it was actually Jennifer's grandfather?
If you believe that dead people are constantly turning radios on and off, it's much more likely that it was some other dead person, than one of the extremely small number of dead people you used to know.
Do you see how many holes in logic there are in this story? Ross Douthat either doesn't see those holes or he is trying to pull a dishonest kind of argument.
Douthat’s favorite form of argument, which he's used several times in the book already, is that if you lack a clear and absolutely complete in every detail rational explanation for an event, it must have been a supernatural event, even if you don't have any solid explanation at all of how that supernatural event could be possible. That's a lopsided way to make an argument.
Ross Douthat has a crude substitute for a rational argument and solid evidence. Whenever he doesn’t understand something, he just claims that a supernatural spirit made it happen. Sometimes that magical spirit is a dead person. Sometimes he names that magical spirit “God”.
Ross Douthat never explains how dead people or his god do what they do. He doesn’t think that spirit magic needs to be explained. He expects everyone to simply believe that supernatural beings exist, and that they are the explanation for things we don’t understand.
There's a reason that Carl Sagan’s advice that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence has been remembered long after his death. The idea that a person can survive after death, but then come back to life and magically control electronic equipment without requires extraordinary evidence because it is an extraordinary claim. There's not any evidence at all for what Michael Shermer and Ross Douthat have claimed about what happened with the radio that Shermer fixed. There is not one actual fact that links the function of that radio to any dead person at all, much less Shermer’s wife’s dead grandfather in particular.
Our emotions can lead us to make wild, irrational associations between events that have no clear relationship. In a later discussion between Douthat and Shermer about this event, Shermer said something really weird. He said he believes that his wife's grandfather was in a multidimensional tesseract and was able to interact with the radio through that interdimensional tesseract, even though he was dead.
Wow. We don't even have evidence that interdimensional tesseracts exist. At this point, Michael Shermer is just telling a science fiction story. He’s improvising off the 1970’s children’s book A Wrinkle In Time.
Ross Douthat has included this story in his chapter about supernatural magic because he thinks it's especially persuasive. He knows Michael Shermer is a well-known skeptic who debunks other people's claims of supernatural events, but even he can't explain this one. The fact that he can't explain this experience doesn't mean that it's supernatural. The fact that you have a skeptic making a silly claim just means that person is human.
We all have moments in which we fall for patterns of sloppy thinking that are irrational and illogical, and we begin to have beliefs that we want to be true, even when there's not evidence that those things actually are true.
Life is hard, and you know what? We have emotions that sometimes overcome our rational thoughts.
We're not computers. We're not reality calculating devices. We're not objective. We are emotional beings.
Here Shermer is, he just got married, his feelings are heightened, and the feelings of his new wife are heightened, and she just said to him, I think this radio is my grandfather.
What's he supposed to say? Just a few minutes after his wedding ceremony, do you think he's gonna say, “Uh, I think my uh, new wife was wrong, I think she was wrong about that”?
No, that would be kind of impolite. It wouldn't be a great beginning to that marriage. So we see that Michael Shermer has a special kind of motivation to engage in sloppy thinking in this particular instance.
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There’s yet another bias in Ross Douthat’s interpretation of Michael Shermer’s story. It’s about those binoculars that I talked about earlier.
Michael Shermer mentioned that almost all the boxes of possessions shipped from his new wife’s house were damaged in transit, completely wrecking a huge number of valued heirlooms, including her grandfather’s binoculars. Why didn’t Michael Shermer and his new wife Jennifer interpret that unexpected damage as a message from Jennifer’s dead grandfather?
Ross Douthat expects us to take it for granted that when unexpected things happen in our lives, dead people made those things happen as a way to communicate with the living, to send a message. So, why doesn’t Ross Douthat apply that standard to the destruction of Jennifer’s grandfather’s binoculars?
If the invisible spirits of dead people have the power to make radios play love songs, then why wouldn’t they have the power to make trucks hit big bumps in the road, causing damage to items packed in boxes inside the trucks? Ross Douthat completely fails to explain why Shermer and his wife didn’t interpret the damaged property as a religious omen, a message from Jennifer’s dead grandfather that she should not marry Michael Shermer.
The reason for this omission is pretty plain. It’s absurd to conclude that a dead person caused a pair of binoculars to break for the same reason that it’s absurd to conclude that a dead person caused a love song to play on a radio.
If we follow the approach adopted by Michael Shermer and Ross Douthat, we could easily end up interpreting everything that happens in our lives as a message from the dead or an instruction from a god. Did you happen to see a duck flying overhead? Maybe the appearance of the bird is an omen that you should be careful of being hit in the head by a flying object. Did the grocery store put up a new display of peanuts? It could be that a magical being wants you to go to the circus.
This way of looking at the world isn’t just silly. It’s self-centered. To suppose that physical reality is nothing more than a show put on for you to watch is downright narcissistic. Yet, Ross Douthat asks that we accept this obsession with egotistical fantasies as an emotionally mature and rational approach to life.
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There is a narrative imbalance between religious people and skeptics. Skeptics who are honest don't claim to know things for absolutely certain. Skeptics don't claim that they have an absolute explanation that explains everything.
Religious people like Ross Douthat, on the other hand, believe that they have a personal connection with a spirit, that knows absolutely everything and is always right about everything. So, the only time that people are wrong about something is when they disagree with that supernatural spirit.
Ross Douthat is applying that outrageous standard to skepticism and to one particular skeptic, the idea that if you don't have an absolute 100% record of being right and knowing and understanding everything, then you are inferior to a religious perspective that knows everything, has absolute 100% knowledge and is always right and always good about everything.
It's not a fair standard, because Ross Douthat never applies that standard to his own religious beliefs.
I don't mean this as a complaint, like, “Hey, it's not fair. You're not playing fair.” What I really mean to say is it's not rational. It doesn't make sense. It’s not consistent.
This irrational inconsistency doesn't fit Ross Douthat's own standard for what constitutes success in his book. He claims that he's building a rational argument, but once again, he fails to do so.
That is why not everyone believes, Ross Douthat.