Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time by Michael Shermer & Stephen Jay Gould

Author:Michael Shermer & Stephen Jay Gould [Shermer, Michael & Gould, Stephen Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, Psychology, Science, Philosophy, Philosophy & Social Aspects, ghosts, Body; Mind & Spirit, Epistemology, Truthfulness and Falsehood, Belief and Doubt, Creative Ability in Science, Creative Ability, Pseudoscience, Parapsychology, Skepticism, Parapsychology and Science, Superstition, extraterrestrials, weird things, irrationality, creationism
ISBN: 9780805070897
Google: LYIkAkBE7tsC
Amazon: 0805070893
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 1997-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

PART 4

We believe we can construct a past that is veritable, that is accurate in terms of actual past events, since the past has left its mark in the present.

The message of this book has been that, while there are many different possibilities, not all of these constructed pasts—not all of the possibilities—are equally plausible. Ultimately, then, we get the past we deserve. In every generation, thinkers, writers, scholars, charlatans, and kooks (these are not necessarily mutually exclusive categories) attempt to cast the past in an image either they or the public desire or find comforting. We deserve better and can do better than weave a past from the whole cloth of fantasy and fiction.

—Kenneth L. Feder, Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries:

Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, 1986

173

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