Noah's Ark and Ancient Astronauts: Pseudoscientific Beliefs About the Past Among a Sample of College Students

Noah's Ark and Ancient Astronauts: Pseudoscientific Beliefs About the Past Among a Sample of College Students Creationist views are tied to a deeply held set of values and world-view. Cult archaeology and other pseudoscientific beliefs are unrelated to most such variables. Francis B. Harrold and Raymond A. Eve OST PEOPLE are curious about the distant past, especially that of our own species. This curiosity has led to the rise of archaeology Mand related sciences, which have given us a growing understanding of human origins and prehistory; but it has also spawned some of the most outlandish pseudoscience on record. Many people readily accept baseless claims about the past—including college students, as one of us (an anthro- pologist) has come to learn while teaching courses in archaeology and human evolution. Students who held such beliefs when they entered these classes did not always change their minds when they were exposed to scientific ap- proaches to the past. One student wanted to leave no doubt as to where he stood; at the end of a test on the human fossil record, he wrote, "Of course I don't believe any of this. 1 believe in the Bible." Such encounters aroused our curiosity concerning these pseudoscientific beliefs among our students. The result was a research project, using the perspectives and methods of social science, to learn more about these beliefs: how widely and strongly they are held, by whom, and why. The research (for a more detailed report, see Eve and Harrold 1986) helped us progress toward answering these questions and suggested ways to deal with such beliefs. The beliefs we studied can all be described as pseudoscientific. Their proponents claim scientific status, or at least that their methodology equals or surpasses that of orthodox science (e.g., Morris 1974a, 8-10). Nonetheless, they consistently ignore basic requirements of scientific research, such as generating testable hypotheses and thoroughly considering relevant evidence (Schadewald 1983; Cole 1978, 1980). Francis B. Harrold is an assistant professor of anthropology, and Raymond A. Eve is an associate professor of sociology, in the Department of Sociology. Anthropology and Social Work at the University of Texas at Arlington. Fall 1986 61 Our experience suggests that these beliefs are divisible into two categories. (1) Creationism. including so-called "creation-science." substitutes a more or less literal interpretation of the account of creation in the Book of Genesis in place of scientific understandings of the origins of the earth and mankind. (2) Pseudoarehaeology, or "cult archaeology" (Cole 1980). includes a variety of sensational claims about man's past, from "psychic archaeology" to Erich von Daniken's famous ancient astronauts. These beliefs lack any foundation in evidence or theory, but have numerous, sometimes passionate, proponents. There are important reasons for learning more about such beliefs among college students. First, an important function of higher education should be to impart some understanding of the past and. with it. a context for understanding the present and the future. "Not to know what happened before one was born," said Cicero, "is always to be a child." Just as vital is the implication of these beliefs for science education. Students who are convinced by the arguments found in Chariots of the Gods? or who think that creationism should be taught in public schools alongside evolution (which they call "just a theory") do not understand much about what science is or how it works. Our need for an informed citizenry, able to deal with scientific and technical public issues, is increasing. However, the prospect of increasing the "scientific literacy" of the American public (Miller 1983) is not encouraging if college students—a highly educated seg- ment of that public—commonly hold such beliefs. Previous Research In recent years, many publications have appeared dealing with creationism (e.g., Montagu 1984; Godfrey 1983) and cult archaeology (e.g.. Cole 1980; Stiebing 1984). They have filled the need for expositions of the scientific and logical bankruptcy of these beliefs, but have contributed little empirical research and little to our understanding of such notions as social phenomena. At the same time, sociologists and social psychologists have compiled a body of research on various pseudoscientific beliefs and their relationships to many social background and personality factors (e.g., Tobacyk and Milford 1983; Singer and Benassi 1981a, 1981b; Emmons and Sobal 1981). These studies have yielded valuable insights, but have dealt primarily with beliefs related to extrasensory perception (ESP) and almost never with creationism or cult archaeology. Relatively little empirical research on these beliefs is available. Some indications of the prevalence of creationism are found in public opinion polls; a recent Gallup poll, for instance, found that 42 percent of respondents reported holding a belief in the direct creation of man within the past several thousand years (Moore 1983. 103). Social researchers sampling the adult population have found that conservative and fundamentalist Protestants tend to reject evolution (Bainbridge and Stark 1980) as well as to support the Moral Majority more strongly than other people (Shupe and Stacey 1982). 62 THE SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Vol. 11 Several studies have dealt, as ours did, with college students. Sixty-two percent of a sample of Ohio biology students accepted evolution, though they did not always understand what the term meant (Fuerst 1984). William S. Bainbridge (1978) reported that, in a Washington sample, belief in ancient astronauts was positively related to various other pseudoscientific beliefs (such as astrology and UFOs), while creationism was unrelated to any of them. Similarly, Bainbridge and Rodney Stark (1980) found that students who were born-again Christians tended strongly to reject a similar set of pseudoscientific claims. In a previous study, to which our own owes much, Kenneth L. Feder (1984) examined creationist, pseudoarchaeological, and general pseudoscientific beliefs among Connecticut college students and found highly variable levels of acceptance. Some of his results will be compared with ours below. Our research was intended to provide data that could be compared with Feder's, while also proposing and testing hypotheses about relationships among beliefs and background variables. We thus hoped for a better understanding of both the prevalence and the etiology of these beliefs. Hypotheses A guiding factor in formulating hypotheses for our study of a sample of Texas college students was our expectation that creationist beliefs are not closely relate^ to pseudoarchaeological ones. This expectation derives from both the research cited above and from the creationist and cult archaeology literatures, which seem to operate in two different domains. Cult archaeology writers often appear to be disposed toward other brands of pseudoscience, borrowing their tenets freely—witness the deft union of mysterious ancient sites with UFOs by von Daniken, and with ESP by Jeffrey Goodman (1977)—while largely ignoring creationism. For their part, creationist authors (e.g., Morris 1974a) are unconcerned with standard pseudoscience topics, but are not shy about proclaiming their religious beliefs. Creationism: We propose that creationist belief can be understood in the context of what sociologists call the "politics of lifestyle concern" (Page and Clelland 1978). In this perspective, the prescientific creationist view of origins is not an isolated belief. Rather, it is acquired and maintained as an element of cultural fundamentalism, a sociopolitical movement that involves a socially and religiously conservative lifestyle and world-view that cuts across class lines (Page and Clelland 1978; Lorentzen 1980; Harper and Leicht 1984). Cultural fundamentalists feel that their way of life, and not just a theory of origins, is under attack from "secular humanists" in government, the media, and education. In turn, they see evolution not merely as a scientific theory, but as the basis for secular humanism, which they feel leads to a host of moral and political evils (e.g., Morris 1974b, 161-168, 178-194). Some cultural fundamentalists are conducting a counteroffensive that might even be compared in some ways to the Islamic fundamentalist revival movement. They Fall 1986 63 are particularly upset by changes in education, where they perceive secularists as trying to undermine their way of life by converting their children to evolution and other dangerous ideas. In this light, their battles earlier in this century to exclude evolution from the schools, and now to insert creationism alongside it, are understandable. We thus propose that creationism among our students is, at least in part, a result of the struggle of culturally fundamentalist parents and churches to resist threatening teachings in what they perceive as a hostile social environment. We do not argue that this is a complete explanation of creationism among students. Certainly other factors affect these beliefs, notably those pointed out by Singer and Benassi (1981a): (1) heavy and uncritical media attention to pseudoscientific claims; (2) poor understanding of scientific (vs. unscientific) methods; and (3) common human "cognitive biases," or mistakes in reasoning, such as the tendency to perceive order in random arrays of data. However, since these factors should affect both creationist and pseudoarchaeological beliefs

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