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The Relationship Between Paranormal Beliefs and Religious Beliefs - Statistical Data Included
Skeptical Inquirer, Sept, 2001 by Glenn G. Sparks
A random sample survey fails to find substantial correspondence between paranormal belief and religious belief. In addition to some methodological differences between this study and one reported earlier by Erich Goode that could account for some of their difference in results, there may be good conceptual reasons to expect that these two belief domains are not closely related.
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Past research indicates that the easy assumption that religious belief and paranormal belief are closely associated may be unwarranted. For example, Williams, Taylor, and Hintze (1989) found little relationship between traditional religious beliefs and belief in the paranormal. More recently, Tobacyk and Wilkinson (1990) found that religious belief was actually inversely related with magical thinking. In the January/February 2000 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, Erich Goode (2000) suggested that his new exploratory study on the relationship between religious traditionalism and paranormal beliefs challenged the traditional finding that beliefs in these two domains were uncorrelated or even inversely correlated. He presented data from a convenience sample of 484 students that revealed some statistically significant relationships between individual paranormal belief items and other items taken as indicators for traditional religious beliefs. Although Goode did not report the precise extent of the statistical overlap between the religious and paranormal beliefs, his data suggested that some significant overlap was certainly present.
In the May/June 2000 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER, several readers, myself included, reacted to Goode's study by pointing out a number of things that would seem to dictate caution in evaluating his conclusion that these two belief domains overlap more than most researchers suspect. While I stand by each of the points that I made in my letter, my intent in this not to revisit that exchange. Instead, I want to try in some small measure to take up the challenge that Goode outlines in the last sentences of his response letter in that issue. He wrote, "Still, I look forward to the findings of other researchers who wish to investigate same relationship. Perhaps Arranasio, Aberson, Stewart, Sparks, or Argall [the letter writers] are willing to step forward and rake up the challenge."
As regular readers of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER might recall, I have been conducting a program of research that investigates the relationship between exposure to media messages and belief in the paranormal (see Sparks in the July/August 1998 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER). As part of that research program, I conducted a random sample survey of 200 respondents in a Midwestern city (Sparks and Miller 2001). In that survey, taken over the telephone, we asked adult respondents to indicate their TV viewing habits as well as the extent to which they believed in ten different paranormal phenomena (astrology, psychokinesis, ghosts, ESP, palmistry, astral-projection, healing, general psychic power, psychic prophecy, and UFOs/space aliens). Because of my interest in the relationship between paranormal beliefs and traditional religious beliefs, the survey also included a few items pertaining to religious belief. Until now, I have not published any of the data from the questions about religious beliefs, but I thought that the challenge o ffered by Goode provided an excellent opportunity.
The Survey
In 1997, Will Miller and I directed a class of advanced undergraduate students, who conducted 200 telephone interviews by selecting phone numbers randomly from the pages of the phone directory in a medium-sized city in the Midwest. The final sample consisted of 102 females and 92 males (with six respondents of undetermined sex). Respondents had to be at least eighteen years old in order to participate in the interview. The median age of the sample was thirty-four. In addition to questions about exposure to different media, respondents indicated whether they agreed, disagreed, or were uncertain about twenty different paranormal belief statements. These items, along with the percentages of respondents who expressed agreement, disagreement, or uncertainty about the beliefs are displayed in table 1.
In addition to the other items on the survey, we asked respondents about their religious beliefs and practice with two specific questions. First, we asked them to indicate the intensity of their religious beliefs on a scale from one (not at all religious) to ten (extremely religious). Second, to get a more behavioral indication of religious commitment, we asked respondents to indicate if they typically attended a religious service on a weekly basis. Responses were coded simply "yes" or 'no." In regression equations that we reported in the original paper (see Sparks arid Miller 2001), viewing of paranormal TV programs was significantly related to paranormal beliefs even after controlling for age, sex, income, education, attendance at a weekly religious service, and intensity of religious belief. These last two variables that dealt with religious belief were not significant predictors of belief in the paranormal.
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