“When I was a freshman at the University of Chicago in 1932,”

Martin Gardner writes in

Are Universes

Thicker Than Blackberries?,

“I intended to become a physicist. For better or worse,

I got sidetracked into philosophy.” He soon became a writer

instead, but his seventy or so books have all been informed

by the sound understanding of science, mathematics, and

philosophy that one could acquire at a good university in

that distant era. Those disciplines have given him a firm

footing for the center of his life’s work, the exposure of

fraud in charlatans pretending to be spiritualists,

religious freaks posing as scientists, and scientists

thinking they are philosophers.

The title essay in this, his most recent collection of

occasional pieces, deals with an example of the last of

these types. The philosopher C. S. Peirce once said that unfortunately

universes are not as plentiful as blackberries. He spoke in

an age when that was an urbane expression of a platitude,

but physics and philosophy have passed through the Jazz Age

since then, acquiring thought-forms that bring to mind the

philosophers’ joke: “What others took to be

a reductio he

embraced as a corollary.” Gardner observes that “One of the most

astonishing recent trends in science is that many top

physicists and cosmologists now defend the wild notion that

not only are universes as common as blackberries, but even

more common,” because the universe splits at every moment

into all the futures that are possible under the laws of

quantum mechanics. Gardner goes straight to the point: the

scientists who say this have given no reason for believing

that the possible worlds other than this one, useful though

they may be as fictions, have real existence.

Physicists who cannot tell the difference between fiction

and reality are among those fraudsters who have deceived

themselves as comprehensively as they have misled the

public. Many of Gardner’s targets are not so innocent on

that score. Several of his chapters examine mediums and

performers who have claimed such powers as sight through

blindfolds. They knew they were tricking the public, and the

only mystery about them is why they bothered to waste their

lives doing so. Much more dangerous have been some of the

gurus who probably did convince themselves, but only because

they refused to ask if the source of their growing power

over their school of disciples and victims was really

founded on any good evidence. Among the worst cases in

Gardner’s gallery of monsters is Dr. Bruno Bettelheim, who

caused untold distress to mothers of autistic children by

telling them they were to blame for the condition. The

evidence for this theory amounted to what it usually does in

these cases, zero.

There are certain issues on which Gardner is arguably not

quite rationalist enough. After war service he returned to

the University of Chicago and studied with Rudolf Carnap,

spending many happy hours editing Carnap’s lectures into a

book (Philosophical Foundations of Physics: An Introduction

to the Philosophy of Science, 1966). He accepts Carnap’s

now rather unfashionable view that the key question in the

rationality of science is the justification of inductive

inference—inference from the observed to the unobserved

(for example, from the past to the future, from a sample to

the population as a whole). Carnap’s plan was to show that such

inferences, though never absolutely certain, were justified

as a matter of logic. Gardner does not agree with that, on

the grounds that induction does not work in all possible

worlds (as it should if it is a matter of logic). He states

confidently that “induction works only on universes that are

uniformly patterned.” He does not offer any universe which

is not uniformly patterned and on which induction does not

work. (Obviously, it is no use taking a chaotic universe,

since there the only induction would be: “The observed is chaotic,

so the unobserved is chaotic,” and indeed it is.) This is

surprising, since Gardner is possibly the world’s expert on

patterns-in-general, as evidenced by his many popular

writings on mathematical structures (represented in this

book by an entertaining piece on magic hexagrams). Surely we

should demand of him what he would demand of a swami who

claimed to be able to levitate—“Don’t tell us, show us.”

Is the same failure to go the last mile with reason evident

also in Gardner’s views on religion? His skeptical friends

in the fight against pseudoscience, parapsychology, and

spiritualism have often been distressed to find that he is a

religious believer, of a sort. Not that he suspends his

skepticism in dealing with religious matters. On the

contrary, small sects with complicated revelations are

well-represented among his targets. If there is one essay in

Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries? that does tire

the reader, it is his extended account of the details of

Oahspe, a book dictated from on high to John Ballou

Newbrough via automatic typewriting in 1881. One can take

only so much of “Closest to Jehovih are his countless Sons.

The Sons have such names as Sethantes, Ah’shong, Aph, Sue,

Apollo,

… Yima, Lika, Uz and Fragapatti. The goddesses … ”

The point of this, Gardner’s thinks, is that the more

details supplied, the more farcical the religion looks. He

is firmly convinced that the deity, though he exists, is not

the kind of being to write books.

Naturally, in view of his skepticism about every particular

sect, we are interested to know the positive content of

Gardner’s own faith. The present book merely informs us that

“he calls himself a philosophical theist in the tradition of

Plato, Kant, Pierre Bayle, Charles Peirce, William James,

and Miguel de Unamuno.” That merely whets our appetite

further, as the intersection of the views of those

luminaries surely achieves the theological equivalent of a

true white square minimalism.

Gardner satisfied everyone’s curiosity in detail twenty

years ago in his most ambitious book,

The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (1983).

Many an

eighteen-year-old, suddenly discovering the vast world of

disputed philosophical questions, has no doubt planned to

write one day a substantial book after reaching a view on

all of them. The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener

actually accomplishes this project, and, as a clear account

of “all the big questions,” with a distinctive point of

view, it is among the best on the market. The first chapter

is “Why I am not a solipsist”—a good place to start—and

later chapters include “Why I am not an ethical relativist,”

“Why I am not a Marxist,” and so on. On religion, he argues

firstly that none of the arguments for the existence of God

are of value (he answers one of the design arguments by

supposing that, “for all we know,” our apparently designed

universe may be one of billions; either he means that

universes may propagate like blackberries when needed to

camouflage traces of the divine, or he has changed his view

on this question.) He argues also that the reasons against

belief in God are not convincing; he returns to this in Are

Universes Thicker Than Blackberries? with a fascinating interpretation of G. K.

Chesterton’s story The Man Who Was Thursday as an answer to the

problem of evil. He admits that the balance of reasons is

somewhat against belief in God. Then, he says, he believes

in God anyway, purely because he wants to believe in a God

who will grant immortality.

Gardner has not invested faith in anything definitively

ruled out by the evidence. Nevertheless, there is something

faintly shocking in the leader of the world’s skeptics in

the struggle against quackery admitting to belief in

something against the balance of reasons, simply through an

act of will.

Much of Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries? addresses

less serious questions. There are enthusiastic accounts of

some old and neglected pieces of popular literature such as

Edgar Wallace’s The Green Archer and a clear non-technical

explanation (which first appeared in The New Criterion in

December 2000) of the point of Gödel’s famous results in logic. As

always, there is reference to many books that one may have

missed, such as Harper’s Encyclopedia of Mystical and Paranormal

Experience (from which it appears that success in the

spiritualist trade may come at the cost of a lot of headaches)

and Rustlings in the Golden City: Being a Record of

Spiritualistic Experiences in Ballarat and Melbourne (London:

Office of Light, 1902). Gardner’s efforts against gullibility

have not been in vain, and there is a sense that the miscreants

are on the run. And there is hope for the future. Gardner reports

on a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association

from 1998 that describes the experiment devised by Emily Rosa to

test the claims of Therapeutic Touch. Practitioners of this “art”

claimed to be able to feel a tingling caused by the “energy

field” surrounding a person’s body when they put their hands near

(not on) the body. The test had the practitioners put their hand

through an opaque screen, with a coin toss selecting whether the

hand of another person (invisible to them) was or was not put

near theirs. Could they tell when there was a hand there? They

could not. Miss Rosa was aged nine.