Present Tense Shane HegartyI was at a farmers' market last weekend, and alongside the breads, fruit and olive oils was a tarot card reader. It cost €20 for a "reading on a specific topic". How specific might she be? "You will very soon be ripped off," she could whisper to any client, "by a middle-aged woman holding a deck of cards."
The world remains cluttered with mumbo-jumbo. It's always there, close at hand: horoscopes on TV3; a newspaper ad offering a "qualification" in "bi-aura therapy"; this week's report that a "psychic" sent gardaí on a fool's errand in search of Annie McCarrick's body.
There are health insurance companies covering homeopathic treatments. And in shops across the country, angel trinkets are sold to people who should know better than to believe that something made in an Asian factory has any more power than the nuts on the machine that made it.
All of which is maddening to some. This week, the biologist Prof Richard Dawkins will take a stab at these various, and often ludicrous, supernatural beliefs. In his Channel 4 series, The Enemies of Reason, he will tackle homeopathy, astrology, crystals and the like. In one episode a "clairvoyant" tells the 66-year-old professor that his father is close to him in spirit. Dawkins has one important quibble - his father isn't dead.
The series will no doubt feature a scene in which Dawkins just can't hold his composure any longer, and instead erupts in a geyser of disbelief at others' gullibility. It remains a flaw in his style, and one that allows his critics to accuse him of channelling his disdain of faith through his own "faith" in science; of practising "scientism". Although, this is almost always a distraction, it's an opportunity to throw something at him other than the scientific evidence he quite rightly demands. His "enemies" can't fight the science with science, so they fight the insults with insults.
Dawkins will also probably echo what others have already said: Francis Wheen in his book How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World; Derren Brown in his exposes of TV magic and mediums. Meanwhile, Dawkins's The God Delusion has sold 1,000,000 copies and spearheads an atheist offensive against unreason and fundamentalism, in which the likes of Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett and Sam Harris have offered a shrill wake-up call to a species which still finds solace in religion and the supernatural. This movement asks the legitimate and vital question: why doesn't our educated, scientifically advanced, free-thinking culture abandon such nonsense?
And yet, the most educated, scientifically-advanced, free-thinking culture in history has not abandoned it. And one question lurks: can we? Appealing to a population's intellect is one thing, but to defeat the enemies of reason we may first need to overpower our biology.
Evidence grows that evolution has hard-wired us to believe. That, either directly or accidentally, we are programmed to be gullible, to trust in religion, astrology, grand conspiracies and little green men.
There has been plenty of recent research by neuroscientists and psychologists. In Pennsylvania, for instance, they have injected radioactive dye into nuns' brains to see what happens when they pray. (Answer: something different to what happens when they inject dye into Buddhists' brains.)
And the problem for those who yearn for a rational world is that irrationality does indeed seem to be part of our evolutionary inheritance. It may be a by-product of some more useful function (identifying patterns in randomness; a predisposition towards authority; our ability to imagine the mind as separate from the body). Or perhaps, as evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson argues, "faith" itself served a direct and useful function in our evolution. Or maybe, as Lewis Wolpert and Dean H Hamer suggest, there is a "god gene" within each of us, a tiny piece of biological code that developed for a particular purpose, but which means that our "belief" is always switched on.
Certainly, we are, both collectively and individually, always closer to belief than disbelief. Even a committed atheist might touch wood for good luck. That old line that "there is no such thing as an atheist in a foxhole" says nothing about any existence of any god, only that belief is a default position, common across cultures.
For the professional debunkers, this poses a massive challenge. Disbelief requires putting up a fight against the compulsion to give in to superstition.
And if that's a symptom of our biology, then it means that the enemies of reason are dug in deep. It doesn't mean that these battles should not be fought, only that the war may never be won.