A 2001 Gallup poll found that 45 percent of Americans agree with the statement “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so.” A 2005 Pew Research Center poll found similarly distressing results: 42 percent of Americans believe that “living things have existed in their present form since the beginning of time.”

Scientists are understandably pessimistic about what such findings say about the future of science and education, and the situation is even worse when we examine other superstitions, such as these percentages of belief published in a 2002 National Science Foundation study:

ESP 60%
UFOs 30%
Astrology 40%
Lucky numbers 32%
Magnetic therapy 70%
Alternative medicine 88%

As the publisher of Skeptic magazine I am routinely asked if I am optimistic or pessimistic about the state of superstition and magical thinking today. The question reminds me of when the comedian Henny Youngman was asked, “How’s your wife?” He would reply, “Compared to what?”

Out of context, such belief percentages in the teeth of so much contradictory scientific evidence could easily make one pessimistic. But because I am a historian of science I take the long view, and compared to what people believed before the Scientific Revolution, there is much cause for optimism.

Consider what life was like and what people believed a mere four centuries ago, just as science began lighting candles in the dark. In 16th- and 17th-century England, for example, populations were sparse, with 80 percent living in the countryside, and the bulk of those engaged in the production of food. Cottage industries were the only ones around in this pre-industrial highly stratified society, in which one-third to one-half of everyone lived at subsistence level and were chronically under-employed, not to mention undernourished. Food supplies were unpredictable and plagues decimated weakened populations. In the century spanning 1563 to 1665, there were six epidemics that swept through London, each of which annihilated between a tenth and a sixth of the population. The figures are almost unimaginable by today’s standards: 20,000 in 1563, 15,000 in 1593, 36,000 in 1603, 41,000 in 1625, 10,000 in 1636, 68,000 in 1665. Childhood diseases were unforgiving, with 60 percent of children dead before the age of 17. As one observer noted in 1635, “We shall find more who have died within thirty or thirty-five years of age than passed it.”

The 17th century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes was wrong in his assessment of man in a state of nature before civilization (people lived longer and healthier lives before the Agricultural Revolution), but his description of life was apropos for his own time: “continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Since magical thinking is positively correlated with uncertainty and unpredictability, we should not be surprised at the levels of superstition given the grim vagaries of pre-modern life. There were no banks for personal savings, insurance companies for risk management, or any of the other security measures we take for granted today. With houses constructed of thatched roofs and wooden chimneys in a night lit only by candles, fires routinely devastated entire neighborhoods. As one chronicler noted: “He which at one o’clock was worth five thousand pounds and, as the prophet saith, drank his wine in bowls of fine silver plate, had not by two o’clock so much as a wooden dish left to eat his meat in, nor a house to cover his sorrowful head.”

Just as alcohol and tobacco were essential anaesthetics for the easing of pain and discomfort, superstition and magic were the basis for the mitigation of misfortune. With an illiteracy rate approaching 90 percent, it is no wonder that almost everyone believed in sorcery, werewolves, hobgoblins, witchcraft, astrology, black magic, demons, prayer, and providence. “A great many of us, when we be in trouble, or sickness, or lose anything, we run hither and thither to witches, or sorcerers, whom we call wise men…seeking aid and comfort at their hands,” confessed Bishop Latimer in 1552.

Saints were worshiped. Liturgical books provided rituals for blessing cattle, crops, houses, tools, ships, wells, and kilns, not to mention the sick, sterile animals, and infertile couples. In his 1621 book, Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton noted, “Sorcerers are too common; cunning men, wizards, and white witches, as they call them, in every village, which, if they be sought unto, will help almost all infirmities of body and mind.” Figure 1 below, from Tobias Schutz’s 1654 Harmonica Macrocosmi Cum Microcosmi, well illustrates the magical links between the microcosm and macrocosm.

Was everyone in the pre-modern world so superstitious? They were. As the great Oxford historian of the period, Keith Thomas, writes in his classic 1971 work Religion and the Decline of Magic (from whence many of these examples and figures come), “No one denied the influence of the heavens upon the weather or disputed the relevance of astrology to medicine or agriculture. Before the seventeenth century, total skepticism about astrological doctrine was highly exceptional, whether in England or elsewhere.” And it wasn’t just astrology. “Religion, astrology and magic all purported to help men with their daily problems by teaching them how to avoid misfortune and how to account for it when it struck.” With such sweeping power over people, Thomas concludes, “If magic is to be defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effectives ones are not available, then we must recognize that no society will ever be free from it.” The superstitious we will always have with us.

Nevertheless, the rise of science ineluctably attenuated this near universality of magical thinking by proffering natural explanations where before there were only supernatural ones. Before Darwin, design theory (in the form of William Paley’s natural theology, which gave us the “watchmaker” argument) was the only game in town, so everyone believed that life was designed by God. Today less than half believe that in America, and in most other parts of the world virtually everyone accepts evolution without qualification. That’s progress.

The decline of magic was not due solely to the rise of science, nor was it a linear descent. For example, and paradoxically, the new emphasis on empiricism led to a struggle to find evidence for superstitious beliefs that previously needed no propping up with facts. Consider the following comment from the early 17th century, from a book entitled The Trial of Mr. Darrell, that shows how even then savvy observers grasped the full implications of denying the supernatural altogether:

Atheists abound in these days and witchcraft is called into question. Which error is confirmed by denying dispossession and both these errors confirm atheists mightily…. If neither possession nor witchcraft (contrary to what has been so long generally and confidently affirmed), why should we think that there are devils? If no devils, no God.

This attempt to naturalize the supernatural, however, was ultimately unsuccessful. Yet the propensity to portend the future through magic led to more formalized methods of ascertaining causality by connecting events in nature—the very basis of science. As science grew in importance, the analysis of portents was often done meticulously and quantitatively, albeit for purposes both natural and supernatural. As one diarist privately opined on the nature and meaning of comets: “I am not ignorant that such meteors proceed from natural causes, yet are frequently also the presages of imminent calamities.”

Natural theology was wedded to natural philosophy. Science arose out of magic, which it ultimately displaced. By the 18th century, astronomy replaced astrology, chemistry succeeded alchemy, probability theory displaced luck and fortune, insurance attenuated anxiety, banks replaced mattresses as the repository of people’s savings, city planning reduced the risks from fires, social hygiene and the germ theory dislodged disease, and the vagaries of life became less vague. As Francis Bacon concluded in his 1626 work, New Atlantis: “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes and the secret motions of things and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible.”

Sic itur ad astra—Thus do we reach the stars.