Mostly this is easy. The ‘energy-healer’ Adam Dreamhealer, who became a millionaire treating cancers using ‘mind­power’, claimed that he received his healing gifts and all the world’s knowledge from a four-foot-tall telepathic blackbird. Park observes that desperation often distorts judgement. For good measure, he attempts to explain the baffling credulousness at the base of New Age mysticism with a thumbnail sketch of the neuroscience of belief-formation. The sketch, however, is philosophically problematic and unhelpful; it would have been enough to leave this topic at the blackbird.

Also easy game are the religionists who claim that cataclysms are divine retributions. Astonishingly, some clerics invoked such claims after the recent Asian tsunami and the inundation of New Orleans, and many faithful believed them. Pat Robertson subsequently pleaded for divine wrath to take out sinful Florida with a hurricane. This vicious nonsense provides an opportunity for Park to expound the theory of tectonic plates and explain tsunamis as consequences of natural processes. As regards Robertson’s plea, Park notes facetiously that God will eventually oblige.

These easy targets could be picked off critically by educated common sense; their appearances’ main purpose is to showcase the science that renders superstitious explanations superfluous. Even better, some superstitions can be tested experimentally. There is no metric for the efficacy of prayer (are the pope’s prayers more efficacious then a stockbroker’s?); however, with large samples this problem is statistically diminished. Several early empirical studies of intercessory prayer have reported positive results, but Park shows that these were methodologically flawed or prejudicially compromised. In the latest, largest and best controlled study, 1800 heart-bypass patients were assigned anonymously to groups, some that prayed and others not. The decade-long trial was completed in 2006. It found that intercessory prayer had no effect on recovery rates whatsoever. The only surprise was that patients who knew that they were being prayed for had more medical complications, possibly a result of performance anxiety.

Superstition contains much useful work in this vein. It is unfortunate that the book’s vision is marred by the crude scientism encapsulated in its final sentence: ‘Science is the only way or knowing – everything else is just superstition.’ Scientism is a set of misconceptions about the status of scientific knowledge and the applicability of natural science methods to other areas of knowledge, such as the social sciences or humanities. Superstition lumbers under most of these misconceptions.

Defending Darwinian evolution, Park remarks that, with the discovery of the structure of DNA, the evidence for evolution ‘was now irrefutable ... science has moved far beyond any question of the reality of evolution’. Questioning evolution, he says, is like questioning the existence of the New World. This is wild stuff. The theory of evolution is indeed indubitable on current evidence, but to regard it as irrefutable is incompatible with the fallibilism that is the hallmark of scientific thinking. Park seems to be aware of this when he says that ‘scientific method requires knowledge to be conditional’, but it is not clear that he believes it.

Although most philosophers of science today are physicalists or materialists, few would follow Park in claiming this ‘dreams and emotions ... can be reduced to the laws of physics’, which, in its context, is Park’s way of insisting this everything can be so reduced. Park seems to believe that this proposition follows from the ‘the most basic law of the universe, forming the foundation of science ... that every physical effect is the result of a physical cause – including human behaviour’. Every clause of this principle is questionable, but even if it were entirely true its underwriting of radical reduction is improbable: has anyone the faintest idea how the current financial meltdown or my fears for the future can be ‘reduced to the laws of physics’? The radically reductive physicalism that Park embraces was beaten to death last century, and it is surprising to find anyone still clinging to the corpse. It creates a plethora of further embarrassments.

Park is puzzled by scientists of faith. For those like the distinguished geneticist Francis Collins, who underwent a transformational religious experience, Park reckons he has the answer: ‘That this brilliant scientist would not recognize his own religious experience as a hormone rush is evidence of the controlling power of our brain chemistry ... It seems that hormones have the power not only to turn on your emotions, but to turn off your critical faculties at the same time.’ This reflection provides Park with an opportunity to discourse on the neurochemistry of pheromones and oxytocin, substances involved in sexual attraction and mothering – matters which do seem vaguely relevant. But as an adequate explanation for Collins’s conversion, this approach is hopeless. Hormones may be involved in emotion­-experiences, but it is difficult to see how merely invoking them can explain the specifically religious experiences. To fill out the detail of these experiences requires a broad psychological perspective. But Park, who thinks that psychology has become scientific at last by its transformation into neuroscience, in effect recognises no psychology to speak of.

For related reasons, Park is unable to offer a plausible explanation for the tenacity of superstitious beliefs. Why do people persist in religion and pay for homeopathy? Like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, those other contemporary scourges of religion and muddle, Park places great weight on early indoctrination. Religious convictions are instilled as we learn to speak. People ‘are no more likely to shed ... religion after puberty than they are to stop thinking in their first tongue ... We can’t help it – we are prisoners of our upbringing.’ He repeats the formula tirelessly to account for all superstition.

But children shed their belief in Santa Claus. The vast majority of childish conceptions give way to adult things. And, obviously, no one learns homeopathy or New Age mysticism at their mother’s knee. If religion and other superstitions have allure, it is not simply by dint of early learning but by the special significance of what is learned. A large part of that significance probably originates in superstition’s connection with unconscious fantasies and modes of thought. But of such matters Park has no inkling, and he has thrown away the tools that would have allowed him to investigate them.

There are several ironies in Park’s reckless conception of superstition as whatever is not science. The conception obscures any realistic view of both science and superstition. For, of course, not all knowledge is science. And superstition is not just error, non-science, or scientific ineptitude: it involves irrationality and credulousness, the defining intellectual vices scarcely touched upon in Superstition. Park (like many of his fellow crusaders) shares with the superstitious an incapacity to recognise a space for philosophical reflection and psychological insight, an incapacity that is increasingly the animating spirit of our times.