Debunking Pseudo-Skeptical Arguments Of Paranormal
Debunkers
Conclusion
As we have seen, these pseudo-skeptical arguments are
basically philosophical statements of belief designed to support a priori
assumptions, rather than to seek truth.
Their style of logic is designed to refute purely on philosophical
grounds rather than factual grounds, which have nothing to do with rationality
or reason. In fact, like fundamentalist
religion, they are rigid and closed-minded to anything new or contrary, no
matter how much evidence there is to support it.
As Faith Rada mentioned in argument # 9, these
skeptics’ mistake is in seeking scientific evidence – which they deny anyway
even when presented – rather than direct experience or proof, which would serve
as the ultimate validation.
Victor Zammit, one of the foremost afterlife
researchers with much experience in dealing with skeptics, describes how these
debunkers reject what doesn’t fit into their world view through the process of
rationalization through cognitive dissonance:
http://www.victorzammit.com/skeptics/fundingskeptics.html
“Let's borrow a page from traditional psychology.
When a skeptic receives information - say, scientific proof for the afterlife --
which is fundamentally inconsistent with his or her entrenched cherished
beliefs, the skeptic tries to rationalize his/her beliefs to reduce and to
offset the intense biological, emotional and mental anxiety. The intense
anxiety is created by the information that the afterlife exists.
The skeptic's mind tries to resist and reject this
new information (even if the information is the absolute truth) - hence the
cognitive (the mind) 'dissonance' - between the new information - (i.e., the
positive evidence for the afterlife) and the skeptic's own personal beliefs
that the afterlife cannot exist.
Closed-minded skepticism is extremely difficult to
shift because his/her skepticism is 'electrically wired' into the skeptic's
neurological, psychological, intellectual and emotional belief system. Thus
with absolute certainty, this skeptic inexorably loses all sense of empirical
equanimity.“
The true skeptic should be skeptical of his own
beliefs as well as of others. But these
pseudo-skeptics often aren’t, instead they are like cynics who are unable to
see the flaws and limitations in their own views. Consciousness and NDE expert Greg Stone, a
member of my discussion list, sums up the closed-minded skeptics' problem in an
interesting way:
"You see the subjective evaluation of a skeptic
holds less weight than the subjective direct observation of the
experiencer. What is needed, and sorely
missing, is a real understanding of the nature and factors of subjective
knowledge. Without this all such
discussions will be foolhardy. The
skeptic continually fails to understand and admit that he works on a subjective
basis. And he seems mystified when
someone accepts someone's direct observation over the skeptic’s subjective
evaluation."
Richard Milton of the Alternative Science website (www.alternativescience.com) who
has faced scorn and derision from skeptics himself, writes:
http://www.alternativescience.com/skepticism.htm
“There is no more honourable word in the scientific
lexicon than that of 'skeptic' -- one who sincerely seeks after truth and who
has the courage to rebut scientific myths and false beliefs with empirical data
and sound logic………
But in recent decades, 'skeptic' has come to mean
something else. It has come to mean the adoption of an attitude of scorn and
derision towards any kind of anomalous data that contradicts current scientific
beliefs, and the adoption of an air of condescension and superiority towards
those who venture to investigate or write about anomalous phenomena…….
And the 'skeptics' who censor and ridicule in the
name of science, whether they know it or not, are the agents not of knowledge
but of pseudoscience.
Science does not need vigilantes to guard its gates.
Science has been successful because good science drives out bad and because an
ounce of experiment is worth any amount of scientific authority.”
And former Naval Scientist Eldon Byrd, who tested spoon
bender Uri Geller, vociferates:
"What major contribution has any skeptic made to
the betterment of humankind? How many
Mother Teresa’s have they produced? How
many great scientific discoveries have they made? Many of them are like movie critics--useless
and usually wrong."
One might wonder why these closed-minded debunkers do
what they do, and what motivates them, for it certainly isn’t truth. Articles have been written which speculate
about this (see the list of links below), but we can’t really generalize here
and apply one explanation to them all.
One explanation though, seems to ring true as a factor. Brian Zeiler writes in his article The UFO Skeptic, Logical
Trickery:
“Skeptics are mostly scientists, but that certainly
doesn't mean they behave scientifically, as has been explained. Their behavior
stems partially from their distaste for public opinions that contradict the
consensus of the scientific community. When a public consensus does contradict
the scientific opinion, the scientists will mount a public campaign to
discredit this opinion, because such an opinion undermines the role of the
scientist in society as the appointed knowledge-seeker and truth-gatherer. What
good are scientists if mankind will only insist on believing in warm, fuzzy
superstitions anyway? So, these scientists who are guilty of the logical
infractions exposed in this essay are so consumed with the presumed validity of
their opinions that, like a zealous religious fanatic, they must convert the
masses to the side of truth in order to salvage their own self-image.”
Here is another explanation from the vantage point of
a mystic named FaithRada:
“Of
course the best way to know phenomena such as Clairvoyance, mental
telepathy and Astral travel etc., is to have the direct validating
experience for one's self.
Truly?
if I were a skeptic... and I was one, that is the ONLY way to really
Know. What good is belief OR disbelief here? One SHOULD hold
out for actual Direct Experience before any judgment is passed.
In fact .. repeated, validated incidences are often necessary, to
rid the mind of its blocks... depending on the resistance one holds
for the idea of an expanded reality in the first place.
Which brings me to the main point why more ardent skeptics/cynics
always insist these events MUST BE frauds and/or ignorant
misunderstandings. FEAR Fear in the sense that if
these events are recognized as valid then their whole world .. based
on certain laws of logic and the way this world SEEMS to work ..would be
destroyed. So, better not to look too deeply. they LIKE their world
the way THEY have come to understand it. .... neat, orderly,
dependable... But the question begs.. Who's sense of law and
order, orderliness and dependability? To the finite mind
there is always chaos lurking around the bend. To the infinite mind there
is no chaos at all.... but that is a huge leap for the individual mind to take. The
contracted mind creates a chasm and then fears it will fall into
it. Amazing yes?
Everything
these "hard core" skeptics/cynics have based their reality on,
as to what IS real, indeed.. who THEY even ARE ... would
suddenly be invalidated and the reality they base their very existence on would
suddenly have no meaning. This is to be avoided at all cost ... and
so they make sure ALL claims are fraudulent or misunderstood by duped minds.
This is their protection mode and they are unlikely to be shaken from it.
Instead they need an "inner" shift.. which will allow them to
recognize a higher order of things. No shift? No undertanding.
After
a while, for those who CAN allow a shift, a new stability does come if
they can survive the mental fall.. but in the moment.. the universe would
appear to be beyond chaotic. They are like babies in the
womb.. not yet quite ready for a whole NEW reality.
& & &
When one
begins to "recognize" that their visions are indeed of valid
"future" events, and so TimeandSpace
are NOT exactly the "set in stone" reality they
thought them to be, ...... it can
initially throw one into a great turmoil.. especially if
they had assumed such events were .. unlikely to
be possible... before this. *note..( if a
mind believes something to be indeed impossible.. then
they will not receive the validating experiences which are crucial to this
knowing since their mind is now actively censoring it from them, at their
request.)
The
more one believes these realities to be improbable, the more
turmoil and trauma they will experience... until the mind simply blocks it all
out. This is why no matter how much evidence is trotted out... it
is like a blind man looking at the moon .. they will experience nothing
... they are simply not able to because of their current mind set of
disbelief.”
Yet here is still a more simpler speculation on what
motivates these pseudo-skeptics, from one of my readers:
“I
sometimes wonder if the debunker or pseudoskeptic mentality results from
what might be termed the "Santa Claus Syndrome." That is, these
debunkers were so traumatized in their youth by finding out there was no Santa
Claus that they made up their minds then that they would never again be duped
by anyone. They figured that if they were duped by their parents on Santa
Claus they must have also been duped on God. They became
polarized in their thinking, i.e., "From now on, I have to see
it to believe it," and got stuck in that paradigm. Thus, the
tendency for debunkers to throw out the Santa Claus analogy is a result of
their own childhood trauma at learning there is no Santa Claus. Perhaps
there was some unusual trust issue with their parents that prompted the
syndrome. It would be interesting if someone could research this, but it
would be an impossible project because they wouldn't admit to certain
shortcomings. They would understand where the study was going and attempt
to skew it toward the intelligent and rational explanation.”
Nevertheless, perhaps there is yet hope for skeptics
and debunkers. Recently, a famous career
skeptic named Susan Blackmore, author of Dying
to Live: Near-Death Experiences (critiqued by Greg Stone in Critique of Susan Blackmore's Dying to Live)
conceded that her prior conclusions about the non-existence of psi were
unwarranted after all. This is amazing
because career skeptics in general never like to admit to being wrong. After all, they have their career and
self-pride among their colleagues riding on their back to give it all up just
to end up being wrong. Therefore, her
admission is very brave and admirable.
And the way she explains her concession is so refreshingly honest, that
all skeptics, both open-minded and closed-minded, should learn from it and take
heed. In her article The Elusive Open Mind: Ten
Years of Negative Research in Parapsychology, she writes:
“How could I weigh my own results against the results
of other people, bearing in mind that mine tended to be negative ones while
everyone else’s tended to be positive ones? I had to find some kind of balance
here. At one extreme I could not just believe my own results and ignore
everyone else’s…. At the other extreme I could not believe everyone else’s
results and ignore my own. That would be even more pointless. There would have
been no point in all those years of experiments if I didn’t take my own results
seriously.” (emphasis added)
In another article written at about the same time she
wrote:
“The other major challenge to the skeptic’s position
is, of course, the fact that opposing positive evidence exists in the
parapsychological literature. I couldn’t dismiss it all. This raises an
interesting question: Just how much weight can you or should you give the
results of your own experiments over those of other people? On the one hand,
your own should carry more weight, since you know exactly how they were done…
On the other hand, science is necessarily a collective enterprise…. So I
couldn’t use my own failures as justifiable evidence that psi does not exist. I
had to consider everyone else’s success.”
And in a recent article she claims to have given up.
“At last, I’ve done it. I’ve thrown in the towel.
Come to think of it, I feel slightly sad. It was just
over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that
convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena… Just a few years of careful
experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena… I became a
sceptic.(emphasis added).
So why didn’t I give up then? There are lots of bad
reasons. Admitting you are wrong is always hard, even though it’s a skill every
scientist needs to learn. And starting again as a baby in a new field is a
daunting prospect. So is losing all the status and power of being an expert. I
have to confess I enjoyed my hard-won knowledge.
…None of it ever gets anywhere. That’s a good enough
reason for leaving.
But perhaps the real reason is that I am just too
tired - and tired above all of working to maintain an open mind. I couldn’t
dismiss all those extraordinary claims out of hand. After all, they just might
be true …”
Closed-minded skeptics should pay close attention to
the underlined parts above. They reflect
how a true skeptic should think.
Now let me clarify again that I am not some gullible
believer who believes in every wacky item under the umbrella term “the
paranormal” out there, such as crystals, channeling, Loch Ness Monster, Bermuda
Triangle, etc. Most of these paranormal
mysteries lack good incontrovertible evidence, and their evidence is scanty and
ambiguous to make any judgments. And
some of course, have too much damaging evidence against them that they are
hardly worth investigating anymore.
Others are simply too controversial to know either way.
Therefore, it was never my intention to be a defender
for all paranormal phenomena in general, only in the proposition that they
should be considered. In fact, I am very
skeptical myself, and not quick to believe something unless I have good reasons
to. I am very cautious by nature and do
not believe everything I hear, contrary to what skeptics often charge me with. My position is that the evidence for any
paranormal phenomenon should be CONSIDERED and INVESTIGATED (with an attitude
of searching for the truth, not with an agenda) rather than rejected
automatically because it doesn’t fit in with convention. Now, I do not claim to have the answers to
all the paranormal mysteries either. No
one does. However, based on my
experience, research, and the overwhelming totality of anecdotal reports (majority
of the US and probably the world), here are my conclusions.
1) I believe
that the evidence here in my article to refute the main skeptical arguments
demonstrates that at least some kind of metaphysical reality exists. The nature and scope of that is yet to be
discovered, as well as the implications.
We have only begun to discover its existence through quantum physics,
scientific experiments, new research into mind/body connections, etc.
2) I believe that
the overwhelming anecdotal evidence from at least half the world, discoveries
in quantum physics, credible scientific experiments, and new research into
mind/body connections prove that at least certain phenomenon are real in the
sense that they have actual unimagined effects – telepathy, ESP, psychic
abilities in general, and ghosts. The
widespread anecdotal evidence for these phenomena alone indicates that
statistically they are very likely to point to something real. In other words, there is something to them
beside hallucination, fraud, or misperception.
Similarly, as one man on a paranormal list concluded,
one does not have to have mystical experiences to conclude that something real
is going on here:
“One
additional thought about waiting for a mystical experience to awaken
oneself. As I said, it's not all that easy for some of
us. There are many who might wait and wait and never have one. I
have had a few marginal mystical experiences, but nothing that would have changed
my thinking had I been a closed-minded skeptic, debunker, pseudoskeptic,
scientific fundamentalist, whatever name we choose to give to such a
person. I have never had a near-death experience, but I consider
myself a "vicarious experiencer," as I have read enough accounts of NDEs
to conclude that they are not all hallucinations. As a number of
psychical researchers have said, no one case is strong enough to convince them;
rather, it is the cumulative evidence. That's why I put together the
30 or so quotations of distinguished scientists and scholars in the appendix at
the end of my book. A person can read the reports of these
various men over time, but one tends to forget many of them, although she may
very well bury them in the subconscious. I believe seeing them all
in one reading might impact some true skeptics. It's one thing
to say a particular researcher might have been duped by a particular
medium at a particular time, quite another to read the accounts of 30 or
more and conclude that they were all duped over and over again. Many of
the researchers I've quoted spent years investigating mediums and sat with
dozens of them.
Bottom
line: It would be great if we could all have mystical experiences,
Kundalini awakenings, whatever, but the best most of us can do is
become "vicarious experiencers."“
Now, if we are right, then there is the question of
what to do with these discoveries and how to apply it to our lives. Well that is the next step, and it is what
truth seekers and open-minded researchers think and ponder about.
One independent film has come out lately though, which
attempts to address that - What the bleep do we know? The film
addresses the latest discoveries in quantum physics and the power of our thoughts. Playing in several states, people have been
seeing it multiple times and it has been receiving standing ovations at its
showings. One of its most important
messages is that contrary to what most people think, thoughts are not harmless. They do not just pass through your head and
then are gone. Rather, they help slowly
program your subconscious mind and instincts, creating instincts that make you
do things without knowing why, often resulting in control dramas of all kinds
which are like loop programs that repeat itself. Check its website for info. and to see if it
will be playing at a theater near you. http://www.whatthebleep.com/home/
For most paranormal phenomena, the jury is still out, and
the evidence is controversial and unclear.
However, the evidence for telepathy and ghosts, for instance, is very
strong when you combine the scientific evidence and overwhelming widespread
anecdotal evidence throughout history.
Therefore, they are very likely to be real and in all likelihood there
is something to it other than fraud, delusion, mistake or misperception.
According to Lew Paz, author of Pushing Ultimates, there is a safe middle
ground between science and mysticism that should benefit both sides in their
search for truth:
“All scientists have a responsibility to broaden
their comprehension of the human situation. An astute skepticism is necessary
in the pursuit of truth, but it must be flexible and open to varied
possibilities, unhampered by a narrow materialistic orientation. Despite the
excessive naivety rife within the New Age movement, the intelligent scientist
can’t toss the entire 5,000 year history of mysticism aside, for a century of
valid empirical research clearly reveals deeper dimensions of human existence
do exist.
Science can never provide us with a total grasp of
existence, and any "theory of everything" based on empirical evidence
alone would not be all encompassing. The intuitive insights of poets, the
visions of mystics and saints, the explorations of shamans, plus the
psychological and psychedelic research of different fields of science,
certainly count in any attempt at total description. But, though science cannot
provide us with an understanding of the whole, it can assist us in cultivating
a greater radius of comprehension. Though not the royal road to wisdom many
have thought it to be, science is a fine tool and an important avenue toward
self-knowledge and overall knowledge of our existential-cosmic situation,
Unfortunately, far too many use science to build a bulwark against the insights
brought forth by explorations of the mind’s archetypal depths and transcendent
dimensions. Scientists and skeptics of materialistic persuasion tend toward a
bias similar to religious fundamentalists zealously defending their belief
system.”
After all, all it takes to prove the existence of
something is one real case, as William James points out,
“If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black, you mustn't
seek to prove that no crows are; it is enough to prove one single crow to be
white.”
--William James
Regardless of your belief about the paranormal, the important
thing is to keep an open mind and not rush to judgments based on our personal
world views.
"Doubt everything or believe everything: these
are two equally convenient strategies. With either we dispense with the need
for reflection." - Henri Poincare
Against critics and skeptics, we must follow our
conscience, heart, and intuition. After
all, as Martin Caidin reminds us:
"What you believe someone else can or can’t do
hasn't got beans with the doing. Or lack of doing. Just go back through your
history books and you’ll discover that just about everything you take for
granted today in your daily lives was absolutely impossible not so many years
ago." - Martin Caidin
The pseudo-skeptics and scoffers should heed the words
of the progressive researcher Dr. Rupert Sheldrake, a current pioneer in psi
research with groundbreaking discoveries, who says in the introduction of his
book The Sense of Being Stared At:
"I believe it is more scientific to explore
phenomena we do not understand than to pretend they do not exist. I also
believe it is less frightening to recognize that the seventh sense is part of
our biological nature, shared with many other animal species, than to treat it
as weird or supernatural."
The problem is that these phenomena, even if real,
don't fit into conventional paradigms of reality. Therefore, what we need to do
is update our beliefs and world views to include these facts and find new
paradigms that account for them. In the meantime, we should keep in mind that
the beauty of mysteries and paranormal phenomena lies not in finding the
answers to every question, but in the awe and appreciation we have for them.
Therein lies the great lesson that there is always "more to learn"
and "something better out there".
As to expanding ourselves beyond our own paradigms,
Mr. Paz states beautifully:
http://www.plumbell.com/Excerpts.html
"The intelligent, open, and questioning mind
does not have to remain limited to a barren materialistic orientation of
reality, or succumb to the delusions of religion or overly simplified
mysticism. Millions among us can become the companions of the great sages, true
poets, profound musicians, gifted artists, philosophers, and scientists of real
merit. We can travel with those who know that the brain's magnificent
electro-chemical surge of embodied consciousness, in its dynamic ferment, transcends
its own activity, igniting frequencies that resonate with dimensions far beyond
what we are ordinarily aware of. To know yourself is to know of these things,
for such exploration expands our consciousness, enriches our minds, and makes
us capable of moving ever nearer to the essential truth of our astonishing
existence."
There is a new paradigm now in science and quantum
physics called the Holographic Paradigm which explains and allows for
paranormal phenomena to exist. You can
read about it in one of my favorite book, The
Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, or right now in this
thought-provoking summary by David S. Walonick, Ph.D. here:
http://www.happierabroad.com/Debunking_Skeptical_Arguments/Holographic_Reality.htm
Let me close on this with three profound quotes which state this in a poetic way.
"Let the mind be enlarged... to the grandeur of
the mysteries, and not the mysteries contracted to the narrowness of the
mind" - Francis Bacon
"Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is
because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't." - Mark
Twain
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the
mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." - Albert
Einstein
Thank you for reading my article.
Sincerely,
Winston Wu
Note: Comments
about this article can be sent to me at WWu777us@yahoo.com.
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