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Debunking
PseudoSkeptical Arguments of
Paranormal
Debunkers
New
Developments and Research
Skeptiko
Podcasts – A new
podcast show that explores controversial
science with
leading researchers and their critics.
Hailed in paranormal circles
as very good at getting to the
heart of the
issues.
Interview
with Dean Radin, author of The
Conscious Universe
– Very
insightful and revealing from an expert insider in psi research.
Afterlife
Research Presented at UN Symposium
– A group of MD’s
headed by Dr. Sam
Parnia announces to a UN Symposium that there is a possibility of life
after
death because they have seen patients with full blown NDE’s
while
their brain
was on a flat EEG line.
Randi
Backs out of Challenge with Homeopath George Vithoulkas
–
Further
confirmation that the Challenge is a mere publicity stunt, not a
serious
investigation.
Dr.
Michael Persinger, Neuroscientist, discovers telepathy in his magnetic
field experiments
Neuroscientist
Dr. Michael Persinger of
Ontario University, hailed by pseudoskeptics for his “God
helmet” experiments
that seem to debunk NDE’s being evidence of an afterlife, has
announced the
existence of telepathy to be an established proven fact. His controlled
experiments involving two subjects in separate rooms reacting to
stimuli at the
same time has produced confirmatory results. Dr. Persinger says that
all we
know for sure is that thoughts are somehow capable of traveling outside
of the
mind through space and matter, but we don’t know how or why. He
speculates that
the Earth has some kind of magnetic field, which animals, fish and bird
flocks
use as a guidance system - that somehow human consciousness may be
linked to.
Here is an
interview with Dr. Persinger on Skeptiko:
http://www.skeptiko.com/michael-persinger-discovers-telepathic-link/
Here is a
video of a public presentation by Dr.
Persinger where he announces his discovery of telepathy and the
implications of
it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9l6VPpDublg
Dr.
Rupert Sheldrake’s groundbreaking new research and
findings into telepathy
Dr. Rupert
Sheldrake, a British biologist, has been
doing some incredible widely acclaimed groundbreaking experimental
research
involving telepathy in humans, pets, and plants. His
well-conducted experiments demonstrate
beyond a doubt that telepathy is real, and has developed a theory
involving
“morphic resonance” to explain the phenomenon.
You can see his website which
is both groundbreaking and
compelling, at http://www.sheldrake.org. His
papers describing his experiments with
people, animals, and plants can also be viewed at:
http://www.sheldrake.org/papers/. He
has also come out with a series of
compelling books on his findings, such as The Sense of Being Stared At
and Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming
Home. You
can see a list of
his books at:
http://www.sheldrake.org/books/index.html.
Recently,
Dr. Sheldrake participated in a live public
debate in
“Telepathy
debate hits
Audience charmed by the paranormal.
Many
people
believe
there is evidence of the power of the mind.
Scientists tend to steer clear of public debates with advocates of the
paranormal. And judging from the response of a
Lewis Wolpert, a developmental biologist at University College London,
made the
case against the existence of telepathy at a debate at the Royal
Society of
Arts (RSA) in
Wolpert is one of
Sheldrake, who moved beyond the scientific pale in the early 1980s by
claiming
that ideas and forms can spread by a mysterious force he called morphic
resonance, kicked off the debate.
He presented the results of tests of extrasensory perception, together
with his
own research on whether people know who is going to phone or e-mail
them, on
whether dogs know when their owners are coming home, and on the
allegedly
telepathic bond between a
An open mind is a very bad
thing - everything falls out -
Lewis
Wolpert,
University College London
Wolpert countered that telepathy was "pathological science", based on
tiny, unrepeatable effects backed up by fantastic theories and an
ad
hoc
response to criticism. "The blunt fact is that there's no persuasive
evidence for it," he said.
For Ann Blaber, who works in children's music and was undecided on the
subject,
Sheldrake was the more convincing. "You can't just dismiss all the
evidence for telepathy out of hand," she said. Her view was reflected
by
many in the audience, who variously accused Wolpert of "not knowing the
evidence" and being "unscientific".
In staging the debate, the RSA joins a growing list of
References
1. Giles, J. Museum breaks mould in attempts to lure reluctant visitors
Nature,
426, 6, doi:10.1038/426006a (2003). |Article|
Report
from
Nature
Dr.
Sheldrake caught Randi lying about him in several
instances, explained
in his account here.
My
interview on Ghostly Talk
I was
interviewed on Ghostly Talk Radio
about this book
in 2004 and 2009.
The shows went very
well and we all had great rapport. You
can listen to the interviews which are archived on my Interview page
here:
https://www.debunkingskeptics.com/interviews.php
Susan
Blackmore, a famous skeptic, recants her stance
on NDE’s
Dr. Susan
Blackmore, a proponent of the anti-spirit
hypothesis for NDE’s, and author of the book Dying
to Live: Near-Death Experiences
(which was critiqued by Greg
Stone
on my list in his article Critique
of
Susan
Blackmore's
Dying to Live) has
recently confessed that her prior conclusions about the probability of
psi and
metaphysical consciousness existing being close to none, were not as
conclusive
as she thought.
And that she was NOT
justified in ruling out psi after all.
Therefore, she has taken an
honest “I don’t
know” stance and left the
issue at that.
This is quite amazing,
because very few career skeptics ever make such admissions to being
wrong, both
for reasons of human pride and the career status they’ve
built up
among their
colleagues.
Here are some relevant parts
of the story, which includes some quotes from Blackmore herself.
http://www.skepticalinvestigations.org/anomalistics/skeptic_research.htm
The same journal issue also
includes a
response by
Blackmore to Berger’s critique, in which Blackmore conceded
“I agree that one
cannot draw conclusions about the reality of psi based on these
experiments.”
Near the end of his critique Berger had written “During my
aborted
meta-analysis of Blackmore’s published work, I was struck by
patterns in the
data suggestive of the operation of psi…. Without a serious
meta-analysis of
the original unpublished source material, complete with weighting for
flaws…the
issue of whether the Blackmore experiments show evidence for psi cannot
be
resolved.” Presumably eager to nip this embarrassment in the
bud,
Blackmore
hastened to say “I am glad to be able to agree with his final
conclusion -
‘that drawing any conclusion, positive or negative, about the
reality of psi
that are based on the Blackmore psi experiments must be considered
unwarranted.’”
It is interesting to examine
Blackmore’s writings
before and after Berger’s critique. Two years earlier, in an
article for the
Skeptical Inquirer entitled “The
Elusive Open Mind: Ten Years of Negative Research in Parapsychology”
she
wrote:
“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.
I asked myself a thousand
times, as I ask
the reader
now: Is there a right conclusion?
The only answer I can
give, after ten
years of
intensive research in parapsychology, is that I don’t
know.”
Although after
Berger’s critique
Blackmore was willing
to concede in an academic journal that “I agree that one
cannot
draw
conclusions about the reality of psi based on these
experiments”,
her writings
in the popular press have not reflected this admission. Commenting on
the
ganzfeld experiments in a newspaper article in 1996, she wrote:
“My own
conclusion is biased by my
own personal
experience. I tried my first ganzfeld experiment in 1978, when the
procedure
was new…. Of course the new auto-ganzfeld results are even
better. Why should I
doubt them because of events in the past? The problem is that my
personal
experience conflicts with the successes I read about in the literature
and I
cannot ignore either side. The only honest reaction is to say
“I
don’t know”.”
Wouldn’t a more
honest reaction be for
Blackmore to
admit in the popular press that “one cannot draw conclusions
about the reality
of psi” based on her own experiments, and that a scientific
opinion should be
based only upon a critical evaluation of other peoples’
published
works?
But perhaps this is asking
too much. After
all,
Blackmore pursued a PhD in parapsychology in order to become a
“famous
parapsychologist”. Having failed to produce research
supporting
the psi
hypothesis, she evidently decided to try to make a name for herself by
attacking the psi hypothesis, which must at the time have seemed to be
an easy
target. Apparently, though, in a recent article she claims to have
given up.
“At last, I’ve done it. I’ve thrown in
the
towel”, she wrote.
“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 …”
We’ll miss you,
Susan
For details,
see the excerpts
from the
article link below:
http://www.rense.com/general70/smart.htm
“"Believe
it or not," Robert Roy Britt writes in the
issue of LiveScience, "according
to
a new study higher education is
linked to a greater tendency to believe in ghosts and other paranormal
phenomena."
Even though researchers Bryan Farha at Oklahoma City University and
Gary Steward of University of Central Oklahoma admitted that they had
expectations of finding contrary results, their
poll of college
students found that seniors and graduate students were more likely to
believe in haunted houses, ghosts, telepathy, spirit channeling and
other paranormal phenomena than were freshmen.
Skeptics Confounded
Although the results of the survey are not surprising to long-time
researchers in the metaphysical/psychic fields, what is startling is
the fact that the
poll analysis is
published in the January-February
issue of The Skeptical Inquirer magazine, the journal of true
unbelievers. While the poll may
have been conducted with
expectations
of demonstrating that as students became more educated they dropped
questionable beliefs in favor of more skeptical attitudes, The
Skeptical Inquirer must be congratulated for publishing results that
they really did not wish to find.
Farha's and Steward's survey was based on a nationwide Gallup Poll in
2001 that found younger Americans more likely to believe in the
paranormal than older respondents. The results of the Farha/Steward
poll discovered that gaining more education was not a guarantee of
skepticism or disbelief toward the paranormal. While only
23% of the
freshman quizzed professed a belief toward paranormal concepts, the
figures rose to 31% for college seniors and 34% for graduate students.
The complete results of the survey may be found in the January-February
issue of The Skeptical Inquirer. The percentages are rounded, and I
have indicated the Gallup Poll 2001 figures in parenthesis, the
Farha/Steward percentages in bold:
Belief in psychic/spiritual healing: 56 (54)
Belief in ESP: 28 (50)
Haunted houses: 40 (42)
Demonic possession: 40 (41)
Ghosts/spirits of the dead: 39 (38)
Telepathy: 24 (36)
Extraterrestrials visited Earth in the past: 17 (33)
Clairvoyance and prophecy: 24 (32)
Communication with the dead: 16 (28)
Astrology: 17 (28)
Witches: 26 (26)
Reincarnation: 14 (25)
Channeling: 10 (15)
It is in the "Not Sure" column that the researchers found that the
higher the education level achieved, the more likelihood there was of
believing in paranormal dimensions and the possibilities of a broader
spectrum of reality.
Belief in psychic/spiritual healing: 26 (19)
Belief in ESP: 39 (20)
Haunted houses: 25 (16)
Demonic possession: 28 (16)
Ghosts/spirits of the dead: 27 (17)
Telepathy: 34 (26)
Extraterrestrials visited Earth in the past: 34 (27)
Clairvoyance and prophecy: 33 (23)
Communication with the dead: 29 (26)
Astrology: 26 (18)
Witches: 19 (15)
Reincarnation: 28 (20)
Channeling: 29 (21)
Why Disbelieve?
Why do skeptics find it so difficult to believe that individuals who
achieve a higher education may still maintain a belief in the
paranormal? The world of the paranormal is one where effect often
precedes cause, where mind often influences matter, where individuals
communicate over great distances without physical aids, and where the
spiritual essence of those deceased may be seen. Why, especially in an
age of new theories embracing quantum physics and other dimensions,
should skeptics find it difficult to believe in a world that lies
beyond the five senses and the present reach of science?
For those of us who have been researching and writing in the
paranormal, UFO, and spiritual fields for many years, the repeated
allegation that we and our readers must be undereducated and unaware of
the science and technology of our contemporary culture becomes very
annoying. As early as 1965, when I was researching ESP: Your Sixth
Sense--which, in addition to becoming a popular book became a college
and high school text, complete with workbook and study guide--the
pioneering work of Dr. Gardner Murphy, Dr. Montague Ullman, Dr. Stanley
Krippner, Dr. Henry Margenau, and many others had already demonstrated
that contrary to common assumption, intelligence has little connection
to paranormal abilities or beliefs. Neither is it the "odd" or poorly
adjusted members of society who most often demonstrate high degrees of
psychic ability. Quite the contrary appears to be true. Those
individuals who are well-adjusted socially and who are possessed of an
extraverted rather than an introverted personality are the ones who
score consistently higher in ESP tests.
The
conducted by Jeffrey S. Levin, associate professor at
Levin said, although only 5% of the population have such experiences
often [that's around 15 million people], such mystical encounters "seem
to be getting more common with each successive generation." And very
interestingly, Levin added, individuals active in mainstream churches
or synagogues report fewer mystical experiences than the general
population.
The November 1993 issue of the Journal of Abnormal Psychology announced
the finds of psychologists at Carleton University of Ottawa, that
people who
report seeing a UFO or an
alien are not any less intelligent
or psychologically healthy than other people.
Their findings
clearly
contradicted the previously held notions that people who seemingly have
bizarre experiences, such as missing time and communicating with
aliens, have "wild imaginations and are easily swayed into believing
the unbelievable."
Dr. Nicholas P. Spanos, who led the study and administered a battery of
psychological tests to a large number of UFO experiencers, said that
such individuals were not at all "off the wall." On the contrary, he
stated, "They
tend to be
white-collar, relatively well-educated
representatives of the middle class."
Becoming More Common
Psychiatrists Colin Ross and Shaun Joshi have affirmed that paranormal
experiences have become so common in the general population that "no
theory of normal psychology which does not take them into account can
be comprehensive."
It may well be that we are turning into a nation of mystics regardless
of the frustration of organized science or organized religion. And we
might add, a nation of intelligent mystics.
The
inclined student is a happier student."
According to a national
study
of students conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute at the
one's sense of psychological well-being.
"A high degree
of spirituality
correlates with high self-esteem and
feeling good about the way life is headed,"
Sarah Hofius wrote of
the
study that took place at forty-six wide-ranging universities and
colleges, encompassing 3,680 third-year students. "The study defines
spirituality as desiring to integrate spirituality into one's life,
believing that we are all spiritual beings, believing in the sacredness
of life and having spiritual experiences."
Another survey that should have offered an enormous amount of proof
that one can achieve a higher education and still believe in the
paranormal was released on
medical doctors believe that miracles have occurred in the past and 73%
believe that miracles can occur today. Sixty-seven percent of the
doctors encouraged their patients to pray; 59% admitted that they
prayed for their patients.
The national survey, conducted by HCD Research and the Louis
Finkelstein Institute for Religious and Social Studies of the Jewish
Theological Seminary, polled 1,100 physicians throughout the
States
Institute, doctors
"although
presumably more highly educated than their
average patient, are not necessarily more secular or radically
different in religious outlook."
Perhaps because of their frequent
involvement with matters of life and death, medical doctors do not lose
their belief in the miraculous as their level of education increases.
A Believing Skeptic
In 2002, the National Science Foundation found that 60% of adults in
the
psychic powers or extrasensory perception (ESP). In June 2002, the
Consumer Analysis Group conducted the most extensive survey ever done
in the United Kingdom and revealed that 67% of adults believed in
psychic powers and that two out of three surveyed believed in an
afterlife.
……………………
In my opinion, humankind's one truly essential factor is its
spirituality. The artificial concepts to which we have given the
designation of sciences are no truer in the ultimate sense than dreams,
visions, and inspirations. The quest for absolute proof or objective
truth may always be unattainable when it seeks to define and limit the
Soul. And I
truly believe that one can
achieve a high level of
education and still maintain a firm belief in the unseen
world.”
Skeptic
Richard Wiseman concedes that remote
viewing/ESP has been proven by normal scientific standards
Skeptic
Richard Wiseman, a
die hard critic of psychic phenomena, has finally conceded that the
case for
remote viewing and ESP has been proven by standard scientific criteria!
For
more info, see these blog entries:
http://deanradin.blogspot.com/2009/09/skeptic-agrees-that-remote-viewing-is.html
http://subversivethinking.blogspot.com/2010/04/richard-wiseman-evidence-for-esp-meets.html
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