A few of quick observations:
1. Scientist Rupert Sheldrake is less enthusiastic about Randi's debunking bona fides:
2. While a magician has a useful skill set for exposing certain types of charlatans, there's a lot of evidence for the paranormal that's not easily reducible to parlor tricks. For instance, has Dembski studied the research of Stephen Braude?
3. Finally:
Randi is an equal opportunity skeptic. He has no specific animus toward Christianity. To him, Christian belief is no more realistic or defensible than any other supernatural claim.
While I'm sure Randi is hostile to religion in general, there's a difference between generic theism and Christianity. The Christian faith includes sexual ethics. Randi is an active sodomite. So I expect he does harbor personal animus towards Christianity. It's not an abstract philosophical construct like perfect being theology, but a living religion with personal ethics, social ethics, and social policies for the church and culture.
Here's Stephen Braude on James Randi:
ReplyDelete"Nevertheless, with his usual bluster, Randi accepted a $10,000 challenge (a considerable sum in those days) to duplicate the Serios phenomena and make good on his claim. Of course, confidence is easy to feign, and Randi does it routinely in his role as magician. He also cleverly takes advantage of the occasional high-profile case he successfully exposes as fraudulent, by publicizing those successes and creating the impression that he's a generally reliable guide when it comes to the paranormal. So Randi's dismissal of the Serios case was all it took for those already disposed to believe that Serios was a fake, and it was probably enough even for those sympathetic to parapsychology but unaware of Randi's dishonesty....What the TV audience never learned was that when the show was over and Randi was pressed to make good on his wager, he simply weaseled out of it. To keep that side of the story under wraps, Randi prohibited publication of his correspondence on the matter. That was undoubtedly a shrewd move, because the letters show clearly how Randi backed down from his empty challenge. However, Randi's original letters now reside in the library at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and researchers, finally, can easily confirm this for themselves. When Serios's principal investigator, Jule Eisenbud, died, I was assigned the task of going through his papers. I collected all the material relevant to the Serios case and deposited it in the Special Collections section of the UMBC library. (This includes correspondence, the original photos and film, and signed affidavits from witnesses.)...But there's no documentary evidence of Randi having even attempted to duplicate the Serios phenomena under anything like the conditions in which Serios succeeded, much less evidence of his having actually pulled it off....In fact, the history of parapsychology chronicles some remarkable examples of dishonest testimony and other reprehensible behavior on the part of skeptics....Skepticism is just as glib and dishonest now as it was in 1882 when the British SPR [Society for Psychical Research] was founded. In fact, despite sensible and careful dismantling of the traditional skeptical objections, the same tired arguments surface again and again. And those arguments all too easily mislead those who haven't yet heard the other side of the story or examined the evidence for themselves." (The Gold Leaf Lady [Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 2007], 22, 34, 126)
For another example of the unreliability of a famous magician who's skeptical of the paranormal, see my article here on Joe Nickell (and another one that's relevant, though not focused on him, here). If I keep to my current schedule for upcoming Enfield posts, I'll be putting one up this spring about what skeptics of the Enfield case actually experienced when they visited the Hodgsons' house. I'll be discussing several skeptics, and one of them is the famous magician Milbourne Christopher. There are tapes of his visit to the house and his discussion with Guy Playfair (and Lawrence Berger) when he was being driven back to his hotel afterward. In spite of Christopher's public skepticism toward Enfield and the paranormal in general, there's good evidence that multiple paranormal events occurred when he visited the Hodgsons' house, including some that happened right in front of him and on tape.
ReplyDeleteMy article on Nickell linked above was written early in the process of my research on the Enfield case. There's substantially more evidence I could now cite against Nickell's claims, but what I included in that 2017 post is more than enough to make my point here.