Science Friction_ Where the Known Meets the Unknown - Michael Shermer [44]
The founding of the Skeptics Society by myself, Pat Linse, and Kim Ziel Shermer in 1992, then, was also not without precedent and historical roots, and while this history has yet to be written, suffice it to say that without the likes of Gardner, Randi, Hyman, and Kurtz there would be no Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine. And what an experience it has been. When they started this movement I was twenty years old and in my third year of college at Pepperdine University, a Church of Christ-based institution located in Malibu and overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Although the site was certainly a motivating factor in my choice of a college, the primary reason I went there was that I was a born-again Christian who took his mission for Christ seriously. I thought I should attend a school where I could receive some serious theological training, and I did. I took courses in the Old and New Testaments, Jesus the Christ, and the writings of C. S. Lewis. I attended chapel twice a week (although truth be told it was required for all students). Dancing was not allowed on campus (the sexual suggestiveness might trigger already-inflamed hormone production to go into overdrive) and we were not allowed into the dorm rooms of members of the opposite sex.
Despite the restrictions it was a good experience because I was a serious believer and thought that this was the way we should behave anyway. But somewhere along the way I found science, and that changed everything. I was considering theology as a profession, but when I discovered that a Ph.D. required proficiency in several languages (Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic, and Latin), knowing that foreign languages was not my strong suit, I switched to psychology and mastered one of the languages of science: statistics. Here (and in research methodology courses) I discovered that there are ways to get at solutions to problems for which we can establish parameters to determine whether a hypothesis is probably right (e.g., rejecting the null hypothesis at the .01 level of significance) or probably wrong (e.g., not statistically significant). Instead of the rhetoric and disputation of theology, there were the logic and probabilities of science. What a difference this difference in thinking makes!
By the end of my first year of a graduate program in experimental psychology at the California State University, Fullerton, I had abandoned Christianity and stripped off my silver ichthus, replacing what was for me the stultifying dogmas of a two-thousand-year-old religion with the world-view of an always changing, always fresh science. The passionate nature of this perspective was enthused most emphatically by my evolutionary biology professor, Bayard Brattstrom, particularly in his after-class discussions at a local bar that went into the wee hours of the morning. Science is where the action was for me.
About this time (the mid-1970s) Uri Geller entered my radar screen. I recall that Psychology Today and other popular magazines published glowing stories about him, and reports were afloat that experimental psychologists had tested the Israeli psychic and determined that he was genuine. My adviser—a strictly reductionistic Skinnerian behavioral psychologist named Doug Navarick—didn’t believe a word of it, but I figured there might be something to it, especially in light of all the other interesting research being conducted on altered states of consciousness, hypnosis, dreams, sensory deprivation, dolphin communication, and the like. I took a course in anthropology from Marlene Dobkin de Rios, whose research was on shamans of South America and their use of mind-altering plants. It all seemed entirely plausible to me and, being personally interested in the subject (the Ouija board consistently blew my mind), I figured that this was rapidly becoming a legitimate subfield of psychological research. After all, Thelma Moss had a research laboratory devoted to studying the paranormal, and it was at UCLA no less, one of the most highly regarded psychology programs in the country.
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