The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [111]
He was referring to mesmerism. But ‘every age has its peculiar folly’. Unlike Franklin, most scientists feel it’s not their job to expose pseudoscientific bamboozles, much less, passionately held self-deceptions. They tend not to be very good at it either. Scientists are used to struggling with Nature, who may surrender her secrets reluctantly but who fights fair. Often they are unprepared for those unscrupulous practitioners of the ‘paranormal’ who play by different rules. Magicians, on the other hand, are in the deception business. They practise one of the many occupations - such as acting, advertising, bureaucratic religion and politics - where what a naive observer might misunderstand as lying is socially condoned as in the service of a higher good. Many magicians pretend they don’t cheat, and hint at powers conferred by mystic sources or, lately, by alien largesse. Some use their knowledge to expose charlatans in and out of their ranks. A thief is set to catch a thief.
Few rise to this challenge as energetically as James “The Amazing’ Randi, accurately self-described as an angry man. He is angry not so much about the survival into our day of antediluvian mysticism and superstition, but about how uncritical acceptance of mysticism and superstition works to defraud, to humiliate, and sometimes even to kill. Like all of us, he is imperfect: sometimes Randi is intolerant and condescending, lacking in empathy for the human frailties that underlie credulity. He is routinely paid for his speeches and performances, but nothing compared to what he could receive if he declared that his tricks.derived from psychic powers or divine or extraterrestrial influences. (Most professional conjurors, worldwide, seem to believe in the reality of psychic phenomena, according to polls of their views.) As a conjuror, he has done much to expose remote viewers, ‘telepaths’, and faith-healers who have bilked the public. He demonstrated the simple deceptions and misdirections by which some psychic spoonbend-ers had conned prominent theoretical physicists into deducing new physical phenomena. He has received wide recognition among scientists and is a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation (so-called ‘genius’) Prize Fellowship. One critic castigated him for being ‘obsessed with reality’. I wish the same could be said of our nation and our species.
Randi has done more than anyone else in recent times to expose pretension and fraud in the lucrative business of faith-healing. He sifts refuse. He reports gossip. He listens in on the stream of ‘miraculous’ information coming to the itinerant healer - not by spiritual inspiration from God, but at the radio frequency of 39.17 megahertz, transmitted by his wife backstage.*
[* Whose minions had interviewed the gullible patients only an hour or two earlier. How, except through God, could the preacher know their symptoms and street addresses? This scam by the Christian fundamentalist faith-healer Peter Popoff, and exposed by Randi, was thinly fictionalized in the 1993 film Leap of Faith.]
He discovers that those who rise from their wheelchairs and are declared healed had never before been confined to wheelchairs -they were invited by an usher to sit in them. He challenges the faith-healers to provide serious medical evidence for the validity of their claims. He invites local and federal government agencies to enforce the laws against fraud and medical malpractice. He chastises the news media for their studied avoidance of the issue. He exposes the profound contempt of these faith-healers for their patients and parishioners. Many are conscious charlatans, using Christian evangelical or New Age language and symbols to prey on human frailty. Perhaps there are some with motives that are not venal.
Or am I being too harsh? How is the occasional charlatan in faith-healing different from the occasional