The Demon-Haunted World_ Science as a Candle in the Dark - Carl Sagan [146]
... [T]he sceptic might take a clue from cultural anthropology and develop a more sophisticated scepticism by understanding alternative belief systems from the perspective of the people who hold them and by situating these beliefs in their historical, social, and cultural contexts. As a result, the world of the paranormal may appear less as a silly turn toward irrationalism and more as an idiom through which segments of society express their conflicts, dilemmas, and identities...
To the extent that sceptics have a psychological or sociological theory of New Age beliefs, it tends to be very simplistic: paranormal beliefs are ‘comforting’ to people who cannot handle the reality of an atheistic universe, or their beliefs are the product of an irresponsible media that is not encouraging the public to think critically...
But Hess’s just criticism promptly deteriorates into complaints that parapsychologists ‘have had their careers ruined by sceptical colleagues’, and that sceptics exhibit ‘a kind of religious zeal to defend the materialistic and atheistic world view that smacks of what has been called “scientific fundamentalism” or “irrational rationalism” ‘. This is a common but to me deeply mysterious - indeed, occult - complaint. Again, we know a great deal about the existence and properties of matter. If a given phenomenon can already be plausibly understood in terms of matter and energy, why should we hypothesize that something else, something for which there is as yet no other good evidence, is responsible? Yet the complaint persists: sceptics won’t accept that there’s an invisible fire-breathing dragon in my garage because they’re all atheistic materialists.
In Science in the New Age, scepticism is discussed, but it is not understood, and it is certainly not practised. All sorts of paranormal claims are quoted, sceptics are ‘deconstructed’, but you can never learn from reading it that there are ways to decide whether New Age and parapsychological claims to knowledge are promising or false. It’s all, as in many postmodernist texts, a matter of how strongly people feel and what their biases may be.
Robert Anton Wilson (in The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science, 1986) describes sceptics as the ‘New Inquisition’. But to my knowledge no sceptic compels belief. Indeed, on most TV documentaries and talk shows, sceptics get short shrift and almost no air time. All that’s happening is that some doctrines and methods are being criticized - at the worst, ridiculed - in magazines like The Skeptical Inquirer with circulations of a few tens of thousands. New Agers are not much, as in earlier times, being called up before criminal tribunals, nor whipped for having visions, and they are certainly not being burned at the stake. Why fear a little criticism? Aren’t they interested to see how well their beliefs hold up against the best counterarguments the sceptics can muster?
Perhaps one per cent of the time, someone who has an idea that smells, feels and looks indistinguishable from the usual run of pseudoscience will turn out to be right. Maybe some undiscovered reptile left over from the Cretaceous period will indeed be found in Loch Ness or the Congo Republic; or we will find artefacts of an advanced, non-human species elsewhere in the solar system. At the time of writing there are three claims in the ESP field which, in my opinion, deserve serious study: (1) that by thought alone humans can (barely) affect random number generators in computers; (2) that people under mild sensory deprivation can receive thoughts or images ‘projected’ at them; and (3) that young children sometimes report the details of a previous life, which upon checking turn out to be accurate and which they could not have known about in any other way than reincarnation. I pick these claims not because I think they’re likely to be valid (I don’t), but as examples of contentions that might be true. The last three have at least some, although still dubious, experimental support. Of course,