“Anyway, you're mischaracterizing the supernatural as it pertains to an infinite entity. If this "God" fellow exists as described, then he's certainly got the wherewithal to totally foul up a scientific study, and he can even do it invisibly and undetectably. Therefore, any experiment purporting to prove God's existence (even via a proxy such as prayer) is doomed to fail simply because it's nonfalsifiable. End of experiment.”
Ummm…you talkin’ to me? Surely not. I only mentioned prayer and miracles in my subject line. The rest of my obviously unread posting dealt with phenomena outside normal experience. You know, like EM fields, which were considered impossible until quite recently. But to be completely fair, they were only considered perinormal, rather than paranormal. The difference being: scientists deny them both, but are more adamant in their denial of paranormal phenomena
But nevertheless scientist, in all their wisdom, denied that EM Fields could exist…until it was proved that they could.
I could list endless anecdotes about current scientific orthodoxy and the hard evidence that contradicts that orthodoxy, but I’ll just offer a couple as an appetizer:
Mainstream Zoology insists that manta rays have only one type of body marking. Dr. Karl Shuker on the other hand has photographic and first hand written documentation dating back to 1934 to suggest otherwise. Yet over 70 years later, they still cling to the one body pattern dogma. Why? I mean, what does it matter if they have white stripes, patches or blotches?
www.elasmodiver.com/Manta_ray.htm
Instead, this exploration is relegated to the realm of cryptozoology. A FRINGE science full of kooks and pseudo-scientists.
Another fringe notion that has crossed over into the mainstream is in the field of archeology. The idea of Archeoastology was once relegated to the peyote-eating hippies of the 1960’s. But over the last 30 years this field has gained academic respectability through patient and honest scientific inquiry.
That scientists can fall prey to fundamentalists views can be evidenced by Stephen Weinburg’s assertion in his NY Times article that once we have the TOE (theory of everything) people will stop reading their horoscopes. WTF? So, once we KNOW the TRUTH people will leave this pagan superstition and come to the unchanging eternal TRUTH of TOE? Give me a break. If that’s not fundamental thinking, what is? And although I love Stephen Hawking, the man misunderstood Wittgenstein. Hawkings has the idea that science is “completeable.” That we can have a TOE. If you’ve read Godel (and understand him) he makes it very clear that mathematics are not completeable and hence, logically, never entirely understandable.
As for scientists who are trammeled for having alternative opinions, (or as you suggest, shoody methodology) I turn you to Bjorn Lomborg a Danish statistician and professor at the U. of Aarhus in Denmark. Mr. Lomborg claims in his 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist that, contrary to popular belief, the earth is in better shape than it has been in years and global warming is overblown. He provided extensive footnotes, over 2900, in his work.
Mr. Lomborg, as you can imagine, was not met with measured criticism of his work. In the Scientific American article, which ran 11 pages, the 4 scientists (who found Mr. Lomborg’s work to be “fundamentally wrong”) reviewing the work were anything but unbiased and measured in their response. 2 of the four had been directly cited in Lomborg’s book for inaccurate predictions on resource deficiencies. Hardly an impartial panel. He was accused of being out of his field and out of his depth. And he was also accused of misusing data and a poor understanding of science without any convincing demonstration of proof of those assertions.
In other journals he was likened to a Holocaust denier and trashed repeatedly with ad hominem attacks and an eventual inquiry by the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty which ruled his book “objectively dishonest” and “clearly contrary to the standards of good scientific practice.”- a ruling they later overturned after acknowledging it as baseless.
Stephen Budainsky, a former Nature editor, suggested that Lomborg was subject to alarmists to respond to valid scientific objections with red herrings such as “counting the number of footnotes cited by their critics, disparaging their critics’ credentials and misrepresenting their views”- everything, in short, but dealing honestly with the evidence presented, whether they agree with its assertions or not.
Another prominent scientist who was obviously using horrible methodology, apparent by his censure and shunning by his colleges, was John Mack.
From the Wikipedia entry on Mr. Mack.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Edward_MackIn 1994 the Dean of Harvard Medical School appointed a committee of peers to review Mack's clinical care and clinical investigation of the people who had shared their alien encounters with him (some of their cases were written of in Mack's 1994 book Abduction). Mack described this investigation as "Kafkaesque:" Mack never quite knew the status of ongoing investigation, and the nature of his critics' complaints shifted frequently, as most of their accusations against him fell apart when closely scrutinized.
After fourteen months of inquiry, there were growing questions from the academic community (including Harvard Professor of Law Alan Dershowitz) regarding the validity of Harvard's investigation of a tenured professor who was not suspected of ethics violations or professional misconduct. Harvard then issued a statement stating that the Dean had "reaffirmed Dr. Mack's academic freedom to study what he wishes and to state his opinions without impediment," concluding "Dr. Mack remains a member in good standing of the Harvard Faculty of Medicine." (Mack was censured for some relatively minor methodological errors.) He had received legal help from Danniel Sheehan and the support of Laurance Rockefeller, who also funded Mack's Center for four consecutive years <1> at $250,000 per year.
Let’s turn to parapsychology and your claim that no scientific evidence has been found supporting it: At the Koestler Foundation in Edinburg at British University, under Chair Bob Morris between 1993 and 2003, six of 9 major experimental studies produced statistically significant results. Targ’s work on Remote Viewing in California also produced consistent statistically significant results. And like the Sanford Research Institute noted further down, BU had stage magicians helping them guard against possible trickery.
When asked if he personally believed in telepathy, Morris replied that he was just a researcher. Adding that there was accumulating evidence that it does occur.
This has been suggested by a number of studies and authors. Like Dean Radin who wrote The Conscious Universe. He says that scientific evidence for telepathy has been accruing for decades. Radin notes that a meta-analysis of all ganzfeld telepathy experiments up to 1997 reveal a probability of a MILLION BILLION to 1. That’s somewhat less that Bush’s contribution to the national debt, but I’m sure you can’t argue that it is insignificant.
“DU is positively infested with a paranoid fantasy about the hegemonic Secret Masters of Science, such as the ones who forcibly inject pure mercury into everyone's veins and who conspire to suppress the agents of truth such as Hulda Clark and Kevin Trudeau”
In response to this I will have to admit, I am not a skeptic. In my opinion skeptics are much too dogmatic.
As Nietzsche suggested: 'There is no better soporific and sedative than skepticism. Skeptics work very, very hard to prove somebody wrong, instead of keeping an open mind about what the person may have discovered that potentially has some merit. However, as I hope I have proved, I don’t just accept everything with an absolutely open mind and at face value. I am a Fortean. Like a skeptic, but with an actual ability to think critically and the self-awareness that I don’t and can’t know absolutely everything. Ummm..and to be honest, I’ve heard Clark’s name mentioned, but have no idea who K. Trudeau is.
Let me offer James Randi’s, founder of SICOP work with Targ at the Stanford Research Institute as a case in point as to why I shy away from skepticism. Mr. Targ’s makes the claim in his book, that Mr. Randi fudged the numbers on a few data sets from Remote Viewing experiments that Mr. Randi insisted on participating in. Now, Mr. Randi is not a shrinking violet, prone to accepting any old libelous remarks made regarding his integrity, yet he has never challenged Mr. Targ or asked for a retraction of this assertion. Does lack of proof constitute proof? Well, no. But we are not talking statistics here, we are talking human psychology. Mr. Randi is so rabidly anti-paranormal, that the very idea that he would threaten his own work by changing data to suit his own ends seems to cry out for redress.
I suppose if the Amazing Randi had been at BU to help fudge the numbers so that the experiments fell to his favor, I wouldn’t have any current studies to quote…
And as an interesting side note, Mr. Randi, perhaps because he does know how easy it is to switch a number here and there, won’t accept statistical evidence in his famed “Million Dollar Prize” for proof of paranormal ability. The ultimate skeptic won’t accept scientific results. That, DU comrade, is too incredibly rich. But he did suggest that if he did accept scientific studies, he would insist on checking the findings with his own statistician…but only to be sure the math was done correctly. Indeed.
And now for the biggest bug-a-bear UFO’s:
http://www.cufon.org/cufon/robert.htmIn 1953, the CIA convened what is usually referred to as "The Robertson Panel," an official investigation into the nature and military significance of the UFO phenomenon. Their report remained secret for a long time, but was eventually made public.
In it, they concluded that the real threat posed to the United States by the phenomenon came not from the flying saucers, but from the public's hysteria over UFO sightings, and the CIA's fear that a foreign power might use that hysteria to mask a military attack against our shores. This was the height of the cold war.
What makes the Robertson Panel report so significant is that, following this conclusion, the Panel gave specific recommendations for how to debunking UFO sighting and extraterrestrial contact claims across the board. As well as advice on how to promote the public ridicule of UFO witnesses and of the phenomenon as a whole.
This "shoot the messenger" message became government policy, and was quickly adopted by the Press, as well. It became impossible to talk publicly about sightings, contacts or anything at all related to UFOs without adding that smirking "he, he, he" at the end that to this day poisons UFO-related news stories on the rare occasions they get reported at all my major media outlets. Everything about UFOs and the hope for extraterrestrial contact became "kooky," "weird," the stuff of comic books and crackpots.
Scientists backed away and refused to even look at seemingly hard evidence like photographs, let alone claims of telepathic communication. It was all presumed, in advance and without evidence, to be a grand hoax, a con game perpetrated on a gullible public. Ufology became a fringe counterculture and, outside this "UFO Ghetto," serious public inquiry into the very much continuing phenomena pretty much stopped.
We now know that the government secretly kept investigating and civilian groups like APRO and NICAP came together to try to win back the field's respectability, but even to this day, they have been largely unsuccessful. Ufology is not a "science," it is "the paranormal." Why? Because the Robertson Panel said so.
Their report was the seminal event in the silencing of serious inquiry into Human/ET contact. That may not have been the CIA's direct intention, they were thinking of National Security and all that, I'm sure, but it was their major long-term effect. And not only was serious public inquiry shut down, a long campaign of ridicule, debunking and confusion through disinformation, character assassination and infiltration of UFO groups and organizations began.
“Any time a wild and unsubstantiated claim is not embraced, its proponents here at DU cry "you're closed-minded, and your science is your religion."
Well, if the fundy shoe fits…..
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