THE IDEOLOGICAL GAME of "skepticism" as practiced by the so-called Committee for Skeptical Inquiry* and other such largely boys' clubs is supposedly done in the interest of upholding "science" as it is commonly claimed to exist by materialist-atheists who are true believes in scientism, rather ironically not only violates the foundations and methodologies of science, but makes science into one of those ideologically self-refuting entities due to their insistence of turning it into an ideological position instead of an open method of testing ideas, theories and claims.
The scientism of the self-identified "skeptics" alone would do that because, as I'll never stop pointing out, scientism is a claim that cannot be tested with science and, so, cannot withstand logical analysis as a self-consistent idea. Materialism and atheism fall into the same category of non-scientific ideas. It's one of the richer ironies of the "enlightenment" that the biggest fattest champions of "science" are among its most basic non-practitioners of scientific method and thinking.
The common lore of "skepticism," especially as that exists after the mid 1970s, itself imposes self-defeating ideas onto their conception of science.
One of the widest spread stands of would be "skepticism" that is easiest to refute has two aspects of self-defeat contained in it. One of the biggest names in "skepticism" of that kind was and is the late but once very prominent "public scientist" the planetary scientist Carl Sagan who popularized the slogan that is often given as "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" before they are admitted into what is held to be true.
But that claim is extremely anti-scientific. What constitutes an "extraordinary" claim as opposed to an "ordinary" one? How can such a claim be identified as such on any basis that controls against the prejudices and ideological rejection of the one making that designation? I will state that I've never heard anyone recite that formula except as an expression of their ideological preference, that's how Sagan used it.
As that slogan is used "extraordinary" means anything that is inconvenient or inconsistent with the ideology of the one using it and noting more. Science regularly publishes papers and books that make some pretty unusual and, at times, contra-experiential claims. Not only in such "sciences" as psychology (the history of psychology since at least Freud is full to the top of such claims) but modern physics and cosmology make all kinds of such claims, often on the slightest of evidence or none at all but "science" accepts those claims without any or much objection. That can be seen in the claims of such untestable speculations as multiverse cosmology, any number of attempts to get round the Big Bang as the absolute beginning of our universe for clearly ideological reasons, and in such things as the "science" that Carl Sagan more or less founded, "exobiology" or the biology of extraterrestrial organisms, organisms of which there is no evidence at all and which organisms science has not and likely never will have to examine (that is unless those come by UFO, which would make other claims by Sagan and the CSICOPs vulnerable). What are we to make of a science which is funded and credentialed WHEN THERE IS NO POSSIBILITY OF HAVING ANY EVIDENCE OF ITS SUBJECT AT ALL, making some pretty extraordinary claims of its own in the process. Yet I don't know of any time that Sagan was asked to test his own such untestable science by his slogan, never mind many of those within "skepticism" who practiced such science. Considering one of the foremost activities of "skeptics" has been to get science they didn't like defunded and shut down, their liking of and practice of science that is based on no evidence at all is rather noteworthy. And also psychology, which I'll get to in a while.
It also calls into question the legitimacy of the ordinary methods of scientific testing, if those aren't sufficient to confirm some ideas, their ability to confirm any other idea is as insufficient. Such a standard, if taken seriously, would obliterate the most basic legitimacy of scientific method whenever those are applied. You can't have two (or in practice more) standards in such a thing or you have no standard.
As such, the slogan also forces us to look at something even more basically wrong with the claims and methods of organized "skeptics" especially in regard to actual science they don't like, the controlled, rigorous testing of what falls under "psychic abilities". Considering how many of those in organized "skepticism" are credentialed and hired within one of the most lax of all the so-called sciences, psychology, such major figures of the past as Ray Hyman, James Alcock, Barry Beyerstein, Richard Kammann, , a "science" which typically practices the sloppiest and loosest and, quite frankly, most scientifically fraudulent of methodologies. As compared to psychology and much other science which is fully accepted as official science, the parapsychologists run one of the tightest scientific operations there ever has been. That is in no small part due to their knowledge that the materialist-atheists will always be there to find any flaw in their experimental methods and analyses of their data. Over and over and over again they have faced that opposition, redesigned their experiments to answer their critics and, over and over again, come up with the positive results that the materialist-atheists hate so much. And the response of their critics is to either lie about what they've done to create fraud or incompetence that isn't there or to, as in the case of those like Ray Hyman, come up with some unstated and unspecified objection that there MUST be something wrong because they don't like the results of the experiments when they reluctantly have to acknowledge the positive results. That has been going on since the start of such experiments into "ESP" and much other such tested phenomena. No other part of scientific experimentation has ever faced the forces of ideological opposition that such scientists have faced and persistently continue to get positive results, often doing what hardly any conventional psychology does, a. reporting negative results and b. replicating experiments, sometimes over and over again. Yet the "skeptics" pretend they haven't done that.
The question is how can the "skeptics" claim to uphold the methods of science, rigorous observation, measurement and analysis as a superior means of discerning AND DETERMINING what is true and what isn't while they so baldly reject some of the most rigorous procedures in doing that kind of science just because they don't like the findings? How have they been getting away with that for literally more than a century? Either those methods are capable of finding the truth or they aren't. You can't claim they have universal power to discover the truth about things that can be subjected to those methods if you reject what those methods find, over and over again.
When the methods of science were first being developed by such people as Francis Bacon, one of the things that they explicitly sought to avoid was the insertion of preference and self-interest into the procedures of science. While there are several items in his Novum Organum that would fit here, this one is particularly relevant to such ideological skepticism, seeing how it largely traffics in public relations, show biz and has so many magicians and conjurers in its membership.
XLIV. Lastly, there are idols which have crept into men’s minds from the various dogmas of peculiar systems of philosophy, and also from the perverted rules of demonstration, and these we denominate idols of the theatre: for we regard all the systems of philosophy hitherto received or imagined, as so many plays brought out and performed, creating fictitious and theatrical worlds. Nor do we speak only of the present systems, or of the philosophy and sects of the ancients, since numerous other plays of a similar nature can be still composed and made to agree with each other, the causes of the most opposite errors being generally the same. Nor, again, do we allude merely to general systems, but also to many elements and axioms of sciences which have become inveterate by tradition, implicit credence, and neglect. We must, however, discuss each species of idols more fully and distinctly in order to guard the human understanding against them.
Particularly notice the sentence I underlined and the part about wanting to "guard the human understanding against them."
What the "skeptics" do, what some of the major figures in the public face of science do is exactly that, THEY INSERT THEIR IDEOLOGICAL PREFERENCES AND SELF-INTEREST DIRECTLY INTO THE CULTURE AND EVEN LITERATURE OF SCIENCE. Some, such as the noted scientific fraudster, Marc Hauser, do their "science" to support their ideology, in his case his atheism, or at least there seems to be a high degree of coincidence between their personal ideology and the direction their "science" takes, especially in those sciences in which the least rigorous of methodologies and analyses reign, alleged science dealing with "behavior." His fraud, successful for many years within science, was in that loosest of scientific fields, the interpretation of animal behavior. I, personally, don't think any of that is scientific as they can't even get one animal to testify as to their motivations and thinking about it. But, then, there's no possibility to verify any self-reporting in most of such "science" when it's People who can articulate something about that. But such fully credentialed and privileged "science" has no such control of that, not such as the rigorous testing of psychic ability 0ften does. You can tell if someone guessed the right card or closely approximated a remotely viewed image or, in some of the most impressive telepathic-precognitive experiments I know of, the experiments into what Dean Radin has called "presentiment" if they had the physical reaction to the telepathically received stimulus. I doubt there's anything in conventional psychology that has that level of rigorous scientific verification, the kind of psychology that so many a card-carrying "skeptic" teaches to gullible students as reliable science. That is until the entire cathedral of that particular school of psychology rots and tumbles down to be covered by the next fashion in such "science." That's happened at least twice during my lifetime (Freudianism and behaviorism) with many a minor movement within the "science" rising and falling, as well.
You can't have it both ways, your likes and dislikes either can or can't decide the truth or falseness of ideas that have verification through the regular methods of science. If you decide they can, then science isn't the producer of objective truth you're claiming it is. The "skeptics" demand the right to do exactly that.
You can't decide that scientific methods, followed as closely as its possible to follow them, can discern even the seemingly implausible truth in something going in the direction of objective verification when you like the results but refuse to acknowledge when those methods verify what you don't like. Consider especially what the cosmologists and current physicists have demanded we believe in on the merely theoretical without any evidence, not to mention such currently popular ideologies as evolutionary psychology and myriad other such credentialed sciences
You can't claim a privilege for inserting your preferred ideological or merely personal preferences into science and demand that everyone acknowledge the validity of the results because none of us is morally or intellectually obligated to go along with something like that anymore than we are when it's done in any other area of life.
And admit when you do that you are establishing science as just another ideological preference, such as is a frequent atheist criticism of religions because any of us is justified to point out that's what you're doing. I think science has been going down that road at an accelerating rate, which is too bad because legitimate science, honestly done, is extremely important. When you consider how important climate change science, environmental science, epidemiological, medical and other such sciences are, it's a crime against humanity to do that.
All of those anti-scientific ruses are what the "skeptics" from their slickest organized operations down to the blog comment rabble of the James Randi "Educational" Foundation, do all of those and more while suckering or coercing those in the media and academia to go along with it. Science, as if science were a thing apart from those credentialed and accepted as being "science," is more prone to that ideological bullying and gulling than the general public is because the profession of science maintains that practice and the taboo on a whole Index of Prohibited Ideas. And it wastes a lot of time doing that and, through putting out some of the most annoyingly smug and conceited jerks as the public face of science, Sagan, Randi, Degrasse Tyson, Shermer, . . . probably does more to discredit science than it does to interest People in it. Their audience tend to be the conceited and ignorant and philosophically incompetent with college credentials.
So, no, I have looked at organized "skeptics" and their antics and I'm impressed that they are not especially honest or especially interested in science, they are interested in maintaining a rigid adherence to their preferences. Their atheism, foremost, their afterthoughts of materialism and scientism. Those preferences are and never can be a legitimate thing within science, though the scientists, themselves, insert those into science. If science has problems, a lot of it starts right there. Not that I'm expecting they're going to do much about it. Not during my lifetime. Too many conceited bigots, especially among the guys of science. Though some gals do it too. You almost have to to get along in science.
* The "CSI" is the rebranding of the self-discredited CSICOP, The "Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal: self-discredited itself in their one and only "scientific investigation." That was into the "Mars effect" a statistical study by the French investigators and bio-statisticians Michel and Francois Gauquelin in which they found that a randomly selected and statistically significant sample of French and Belgian athletic champions had a strongly statistically significant chance of having been born when the planet Mars was in two certain positions in relation to the Earth and the sun. CSICOP was led into catastrophe by two of its prominent members who should have understood they proposed an incompetently framed challenge to the Gauquelins, the Harvard employed bio-statistician Marvin Zelin and the UCLA astronomer George Abell, at the urging of the central figure of CSICOP and organized "skepticism" the statistically and scientifically incompetent University of New York at Buffalo philosophy prof Paul Kurtz.
A fairly good but somewhat biased description of the origin of the affair was given by Ricard Kammann, a former member of the "skeptics" group:
Michel and Francoise Gauquelin found that European sports champions were born in Mars sectors 1 and 4 at a rate of 22% instead of the 17% expected by chance. However, the definition of "chance" requires making assumptions, for example, about the times of day that people are born which are not truly random. While one can try to take all such factors into account to calculate a chance baseline, Marvin Zelen proposed a shortcut in 1976 by looking at the Mars sectors of ordinary people to see how often they are born in sectors 1 and 4. As a method of finding the right baseline, the Zelen challenge is a definitive test.
The first error by the skeptics occurs in the funny way Zelen designed this challenge. Quite logically he said that the control group should be born at the same times and places as the champions. He suggested using 100 or 200 of the original champions to locate the matched control group. Practically nobody noticed in the fine print of Zelen's statistical design that he planned to see if the Mars effect in these 100 or 200 champions was above the baseline effect in their birth mates.
The catch-22 is the small sample size Zelen suggested. If there really is a Mars effect of 22% above 17%, a sample of 100 champions is far too small to detect the effect reliably. The Gauquelins not only spotted the error, but presented Zelen with a mathematical proof of it. As far as I know, Zelen has never admitted the point.
Taking up a corrected version of the Zelen challenge, the Gauquelins deleted a part of their champions group because it would be too difficult to get their control data, and used as many of the remaining champions as they could. Since the local French birth records offices would not always supply the data, the champions group dwindled to 303, but through them, a large control group of 16,756 non-athletes was located. When Zelen analyzed the data, the control group baseline came in almost perfectly, at 16.4%, and the 303 champions incidentally came in with a Mars effect of 21.8%, both as Michel Gauquelin had predicted.
Even the observed Mars effect in the 303 champions subsample was significant at the .02 level. This says that if there really is no Mars effect, and we ran the experiment 100 times, always using 303 champions, we should only observe a value as high as 21.8% in a mere 2 experiments. By a scientific rule of thumb, the investigator is allowed to claim a real effect whenever the "chance probability" of the observed result falls below 5 in 100 experiments. (This arbitrary .05 threshold will appear over and over again here as the "litmus test of truth.")
I will note that much of the best of formal, controlled psychic research has reached or surpassed that "litmus test of truth." Yet it is held by those who stand by that standard as invalid. They certainly have had a hand in its arbitrariness.
The CSICOPs were warned they had made an incompetently constructed challenge by Dennis Rawlins one of CSICOP's co-founders. Rawlins, in this issue at least, was the honest astronomer but is a pretty unlikable and militant materialist-atheist devotee of scientism in the typical "skeptics" 12-year-old boy style. His specialty was in rather brilliantly analyzing historical issues related to astronomy and supporting himself as a more or less free-lance writer. Rawlins' account of the botched procedures of Zelen, Kurtz and Abell and their and CSICOP's extraordinarily sleazy cover-up and denial of their mistakes was published in FATE magazine in 1981, CSICOP's cover-up and sleazy behavior were carried out by a contemporary who's who of materialist-atheist-scientism and makes lively reading, even if the necessary understanding of the statistical issues involved takes some time to understand. A couple of other analyses of the problem were done by Richard Kammann (a member of CSICOP who resigned once he realized that Rawlin's accusations were valid and that nothing was going to be done within CSICOP to set the record straight) and Patrick Curry published in the now defunct more scholarly and openly inquiring journal of skepticism, Zetetic Scholar. All three can be found online.
I will point out that after the "sTARBABY" debacle, none of the statistically-scientifically incompetent champions of materialist-atheist-scientism, such as the big names in it, Paul Kurtz, James Randi, Phil Klass, etc. seems to have ever gone back and learned much about statistics and the issues involved. Considering that a knowledge of such stuff would be necessary before understanding the validity or invalidity of the scientific research they disliked and attacked and got shut down, it's remarkable that the scientists among their colleagues don't seem to have done much to correct those deficenies in their "skepticism." It's remarkable that those big fat self-proclaimed campions of free scientific inquiry, such as those in CSICOP, have probably shut down more science than the Vatican court that tried Galileo did.
