Coincidence Provides An Excellent Example Of What I Was Talking About Yesterday

I will start this by cautioning against using Wikipedia to look up anything in this area because Wikipedia has been open to a concerted, organized, years-long public effort to twist entries dealing with the Atheist Index Of Prohibited Ideas and those who maintain that area of atheist religion and those who have the gall to actually do standard and very high levels of scientific research into those things which atheists have forbidden.   I've written about Susan Gerbic's cult of those who ratfuck Wikipedia on behalf of their religion a number of times.  

So anything written there about any of the people or ideas or experiments in this area is best taken as dishonest.   

As good an example as any of the distance between the apocryphal Leplace of atheist use and the man who wrote the Philosophical Essay on Probability was recently published by the professional atheists (oh, yeah, make that "Skeptics") Arthur Reber and James Alcock in one of the major journals of their religion, "Skeptical Inquirer", an article bragging about their upcoming article protesting a paper of a large study reviewing the published reviewed literature into such forbidden topics.  It is only by chance that I found out about this yesterday.  Or maybe it wasn't by chance?

They were unable to address the experimental designs, the conduct of the experiments, the statistical analyses of the data that those experiments yielded, I mentioned that one of the patriarchs of their religion, Ray Hyman, a psychologist like these two slightly younger hierarchs in organized atheism, has had to admit that parapsychological research as done by scientists who investigate these forbidden topics is some of the most rigorous of scientific research.  

This statement from their SI article  proves exactly what I said about the ideological insertion of atheism directly into the culture and practice of science, violating the very methods that the atheists pretend to uphold in their more pious declarations:

We did not examine the data for psi, to the consternation of the parapsychologist who was one of the reviewers. Our reason was simple: the data are irrelevant. We used a classic rhetorical device, adynaton, a form of hyperbole so extreme that it is, in effect, impossible. Ours was “pigs cannot fly”—hence data that show they can are the result of flawed methodology, weak controls, inappropriate data analysis, or fraud. Examining the data may be useful if the goal is to challenge the veracity of the findings but has no role in the kinds of criticism we were mounting. We focused not on Cardeña specifically but on parapsychology broadly. We identified four fundamental principles of science that psi effects, were they true, would violate: causality, time’s arrow, thermodynamics, and the inverse square law. 

This differs in absolutely no way from what Galileo famously complained of to Kepler,  that the professors of Ptolemaic cosmology absolutely refused to look through his telescope, no doubt because they held that what they would see with their own eyes COULDN'T BE TRUE because they believed it violated their knowledge.  I wish Richard Feynman were around to address their clam about "time's arrow," perhaps "causality" as well.   I would imagine Laplace would find their use of his theory to be rather embarassing.  What they mean about it violating "the inverse square law" is rather curious as the record of Psi researchers as opposed to organized atheists is that they tend to be entirely better mathematicians than their opponents.  "Skeptical Inquirer's" place in the sTARBABY scandal which was floated on massive mathematical incompetence is a good introduction to that.*  

I will note that neither of the atheists - both of them not physicists but psychologists - did more than make that declaration of the violation of sacred principles of contemporary physics.  No doubt if I wanted to look for it, I could come up with voluminous condemnation by physicists of ideas that became standard parts of physics over the centuries in the way that Nicholas Slonimsky did by critics condemning some of the greatest works of Western Music in his lexicon of musical invective.  But, as can be seen, all you have to do in the religion of conventional atheism is make the claim, you don't have to back it up.  

So you can more conveniently contrast that to what Laplace indisputably said in his essay, here it is again:
 
We are so far from recognizing all the agents of nature and their divers modes of action that it would be unphilosophical to deny the phenomena solely because they are inexplicable in the present state of our knowledge. But we ought to examine them with an attention as much the more scrupulous as it appears the more difficult to admit them; and it is here that the calculation of probabilities becomes indispensable in determining to just what point it is necessary to multiply the observations or the experiences in order to obtain in favor of the agents which they indicate, a probability superior to the reasons which can be obtained elsewhere for not admitting them.  Laplace 

Clearly Alcock and Reber have no problem being "unphilosphical" in exactly the way that Laplace condemned.  They are repeating the fallback of their sect of atheism when it cannot account for clearly demonstrated phenomena, demonstrated with a level of scientific method and practice, the atheist-psycologists demanding that those are not adequate for the purpose.  Applying a standard that, if applied to the published literature of conventional psychology would dissolve their field and expose them as the equivalent of old time astrologers, phrenologist, and whatever discredited once ubiquitous field within academic and para-academic repute.  

Worse than what Laplace imagined in such people, they match those anti-Copernican teachers of science who Galileo complained about.   Remember this when you next hear an atheist talk about Laplace, Galileo, Copernicus, etc.  

*  You might want to consider just one response to some of Alcock's previous debunkery by Daryl Bem.  Other than pointing out that some of the procedures used by Bem that Alcock's debunkery depended on was standard within Alcock's field of psychology -EVEN USED BY PEOPLE ASSOCIATED WITH ALCOCK - he could point out that even the skeptical reviewers who were hostile to his research had to admit he conducted legitimate scientific research and that his analysis of the data couldn't be criticized. 

The contrast between the assessments of Alcock and the Journal’s editors and reviewers is also particularly newsworthy because it is not simply a reprise of the familiar disagreement between skeptics and proponents of psi (ESP). Like Alcock, several of the reviewers expressed various degrees of skepticism about the reality of psi, while still urging its acceptance. Unlike Alcock, however, they are all active researchers who regularly contribute to the mainstream experimental literature in psychology and cognitive science. Their task was to evaluate the logic and clarity of the article’s exposition, the soundness of its experimental methods, and the validity of its statistical analyses. They did not have to agree with my conclusions regarding psi to make those assessments. As Joachim Krueger, an experimental psychologist at Brown University, put it so charmingly: “My personal view is that this is ridiculous and can’t be true. Going after the methodology and the experimental design is the first line of attack. But frankly, I didn't see anything. Everything seemed to be in good order (quoted by Peter Aldhous in the NewScientist 16:29, November 11, 2010).”

Given that encounter between Alcock and Bem it's no wonder that he and his tag-team buddy are reverting to the tactic of refusing to look at the data, recreating exactly what the Ptolemaic professors did which, no doubt, they would cite in their hypocritical advocacy for atheist-materialist-scientism at the drop of a cliche.  Only they would misrepresent it, attributing that refusal to the already dead Cardinal who is the villain of their costume drama recreations of the events.  Their grasp of history would fit right in with the worst of Hollywood and BBC distortion of it.