Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Suggestions on effective strategies for criticizing organized skepticism and materialistic atheism

 
Any project, if it pretends to be succesful, has to be grounded on clarity regarding its purposes. Having clear, concrete and specific purposes regarding whatever course of action you want to take is a necessary (even though not sufficient) condition for attaining success. You have to know exactly what is the objective of your action and use this as the criterion to know if your action is being effective or not.

Critics of pseudoskepticism/organized skepticism (like me) attack "skeptics" and "debunkers" for a number of reasons (ethical, intellectual, scientific, spiritual or a combination thereof). In the parapsychological community, for example, the critics against organized skepticism are motivated by scientific reasons, i.e. parapsychologists consider that the scientific evidence for ESP is good and debunkers are misrepresenting the evidence and therefore damaging the progress of science in this area.

In my own case, I strongly disagree with organized skepticism/debunking by a combination of scientific, philosophical, ethical and spiritual reasons, all of which are (by itself) suffcient to critique it. Other critics could, perhaps, have other reasons too.

Here are some of my suggestions for criticizing organized skepticism:

1-Know in detail the public you're addressing. Each public has different assumptions, presuppositions, ideologies, core beliefs and so forth, and the arguments which work for a public won't necessarily work for another. Arguments don't work in a vacuum; they're evaluated for their plausibility against a explicit or implicit background framework.

For example, if your public is mainly composed of "spiritualists", you can speak freely of "spirits" or the afterlife, and use the best evidence from mediumship to debunk pseudoskeptics. But this argument won't work if your public is composed of Christian fundamentalists, mainstream scientists, or infidels-like atheistic fundamentalists. In fact, in the latter case, your "argument from mediumship" will backfire, and you will loss any credibility before them.

If your public is composed of open-minded agnostics or atheists (sympathetic to secularism, empirical science and anti-spirituality), don't appeal to spiritualistic evidence or complex metaphysical speculations, but to the best evidence from experimental parapsychology, and shows clearly and exactly how and when specific professional skeptics have misrepresented the evidence, or even worst, have dismissed them on philosophical or ideological grounds (for example, as I've done here).

If your public is very heterogeneous (i.e. composed of a wide range of people, like atheists, agnostics, skeptics, Christians, spiritualists, etc), this strategy will be more difficult. However, you can apply it for a certain extent arguing from the common basic assumptions among them (e.g. standards of logic and rationality, common sense, principles and facts of science and history widely accepted, etc.) in the framing of your arguments. Otherwise, your arguments will sound plausible for a group but implausible to the other.

This first step is absolutely CRUCIAL, because it will determine the chances of success of your strategy.

2-Use evidence (factual data) and logical argumentation in your attack of skeptics. Don't rest your case simply in "slogans" or labels, but in factual information. Provide specific references (links, citations, bibliography, youtube videos, etc.), so your readers or hearers will can check for themselves the accuracy and veracitiy of your information.

This not only will increase your credibility, but moreover will crush the credibility of skeptics on the face of evidence which refutes them.

3-Use the best technology to present your case. Specially, you can use youtube with great effectiveness, since youtube is one of the most visited websites in the world. Most people (specially young people) don't like to read or study too much (it is too boring for them), but they like to watch videos on youtube. Hence, you can use this fact to create high-quality videos explaining exactly where "skeptics" have gone wrong, and why the evidence (for psi, afterlife, consciousness, UFO or whatever) points out.

Also, the use of "podcast"and audios is very useful: you will reach an amazing number of people with these methods.

4-Familiarize yourself with the best published anti-debunkers online literature, for example, with the well known critique of Vinstonas Wu, and others of great quality (like this). So, you can refer to these links when presenting your case.

But use these sources wisely not blindly, because it is possible that these sources are relying on violations of the principles mentioned above. For example, in the excellent critique of Wu, he makes references to ghosts or the controversial work of Gary Schwartz or UFOs, which even some spiritual-minded people may be skeptical of. Some parapsychologists don't accept Schwartz's evidence (nor the existence of ghosts or the afterlife or UFOs), and this may produce skepticism regarding Wu's mostly excellent critique of debunkers.

5-Exposed the fallacies of the materialistic and metaphysical naturalistic worldview. In my opinion, this is the key factor missing in the anti-pseudoskeptical literature. For example, most psychic researchers pose the debate with skeptics only in terms of "scientific evidence", not realizing that the evidence is interpreted against a background knowledge (which in the case of most scientists, includes materialism) that the debaters don't share. 

Therefore, a piece of evidence which will support NDEs (e.g. having accurate information of the enviroment and reported enhanced mentation during near-death experience in a hospital) will fit easily with the background information of theists, Christians, spiritualists, idealists, etc. but NOT with the background information of naturalists, who will feel pressure to explain away the evidence as "anecdotal", "non-replied", "non-well controlled", "cerebral anoxia plus receiving information from the enviroment through normal perceptual means", "fraud", "deception", "wishful thinking of NDEs researchers who are believers in the afterlife", "the unreliability of memory", etc.

If the background knowledge of skeptics (materialism, naturalism) is not made explicit, exposed in detail and rigurously criticized, your evidence only will convince the people who already agree with you (e.g. people with your same or similar background knowledge which fits well with the NDEs). You will be preaching for the chorus.

So, your case for NDEs (for example) will have to be compained of a serious, honest, rational and well-supported critique of mind-body materialism (and, in my opinion, of the broad metaphysical naturalist picture too). More or less this is the approach of Chris Carter in his trilogy of excellent books dealing with parapsychology and the afterlife.

You have to be familiar with some of the best and most sophisticated and informed philosophical criticisms of naturalism, like John Lennox's book "God's Undertaker"; Alvin Plantinga's book Where the Conflict really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism, and John Haught's Is Nature Enough?, to know the weaknesses of naturalism and exploit them.

Think hard about these suggestions,

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