In a previous post, I complained about anti-intellectual, obscurantistic and pseudoscientific trends in certain paranormal circles. In this post, I want to expand this argument. For the purposes of this post, let's call "paranormalist" the people who exemplifies this kind of anti-intellectual mindset. (I'm not impliying that everybody who accepts the paranormal, myself included, are paranormalists in that sense. On the contrary, people like Dean Radin, Charles Tart, Chris Carter, Stephen Braude and many, many others are people of high intellectual level and enjoy my utmost respect, regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with some of their views).
I argued in my post that many paranormalists use (or rather, misuse) science, specially quantum mechanics in order to support some of their paranormal views. I showed that the proper interpretation of quantum mechanics is controversial among QM scholars and philosophers of physics, and that there are exists around 10 different interpretations of it, which have wholly different metaphysical implications. This point tends to be bypassed by paranormalists, who speak of QM as whether its metaphysical implications (supposedly supporting the paranormal) are a straightforward and settled matter.
They have no idea of what the hell they are talking about.
Let's see another example of the influence of New Age beliefs in contemporary paranormal community:
Example of the historical Jesus:
Since discussing about Jesus and Christianity seems to evoke very, very strong and negative emotions in so many people which tends to impair their rationality, objectivity and logical thinking, I ask all my readers, including the Christian ones, to assume (just for the purpose of this post and of helping readers with emotional/spiritual wounds and scars to think with less bias) that Christianity is false. This assumption will allow us together to discuss the matter objectively and without strong feelings of "fear" and "guilty" connected with Christianity. Are you ready? Let's it on!
In New Age circles, what predominates is religious pluralism, the view that salvation is possible through several religions or spiritual paths, not just one. One reason for it is that the New Age has been strongly influenced by Eastern worldviews and philosophies, which include a plurality of views about God and spiritual matters. Some of these worldviews are atheistic and impersonalistic (e.g. some versions of Buddhism or Hinduism), and even polytheistic, other pantheistic or theistic.
Hinduism has played a major influence on New Age thinkers and authors. In the wikipedia entry on Hinduism, you can read this about its concept of God:
Hinduism is a diverse system of thought with beliefs spanning monotheism, polytheism, panentheism, pantheism, monism, and atheism among others;[136][137][138][139] and its concept of God is complex and depends upon each individual and the tradition and philosophy followed. It is sometimes referred to as henotheistic (i.e., involving devotion to a single god while accepting the existence of others), but any such term is an overgeneralization.
Note that regarding the concept of God, Hinduism includes beliefs which are mutually incompatible with each other, from atheism to polytheism. And the concept is dependent on "each individual and tradition and philosophy followed", because Hinduism doesn't share a canon or set of stable beliefs regarding God.
This kind of radical subjectivism and religious pluralism has had its impact on the New Age and from it to the paranormal community.
For example, in one of my posts about Jesus' resurrection, several paranormalists "suggested" that the resurrection, if happened, happened because Jesus was an expert in Yoga, Chi Kung, Meditation, Buddhism, Tai Chi and so forth, and these practiques/techniques allowed him to bring back to life his corpse.
Like in the case of QM, these people hold such beliefs on a prioristic grounds and independently of the historical evidence. No serious, scholarly, historical evidence supports such claims. In fact:
-No evidence exists for Jesus knowing, let alone mastering, these techniques. (Obviously, if Jesus was God or the Son of God, then presumibly he knew them... but we're assuming in this post that Christianity is false, remember?).
-No evidence exists that these techniques, after being mastered, allow the practitioner to become immortal through the resurrection (in the Judeo-Christian understanding of it).
-No evidence exists that Jesus gave credit to un-Jewish religions, worldviews or philosophies (like Hinduism or Buddhism or Taoism), let alone their idiosyncratic practiques (whatever their utility could be).
-The best evidence about Jesus supports that he preached the coming of God's Kingdom and the conditions for enter in it, and this implies assuming from the beginning and throughly a radically theistic worldview, not an atheistic nor polytheistic ones (hence, hardly, Jesus would confuse his hard-core monotheistic Jewish followers with worldviews or philosophies which are atheistic, pantheistic, polyheistic or at best highly confused about God, which would ring blasphemeous, implausible and incoherent to his followers who expected a Messiah understood in Jewish terms). This supports the implausibility of the claims of Jesus teaching Eastern philosophies or practiques.
So, not only no evidence supports any of these paranormalists' speculations, but that the actual evidence at hand supports contrary conclusions.
But for many paranormalists... to the hell with the historical evidence about Jesus!
This kind of "suggestions" by paranormalists are possible only in people more or less infected with New Age beliefs and idiosyncratic ideas about the Historical Jesus, or simply ignorant of the scholarly discussion about Jesus (or all of these together).
In fact, note that if we apply the criteria of authenticity (widely used by Jesus scholars) we don't find ANY support to the view that Jesus knew or mastered all or some of these techniques (nor that he used them to produce his resurrection). But if we apply such criteria, we get at least prima facie evidence for Jesus' self-understanding as the unique or exclusive Son of God with special prerrogatives to the salvation of man.
Now the interesting question is: Why does people become hostile, skeptical, dissmisive and incredulous regarding Jesus claiming being the unique and special Son of God (when some of such exclusivistic claims DO pass the criteria of authenticity), but at the same time become extremely sympathetic, favourable, prone to accept and consider very plausible the view that Jesus knew and mastered a bunch of hinduistic, chinese, non-Jewish techniques like Yoga or Tai Chi (a claim which doesn't pass any criterion of authenticity)? How do we explain this ASYMMETRY in the use, reading and evaluation of the evidence and of what is plausible or not?
This asymmetry provides telling and compeling evidence of the implicit prejudices, bias and pressupositions operative in these people.
This asymmetry provides telling and compeling evidence of the implicit prejudices, bias and pressupositions operative in these people.
Thinking hard about this taught me that for many in the New Age community, evidence is secondary. What they think about Jesus is largely determined by their prejudices and pressupositions about what "Jesus is supposed to be", and not about what the historical evidence shows. They "read" the evidence, and the sources of the evidence, in terms of such presuppositions (e.g. from the beginning, they give more credibility to liberal authors who say what they want to hear, than to Christian authors who defend the traditional view, without examining the evidence supporting each position... an approach very similar to "skeptics" who, instead of engaging with the evidence themselves, give credit to what the Skeptic Dictionary or James Randi says because, supposedly, "psychic researchers like Dean Radin are professionally interested in defending parapsychology and hence are biased and unreliable"). Sheer prejudice and superficiality.
Why would a materialistic author like Michael Shermer be more objective regarding parapsychology than Dean Radin? Why would the Jesus Seminar (which supports an atheistic and naturalistic mindset as seen in the introduction of his main book) be more objective and credible that Christian scholars (evangelical, catholic, or whatever)?
Everybody defend what they think is true, and we have to examine the evidence to settle the matter. Simply pointing out that certain people (e.g. Christian apologists) are unreliable because they're defending a one side of the story is stupid, since every rational person defends the side of the story he thinks is true (if you defend both sides of a contentious issue, you're breaking the law of non-contradiction, holding mutually incompatible theses, and don't contributing anything to settle the debate).
Does Dean Radin defend the case AGAINST parapsychology? Obviously not, because he thinks parapsychology is a science and the evidence for psi is good (hence he actively supports the case FOR it, for example creating the website SHOW ME, which shows precisely some of the best evidence FOR psi. Although evidence against psi also exist in the literature, and Dean Radin mentions it, the skeptical belief that only negative evidence against psi exists is false, as Radin tries to show in his website. Therefore, he's trying to show, on the grounds of all of the evidence, positve and negative, that psi is an actual, really existing phenomenon).
Does Chris Carter defend the case for the SUPER-ESP interpretation of afterlife evidence? Obviously not, since he thinks the super-ESP cannot account for the best cases.
Does Richard Dawkins defend the case for theism? Obviously not, since he thinks atheism is true and theism false.
Does socialists support the case for capitalism? Obviously not, since they think socialism is correct and capitalism wrong.
Does Jime Sayaka defend the case for materialistic pseudoskepticism? Obviously not, since I think materialism is false and pseudoskepticism is obscurantistic and contrary to reason.
Every rational person defends what he thinks is true, and hence he defends one side of the story. Why would the rational defenders of Christianity (e.g. Christian apologists) would be an exception? Like everyone else, they're defending what they think is true. Why exactly the defenders of Christianity are unreliable, but the apologists and defenders of any other position (e.g. liberal Christianity, atheism, religious pluralism, NDEs, parapsychology, animal rights, science, spiritualism, democracy, socialism, free market, feminism, enviromentalism, abortion, anti-abortion, etc.) are, or could in principle be, reliable?
I've became increasingly dissapointed with the intellectual atmosphere of many people in the paranormal communities, which I now consider them to be extremely prejudiced, obscurantistic, misleading, extremely arrogant and profoundly ignorant of topics regarding which they talk authoritatively and dogmatically but know next to nothing (like QM, the Historical Jesus and many others).
Regardless of the influence of materialism and pseudoskepticism in the outcasting of paranormalists and the paranormal itself, I'm sure that many paranormalists themselves are guilty of having so bad intellectual reputation. They deserve it.
In future posts, I'll provide more examples of contemporary "paranormal obscurantism".
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