Note: This article first appeared in the CFN Newsletter for September - October 2009.
There’s nothing that skeptics enjoy more than a good debunking. Set up a big fat target and let the fun begin: How could anyone believe that nonsense? Or pose an apparently insuperable challenge: prove that you have paranormal powers and we’ll give you a million bucks. Thus far, no takers.
Among those leading the skeptical charge (my apology for omissions) are James Randi, founder of the Randi Educational Foundation; Michael Shermer, head of the Skeptics Society and author of Why People Believe Weird Things; Joe Nickel and others at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, publishers of Skeptical Inquirer; physicist and science-defender Lawrence Krauss; Massimo Pigliucci, host of Rationally Speaking; neurologist Steven Novella who heads the New England Skeptical Society and hosts Neurologica; and of course America’s favorite exploders of supernatural shibboleths and fashionable nonsense, Penn and Teller on their show Bullshit!. None of these guys are to be trifled with if you have the least propensity for wishful thinking. Their critical gaze has shredded every imaginable quackery, from Bigfoot to birthers, spoon-bending to séances, vaccine scare-mongering to visitations from the dead. If there’s no solid empirical evidence for it or if it’s logically suspect, they’re all over it, and then it’s all over for the wishful thinker. This of course fulfills an important function for the culture: keeping it intellectually honest, or at least less dishonest.
Given all this, it’s striking that the skeptical community pays relatively little attention to one of the weirdest beliefs going: that human beings have contra-causal free will.[1] Read the full story
