Skip to main content

Psychic sophistry


Anonymous asked how to respond to someone who is very much into psychics like the U.S. Doreen Virtue. Should we humour them?

Probably depends on the individual. By far the best person to talk to is Tony Youens, who has a website here.

I actually asked Tony to write a piece for THINK on psychics, which you can read here. Hope it helps.

I also recommend you get your friend to read this.

When we launched THINK at Borders Bookstore in London, I advertized the event as involving philosophical discussion of psychic stuff and presented Tony as a genuine psychic. He did some nice stuff - spoon bending, telepathy, etc. and some audience members were taken in. At the end, we revealed the truth, and some people got very upset. In fact one insisted Tony really was psychic - he just didn't realize it.
Labels:

Comments

Anonymous said…
Hi Stephen,

Many thanks for the links, I'll check them out. Unfortunately Doreen Virtue goes way beyond the psychic stuff. She literally believes in angels, fairies, elementals, atlantis, alien abduction, crystal power (which ultimately led to the destruction of atlantis by the way) and many other such things. I am left in a kind of twilight zone where nothing is too absurd to be believed. How do you debate what is rational at all with someone who is willing to take such ideas seriously?
Strange though it may seem in light of this, the individual in question can be quite logical, reasonable and questioning but just not in this area. Spirituality I suppose might be the blanket term.

I must admit that I find myself a little shaken by the level of fantasy to which people are capable of subscribing. There really doesn't seem to be anything too ridiculous. Doreen et al often make reference to what they call the 'spiritual renaissance'. There does seem to be an alarming increase in this kind of thinking. I have seen 'angel shops' and other such stores selling new-age paraphernalia popping up. It seems so surreal at this point, I'm sure you could open a shop that literally sells 'snake oil' and do a roaring trade. All you need is an apparent expert to use words like 'harmonics', 'energy', 'clensing' and 'healing' in describing it.

While the evidence is far from conclusive, this sort of thing, the upsurge in fundamentalist religion, political tendancies towards 'old fashioned values' which inevitably contain some religious leanings, is there a general tendancy away from rationality brewing?
November 6, 2007 at 5:28 PM
anticant said…
She sounds like a Muslim. There are billions of them.

Rational argument isn't on any of these folks' agendas. It's far too dull and boring.
November 6, 2007 at 8:59 PM
pacificblue said…
Hi Mr Stephen,

i am a student from Singapore and i have just read your book entitled "the philosophy gym".

I found it to be a brilliant piece of writing especially in your ability to present many different sophisticated philosophical arguments in a clear and succinct manner . Your argument regarding homosexuality was particularly interesting and i must admit , it even corrected my initial prejudices regarding the issue many thanks!
November 7, 2007 at 3:18 AM
Stephen Law said…
Many thanks, Daniel.
November 7, 2007 at 9:03 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Evil God Challenge and the "classical" theist's response

On another blog, FideCogitActio, some theists of a "classical" stripe (that's to say, like Brian Davies, Edward Feser) are criticisng the Evil God Challenge (or I suppose, trying to show how it can be met, or sidestepped). The main post includes this: In book I, chapter 39 , Aquinas argues that “there cannot be evil in God” (in Deo non potest esse malum). Atheists like Law must face the fact that, if the words are to retain any sense, “God” simply cannot be “evil”. As my comments in the thread at Feser’s blog aimed to show, despite how much he mocks “the privation theory of evil,” Law himself cannot escape its logic: his entire argument requires that the world ought to appear less evil if it is to be taken as evidence of a good God. Even though he spurns the idea that evil is a privation of good, his account of an evil world is parasitic on a good ideal; this is no surprise, though, since all evil is parasitic on good ( SCG I, 11 ). Based on the conclusions of se...
446 comments
Read more

EVIDENCE, MIRACLES AND THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS

(Published in Faith and Philosophy 2011. Volume 28, Issue 2, April 2011. Stephen Law. Pages 129-151) EVIDENCE, MIRACLES AND THE EXISTENCE OF JESUS Stephen Law Abstract The vast majority of Biblical historians believe there is evidence sufficient to place Jesus’ existence beyond reasonable doubt. Many believe the New Testament documents alone suffice firmly to establish Jesus as an actual, historical figure. I question these views. In particular, I argue (i) that the three most popular criteria by which various non-miraculous New Testament claims made about Jesus are supposedly corroborated are not sufficient, either singly or jointly, to place his existence beyond reasonable doubt, and (ii) that a prima facie plausible principle concerning how evidence should be assessed – a principle I call the contamination principle – entails that, given the large proportion of uncorroborated miracle claims made about Jesus in the New Testament documents, we should, in the absence of indepen...
159 comments
Read more

Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism refuted

Here's my central criticism of Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN). It's novel and was published in Analysis last year. Here's the gist. Plantinga argues that if naturalism and evolution are true, then semantic epiphenomenalism is very probably true - that's to say, the content of our beliefs does not causally impinge on our behaviour. And if semantic properties such as having such-and-such content or being true cannot causally impinge on behaviour, then they cannot be selected for by unguided evolution. Plantinga's argument requires, crucially, that there be no conceptual links between belief content and behaviour of a sort that it's actually very plausible to suppose exist (note that to suppose there are such conceptual links is not necessarily to suppose that content can be exhaustively captured in terms of behaviour or functional role, etc. in the way logical behaviourists or functionalists suppose). It turns o...
151 comments
Read more