Michael Prescott's Blog

When worldviews collide

Anyone who reads the skeptical literature will have noticed that, all too often, skeptics say or insinuate that those who believe in life after death are irrational, gullible, credulous, simpleminded, etc. Obviously, this kind of name-calling is antithetical to open, courteous debate. It is also, in my opinion, quite unfair. As I see it, there is enough evidence to justify a belief in life after death, even on the part of a rational, intelligent, serious-minded person in full possession of critical thinking skills.

But there is also a certain amount of ambiguity in the evidence, leaving some room for doubt. In other words, the evidence is highly suggestive, perhaps even compelling, but not conclusive. And there is a natural human tendency to doubt something that we cannot see with our own eyes, and to question claims that sound too good to be true. Most of us were taken in by childhood stories about Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. We are now a bit jaded. We won't be fooled again.

Doubt is understandable. Belief is also understandable. Neither position is inherently irrational, and neither position deserves to be treated with scorn and ridicule.

Skeptics frequently imply that anyone who disagrees with them on this subject is driven by a pathological fear of death or a narcissistic desire to live forever. It would be fairer, and more respectful to their opponents, if they simply acknowledged that the evidence, while the equivocal, is not negligible and that conclusions other than their own are defensible. This simple change of tone would go a long way toward improving the dialogue.

Of course it would also be good if those of us on the pro-afterlife side would remember to treat our critics with respect, and to eschew vituperation and armchair psychological analysis. The empirical case in favor of the afterlife is stronger than skeptics admit, but not as strong as the more ardent true believers aver.

I've sometimes thought that if the issue of the afterlife were on trial, the verdict would depend on whether it was a criminal or a civil case. In a civil case, the verdict is reached by a simple majority of the jury, who decide on the basis of a preponderance of the evidence. In a criminal case, the jury must reach a unanimous verdict, and to convict they must be certain beyond a reasonable doubt. I think the evidence for the afterlife is strong enough to satisfy the requirements of a civil trial but probably not those of a criminal trial.

In these circumstances, a cooling of the rhetoric on both sides of the debate would be desirable. Unfortunately when the issue is the nature of reality and the meaning of life, it's hard to maintain an attitude of decorous equanimity. Perhaps that's one reason the debate gets so heated. For both skeptics and believers, the stakes are just too high.

Podcast fever - catch it!

Chris Carter, author of the excellent Parapsychology and the Skeptics, was interviewed by Skeptico recently. Here's a link to the podcast and transcript.

Personally, I think Carter pretty much destroyed the interviewer in the last series of exchanges, which concern the open-mindedness (or lack thereof) of media skeptics.

Not that I'm biased or anything.

Do you believe in miracles?

Authors get blurbs all the time, but here's one I found pretty remarkable. It appears in Dinesh D'Souza's new book What's So Great about Christianity:

"As an unbeliever I passionately disagree with Dinesh D'Souza on some of his positions. But he is a first-rate scholar whom I feel absolutely compelled to read. His thorough research and elegant prose have elevated him into the top ranks of those who champion liberty and individual responsibility. Now he adds Christianity to his formula for a good society, and although non-Christians and non-theists may disagree with some of his arguments, we ignore him at our peril. D'Souza's book takes the debate to a new level. Read it."

- Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine

Whatever you may think of D'Souza, Shermer, skeptics, or Christianity, I have just one question for you:

Can you imagine James Randi ever providing a quote like this?

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P.S. Although I don't accept its central argument, I still found D'Souza's provocative book The Enemy at Home intensely interesting and hard to put down. But be warned: whether you're a conservative or a liberal, the book will infuriate you. Guaranteed.

Who's in crisis?

On a comments thread, Leo mentioned (somewhat off topic, but we'll let that pass) that he'd been engaged in online debate with a skeptic. Among his other arguments, the skeptic had this to say:

Crisis apparitions.. the people are in a crisis. Under great emotional stress people are very likely to have their perceptions altered(the time slowing down effect is a good example, which I believe has been found to be a manipulation of the memory of the event and not the perception of the actual occurrence of the event) and it's not a stretch for them to believe they see loved ones.

This and other pronouncements were presented with an air of authority, an almost condescending weariness at having to explain the patently obvious.

But here's the rub. "Crisis apparitions" are events in which a person sees the apparition of a loved one and later learns that the loved one in question was having a crisis at the time. Usually the loved one was dying at that moment, a fact that the percipient was unaware of.

In other words, the person in crisis is not the percipient, but the person whose apparition is perceived.

Here is a fairly standard crisis apparition case from the 19th century, cited in an article by Scott Rogo:

I sat one evening reading, when on looking up from my book, I distinctly saw a school-friend of mine, to whom I was very much attached, standing near the door I was about to exclaim at the strangeness of her visit when, to my horror, there were no signs of anyone in the room but my mother. I related what I had seen to her, knowing she could not have seen, as she was sitting with her back towards the door, nor did she hear anything unusual, and was greatly amused at my scare, suggesting I had read too much or been dreaming.

A day or so after this strange event, I had news to say my friend was no more. The strange part was that I did not even know she was ill, much less in danger so could not have felt anxious at the time on her account, but may have been thinking of her; that I cannot testify. Her illness was short, and death very unexpected. Her mother told me she spoke of me not long before she died ... She died the same evening and about the same time that I saw her vision, which was the end of October, 1874.

Note that the person relating this story was most definitely not in a crisis. He was sitting and reading a book. The apparition itself scared him, but he was apparently quite relaxed until then. And this case is typical of thousands - literally thousands - that have been collected.

Thus the skeptic's apparently knowledgeable debunking is based on a faulty assumption: "The people [meaning the people who see the apparitions] are in a crisis ... under great emotional stress ... their perceptions altered."

Not so. The people who see the apparitions are not under stress, not in a crisis at all.

Now, anyone who has studied the subject of crisis apparitions must know this. We can conclude, then, that the skeptic has never studied the subject. He knows literally nothing about it. He does not even know what the term "crisis apparition" means.

Yet he is sure he knows it's all bunk. And he is willing to state as much with confidence and conviction.

How much of skepticism fits this description? How much of it is mere bluster by people who have never looked at even one case study of the phenomena they deride?

And why should anyone take them seriously?

Clash of the titans

This story from The Daily Grail only underscores my suspicion that media skeptics and debunkers are much less confident in their position than their bluster would suggest.

Note how Richard Dawkins simply refuses to discuss any actual facts or evidence, preferring to rely on verbalistic debating tactics. When Rupert Sheldrake declines to play along, Dawkins packs up his video gear and goes home.

So long, and thanks for all the fishiness

Here's another excellent post by Greg Taylor of The Daily Grail, this time pointing out that James Randi's fabled Million Dollar Challenge will officially end in two years. 

For reasons I explored in a series of posts starting here, it will not be missed. Well, not by me, anyway.

Weighty matters

Here's a trivial thing I noticed a while ago. For some reason it stuck in my mind. In a comments thread at a political website, people were arguing about whether or not Mitt Romney's religion would affect his chances in the primaries. I'm not getting into that. What interested me was a comment left by one of the participants:

All religions have strange beliefs. Belief in a invisible massless soul is as strange as you can get.

Apparently we are meant to understand that a belief in something invisible and massless is inherently ridiculous. But why?

Certainly there is nothing inherently crazy about the idea of something invisible. All sorts of things are invisible to the human eye, yet they surely exist. And some things are just invisible, period. As far as I know, there's no way to obtain a visual image of a quark, but there seems to be no doubt that quarks exist.

The key word, then, is not invisible but massless. Yet here too, it seems unreasonable to assert that nothing can exist without mass. After all, until recently it was assumed that the subatomic particles called neutrinos had no mass. I remember Isaac Asimov going on at some length about the strange massless property of neutrinos in one of his popular science books. This was the conventional wisdom for many years, although recent observations have suggested that neutrinos do have some slight, barely detectable mass, after all.

If, for decades, it was perfectly acceptable for neutrinos to be both invisible and massless, and nobody ridiculed scientists for believing and asserting precisely this, then why should the concept of an invisible, massless soul be any more risible?

The answer, of course, is that science - considered by many to be the ultimate arbiter of the facts of reality - has stamped its imprimatur on the idea of the neutrino, but not on the idea of the soul. In fact, some of science's more militant propagandists have asserted that there is not and cannot be a soul, though their arguments are more ideological than empirical. (They simply assume that materialism is true, then draw the conclusion that nothing nonmaterial can exist. This is circular reasoning.)

In sum, we were expected (until lately) to accept the reality of an invisible massless neutrino, but to reject and ridicule the reality of an invisible massless soul. All because science "says so."

What this amounts to is an appeal to authority. Strictly speaking, this is a logical fallacy, but it might be acceptable if science were the relevant authority in this matter. Is it? Science is a tool of investigation supremely adept at ferreting out the truth about things like quarks and neutrinos but, arguably, not at all suited to dealing with matters of consciousness and spirit.

And by the way, what kind of visibility and mass are possessed by consciousness? How do you weigh a thought, or see an emoti0n? You may be able to map corresponding brain states or weigh parts of the brain, but this is not the same as seeing and weighing the content of consciousness - which is, of course, ineffable, yet real. One might even argue that the content of consciousness is the most real thing we know.

In any event, it's interesting to see how the skeptical position sloppily accepts an obvious double standard. Invisible and massless entities are accepted without demur if they are consistent with the materialist worldview, but rejected out of hand if they contradict materialism.

It's an argument that, like the humble neutrino itself, doesn't seem to carry much weight.

The secret Gardner

A while ago I discussed skeptic Martin Gardner's remarkably ill-informed debunking of the famed medium Leonora Piper. Shortly afterward, Greg Taylor of The Daily Grail emailed me with some pertinent remarks. I meant to post these at the time, but it slipped my mind.

Well, better late than never.

Greg wrote,

Came across something when reading an SPR journal which is a decent response to one of Martin Gardner's accusations against Leonora Piper. Thought you'd probably be interested in it:

Gardner: "Mediums in a city know one another. Those who patronize one medium usually visit others. At the time there were scores of mediums in Boston, forming a network of scoundrels who passed information freely back and forth."

SPR Journal: "That Mrs. Piper should have worked up the dossiers of all the sitters some time before was practically impossible. No doubt it was permissible to assume a freemasonry amongst professional mediums, and that any information obtained by one of the fraternity would be at the disposal of all. But a considerable proportion of Mrs. Piper's sitters were not even numbered amongst the 500 odd Members and Associates of the A.B.S.P.R. ; and very few had ever been to a professional medium before." ...

Also, as you mentioned the simultaneous voice and writing communication in your original blog, I thought it worth pointing out this passage from Michael Sage's book on Piper. [Free e-book can be downloaded here - MP.] Fascinating aspect of the phenomenon IMO:

"The voice may keep up a conversation with a sitter while the hand keeps up another in writing with someone else on a wholly different subject. If the sitter who is talking with the hand allows his attention to be distracted by what the voice says, the hand recalls his attention by its movements. When anyone is speaking to the hand control, it is necessary to speak to the hand, and close to the hand, or there is a risk of not being understood. In short, one must behave as if the hand were  a complete and independent being.

"Observation of this phenomenon suggested to Dr Hodgson that by using the left hand he could perhaps obtain three communications on three different subjects. He tried and succeeded, although imperfectly; no doubt because, in the normal state, the left hand is not used to writing...

"The writing often looks like that on a lithographic stone, and can only be read when reflected in a glass; this writing, which is called mirror-writing, is produced as rapidly as ordinary writing, though Mrs Piper, in her normal state, would be unable to write in this way. This mirror-writing has been often observed in subjects who write automatically; the cause for it is still to be found."

Bored now

Quite often on this blog, I've tried to counter various skeptical arguments about the paranormal. But I probably won't be doing as much of that in the future. The reason is that I'm bored with skepticism.

A good illustration of how boring skepticism can be is found in a discussion thread about the death of biochemist Jacques Benveniste, a longtime bete noir of James Randi. One of the participants in the thread has the screen name Ray Haupt. Let's look at some of what he has to say.

Study of anomalies surely must be interesting, but anomalies are things that exist in some way different from their relatives. A three legged duck, for instance, would be quite interesting.

But what is so interesting about things that don't exist? What these professors are doing is playing into superstition and ignorance, not enlightenment. The fact that some people think that things exist does not make them exist. Good examples are the Loch Ness Monster and UFO's.

In short those good professors quack like three legged ducks but I do envy Dr. Bauer for having spent a summer at Loch Ness, and quite honestly I would jump at the chance to go on that wild goose chase if it were offered.

Ho hum. We have been down these paths before.

This is a pretty good summary of the skeptical attitude. There is the affected ennui ("Ho hum"). The dead certainty that some things just "don't exist." (I agree about the Loch Ness Monster and am indifferent to UFOs, but it's the attitude that I'm addressing here.) The claim that the other side represents "superstition and ignorance," which naturally implies that the skeptical side stands for reason and knowledge. The casual implication that any investigation of the paranormal is a "wild goose chase." Above all, the sarcastically blase tone.

Here's another post from Ray:

Some things deserve a hard look by scientists and when the evidence has been examined then perhaps some logical conclusion will emerge. The Loch Ness monster, for example, has a certain appeal, it was investigated, and the logical conclusion is that it is just plain silly. The same can be said for reincarnation with a little bit of twist, the twist being that there is not only no solid evidence of reincarnation, but there is not even any soft evidence. All there is is the testimony of enthusiasts, and nothing more.

In fact, Dave, I did read a book on the matter called "Reliving Past Lives" written by some chick named Helen Wambaugh who claims a PhD, and predictably, resided for many years in California. Fortunately I did not spend any money on this book. I pinched it from a B&B in British Columbia. It was first published in 1966. Can PhD's be retracted by the educational institution? Here is a case where it should be. Is Wambaugh a member of SSE by any chance??

No one among skeptics that I have met would refuse a fair hearing on a subject such as Cold Fusion even though it does seem kind of unlikely at this point in time. That is, if there is some reason to believe that the claimant is credible and actually has some evidence to share, even thin evidence.

More of the same, of course. Now we are told there is no evidence of any kind for reincarnation. Really? Has Ray ever looked at Ian Stevenson's data? That's unlikely, but he did read a book "by some chick named Helen Wambaugh who claims a PhD." In passing I note the casual misogyny of "some chick." Normally I wouldn't mention this, except that the skeptical movement is overwhelmingly dominated by aggressive males, and this remark fits the profile to a tee. Note that he says Wambaugh (her name is more commonly spelled Wambach, though either spelling is acceptable) "claims a PhD." She didn't just claim it, she had a PhD, but the skeptics can't bear the thought that someone who disagrees with them might have any academic standing.

Ray tells us that he "pinched" the book from a bed and breakfast. Is he being funny, or is he seriously admitting to petty theft? Then he asks if PhDs can be retracted. Amusingly, James Randi has made exactly this same point (cited in Parapsychology and the Skeptics, by Chris Carter). Randi, of course, is no PhD and I'm betting Ray isn't, either, but both are eager to dictate who may or may not hold that title.

Then there's the "we're actually so open-minded" argument, used this time in relation to cold fusion. Skeptics, Ray says, would give a fair hearing to cold fusion claims. Really now. Would they?

Next we hear from another skeptic, confusingly enough also named Ray. His screen name is RayGavel, and he quotes his own long, long, long review of Wambach/Wambaugh's book. He does make some valid points, and I'm not here to carry water for Wambach, whose methods have been criticized even by people sympathetic to parapsychology. (Scott Rogo, for instance, dismisses Wambach's work as being of little value in his book The Search for Yesterday.) What's interesting to me aren't the more substantive criticisms but the casual asides.

Here are a few highlights. The material in square brackets is RayGavel's; for some reason he uses these brackets a lot.

According to Sagan (1996, p. 138) "... hypnosis is an unreliable way to refresh memory."

This may be true, but since when is astronomer Carl Sagan an authority on hypnotism?

Wambach questions whether the experience is fantasy or a reflected reality, and, after ten years and over 2000 hypnotic regression sessions, she feels she has her answer. Her subjects had neatly "divided themselves into 49.4% past lives as women and 50.6% as men -- a biological fact in past time periods." She claims the subjects couldn't have arrived at these percentages "by telepathy, fantasy, or chance alone. Past-life recall did accurately reflect the past."

[HOLY STATISTICS BATMAN!!! I wonder how many pages of data she had to sift through to come up with ~that~ correlation. Where did she obtain the data she used for comparison purposes? How can she be certain these percentages were "a biological fact in past time periods"? Where did she obtain the census figures for the entire planet, for example, and just why is she so enamored with telepathy?]

This is just silly. Is RayGavel seriously contending that a roughly 50-50 split between males and females is not typical of all eras and cultures? 78% of Wambach's subjects were female, yet in the aggregate they recalled male and female past lives in almost equal measure.

Moreover, she found many other statistical correlations, which RayGavel doesn't find room to mention in his long, long, long review.

Though no scientific evidence exists for telepathy Wambach seems to accept it as a matter of fact.

Here is skepticism at its best - when there are thousands of studies conducted over more than a hundred years, just say there's "no evidence."

During an abnormal psychology class Wambach's student, Sheryl, relates a dream of a car crash whereby she is decapitated. Wambach interprets the dream as a conflict between having fun and the need to study. The decapitation indicates worries about approaching exams.

Three months later Wambach finds out Sheryl was killed in a car accident that nearly decapitated her. That seems proof to Wambach that "Sheryl had foreseen her own death."

[Nowhere does Wambach mention the possibility of coincidence.]

Ah, "coincidence," the favorite last resort of the skeptic. A young woman dreams of being decapitated in a fatal car crash and three months later she is "nearly" decapitated in a fatal car crash. Coincidence!

She relates the story of a young housewife who, after one of Wambach's lectures, hands in a journalism assignment for an imaginary news event. The young woman writes of an airplane crash, giving the flight number (401), date, place (Florida), and the fact one hostess survives and another dies.

The imaginary news story turns out to be a horribly prophetic fact -- all the details match exactly, except the date. Wambach is "astounded", and speculates that the student "was in a mildly altered state of consciousness... [and had] tapped in to a probable future reality..."

[No explanation of how that would be possible, but the details ~almost~ match exactly, so it's considered a 'hit'.]

And why would this not be considered a hit? Just because we don't understand the mechanism? Skeptics seem to think that unless we can explain how something happens, we aren't justified in believing that it happens, even if we have direct evidence of it. When you think about it, this mindset is totally bizarre. We understand very little about life and the universe - we have far more questions than answers - yet we continue to make observations. How could we do otherwise? There still is no generally accepted theory of gravity. Should we ignore all observations of falling objects because we don't have the theoretical wherewithal to explain them?

I can think of a number of questions that, if answered, might provide a more mundane explanation for the woman's story. For example, where was the woman from? Did she have any connection to Florida? Had she or any relatives ever flown in Florida? Since she wrote her story right before the Christmas holidays, was she or any relative going to be traveling by air during that time period?

How, pray tell, would any of these lines of investigation help to explain the apparently accurate premonition? RayGavel seems to think that the woman may have known the three-digit flight number through normal means, but even if this is true (and there is no evidence for it), so what? Tens of thousands of flights take off and land safely every day. Just knowing the flight number would not help the woman to accurately predict that this one particular flight would end in tragedy.

Wambach admits she is fascinated by parapsychology and decides to teach it full time instead of her usual courses in Child Development and General Psychology. She decides to devote her attention and energies to parapsychology, hypnosis, and ESP.

[I wasn't surprised -- her acceptance of paranormal events and theories, such as telepathy, ESP, and reincarnation, was plainly evident.]

Get that? Wambach "admits" to an interest in parapsychology - as if  this is a shameful secret that RayGavel has managed to ferret out. Then he says proudly he "wasn't surprised." Well, since the book Wambach wrote is about reincarnation and is titled Reliving Past Lives: The Evidence under Hypnosis, why exactly would he be surprised? "Her acceptance of paranormal events and theories ... was plainly evident." Gosh, ya think? What gave it away?

As noted, some of the specific criticisms of Wambach's cases are probably justified, but there's nothing in those criticisms that any reasonably astute readers couldn't have come to on their own. All that RayGavel adds to the discussion is snark, false generalizations about the lack of evidence for the paranormal, and weak appeals to coincidence.

As for the other Ray, all he adds is belligerence and general pigheadedness - reminding me of something said by yet another Ray - the academic skeptic Ray Hyman, who observed that, "As a whole, parapsychologists are nice, honest people, while the critics are cynical, nasty people."

If you doubt it, consider this parting shot from Ray Haupt. Remember that the ostensible subject of the discussion, before it got sidetracked, was the recent death of Jacques Benveniste, who studied the properties of highly diluted solutions.

"Is it true," Ray Haupt quips, "that Benveniste wanted the undertaker to use a 30C dilution of embalming fluid?"

Ha ha. Good one, man.

I don't know about any of you, but increasingly I find responding to these "criticisms," or even reading them, to be a waste of time and energy. It's like arguing with members of the Flat Earth Society. At some point, you just have to recognize that these folks have made up their minds (usually without even glancing at the evidence presented by the other side) and are not going to be persuaded to think differently, no matter what. Which in itself might not be so bad, if they were friendly and civil - but too often, they're hostile, sarcastic, self-righteous, and frankly, kinda weird. I mean, what is it with people who can be this sure of themselves when most of them know little or nothing about the subject and are only repeating what they've heard from such dubious authority figures as James Randi and Carl Sagan?

As Willow would say: "Bored now." Until the skeptics start coming up with some fresh material, I'll be paying a lot less attention to them.

Heads I win, tails you lose

My last post noted that the odd fact that, one day after a well-publicized prayer vigil in Georgia, a heavy rainstorm moved through the drought-ravaged state.

I was thinking more  a little more about this, wondering why the issue stuck in my craw a little bit. After all,I don't much care about praying for rain. It's not an issue of personal importance to me. Then I realized that what troubled me about the story was the skeptical response, which was all too typical of the stubbornly intractable mentality of hardcore skepticism.

Consider what would have happened if no rain had fallen after the prayer vigil was held. The skeptics would have lost no time in declaring this to be "proof positive" that prayer doesn't work.

Instead, rain did fall. Unfazed, the skeptics responded that it wasn't enough rain, or that the rain damaged a church, or that there was a 30% chance of rain in the long-term forecast.

Heads I win, tails you lose.

No matter what the outcome of the prayer vigil experiment (if we can call it that), the skeptics would refuse to revisit their beliefs. Even if a downpour had arrived out of the clear blue sky while the prayer was underway, the skeptics would have chalked it up to that all-explanatory last resort, "coincidence."

A slightly more sophisticated skeptic might say that a single instance proves nothing, and that a whole series of tests must be run in order to establish a meaningful pattern. Fair enough ... but observe that even when whole series of tests are run in other areas of psi investigation, with positive results, the skeptics still refuse to accept the outcome. They quibble about side issues, question the experimenters' honesty, misrespresent the statistics, or simply decline to talk about the subject (except when issuing armchair denunciations). So the issue of running more tests turns out to be a red herring. An infinite number of tests would not change the skeptics' minds. Nothing can change their minds.

Many scientists today accept Karl Popper's thesis that a scientific theory must be falsifiable - that is, there must be some way to test it that could, in principle, disprove it. By this standard, skepticism is an unscientific approach, since clearly it is not falsifiable by any known means. No matter what evidence is presented against the skeptical worldview, skeptics cling to it. There is no psi experiment, no matter how rigorous, that would persuade a Michael Shermer or a James Randi to change his mind (even if, for public consumption, they like to profess their open-mindedness). If 2,000 individual trials of the ganzfeld protocol cannot persuade skeptics that something paranormal is going on, nothing ever will.

But why? What is it about skeptics that makes them so resistant to changing their minds, at least in this area? I think it has to do with the subject of my second-to-last post.

Psi phenomena seem to occur when inhibitions are lowered. Conversely, when inhibitions are high, no such phenomena are likely. In order to encourage psi abilities, you have to lower your inhibitions. In other words, to a certain extent, you have to surrender control.

I think that the skeptics, for the most part, are people unwilling to surrender control. They want to believe that through ratiocination they can achieve control over the circumstances of their lives. For them, any practice of intuition is a threat to this sense of control. Spontaneity, impulsiveness, any sort of emotional freedom is dangerous and scary to them. They must think everything through, analyze and judge, find (or create) rational or rational-seeming connections in order to maintain this feeling of control, which is pivotal to their sense of self.

Control is the province of the ego, which is hypervigilant, paranoid, defensive, and judgmental. Most skeptics are strongly ego-driven. Of course, ego development is a normal and healthy stage in personal growth; but some people get stuck at a level of ego development that is counterproductive. They don't outgrow the aggressive need for certainty (founded on deep insecurities) that is characteristic of adolescence. Long into adulthood and even old age, they remain at the emotional level of teenagers, scared of a world they perceive as hostile, and seeking to compensate for their fears by pretending to be in control of everything around them.

But don't people who pray for rain also seek to control outside circumstances? Yes, but with this difference: they don't attibute the control to their own powers of ratiocination. They regard God, not themselves, as the controlling agent. Even if their own minds are ultimately responsible for any effects that occur, they don't know it. Moreover, the part of their mind that may bring about the results is not the ego, but the intuitive, nonrational part that can be called the subconscious or the higher self - the very part that the ego, in its hubris and neurosis, belittles and denies.    

The ego is built on lies, and its sense of control is itself a lie. At some level the skeptic knows that it is not actually possible to control the world by even the most concerted effort at rationalization. This may explain the unfocused anger and hostility that so many skeptics project. It is unfocused because its actual focus is the ego itself, and this is a truth that the ego can't face. Far easier for the ego to project its negative feelings outward onto other people, demonizing and caricaturing them. Self-hatred becomes hatred of the Other.

A person saddled with an ego-based need for control is not going to surrender control under any circumstances. To accept psi is to relinquish control. It is to acknowledge that the rational mind cannot apprehend all mysteries, that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in the skeptical philosophy. And psi, by its nature, is a realm of ambiguity accessed by surrender of inhibitions. Nothing could be more threatening to the ego.

I think that's why skeptics are so stubborn and, often, so oddly vehement. Any suggestion that psi is real threatens the core of their being - as they perceive it. They will do whatever is necessary to protect themselves from such an attack. They will insist that the coin always comes up a winner, whether it's heads or tails.

And meanwhile, the rain it raineth every day.