This was recently brought up in Alexander's intro thread, and I'm posting it here so everybody can follow it and/or provide feedback.
Assertions of an active conspiracy are common, I'm glad you aren't saying that, but you're very nearly saying that to the extent you misunderstand scientists and the scientific community.AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:Just with regards to scientists choosing their research in certain directions. It's exactly like you said, they need to allocate time and resources to endeavours they think are likely to be fruitful. To think their assessment of fruitlessness in paranormal/psychic research is based for a 100% on past research is naive to me. There are other contributing factors, philosophical and personal in nature. I accept your point that most if not all scientists care a lot about the truth, but they are still bound by their own positions and beliefs. I never stated there was a conspiracy, that's just you putting words into my mouth. But there's no guarantee there aren't collective biases they aren't seeing.
If there is any bias at all, it's in favor of the paranormal.
I'll start with a bit of an anecdote (although it risks dating me):
When I was younger, I was intensely interested in the paranormal. Particularly ghosts and psychic phenomenon.
I accepted the then common belief that these things were true, but didn't blindly accept the common explanation for them; I wanted to know what they were, and how they worked.
I spent time pondering over experiments as I learned more about science, trying to work out theories (testable) about what the mechanisms of ghosts/etc..
Eventually I learned that all of these experiments I was trying to design had already been done. Looking more into them, it was actually pretty disappointing. All of these great ideas, and people beat me to them!
Not only had they been done, but they absolutely failed to show any positive result. Not that ghosts weren't understood, but that there just wasn't even any unexplained phenomena there to begin with. It's not just machines, humans and psychics can't even see ghosts or tell us anything about them when controlled (compared to each other without preexisting knowledge or collusion).
I then went on later to learn about real stuff like quantum physics that is much more mysterious -- and by virtue of being real, more interesting.
There's something very important to understand here: This is not an uncommon story. It's not just my story, but a story you will hear again and again.
The more widespread skeptic movement really only got started in the late 70's with CSI, following the work of James Randi in the late 60's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Milli ... _Challenge).
Many scientists even through the middle of the last century were abuzz with interest in the supernatural. Huge amounts of money spent on it -- not necessarily wasted, if at least we learned something (you do have to at least try, and sometimes you're wrong, but it's not a waste to learn something is a dead end).
This is not an issue science has simply ignored, but has been (mostly) burnt out on by constant experiment.
Scientists were apparently being duped left and right by common magician tricks before Randi came on the scene (it had been a generation since Houdini was murdered for being a skeptic).
There are a number of reasons they were so easily duped. First off they really wanted to believe in the supernatural for personal reasons, and secondly (and more importantly) because of ambition. Even if you hate the supernatural, you find a way to love it if there's any chance of it being real, because you don't hate Nobel prizes.
Science, as you fail to understand, is founded on a sort of one-upmanship and proving each other wrong -- particularly innovating in a new field to prove something as yet uncharted.
There's an enormous bias there to explore the unknown and hope you find something that makes you famous, and that bias overrides anything else you could speculate on; so much so that scientists will readily see things that aren't there, chasing their tails for decades after an elusive proof until somebody corrects them with objective evidence (sometimes they don't wise up after that, even, which is when they become pseudoscientists).
It's more a problem that we spend too much time looking for things that aren't there, rather than too little.
Paranormal research IS still ongoing, by the way.
Here's a list of universities that claim to educate or research parapsychology:
http://www.parapsych.org/section/34/uni ... on_in.aspx
(obviously a biased source in favor of it)
The desire to discover something uncharted is so strong that it even STILL overrides reasonable parsimony for many.
To think anything else is ignorant of the past research, and of human nature itself. Scientists are humans too, and like the rest have a distinct interest and will to believe in something extraordinary.AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:To think their assessment of fruitlessness in paranormal/psychic research is based for a 100% on past research is naive to me.
Wouldn't it be awesome if we could transcend our mortal forms as spirits? If we could bend the laws of the universe to our wills?
Of course. Nobody (or scarcely anybody) really WANTS to be mortal. We all want superpowers. It it nothing but rational objective evidence that divests us of that belief.
Yes,AlexanderVeganTheist wrote:There are other contributing factors, philosophical and personal in nature.
Will to believe in the extraordinary, and Ambition. Those favor the exploration and belief/hope in the supernatural for scientists, not the other way around.
Also, scientists in general are only slightly less likely to be religious than the general public (only significantly less likely if they're particularly good at their jobs), but in the field there still are many religious scientists.
Only somewhere around 1/3 of scientists openly identify as atheists, with about 1/3 'agnostic', and 1/3 still believing in some kind of god, and within that third, some half (15% of all scientists) of which are overtly religious, and believe sincerely and strongly in the supernatural. (this from wiki and various surveys)
http://news.rice.edu/2014/02/16/misconc ... new-study/The study also found that 18 percent of scientists attended weekly religious services, compared with 20 percent of the general U.S. population; 15 percent consider themselves very religious
That's a very strong bias. If you think the fundamentalist Christians wouldn't scramble to research (and fund better than any study in history) anything that even gave a whiff of poking holes in materialism and suggested anything like a soul, you have another think coming.