Hello all.

Although I have only read this latest interesting summer thread in passing (a small girl at home with an ear infection needs attention), I feel at least some arguments/opinions need a comment.

In both "camps" of the science/religion divide (and for the sake of this argument, there is no sharp division between religion, spirituality and occultism) there are of course fundamentalists. But most of us inhabit the middle regions and find straw man arguments little useful. Most "moderate" skeptics feel fine about arguments like Jake's: "A long chain of coincidences, often bearing deep personal significance, is capable of being a gratifying life without constituting - or trying to constitute - 'proof'. More often than not it is the experiential process that really interests the magician, rather than the results or proving it is responsible for them." In other words, use crystals, homeopathy, ceremonial magick, humanism or whatever as you wish.

It is when religious actors claim the *authority* of science in the public realm through harmonizing or intergrative arguments, or claim political authority to reorient the secular nature of democratic debate, a "skeptical community" forms to counter these claims. Remember that skeptics come in informed and tourist versions, as do occultists and other religious folks. The informed skeptics have actually weighed pros and cons through intensive studies and thus discard new evidence a posteriori, not a priori. Not the knee-jerk "no, because I'm an atheist"-argument of the tourist, but a statistical "not likely given the 1000 previous experiments discarding the theory".

As to the use of science: The understanding of the heterodoxy and multiple developments of magic and esotericism seems developed on this list, so perhaps I should remind you that generally, the same is true for science.

Science is polyvocal, with many disciplines and specialized languages. This is even more so in academia as a whole, with the famous two cultures of science and the humanities. Nevertheless, a common language and a common field of play has been developed, because science is *not* democratic. Or, it is in principle on the level of access and participation (everybody is invited to contribute), but not on the level of argument and theory (you need to know what you're talking about and present it the right way). Skeptics are among those who "patrol" science and public discourse to reveal fallacies and inconsistencies, not because science needs it, but because they want to.

Personally I find their work very useful, even the more radical ones like Randi, Penn & Teller and Dawkins. While they all reveal a lack of understanding the subleties of religion, they do point out some potentially dangerous thought-patterns *on both sides*. And angry men are funny. When they miss the substance of religious claims, they also mirror pro-psychic fundies' lack of understanding science. For example, biology is *not* Darwin or the theory of evolution. It is not even Watson and Crick and DNA. It has progessed far from these fine starting points into genetics, chemistry and ecology. Similarly, physics is not Kepler or Newton. It is not even Einstein, Bohr and Schrödinger. Again, physics has progressed from these fine starting points into quantum field theory, experimental sub-particle physics and speculations on dark matter and energy. So the very vocal minorities on both sides have a very limited understanding of the contemporary intricacies of the other.

As for Uri Geller, whom I have very little knowledge outside second-hand presentations, he might be a very capable magician. But to quote the only absolute authority in this aeon, Dr. Phil: If you see one rat, it generally means 50 more. In other words, I do feel that revealing trickery with Blavatsky, mediums or Geller discredit their "acknowledged successes" (to quote Marie). Which by the way seems acknowledged only by a limited group of tests. I agree that we should not dismiss anything out of hand, but we should be so open-minded our brains fall out either.

Summer greetings from

Jesper.

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Jesper Aagaard Petersen
Research Fellow, Dept. of Archeology and Religious Studies
NTNU, Dragvoll
NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway
Tlf. 0047-735-98312
email: [log in to unmask]