The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science

by Will Storr

  When I phone Eagleman, he is airport-bound, in the back of a New York taxi. After a quick preamble, and entirely without warning, I ask him this most dangerous of questions, the one on whose answer hangs our very concept of what a human being actually is. Is it possible that consciousness might exist outside the brain, perhaps as a kind of field?

  There’s a long, tantalising pause. ‘Um … Ah …’ Another silence. ‘Here’s what I think. I think it’s … I think … I have to be very careful what I say. Okay. It’s absolutely poss— er … let me back up a minute.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘I understand that this is a controversial area.’

  ‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘Well, the idea of materialism is that we’re nothing but pieces and parts. So if you put all those pieces and parts together, then you get consciousness. But we don’t actually know that that’s the right answer. We just assume it is. And it’s probably an okay strategy to burn up a generation doing that because you have to get all the way to the end of a problem to see if you get stuck or if there’s a solution. But it is perfectly possible that materialism will not be a solution and that our science is too young to recognise something else that’s going on. So I think it’s appropriate to have some intellectual humility and scepticism about whether our current physics and biology are sufficient.’

  ‘Wow,’ I say. ‘I really didn’t think you were going to say that.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to get quoted saying that I support Sheldrake’s theories, because I’m not familiar with them,’ he says. ‘But I’m a supporter of people proposing wacky ideas because every single major advance started off as a wacky idea. We’re at a very young period in our science right now. We need ideas. What doesn’t make sense is to pretend that we know the answers and to act as if we’re certain that materialism is going to bring us all the way home, because we have no guarantee of that.’

  Of course, we must remember that Eagleman’s admission doesn’t mean that Sheldrake is right. Science still moves slowly, carefully and by a unique mode of bickering and begrudging nearly-consensus, as it should. And Sheldrake has his own coherence problem – his results tend to be far more significant than those of other parapsychologists, and they are not consistently replicated.

  By the end of it all, though, I am reminded of the way that I felt about UFOs. Back then, no matter how powerful the arguments I heard, no matter how much I realised, rationally, that I should at least accept the possibility of alien space travel, I could not. My unconscious had made a decision. It would not be shifted. And once again, on the question of telepathy, it is broadcasting a great, dark lump of no. I am no less prejudiced than David Irving and the materialist Skeptics: no evidence could ever be good enough. My position is surely deeply unfair. But, still. There it is.

  But I am less sure. A new grey space has been nudged between the black and the white. And it is invigorating to have some mystery back. It feels wonderful to have doubt.

  And I have new doubts, too, that lie beyond the slender limits of telepathy. Sheldrake defended himself easily against many of Wiseman’s attacks. It was the opposite experience from that which I had been led to expect.

  So, what about this James Randi? Could Sheldrake’s criticisms of him also be worth hearing? I have had a long-suppressed intuition, bulging and pleading to be noticed, that says there is something unsavoury about the so-called ‘patron saint of the Skeptics.’ Back at the anti-homeopathy gathering in Manchester, though, I had decided that my feelings on this matter were not to be trusted. They were emotional, not based on evidence, irrational. I accepted this in the spirit that I tend to accept most criticism; my scolders are right because of course they are right. The naughty boy, the thief, the failure, the terrified, obsessive lover. Wrongness is the story of my life.

  But since then, I have learned that hunches can be the result of intelligent calculations. Often, they can be right. I begin to wonder about this ‘strange story’ about ‘a previous encounter’ with Sheldrake that Randi wrote of on his website. Could there actually be grounds for Sheldrake’s calling this icon of reason ‘a liar?’ What happened between them? Could the silent warning song of my unconscious actually, for once, be true?

  15

  ‘A suitable place’

  Everybody loves James Randi. He is a genius. He is an icon. He is truth’s war dog and has been feasting on the feet of the deluded and the dishonest for longer than many of us have been alive. Wired magazine says that ‘he knows more about the workings of science than half the PhDs in America.’ Richard Dawkins has given him a ‘Richard Dawkins award’ and hosted sell-out thousand-dollar-a-head fundraising dinners for his educational foundation. Celebrity magicians Penn and Teller call him ‘our inspiration, our hero, our mentor and our friend.’ Professor Richard Wiseman credits his 1982 book Flim Flam as having a ‘huge impact’ on him, with its ‘hardline approach’ that assumed that ‘none of it is true.’ The former editor of The Skeptic magazine says, ‘He has done more to promote scepticism worldwide than any living individual. And any dead individual as well.’ The founding editor of the US edition has called him ‘the pioneer of the skeptical movement.’ The New York Times has described him as our ‘most celebrated living debunker.’ Isaac Asimov has said, ‘His qualifications as a rational human being are unparalleled.’ Sir John Maddox, the former editor of the world-prestigious science journal Nature, has said, ‘I don’t know what his IQ is, but I’m sure it’s off the scale.’

  And a man who claims to have met a psychic dog says that he is a liar.

  It does not seem possible that Dr Rupert Sheldrake can be right. For one thing, Randi’s boosters are known for their cautious and critical evidence-based thinking. When I was among the Skeptics in Manchester, I wondered how they felt about their own susceptibility to the biases that twist the perspectives of ordinary people. Michael Marshall, who helped organise the conference, told me that their natural inclination for questioning and analysis gave them an ‘inoculation against dogma.’ Skeptic celebrity Dr Steven Novella, a senior fellow at the James Randi Educational Foundation, said, ‘The reason why scepticism is incompatible with dogma and ideology is, it’s very anti-dogmatic and anti-ideological at its core.’

  Hearing all that, it would seem abundantly unlikely that the man the Skeptics exalt as their ‘patron saint’ is a liar. But this is what Sheldrake claims. He says that Randi has a history of behaving in exactly the way that he so aggressively abhors in others – that he is a showman, who lies in service of his celebrity. The Skeptics do not accept this, Sheldrake says, because they are blinded by the biases from which they claim immunity.

  I am not sure what to think. I mean, look at the facts – at that glistered register of acolytes: Dawkins, Wiseman, Novella, Maddox, the New York Times. The forces ranged against Sheldrake could hardly be more impressive. I cannot find a senior scientist or mainstream publication that has anything negative to say about Randi – or much positive about Sheldrake. There is a consensus here. And it is not singing the favours of the psychic dog man.

  But what of my biases? My problem is, I liked Sheldrake. I did so for the same reason that I felt a warming attraction to Harvard’s UFO professor, John Mack. They are fascinating minds, troublemakers, heretics. Their beliefs glitter and pulse and enchant. Wiseman was likeable and funny, yes, but he was the holder of the glitter-extinguisher. He was teacher. He was Dad.

  I used to imagine that our biases and delusions existed on a layer above a solid and clear-sighted base. Beneath your mistakes, I thought, there is your human nature, which is rational and immovable and seeks only truth. If you came to suspect that you were in error, you could easily work your way back to sense. What I now know is that there is no solid base. The machine by which we experience the world is the thing that becomes distorted. And so it is impossible to watch ourselves falling into fallacy. We can be lost without knowing we are lost. And, usually, we are.

  But if this is true for me, then surely it is true for everyone,
no matter how publicly they declare themselves to be ‘free’ or ‘rational’ or ‘critical’ thinkers. Can anyone really be immune? What about Randi? I am suspicious of the coherence of his beliefs, which seem to be held with such a severe level of vehemence that no room is left for doubt. But even so, can Sheldrake possibly be correct? It would be testament, indeed, to humanity’s powers of self-deception if the Skeptics, of all people, could be shown to have unquestioningly installed a liar as their leader. But it would be telling, too, if it turns out that Sheldrake is wrong. It would say much about the truth-finding power of consensus and the deceptive energies in Sheldrake’s brain which have led him to unfairly malign a man who is a hero, and not an enemy, of science.

  I start by reading and comparing the various life stories of Randall James Hamilton Zwinge has recounted in interviews that he has given to the media over the years. The stories that have been reported are astonishing.

  James Randi was born an illegitimate ‘genius or near genius’ on 7 August 1928. A child prodigy with an IQ of 168, he spent his leisure time pursuing personal projects, such as making photo-electric cells and doing chemistry experiments in his basement. By the age of eight he was arguing with other children about the existence of Santa Claus. By nine, he had invented a pop-up toaster. Canadian officials decided that he was too intelligent to benefit from school, so he was given a special pass that said he did not have to attend. Instead, he educated himself in the Toronto Public Library and the Royal Ontario Museum where, by the age of twelve, he had taught himself geography, history, astronomy, calculus, psychology, science, mathematics and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics.

  Randi was fifteen when he committed his first public debunking. He claims that his exposé of a ruse at a local Spiritualist church, the ‘Assembly of Inspired Thought’, led to his dramatic arrest. At seventeen he had a bicycle accident in which his back was broken. He spent thirteen months in a body-cast, using the time to teach himself the skills in magic and lock-breaking that would be essential to future work in conjuring and escapology. He confounded his doctors, who told him that he would never walk again (or, in a later account, walk straight again).

  Still seventeen, he was back at school – Toronto’s Oakwood Collegiate Institute – where he achieved ‘mediocre’ results, but only because he chose not to apply himself. He brought his first exam to a premature finish by writing beneath a question ‘This is a premise I cannot support, signed Randall James Hamilton Zwinge’ and walking out, refusing to take any more tests.

  Still seventeen, he joined Peter March’s Travelling Circus and began performing in a turban as a wizard named Prince Ibis. Still seventeen (he did a lot when he was seventeen), he took a job writing newspaper horoscopes as an ‘experiment’, in which he wanted see how easy it was to dupe the public with paranormal claims. That came to a dramatic end when he saw two office workers (or, in another account, two prostitutes) reading his column. When the office workers/prostitutes (or, in a third account, a waitress) told him that they took his astrological predictions seriously, he was so disgusted that he resigned, vowing never again to pose as having supernatural abilities. (In yet another contradictory account, this crucial, life-changing resignation came about when he was asked to use his telepathic powers to find a lost child.) ‘I could not live with that kind of lie. So I went back to the rabbits and the handkerchiefs.’

  Whether it was horoscope- or lost-child-related, Randi retired his psychic pretence when he was seventeen. At least that’s what I thought, until I read an article in the Toronto Evening Telegram which reported that he first realised he had ESP aged nine and that he would habitually pick up the telephone before it rang because he ‘sensed’ that someone had dialled his number. In a follow-up article, he claimed: ‘Certain perceptions have been given me and I have improved them by deep study of the science of mental telepathy and clairvoyance.’ The headline was ‘He Sees the Future’. Randi was twenty-two.

  It was somewhere around this point that he became an escapologist. Interviews that he has given offer an almost unbelievable account of his daredevilry. He has freed himself from a straitjacket while hanging upside down over Japan, called his mother from a coffin in Halifax harbour, broken out of twenty-eight jail cells in Canada and the US (although sometimes he says it was twenty-two, ‘all over the world’), sealed himself in an underwater casket for an hour and forty-four minutes, wrestled himself loose from a straitjacket as he hung by his heels above Broadway and from out of helicopters and from over the top of Niagara Falls and, in 1974, won a Guinness World Record for entombing himself unclothed in ice under medical surveillance for forty-three minutes and eight seconds.

  He toured with Alice Cooper and got to know Salvador Dali. On a radio show in 1964, he first offered his cash prize – ten thousand dollars to anyone who could demonstrate a paranormal power under controlled conditions. His great fame as a debunker, though, began during a 1972 episode of The Tonight Show, on which he humiliated the celebrity spoon-bender Uri Geller by insisting that he couldn’t touch the metal props before showtime, then watched as he spent an agonising twenty-two minutes with his super-powers mysteriously paralysed. That was to be the start of a feud that ultimately turned legal, at one point threatening to bankrupt Randi, who has said that a dying wish is to have his ashes thrown in Geller’s eyes. Two years after The Tonight Show, Randi helped found the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), the forerunner to today’s James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), a charitable organisation that seeks to protect people from ‘the true danger of uncritical thinking.’

  Since the 1960s, his challenge fund has grown to one million dollars and the celebrity and reputation of the man who has been declared ‘one of America’s most original and fearless thinkers’ has swollen with it. And ‘The Amazing Randi’ is in little doubt as to the risks of his work. He has claimed to receive regular death threats, telling one journalist, ‘I xerox everything and send it to the FBI. If I die mysteriously they will know who to go to’ and another, ‘I don’t answer the door unless I know who’s there.’ But it is worth it. For belief in the supernatural is heralding a new dark age. It can be even fatal. ‘It’s a very dangerous thing to believe in nonsense. You’re giving away your money to the charlatans, you’re giving away your emotional security, and sometimes your life.’

  As for the JREF’s cash prize, nobody has yet passed its preliminary stages. No formal test has ever been carried out. ‘It’s the simplest challenge in the world and nobody has even come close,’ he has said. ‘People continue to believe in this claptrap. The level of human gullibility simply amazes me. There are just millions and millions of suckers out there.’

  *

  He is a record-breaking, toaster-inventing, hieroglyphics-reading, jail-cell-escaping, helicopter-dangling, crook-baiting, doctor-defying, fear-baiting certified genius. No wonder they call him amazing.

  Who knows what’s behind the inconsistencies in his stories? But let’s be charitable. James Randi is now in his eighties. He has been giving interviews for more than six decades. Journalists may make errors and memory may distort. Narratives become simplified. But he does exhibit one particular self-deception on a rather grander scale: an apparent blindness to his own biases. It is common for Skeptics to claim that they are truly open-minded, even when their behaviour suggests that they are anything but. James Randi, though, takes this phenomenon to a fascinating new level. He even rejects the label ‘debunker’, insisting that ‘I am an investigator. I don’t go into things with the attitude that something is not so and that I am going to prove it to be not so. I am willing to be shown that something is true.’

  And yet he is routinely merciless with proponents of what he calls ‘woo woo’. He ridicules and insults them in public appearances and in blog posts. Those who criticise him often get called ‘grubbies’. He gives annual ‘Pigasus’ awards to the offenders that he judges to be most egregious, explaining to reporters, ‘We will give awa
y the million dollars when pigs can fly.’ It is incredible that Randi can sincerely hold these two violently opposing positions: trustworthy judge and vicious prosecutor. But that, I suppose, is the human brain.

  Randi uses the JREF’s challenge as a mode of evidence to indicate that scientists such as Sheldrake are deceiving people; that they don’t really believe what they claim. ‘Why isn’t someone like Sheldrake coming after it?’ he has asked. ‘He stays away from it because, in my estimation, he knows full well that this business of being stared at and the dog that knows its owners are coming home will not pass any test. If it will pass the test I will give him the million dollars. I will give it to him in the middle of Piccadilly Circus, naked.’

  Sheldrake calls him ‘a man of very doubtful character indeed.’ He says he is a ‘thug.’ While Randi has, on one occasion, admitted a physical assault on a man who made unpleasant allegations against him (‘One shot, to the chops. He went down, and was carried out. Very satisfying, I assure you’) and threatened another, his aggression is otherwise verbal. ‘I want people to consider my point of view,’ he has said. ‘If they wish to reject it they can crawl back into the traffic and get run over by the next lorry.’

  I begin finding stories from people who believe they’ve been treated dishonestly by Randi and his organisation. One extraordinary tale comes from Professor George Vithoulkas of the International Academy of Classical Homeopathy in Athens. In 2003 Vithoulkas decided that he wanted to carry out a test into the efficacy of homeopathy that was first proposed by Skeptic Alec Gindis and enter it for the Million Dollar Challenge. The two men made Randi a serious proposal: Gindis would sponsor the experiment, which would be arranged by Vithoulkas, and held in a hospital under the guidance of a team of independent scientists. It would involve at least three hundred participants for a minimum of one year.