Straws in the wind: Why did “skeptics” society CSICOP change its name?

Call me slow, but I only recently twigged to the significance of the name change that Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP, founded in 1979) underwent in 2006, to become the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI). Various explanations are given, including that the former name was “too long” and

The change comes, in part, due to the prominence of the word “paranormal” in the well-known acronym. Executive Council member Kendrick Frazier, editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, said the reference sometimes led those unfamiliar with the group to narrowly limit their concept of the organization’s goals. Also, misconceptions of motives had to be continually corrected.

The November 30 press release also goes on to say that the problem was that the old name caused people to think that CSICOP promoted the paranormal.

Oh, I doubt anyone thought that about CSICOP. And few missed the significance of the "COP" part. No doubt, for many members, that was the real attraction.

I bet the real story (whatever it is) is entangled with something that Mario Beauregard and I discuss in The Spiritual Brain: Laboratory research confirms telepathy as a low level effect, and has done so for decades. As New Scientist's John McCrone noted in 2004,

In many ways, it is the skeptical community that is on the back foot, unable to explain away the results in terms of cheating, artefact or fluke. They are back to making suspicious noises about why believers get results.

Yes, that and changing the name of an organization to bury the problem?

Whatever causes the CSI people take up, they will remain unidirectional skeptics. But they seem to be backing off wholesale disproof of the non-material elements of our lives (the paranormal).

Here’s a further explanation from CSI/CSICOP and here from founder and chairman Paul Kurtz.

Poster boy for atheism rails against genome mapper Francis Collins in science journal Nature

Neuroscience grad student Sam Harris, who still doesn’t want anyone to know where he lives, rails against prestigious science journal Nature for publishing a respectful review of Francis Collins’s The Language of God:

The Language of God should have sparked gasping outrage from the editors at Nature. Instead, they deemed Collins’s efforts “moving” and “laudable”, commending him for building a “bridge across the social and intellectual divide that exists between most of US academia and the so-called heartlands.”

Now, I have had a love-hate relationship with Language of God, having given it both good and bad reviews, depending on the audience.

Basically, Harris hates Language of God because he hates all religions other than his own private one, but Nature likes the book because it suggests that a dumbed-down spirituality is no threat to the materialism that Nature generally espouses.

And, as for me, I have mixed feelings about it because I prefer the sort of robust spirituality that is a genuine threat to materialism - though not to sanity. But Language of God makes uch more sense than the current rants against religion.

P.S.: I don’t care if Harris lives in a yurt in Mongolia, but I wish he’d finally get his PhD. The term “neuroscience grad student” bugs me, but I can’t award him an honorary doctorate just so I don’t have to use it.

Commentary: Why it is hard to separate politics and religion

In “The Politics of God”, a long essay in the New York Times, Columbia Humanities prof Mark Lilla offers some thoughtful reflections on the political theology that can lead to violent extremism, starting from the premise that sixteenth-century Europe was much like the modern Middle East:

A little more than two centuries ago we began to believe that the West was on a one-way track toward modern secular democracy and that other societies, once placed on that track, would inevitably follow. Though this has not happened, we still maintain our implicit faith in a modernizing process and blame delays on extenuating circumstances like poverty or colonialism. This assumption shapes the way we see political theology, especially in its Islamic form — as an atavism requiring psychological or sociological analysis but not serious intellectual engagement. Islamists, even if they are learned professionals, appear to us primarily as frustrated, irrational representatives of frustrated, irrational societies, nothing more. We live, so to speak, on the other shore. When we observe those on the opposite bank, we are puzzled, since we have only a distant memory of what it was like to think as they do. We all face the same questions of political existence, yet their way of answering them has become alien to us. On one shore, political institutions are conceived in terms of divine authority and spiritual redemption; on the other they are not. And that, as Robert Frost might have put it, makes all the difference.

Not a man of easy assumptions or simple answers, Lilla writes of Rousseau’s views, for example,

Religion has its roots in needs that are rational and moral, even noble; once we see that, we can start satisfying them rationally, morally and nobly. In the abstract, this thought did not contradict the principles of the Great Separation, which gave reasons for protecting the private exercise of religion. But it did raise doubts about whether the new political thinking could really do without reference to the nexus of God, man and world. If Rousseau was right about our moral needs, a rigid separation between political and theological principles might not be psychologically sustainable. When a question is important, we want an answer to it: as the Savoyard vicar remarks, “The mind decides in one way or another, despite itself, and prefers being mistaken to believing in nothing.” Rousseau had grave doubts about whether human beings could be happy or good if they did not understand how their actions related to something higher. Religion is simply too entwined with our moral experience ever to be disentangled from it, and morality is inseparable from politics.

But what happened when, sickened by the Reign of Terror sponsored by atheists during the French Revolution, German Christians decided that a reformed religion was the answer? For that, you must read the article, but here’s a hint ....

... the liberal deity turned out to be a stillborn God, unable to inspire genuine conviction among a younger generation seeking ultimate truth. For what did the new Protestantism offer the soul of one seeking union with his creator? It prescribed a catechism of moral commonplaces and historical optimism about bourgeois life, spiced with deep pessimism about the possibility of altering that life. It preached good citizenship and national pride, economic good sense and the proper length of a gentleman’s beard. But it was too ashamed to proclaim the message found on every page of the Gospels: that you must change your life. And what did the new Judaism bring to a young Jew seeking a connection with the traditional faith of his people? It taught him to appreciate the ethical message at the core of all biblical faith and passed over in genteel silence the fearsome God of the prophets, his covenant with the Jewish people and the demanding laws he gave them. Above all, it taught a young Jew that his first obligation was to seek common ground with Christianity and find acceptance in the one nation, Germany, whose highest cultural ideals matched those of Judaism, properly understood. To the decisive questions — “Why be a Christian?” and “Why be a Jew?” — liberal theology offered no answer at all.

And what rough beast, his hour come round at last, slouched in to replace it?

Lilla’s suggestions for addressing Islamic extremism and interesting and thoughtful too.