Dawkins to attack dowsing on TV

[Ian Pegler]

Skeptic and Biologist Richard Dawkins (the author of "The God Delusion" and "The Selfish Gene") has been given another TV series.

His previous TV series "The Root of all Evil" attacked Religion. In this new 2 part series, "The Enemies of Reason", Dawkins will be attacking, amongst others, New Age therapies, faith-healers, homeopathy, Deepak Chopra and dowsing.

The first part of "The Enemies of Reason" will be show on Channel 4 on August 13th, with the second part scheduled for the following week.

The 66-year-old scientist has investigated a range of gurus and therapists, including faith healers, psychic mediums, angel therapists, "aura photographers", astrologers, Tarot card readers and water diviners, and concluded that Britain is gripped by "an epidemic of superstitious thinking".

CLICK HERE to read the article.

Doubtless he'll be writing a book at some point...?

A Times article mentions the dowsing experiment in more detail:

He has more sympathy, though only just, for a group of dowsers attempting to find one canister containing water amid 11 containing sand.

The results are no better than the law of averages "or pure guesswork" leaving one woman close to tears, devastated by the apparent disappearance of her powers.

This sounds like a description of the experiments done by Prof. Chris French at the BAAS festival last year.

Ian



Edited by I.P. 10.4.09 - added cross-reference to related thread, deleted spurious characters

[Ian Pegler]

This sounds like a description of the experiments done by Prof. Chris French at the BAAS festival last year.

Yes, there he was, large as life. No sign of Jim Lyons though.

The results are no better than the law of averages "or pure guesswork" leaving one woman close to tears, devastated by the apparent disappearance of her powers.

In tears? Really? I saw none, although she was well baffled. Devastated? Hardly. Come off it, Peter Millar.

Another dowser was obligingly cut off mid sentence by the VT editor, as was the spiritualist medium. All the scientific evidence for dowsing was dismissed without any analysis. The whole thing was POV Richard Dawkins, which of course was the whole point. Will Channel 4 now give us air-time to respond?

Should we complain to OFCOM?

Ian


Edited by I.P. 10.4.09 - deleted spurious characters

[simonwheeler]

Or come up with a programme "treatment" showing that dowsing is authentic, and contact a number of production companies...including the one which did the Dawkins prog?

[Helen-Healing]

The two episodes of the Dawkins prog that I have seen have been pathetic. He 'proves' nothing, merely rants with a strained look on his face & the veins in his neck standing out. Quite unpleasant to watch really. The only times he relaxes is when he's chatting to people who agree with him.

The dowsing experiment was just silly. They put plastic bottles of dead water into containers, and try to call that 'dowsing for water'. It's the equivalent of putting a few grains of processed white sugar into a box, and asking them to dowse for a sugar cane plantation. If you see what I mean.

Actually often has a place on the website where people can respond...will have to look for it.

[Ian Pegler]

Or come up with a programme "treatment" showing that dowsing is authentic, and contact a number of production companies...including the one which did the Dawkins prog?

FWIW:

The programme was produced by IWC media. It was produced and directed by Russell Baines (could be Barnes, hard to make out on my telly).

There's nothing on the website to indicate any kind of track record of programmes that attack the 'paranormal' unless you include Dawkin's "Root of All Evil" which was really an attack on religion. I don't think the web info is comprehensive though. They've been going since May 2004 and have offices in Glasgow and London.

I made some notes while I watched it through again. The time-codes are only approximate:

At 00:05:50 the title of the Astrology column is deliberately blurred out. Similarly at 00:06:05 a magazine cover is blurred out. Presumably for legal reasons.

At 00:10:47 Richard Dawkins (V.O.) says:

It [i.e. Astrology] was developed in the 2nd Century A.D. by the philosopher Claudius Ptolemy and has not moved on since, despite the discovery of new planets and despite a shift in the Earth's rotational axis that has thrown Ptolemy's Zodiac out by 23 degrees.

I think some historians, let alone astrologers, might have something to say about that!

As an example of the editor's "artifice" (as Jeremy Paxman would put it), at 00:11:47, interviewing an astrologer, Dawkins says:

How could the rise of Saturn possibly be a signifier for something that's going on physiologically in a person's body?

At this point (approx 00:11:55) the sound-track, but not the visual, then CUTs to:

The position of the planets in ...

However, because it's an over-the-shoulder shot of Dawkins we don't see his lips move, so the CUT is disguised. The visual-track CUTs about a second or two after the audio, so you don't notice it. When you hear him say "The position of ..." he's probably not saying it at all.

I noticed a howling jump-cut when Dawkins interviews Derren Brown, who by the looks of things is about to describe spiritualist mediums in no uncertain terms. The TC is 00:20:22, when Derren Brown says:

...and become addicted to these...these...

at which point it CUTs to Derren Brown in an entirely different situation, facing an audience, and we never hear him finish his sentence!

Okay, on to the bit on water-divining.

Having done the bit about the bats, Dawkins' (V.O.) says (at 00:33:14):

... the so-called evidence for psychic phenomena is not robust but willo-the-wisp.

This is the sum total of Dawkins' dealing with the evidence.

After the tests, we hear from one or two dowsers who took part.

At 00:33:53 we hear from Jim Negus who says:

I think the question and I expect God to respond in the way that I understand.

Clearly this is divining (c.f. my comments here), and he did get one right.

At 00:37:21 Ken Church says:

I feel the whole test is wrong...

at while point it CUTs to another dowser, Karen Fuller, who at 00:37:25 says:

I'm shocked beyond words that this has happened...

at which point the visual CUTS AWAY to a man smoking a pipe.

Karen's speech continues (audio only):

...but I did say from the outset [added emphasis mine] could we just get some...

at which point (TC 00:37:32) the visual track CUTS BACK to Karen and her dialog continues:

...grey blocks and some scaffold boards so that I can walk above it which is what I would routinely do and I've done for forty years.

Clearly, just because they were seen complaining after the test did not mean that they weren't also complaining before hand.

At 00:37:48 we see Ken Church again. He says:

If you understand dowsing like I do you'll understand that everything leaves an image.

at which point he is CUT. I think he was just about to tell Richard Dawkins about how the remnance effect might intefere with the tests.

Ian

[Helen-Healing]

Wow, you really go into this in depth, don't you??

But I do know what you mean. Sentences were cut off all the time after the first few words & left you wondering what else had been said that they didn't want you to hear! And I only watched it once, and could pick that up! Selective editing, as you suggest.

[Ian Pegler]

Wow, you really go into this in depth, don't you??

The devil is in the detail. I've only looked at part of it, I couldn't even begin to deconstruct the section on spiritualism. It had more cuts than a HellRaiser movie. What a job.

But I do know what you mean. Sentences were cut off all the time after the first few words & left you wondering what else had been said that they didn't want you to hear! And I only watched it once, and could pick that up! Selective editing, as you suggest.

Editing is inherently selective, but for every foot of "tape" you watch a few more feet hit the cutting-room floor - metaphorically speaking - because these days it's all done on computers, which allows even more flexibility and time for experimentation.

This means that a great responsibility rests on the shoulders of the editor to provide balance, but as the whole thing was POV Richard, that was never going to happen.

I decided to do this little deconstruction-job because the real message (about the power of TV) needs to get across.

Ian

[Ian Pegler]

At 00:10:47 Richard Dawkins (V.O.) says:

It [i.e. Astrology] was developed in the 2nd Century A.D. by the philosopher Claudius Ptolemy and has not moved on since, despite the discovery of new planets and despite a shift in the Earth's rotational axis that has thrown Ptolemy's Zodiac out by 23 degrees.

I think some historians, let alone astrologers, might have something to say about that!

There's a brilliant debunking of the above statement by Richard Dawkins on the following Astrology forum:

CLICK HERE to read the article

Saves me having to write anything! Basically put, Dawkins is wrong on every single point.

The devil, like I said, is in the detail !

Ian


Edited by I.P. 27.8.08 - Updated link to Chris Brennan's blog

[Ian Pegler]

For any astrologers who may be interested, a copy of the Tetrabiblos can be found online:

CLICK HERE to read the Tetrabiblos.

In particular look at Book One, Chapter XIV. Tropical, Equinoctial, Fixed, and Bicorporeal Signs where it says:

The tropical signs are two: viz. the first thirty degrees after the summer solstice, which compose the sign of Cancer; and the first thirty degrees after the winter solstice, composing the sign of Capricorn ...
There are also two equinoctial signs: Aries, the first after the vernal equinox; and Libra, the first after the autumnal equinox: they are so called, because the Sun, when in the first point of either, makes the day and night equal.

Clearly the signs of Ptolemy are in reference to the tropical zodiac, which in terms of how it is defined by astrologers is entirely accurate because it moves with the precession produced by the rotational wobble of the Earth's axis. It is not out by even a fraction of a degree, let alone 23 degrees.

The precession of the equinoxes was noted by Hipparchus as early as c.120 B.C so Ptolemy must have known about it. His decision to use the tropical zodiac was therefore an entirely conscientious one and he obviously didn't see it as a problem.

Ian

[Ian Pegler]

As an example of a skeptic invading someone else's forum, JREF poster clerihew80 decided that the romanticists on the John Keats forum needed a lesson on the "facts" of astrology. His handle on the Keats forum is ChildeHarold80.

In doing so, he decides to regurgitate the B.S. put out by Dawkins in his "Enemies of Reason" programme and in doing so somehow manages to get his "facts" even more wrong:

...since the signs of the Zodiac were drawn up in the second century A.D. by Ptolemy (the same infallible authority behind the Ptolemaic system which said that the Earth was at the center of the universe), the earth's rotational axis has shifted by some 30 degrees. Thus, the signs commonly used in horoscopes are off by at least a month. They are also insufficient: there should be 13, rather than 12.

Oh dear.

Thanks to Dawkins' vague drivel, the skeptics now seriously believe that Ptolemy "drew up" the zodiac, etc. etc. even though this is all completely wrong. The skeptical movement has now acquired a bad meme of its own.

clerihew80 is upset at the moderators of the John Keats forum. Why? because they're allowing their members to talk about astrology! Imagine that!

A bunch of poetry fans mention astrology and some Randi fan just can't resist going over there and putting them "straight"...

Oh dear, oh dear...

Ian

[john23]

The Devil's Vicar http://www.whale.to/a/dawkins_h.html

He is just a tool of the Elite, probably unbeknowing to himself, they just feed his ego, like they feed Blair with 200,000 fee for one lecture

He only attacks easy targets such as homeopathy, which is what the BBC has being doing since TV began, you will never see anything on Vitamin C that has 1,200 peer review citations to back it up but is never used http://www.whale.to/a/levy4.html

I would like to ask him what he makes of the 500,000 year old human fossil footprints

We have to put up with this all the time, nasty idiotic attacks on non-allopathic medicine.

The Elite know all about ley lines, they plonk all their building on them, eg Buck House, yet their controlled media say they are just inventions of the Romantics (telegraph).

This is the same game with psychic stuff:

"I said that was quite interesting. I asked the dean whether he had taken part in such rituals. He said yes, but declined to describe the ceremonies. He was essentially telling me that a secret society was the proper home for the paranormal. His attitude as I read it implied that the paranormal was THE PROPERTY of secret societies---and the great unwashed masses were barred from such knowledge. It was the first time I realized there might be more to the prejudice against paranormal research than meets the eye..." For some people, so-called scientific opposition to allowing and funding paranormal research is merely a pose. These people are actually perverse mystics, and they want to protect their "monopoly" on the subject. They also want the kind of psychic control over others they think is possible through their ritualistic practices."--- THE PARANORMAL AND SECRET SOCIETIES ---JON RAPPOPORT

They have control of the earth energy system and they don't want anyone else looking in, it is how they control, just like they plonked the churches on pagan sites, and took over the energy power spots.

Pity orgonite blows that game clean out the water.

Likewise Bruce Cathie found that the nuclear fearmongering was based on a lie, and based on earth energy dynamics:

"One of the most startling facts that I discovered by application of grid mathematics was that an atomic bomb is a device based on the geometrics of space and time. To be successfully detonated, the bomb MUST be geometrically constructed, placed on, under, or over a geometric position in relation to the Earth’s surface, and activated at a SPECIFIC TIME in relation to the geometrics of the solar system. I found that it was possible to precalculate the time of various bomb tests, and the locations where it was possible to explode a bomb.......I realised that an all-out atomic war was an impossibility. Both sides could precalculate well in advance the time and positions of atomic attack. Plus the fact that only certain geometric locations could be detonated anyhow. A logical war cannot be considered under these circumstances. This could be the explanation for the proliferation of conventional weapons in modern warfare."----Bruce Cathie

[Ian Pegler]

An interesting postscript to this sorry saga has come from Dr. Rupert Sheldrake.

It explains why he didn't appear on the Enemies of Reason show, in spite of being interviewed by Dawkins.

I've added some red highlighting over some interesting points.

IMHO, a fine example of how some media people will try to ensnare you.

So it was Russell Barnes, not Baines. I need a new telly.

Ian

News Release from Rupert Sheldrake Online

11th January 2008

From Rupert Sheldrake

"Richard Dawkins Comes to Call" has just been published in Network Review: The Journal of the Scientific and Medical Network and is now on the web site - It is also pasted below.



Richard Dawkins comes to call

Rupert Sheldrake

Richard Dawkins is a man with a mission - the eradication of religion and superstition, and their total replacement with science and reason. Channel 4 TV has repeatedly provided him with a pulpit. His two-part polemic in August 2007, called Enemies of Reason, was a sequel to his 2006 diatribe against religion, The Root of All Evil?

Soon before Enemies of Reason was filmed, the production company, IWC Media, told me that Richard Dawkins wanted to visit me to discuss my research on unexplained abilities of people and animals. I was reluctant to take part, but the company's representative assured me that this documentary, at Channel 4's insistence, will be an entirely more balanced affair than The Root of All Evil was. She added, "We are very keen for it to be a discussion between two scientists, about scientific modes of enquiry". So I agreed and we fixed a date.

I was still not sure what to expect. Was Richard Dawkins going to be dogmatic, with a mental firewall that blocked out any evidence that went against his beliefs? Or would he be open-minded, and fun to talk to?

The Director asked us to stand facing each other; we were filmed with a hand-held camera. Richard began by saying that he thought we probably agreed about many things, "But what worries me about you is that you are prepared to believe almost anything. Science should be based on the minimum number of beliefs."

I agreed that we had a lot in common, "But what worries me about you is that you come across as dogmatic, giving people a bad impression of science."

He then said that in a romantic spirit he himself would like to believe in telepathy, but there just wasn't any evidence for it. He dismissed all research on the subject out of hand. He compared the lack of acceptance of telepathy by scientists such as himself with the way in which the echo-location system had been discovered in bats, followed by its rapid acceptance within the scientific community in the 1940s. In fact, as I later discovered, Lazzaro Spallanzani had shown in 1793 that bats rely on hearing to find their way around, but sceptical opponents dismissed his experiments as flawed, and helped set back research for well over a century. However, Richard recognized that telepathy posed a more radical challenge than echo-location. He said that if it really occurred, it would "turn the laws of physics upside down," and added, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

"This depends on what you regard as extraordinary", I replied. "Most people say they have experienced telepathy, especially in connection with telephone calls. In that sense, telepathy is ordinary. The claim that most people are deluded about their own experience is extraordinary. Where is the extraordinary evidence for that?"

He produced no evidence at all, apart from generic arguments about the fallibility of human judgment. He assumed that people want to believe in "the paranormal" because of wishful thinking.

We then agreed that controlled experiments were necessary. I said that this was why I had actually been doing such experiments, including tests to find out if people really could tell who was calling them on the telephone when the caller was selected at random. The results were far above the chance level.

The previous week I had sent Richard copies of some of my papers, published in peer-reviewed journals, so that he could look at the data.

Richard seemed uneasy and said, "I don't want to discuss evidence". "Why not?" I asked. "There isn't time. It's too complicated. And that's not what this programme is about." The camera stopped.

The Director, Russell Barnes, confirmed that he too was not interested in evidence. The film he was making was another Dawkins polemic.

I said to Russell, "If you're treating telepathy as an irrational belief, surely evidence about whether it exists or not is essential for the discussion. If telepathy occurs, it's not irrational to believe in it. I thought that's what we were going to talk about. I made it clear from the outset that I wasn't interested in taking part in another low grade debunking exercise.

Richard said, "It's not a low grade debunking exercise; it's a high grade debunking exercise."

In that case, I replied, there had been a serious misunderstanding, because I had been led to believe that this was to be a balanced scientific discussion about evidence. Russell Barnes asked to see the emails I had received from his assistant. He read them with obvious dismay, and said the assurances she had given me were wrong. The team packed up and left.

Richard Dawkins has long proclaimed his conviction that "The paranormal is bunk. Those who try to sell it to us are fakes and charlatans". Enemies of Reason was intended to popularize this belief. But does his crusade really promote "the public understanding of science," of which he is the professor at Oxford? Should science be a vehicle of prejudice, a kind of fundamentalist belief-system? Or should it be a method of enquiry into the unknown?

Rupert Sheldrake

Edited 16.01.08 - corrected 1 typo.

Edited by I.P 12.7.08 - removed spurious characters from text

[john23]

Good find. Debunking appears to be a pseudonym for suppressing. The US has been using remote viewing for decades http://www.whale.to/b/remote_viewing.html. And any decent psychic will read your mind or anyone elses if you ask them, called mind reading, a well know ability well used by all governments.

Hennessey found out the real elite are telepaths http://www.whale.to/b/hennessey_h.html

which is another story

"But, there are a group of scientists and non-scientists who are adamantly opposed to the idea, not because they've studied the evidence, but because they haven't" says Sheldrake.

you have to wonder why.


Edited by I.P. 10.4.09 - corrected spurious characters

[Ian Pegler]

Debunking appears to be a pseudonym for suppressing.

This seems to be true a lot of the time, regardless of who is doing the debunking.

Creationists apply their skepticism to Darwinism and try to suppress the teaching of Evolution in schools. Darwin followers apply their skepticism to Creationism and try to suppress the teaching of Creationism in schools.

But why should the urge to suppress follow as consequence of skepticism? The only reason I can see is a conviction that you're right and the other guy is wrong, which another thing they have in common - both groups are fundamentalists i.e. they believe they are in full possession of absolute, fundamental Truth.

I have pasted another of Sheldrake's articles below. Added emphasis mine.

Ian

The skepticism of believers - Rupert Sheldrake

I used to think of skepticism as a primary intellectual virtue, whose goal was truth. I have changed my mind. I now see it as a weapon.

Creationists opened my eyes. They use the techniques of critical thinking to expose weaknesses in the evidence for natural selection, gaps in the fossil record and problems with evolutionary theory. Is this because they are seeking truth? No. They believe they already know the truth. Skepticism is a weapon to defend their beliefs by attacking their opponents.

Skepticism is also an important weapon in the defence of commercial self-interest. According to David Michaels, who was assistant secretary for environment, safety and health in the US Department of Energy in the 1990s, the strategy used by the tobacco industry to create doubt about inconvenient evidence has now been adopted by corporations making toxic products such as lead, mercury, vinyl chloride, and benzene. When confronted with evidence that their activities are causing harm, the standard response is to hire researchers to muddy the waters, branding findings that go against the industry's interests as "junk science." As Michaels noted, "Their conclusions are almost always the same: the evidence is ambiguous, so regulatory action is unwarranted." Climate change skeptics use similar techniques.

In a penetrating essay called "The Skepticism of Believers", Sir Leslie Stephen, a pioneering agnostic (and the father of Virginia Woolf), argued that skepticism is inevitably partial. "In regard to the great bulk of ordinary beliefs, the so-called skeptics are just as much believers as their opponents." Then as now, those who proclaim themselves skeptics had strong beliefs of their own. As Stephen put it in 1893, "The thinkers generally charged with skepticism are equally charged with an excessive belief in the constancy and certainty of the so-called 'laws of nature'. They assign a natural cause to certain phenomena as confidently as their opponents assign a supernatural cause."

Skepticism has even deeper roots in religion than in science. The Old Testament prophets were withering in their scorn for the rival religions of the Holy Land. Psalm 115 mocks those who make idols of silver and gold: "They have mouths, and speak not: eyes have they, and see not." At the Reformation, the Protestants deployed the full force of biblical scholarship and critical thinking against the veneration of relics, cults of saints and other "superstitions" of the Catholic Church. Atheists take religious skepticism to its ultimate limits; but they are defending another faith, a faith in science.

In practice, the goal of skepticism is not the discovery of truth, but the exposure of other people's errors. It plays a useful role in science, religion, scholarship, and common sense. But we need to remember that it is a weapon serving belief or self-interest; we need to be skeptical of skeptics. The more militant the skeptic, the stronger the belief.

< from here >

[john23]

Yes, spot on when he says this: "Skepticism is also an important weapon in the defence of commercial self-interest. ....The more militant the skeptic, the stronger the belief."

That sums up Dawkins and Randi. 'Belief' isn't quite the right word, as they are just defending commercial interests, it sounds like a religious type belief. But they are just defending Allopathy when they bash homeopathy under the guise of Skepticism. For example CSICOP's journal is called the Skeptical Inquirer and it is leading the attack on vaccine critics--their articles defending vaccination http://csicop.org/si/2007-06/novella.html are being sent around the country by the CDC http://whale.to/b/csi.html Kind of obvious really.

A board member of CSICOP is Professor Paul Kurtz, chairman of Prometheus Books, which publishes books describing pedophile encounters. Its human sexuality editor is CSICOP member Professor Vern Bullough, who is also a board member of Paedika.

Not nice people, Skeptics.

Anyone would have thought the real skeptics would be skeptical of the majority mind set, but no, but the majority lot have taken control of the word, basic propaganda. They don't miss a trick.

Regarding CSICOP (the right term for them), see the quote above by Rappoport. They are really Control of the Paranormal. Paranormal is a term they invented for the internal reality and all that goes with it--all the entities (eg ghosts) that hang around in the first level of the Internal reality, the Etheric plane. Their real control comes via the Etheric plane, so they don't want anyone in there except them. Above that is all the God circuits---and they promote Atheism, so that would bust that mind control programme. Atheism keeps people in a very small box that is easy to control, and essential to Allopathy, for one, their main source of income.

Dowsing is just another tool they don't want the masses looking into, as it would lead them in the wrong direction (internally and into Nature), and it is something they want to keep to themselves. I heard a story of a man would could dowse where all their nuclear subs were and they wouldn't let him out of the contry. And any reading of Malcom Rae question and answers would show anyone the real power in dowsing that they want suppressed. And dowsing is tied to Radionics, another one they have kept well suppressed--one Radionic man wrote to me from jail, and all sorts of healers use it like Ghadiali http://whale.to/v/ghadiali_h.html

A veritable Pandora's Box of goodies to blow them away.

Of course, you have to control the media first so you can put out this childish propaganda. Joan Bakewell went to zero in my book when she made a programme defending Vivisection. Hardly a great thinker, just a propagandist.

And I suspect randi is a telepath himself so he could easily disrupt any homeopathic experiment. Dawkins also in all propabaility.

Skeptics are just an outshoot of quackbusters which were originally set up by the AMA when they got their fingers burnt suppressing Chiros http://whale.to/p/quacks.html as Joseph Lisa documents http://whale.to/a/lisa_b.html

Anything Dawkins attacks would be worth looking into. Just like whatever Blair is promoting--do the opposite.

As for religion--those religious Creationists, notice how Dawkins only attacks them, not any non-religious spiritual people. All that earth was made in 6 day stuff is easy to laugh at, but he wouldn't go near any experiental spiritual person like mystics, yogis etc who are 2 a penny in India and respected. Just like the Indian government is using Homeopathy. Anyone can take apart beliefs from books like the Bible but anyone who has direct experience would laught at him, and that wouldn't do his debunking game much good.

The greatest American mystic, in print, was John Lilly, who was a noted scientist and medical doctor. He may as well have never existed as far as these characters go, they don't want anyone sourcing his knowledge. He actually worked for them (was one of them), he evaluated LSD for them probably for mind control, and blew Atheism clean out of the water, decades ago. Yet here we have Dawkins laughing at religious people who believe in God. Hello?

And Sheldrake, from memory, knew John Lilly so would know he also proved telepathy through LSD, so why is he playing this game?