Randi's Prize What Sceptics Say About the Paranormal, Why They Are Wrong, and Why It Matters

Robert McLuhan

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Why I wrote this book

Do people have paranormal experiences? They certainly say they do (I’ve had a couple of encounters with fortune tellers that were interesting, to say the least). But are they really paranormal? Or can they be explained in normal terms – as misperception or wishful thinking, for instance?

I started asking myself this when I got interested in science in my late thirties. Until then I hadn’t though about the paranormal at all. Take telepathy – on some level I assumed it was real, but so rare that no one talked about it much.  But I then learned from scientists, brilliant and persuasive writers such as Richard Dawkins and Carl Sagan, that such things can’t happen and don’t happen. Period.

This puzzled me, and I set out to discover the truth. I read everything I could lay my hands on about consciousness, near-death experiences and experimental ESP research, as well as reports of investigations into ghosts, poltergeists and mediums.  I also read the debunking literature by sceptics such as the stage magician James Randi and psychologists Richard Wiseman, Susan Blackmore and Ray Hyman (Wiseman in particular is always ready to provide a ‘normal’ explanation for headline-catching paranormal claims).

My conclusion is that much of what sceptics say deserves to be taken seriously, but that their explanations aren’t the whole story.  I especially disagree with them that parapsychologists who investigate such things – and who themselves are often serious scientists: psychologists, physicists, biologists and so on – are wrong to do so, or are even ‘wide-eyed nincompoops’, as Randi has put it. Frankly, that sort of talk irritates me – why wouldn’t people be curious about such an extraordinary aspect of human experience. So Randi’s Prize is an attempt to balance things out a bit, exposing some of the exaggeration, opportunism and ignorance in debunkers’ counter-explanations.

I do find the idea of psychic phenomena interesting, but that’s not really what motivated to write the book. What absolutely fascinates me is the taboo around the paranormal: it’s treated as a subject for books, films and TV dramas – mere entertainment. Yet if it’s true, if the human mind truly is capable of psychic interactions, this has huge implications for our understanding of who we really are and how we got here. (I’m especially interested in the religious implications, which are massive, but which are almost entirely overlooked in current debates.)

In the end I believe that’s why the paranormal is such a deeply controversial subject, and one which we prefer not to think about too much. Our reaction to it is understandable, but can we go on like that for ever? These are questions that I’ve been trying to get to grips with in Randi’s Prize.

Which three authors’ work would you compare your writing to? Rupert Sheldrake, Dean Radin, Colin Wilson

Synopsis

James 'The Amazing' Randi is a stage magician who says he has a million dollars for anyone who can convince him they have psychic powers. No one has even come close to winning, proof, say sceptical scientists, that there is no such thing as 'the paranormal'. But are they right? In this illuminating and often provocative analysis, Robert McLuhan examines the influence of Randi and other debunking sceptics in shaping scientific opinion about such things as telepathy, psychics, ghosts and near-death experiences. He points out that scientific researchers who investigate these things at first hand overwhelmingly consider them to be genuinely anomalous. But this has shocking implications, for science, for society and for even perhaps for ourselves as individuals. Hence the sceptics' insistence that they should rather be attributed to fraud, imagination and wishful thinking. However, this extraordinary and little understood aspect of consciousness has much to tell us about the human situation, McLuhan suggests. And at a time when militants are polarising the debate about religion, its mystical, spiritual element offers an optimistic and enlightened way forward. Randi's Prize is aimed at anyone interested in spirituality or those curious to know the truth about paranormal claims. It's an intelligent and readable analysis of scientific research into the paranormal which, uniquely, also closely examines the arguments of well-known sceptics.

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