The dialog in this thread has revealed the gulf between worldviews that I mentioned in an earlier post.
Although I do not agree with every locution Lekatt has written here (just as I do not disagree with everything the skeptics have written), I am quite disappointed in the skeptics treatment of him as a person and their attitude toward what he has to say.
Lekatt offers his own experiences, by which he has been convinced of certain truths. Call them anecdotes if you will, but those who experience a particular thing are compelled by it to change their beliefs. If someone has had an NDE, he or she is compelled by that experience to encompass it in his or her worldview. If someone has experienced or witnessed psi and can see no evidence of trickery, then one is compelled to encompass that in his or her worldview. This is true regardless of whether these phenomena can now be proved to exist according to methods of which the skeptics approve. Nor is this true only of phenomena that are typically labeled “paranormal”–many unusual physical phenomena have been observed as well that as yet similarly defy proof in the laboratory. Nevertheless, those who have observed them cannot help but believe that these phenomena exist.
It may be that a person’s interpretation of phenomena is not precisely correct, but that a higher truth may yet encompass it. For example, “alien abductees” are regularly excoriated on this board for believing that they have been visited by space aliens; yet it may be that such visions/hallucinations are in fact products of the group unconscious of the species. This seems to be the most sophisticated hypothesis today. link
Lekatt and others offer their experience. It is our choice to learn from them or mock them. My way of thinking is New Age: I try, often unsuccessfully, to see the light in all and learn from all. To me, the world of imagination is also real in its own way. The only thing I reject is dogma, the idea that we must think in a certain way–or else.
The sociological dynamic present in this “debate” is unfornate. Science is a tool of progress, not an end in itself. It can help reveal the truth; it is not itself the truth. What it most of all is not is a game in which opposing viewpoints are pinned to the mat simply because they can be pinned. A person who truly desires to know the truth does not rebuff his opponent in order to shame him and then forget him. Rather, he appreciates his opponent for whatever truth he has to offer, and encourages him to be at his best. I see poeple here not eager to learn from Lekatt, but to slap him around and shame him. I have received the same treatment, and so have many others. This attitude and behavior is crude in the extreme. It is simple one-up-manship and has nothing to do with the true spirit of inquiry.
Science is only as good as its experiments and measuring tools make it. In the year 1850 people could have talked all day long about how no evidence for radio waves or neutrons existed–none!–and they would have been right. Mankind will continue to experience many phenomena that science will be unable to measure for centuries or millenia. If those who are entrusted with searching for new knowledge continue to deny what the vast majority of people experience, saying that there is no evidence for it, it is merely fantasy or hallucination, then the term “science” will simply come to mean the study of those things which scientists say exist. The rest of us will continue to blunder ahead, mocked by the minority that refuses to take interest in what we do, but still likely, I think, to make many amazing discoveries.
