This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 3, Issue 5, from 1989.

For most of my life I looked on doctors with some awe. Doctors were special people. That’s why we called them ‘Doctor’ and not ‘Mrs’ or ‘Mister’, wasn’t it? And they knew all about life, the universe and everything. Didn’t they?

I don’t know exactly when my default respect for doctors – especially medical doctors – began to wane; soon after I learned to be a skeptic I suspect. Hearing of doctors who practice or believe in alternative medicine has led me to a theory about most general practitioners: as their training does not teach scientific experimentation, they are no better than computers. A well programmed computer could – and one day will – ask all of the questions your doctor asks, and arrive at the same (or better) diagnosis. A general practitioner only has to respond like a computer. As long as they have been programmed properly and has sufficient memory they will come up with the same answer time after time.

As the person who becomes a general practitioner is not required to think logically he is left open to holistic propaganda. This doesn’t mean that he is a worse GP. By no means. I wouldn’t want to change my own doctor for a moment. He is an excellent GP in whom I still have a lot of faith. But, he believes in alternative medicine ‘because the patients get better’.

“What is all this leading to?”, I hear you ask. Well, I am reminded of the awe in which I once held doctors when I hear new skeptical groups say “We must get a magician”. It’s as though a magician is going to be their fail-safe system. Is a magician essential? Unless he or she is competent in this particular field, I don’t believe so. A magician might be able to give advice after watching an informal psychic demonstration, although – as I have said before – there are few instances of psychics doing magic tricks. But be careful of over-rating your magician when it comes to an official test. Otherwise, a disaster could occur.

Just as there are ‘doctors’ and ‘doctors who can think’, so there are ‘magicians’ and ‘magicians who can help in psychic investigations’. But having said that, I believe that most intelligent, thinking people should be able to ‘control’ against psychics doing magic, for I cannot recall any trick which can be repeated under properly controlled conditions. This is why one of the rules of magic is ‘Don’t tell the audience what you are about to do’.

Another is ‘Don’t repeat a trick’ (they know what’s coming). Consequently, if a spectator (or experimenter) has any intelligence and knows what the effect is, he should be able to ‘control’ against cheating, especially in repeated tests.

If the magician or psychic is using his own faked equipment it is an entirely different matter of course. For a test in which a dowser had to say whether an electric current was on or off, James Randi did allow him to use electronic equipment made by an associate. To do so was taking an enormous chance, although I am sure that Randi would have insisted on keeping the equipment for examination if the result had been positive. But Randi is an experimenter of incomparable experience. He has more than enough knowledge of magic, and just as important he knows an enormous amount about science. In these respects he is probably unique and should not be compared with any other magician, nor indeed with any other psychic investigator.

There are a number of cases in which ‘magicians’ have supported psychics and mediums, and their testimony has falsely been given more credence because they are magicians. One such case involved ‘tests’ of Uri Geller conducted by Artur Zorka and another magician in Atlanta, Georgia, whose pretentious report was reprinted in The Geller Papers.

Zorka’s paper was entitled ‘Official Report: Society of American Magicians, Assembly 30, Atlanta Chapter, by The Occult Investigations Committee’, and took up all of two pages in The Geller Papers. The ‘tests’ were not pre-arranged, but took place in an office just minutes after the magicians met Geller following a television show which they had watched from the audience. A final ‘test’ was even conducted on a pavement. Zorka stresses in his report that “the type of control put on by a magician is different from that of any other investigator. It is a control designed specifically, by those who are trained for a profession in the art of deception, to prevent fraud.” That’s fine in theory, but not good enough when other factors negate these ‘controls’, as we shall see.

The report is very favourable to Geller, telling how the nylon-reinforced handle of a fork “literally exploded” in his hand; how he “made remarkably accurate facsimiles” of drawings made by “the committee”; how he duplicated designs “merely thought of” (Zorka’s emphasis); and how “from a distance of no more than five feet” Zorka saw a key bend “beneath Geller’s touch”.

Zorka’s report is as interesting for what it doesn’t say, especially as some of the details he left out are included in a letter he wrote to Milbourne Christopher, which is also in The Geller Papers. The letter takes up two and a third pages – more than the report. Zorka told Christopher that before he met Geller he had tested a similar fork to the one which “exploded” in Geller’s hand by trying to bend it in a vice because he couldn’t bend it by hand. The handle had cracked. No surprise there. The difference between the Geller fork and Zorka’s was that the metal rod around which the handle had been fitted to the Geller fork was bent. Zorka was wrong in choosing a fork which had a handle made of a different material. He should have used a one-piece fork.

Questions: Did Geller break the handle when trying to bend the fork by force? Did he then physically bend the rod during any distraction caused when the handle had shattered? How did Zorka ‘control’ for this possibility? When did Zorka notice the rod was bent?

In the telepathy tests I am quite happy to accept that Zorka and his associate didn’t let Geller see what they drew. That scenario isn’t necessary given the way that Geller sometimes seems to work. The report simply said:

After a few false starts, Geller was able to make remarkably accurate facsimiles of the target drawings. The target drawings were made on plain sheets of white paper, and when the drawings were finished they were covered.

In the Christopher letter, Zorka says that three attempts at telepathy – in which Geller tried to reproduce drawings – failed. So Geller told Zorka not to write anything, but to think of some object. Zorka thought of one of his dogs. Geller made a drawing, became unsure, discarded the paper and said he wasn’t getting anything definite. He then suggested going back to the original method of drawing the target. Note how Geller was running the experiment.

It is interesting that it is from the letter, and not the report, where we learn the details of a successful experiment during which Geller first asked Zorka to imagine the object was drawn on a piece of paper, and then, not having been successful, imagine the object was on a TV screen which Geller had drawn on a pad. When I have seen Geller doing this sort of thing he has sometimes asked the person thinking of the drawing to close their eyes and imagine they are drawing it on a large screen. While doing this the person often makes small movements of the head from which Geller might be able to pick up a few lines or even a complete simple drawing, not necessarily to scale (some of the Zorka results were not to scale.

Zorka can be excused for not taking this method of picking up clues into consideration. It isn’t a standard method, and to my knowledge hasn’t even been demonstrated as workable. I merely report an observation and a hypothesis.

Let’s now return to the experiment in which Zorka thought of his dog. Towards the end of his letter to Christopher he explains that when:

straightening up the office before we left, I picked up the paper Geller had discarded on one of the first tests. The one where I had not drawn a ‘target’. On it was a rough drawing of what looked like a dog.

Now, if this was the drawing which Geller had made during that experiment, why did Zorka report Geller as saying (and I quote from the report) “he wasn’t getting anything definite”? What’s more definite than a dog? I suggest the possibility that the dog was drawn secretly by Geller after that particular experiment in the hope that it would be found by Zorka later. It’s not a bad bet that someone might think of a dog (or tree, or house, etc) at some time during so many experiments; and if someone is silly enough to make a match after the event Geller is given credit for another hit. Zorka certainly has no right to include this as a successful experiment, and even mentioning it in support of Geller shows his naivete as an experimenter.

The final ‘controlled’ experiment took place on the pavement outside of a hotel where Zorka was to meet his father. As mentioned, the report says that Zorka witnessed the event “from a distance of no more than five feet”. Well, Zorka must have extremely long arms, for in the Christopher letter he later wrote:

I asked him to try, one more time, to bend a key for me. I gave him a very short key which I chose because its length might make it difficult to get a good grip on. He didn’t even take it from me. He told me to hold it between my thumb and forefinger. As I did, he stroked it with his finger and it started to bend. I placed the key into my palm and watched as it continued to bend. I cannot explain it.

With additional contradictory statements like “I gave him a very short key…” immediately followed by “He didn’t even take it…” I think that Zorka’s inability to describe events as they really happened is quite apparent. I must, however, add something about the key ‘bending’ in Zorka’s palm. Zorka was, by his own admittance, unable to explain in conjuring terms anything which Geller had done up to that point. He was therefore open to any excited suggestion which Geller might have made that the key “was still bending”. It’s something which I recall Geller doing since then. And some people will believe they see the key continuing to bend, just as a radio presenter did during one of Randi’s performances in Bristol.

Zorka’s letter to Christopher has added invaluable information about the poor quality of the experiments which just isn’t apparent from the report. There may well be many more things which occurred on that occasion and which Zorka either didn’t notice, or doesn’t mention because he thought them irrelevant. He apparently doesn’t realise the importance of some of the damning things which he did reveal.

This is a classic case where the knowledge of two performing magicians was just not sufficient. They let Geller run the experiments and were not only fooled by him, they fooled themselves. They were also quite happy to issue an Official Report which grossly exaggerates the events. There is much to be learned from this. The next time a skeptic suggests the importance of a magician, recall this story and remind him that magicians only pretend to perform miracles.

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 3, Issue 4, from 1989.

Paul Kurtz recently gave a talk in London, entitled The Transcendental Temptation. Kurtz was interesting, but the behaviour of the audience left much to be desired. There seemed to be a self-righteous smugness in the air. A section of the audience made a notably ill-mannered response to a man attempting to explain his sense of bliss. This sensation, which he sometimes felt during periods of intense and productive scientific work, had a flavour which disturbed the flat certainty in a simple material world. No such doubt appeared to trouble the lives of many of the audience, who laughed openly and loudly.

Many of Kurtz’s audience would perhaps argue that they run their lives according to the precepts of science – an aseptic technique guaranteed not to allow irrationality to contaminate thought. In what way does this differ from logical positivism? This philosophy, associated with, among others, the late A.J. Ayer, argued that only things which were empirically testable had any meaning (I say testable deliberately to fudge the issue of verifiability versus falsifiability) It fell down by not applying its own metaphysical premise to itself. If metaphysics was untestable – and thus meaningless – so was the basis of logical positivism. A thorough skeptic also runs this risk.

Limits of logic

On the wall of the library where Kurtz spoke is a portrait of Bertrand Russell. Russell tried to set mathematics-and thus the basis of science – on a completely rigorous footing. With Alfred North Whitehead he wrote Principia Mathematica, which was to expound once and for all the essence of logic. They failed. It was proved mathematically soon after, by Kurt Gödel, that their central problem was not solvable. Perhaps they didn’t know it at the time, but their explanation was founded on a great fallacy. It is also one which many who condemn other people’s belief systems suffer from: it is the fallacy of the metaposition. A metaposition is a higher viewpoint, a position from which all can be seen, including other people’s reliance on implicitly contradictory language. My contention is that such a stance cannot be attained. Wittgenstein suggested that language is a ladder that we should dispose of once we have climbed above its constraints. But this ladder cannot be climbed-it doesn’t go anywhere. There is no directed ladder but a large spider’s web which goes off in all directions, and never ends.

Deep down doubts

Can we ever know anything with certainty? A simple starting point is that perception is a constructive process. Sensing is never mere passive reception of data. Data is sorted and processed according to preconceived categories. Whether these categories are a matter of nature or nurture is irrelevant here. The answer is probably both. Outright assertion of the primacy of the subjective may not be the best response, but surely neither is the alternative – which is what sociologist Habermas has called scientism: the belief that the only legitimate source of knowledge is science.

Limits of language

Language divides the random chaos of experience after it has been filtered by very low-level ‘prejudices’, the ‘stereotypes’ mentioned above-into categories which are to a significant extent defined by the language in which they are expressed. This can be demonstrated by the different ways languages divide the light frequency spectrum into different (and arbitrary) sections to label as colours. There are probably basic clusters of sense data which receive corresponding labels in all languages; like dogs, bodily organs and musical instruments; but many of the truly important elements of social existence can lay no such claim to inter-cultural coherence.

Two experiments provide nice illustrations. An experiment involved showing slides of playing cards to people, very rapidly. There would be errors introduced, such as the ‘six of spades’ being red. This would be perceived as either a six of spades, or hearts, without any inkling that anything was wrong. Gradually the subject would be exposed to the cards for longer and longer periods, and eventually would see the errors. In between, a period of anxiety was noted. Subjects began to suspect something, but could not see what. A similar experiment has been conducted using film of people speaking-but with a mismatched soundtrack. The picture would show the speaker saying ‘jump,’ and the sound would be ‘bump.’ Subjects heard nothing unusual, either jump, bump, or perhaps dump.

The pit of solipsism

We must surely, then, doubt even the evidence of our senses. How can such scepticism, such doubt, be ruthlessly applied without falling into the pit of solipsism? Solipsism is the belief that there is nothing the existence of which we can be certain. Everything could be an imaginary construct. Descartes’ way out – which included the famous I think, therefore I am – is doubtless unacceptable to many (Perhaps it should have been rewritten as ‘there is thinking… probably’?). It was based upon the belief that God would not fool us. So if God does not exist, how can we be sure we are not being tricked? It is easy to believe that we are able to manage without any need for faith that we can manage our whole lives according to the certainties which follow verification by science.

Some of this certainty can be wisely diluted by a solution of Popper from which a notion of science can be distilled. Science uses the best available theories to explain the known observations. We can perhaps mark the limits of science, but are these the same as the limits of knowledge? Science helps to explain plate tectonics and the genetics of schizophrenia, but what about aesthetics, or shopping? Claiming to live this rigorous way is reasonably convincing, but does it account for the discomfort associated with the playing cards above or the wrecking of Einstein’s blackboard? Einstein’s only lecture at Cambridge left two blackboards covered in his notes, calculations and explanations. They were kept in the seminar room as a souvenir. A Professor came into the room one morning to find the cleaner kindly finishing wiping one of the boards clean, about to start on the other. An academic horror story? And a true one. A disaster? But no information was lost. Nothing of scientific value – only of sentimental worth. Would a true sceptic feel any discomfort at this? Why?

‘Explanations should be as simple as possible but not simpler, ‘ said Einstein. Perhaps this is a route to a reasonable basis for limiting scepticism? If we are part of a swirling mass of meaningless, arbitrarily divided existence, then we need some rules to judge one thing against another. Simple empiricism is not good enough, unless you are prepared to suspend your scepticism at an arbitrarily chosen point. Perhaps then parsimony is an alternative – arbitrarily attempt to keep the number of arbitrary rules and judgements to a minimum.

It should be remembered that truth and certainty only have meaning in so far as they have behavioural consequences. And perhaps the most immediate behavioural consequence for many people should be the recognition that smugness is usually unfounded.

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 3, Issue 2, from 1989.

Having been a mineral collector for 15 years I can say that I am well and truly hooked on crystals but emphatically not in the New Age sense. For me the attraction lies in the aesthetic appeal and the scientific interest. For the New Agers crystals are ‘a perfect expression of the divine mind’, they ‘stimulate healing within the body, based upon the principles of harmony and vibration’ and they ‘ transform and harmonise energies at all levels’.

Crystals have attracted mankind for millennia. Peking man collected rock crystals and Australian aborigines use rock crystals and amethysts in rainmaking rites, and they attribute to them malevolent powers. The idea that they can heal the sick has been around in western culture for a long time but with the recent surge in the New Age religion crystals have become big business. Miners in Brazil and Arkansas, the main sources of quartz crystals, can’t dig them out of the ground fast enough-and prices have shot up.

The idea behind it all is that illness is caused by bad vibrations or disruption of energies in the body and that crystals can put these right, but more of that later. My first impression of these crystal healing, telepathic, New Age, pyramid energy people was that they were mostly a bunch of scientific illiterates with no understanding whatsoever of the subjects they profess to know so much about. In the case of crystal healers I have the distinct impression that the majority couldn’t tell orthorhombic from triclinic, would think unit cell was a place where prisoners were kept and that a space group was a rock and roll band from Mars.

No doubt this is true of the majority (and judging by some of the things I have read about crystals it is certainly true of some). It is not true of Ra Bonewitz, whose book Cosmic Crystals (Turnstone Press, 1983) I forced myself to read as a preparation for this article. Bonewitz is a geologist and the first half of his book is a fairly accurate and scientific description of crystals and their properties, though there are boobs like calling cinnabar ‘an oxide of mercury’ (it’s a sulphide). The second half is about 90 to 95% mystical drivel. I was most disappointed that someone who ought to have known better obviously did not.

I was reminded of an American I once read about (regrettably I can’t remember his name) who had a PhD in astronomy and yet believed that the earth lay at the centre of the universe with the sun, planets and stars orbiting it. I suppose even intelligent and well-educated people are not immune to human psychological weaknesses. Bonewitz’s book is fairly representative of crystal healing belief (perhaps slightly better than most) and the material below was derived from it.

For those who want to take up this crystal stuff Bonewitz gives plenty of instructions. First you must obtain a crystal. Ideally you could find your own but don’t worry if you have to buy one – as Bonewitz explains – ‘you are simply exchanging the energy you have put into acquiring your money for the energy the crystal has accumulated in making its way to you. A crystal that has come half way around the world has acquired the energy of the miner, of the buyer, of the importer, and of the various forms of transportation required to reach the mineral seller. The exchange for money energy maintains the perfect balance of energy that characterises a crystal’.

When presented with a selection of crystals and you don’t know which to choose just close your eyes for a moment and open them and grab the first crystal that you see. The first one that catches your eye does so because you have been drawn to it. Then it must be consecrated. Just will that it be used only for good. Now cleanse it of undesirable energies, i.e., wash it in water and ask the elementals of water (whatever they are) to remove those energies (don’ t forget to thank them afterwards). Alternatively, you can leave your crystal in the sun, ·or breathe on it or wash it with eucalyptus oil.

Now you are ready to programme the crystal. Simply direct a thought into the crystal that its energies should be used for a particular purpose and that the crystal should retain that thought or intention within itself.

The crystal can now be used to focus your energies and aid you in your meditation so that you can reach higher levels and ‘begin to discover the divinity within yourself’. It will also protect you from psychic attack and assist in telepathy.

It seems they also have horticultural applications: ‘If you have problems in the garden, put a perfect image of the garden into the crystal, and place or bury the crystal in an appropriate spot in the garden’. If you have an ill plant, fill a crystal with healing energy and leave it next to the plant. To improve plant growth, plant crops in concentric circles (so that the natural energy of the plants is retained in continuous flow rather than dissipated at the ends of rows) and put a crystal in the centre.

Don’t use them for purposes other than those they have been programmed for. Evidently one London homeopath made this mistake. He used a crystal as a repository of homeopathic information and intuition to be used in conjunction with a dowsing pendulum. He then decided to try using the crystal instead for meditation. The next day he discovered that all the homeopathic programming had been erased! I wonder if the patients noticed.

‘How does it work?’ you may ask. Well it’s all to do with energy. Bonewitz distinguishes between ‘mundane energies’ – those that can be measured by scientific instruments – such as electricity, light and heat, and ‘spiritual energies’ – those that cannot be so measured. According to Bonewitz these are, ‘Energies of thought, will, healing, and the energies that make up the higher spiritual bodies.’

Illness is ‘a reflection of disruption or disharmony of energies in the subtle bodies, and …healing takes place by restoring harmony to the subtle bodies.’ This is done by placing a ‘crystal in the area of energy disharmony (illness) and allowing its transformative power to work to bring the subtle energies back into harmony’. That’s funny – I always thought illness was caused by germs, injuries, bad diet, bad habits etc. Bonewitz also has peculiar ideas about epilepsy: ‘…in an epileptic seizure the subtle bodies often become misaligned or completely separated from the physical body’.

What utter baloney. I am naturally concerned that gullible people with serious illnesses will swallow this mystical drivel and seek out crystal healing instead of real medical help. But this problem is not confined to adults who are free to make their own choices, and to affect their own lives. I have this horrible feeling that sooner or later some crystal crank whose young child complains of pain in the lower right abdomen will put a crystal there rather than have the kid’s appendix seen to. As those who follow the activities of American faith-healers will know this sort of scenario has happened before-often with tragic results.

All this was bad enough but when I got to the bit about Atlantis in Bonewitz’s book I nearly threw up. If you think the beliefs I have described to you so far resemble the excrement of male bovines try reading what these people believe about Atlantis. I haven’t the space for details but according to New Agers the inhabitants of Atlantis used crystals extensively with the largest crystals located at major points of earth power. The priesthood, however, were corrupt and tried to use the crystal energies for their own ends. Eventually they tried to literally move whole continents.

At this point ‘the Hierarchy that oversees the development of the Earth’ intervened. The Atlanteans were threatening the whole solar system. The unafflicted priesthood were forewarned and fled to the rest of the world to influence developing cultures in Tibet, China, Egypt and elsewhere. No sooner had they left than Atlantis was violently destroyed in cataclysmic upheavals.

Never mind evidence for all this – there is none and Bonewitz offers none. I suppose one is supposed just to take it all on faith. It all sounds about as probable as flying pigs. Some of the claims about crystals might be testable. The healing claims could be subjected to standard, double blind, clinical trials, just as with drugs. One could perhaps use cut glass as placebos. One particular claim seemed to me to be an especially easy one to examine – that the energies of crystals from Brazil are different to those from Arkansas even though they look the same. Apparently healers can feel the difference.

I doubt the believers would be moved by any negative findings. For them it is a religious belief. It is tied up with immortality, reincarnation and magical powers. Their emotional desire to believe transcends facts and reason. It is all in the mind and something Bonewitz writes merely confirms this for me. He reports that when people are given a crystal and asked to close their eyes and describe the crystal’s energies they have a great variety of different experiences.

Some see images, some see colours, some feel the crystal to be heavy or light, some feel pulsations, heat, cold, or pain, some hear sounds and a few detect smells. To me this collection of contradictory experiences with the same crystal shows that people are just imagining things. To Bonewitz it’s all a part of the magic of crystals.