"I think, my Kepler, we will laugh at the extraordinary stupidity of the multitude. What do you say of the leading philosophers here to whom I have offered a thousand times of my own accord to show my studies but who have never consented to look at the planets, moon, or telescope." Letter from Galileo to Kepler. 19th August 1610, www.humanistictexts.org
The "multitude" Galileo refers to are his own academic colleagues at the University of Padua. I think, my Kepler, that we shall also laugh at the extraordinary stupidity of our own leading philosophers and scientists. Intelligence is the ability to benefit from experience; stupidity is its opposite. Extraordinary stupidity is the refusal even to look.
Most people are sheep. Sheep are useful, hardworking animals, but their most powerful instinct is to go with the Herd. Most people are constitutionally unable to believe anything not approved by the Herd. They are unable to ever learn anything not in the textbooks. What we call "education" is training in the beliefs, attitudes, worldview, values, and lifestyles of the Herd. Very rare is the Hawk, lord of the horizon. Yet all human progress and all human change comes from the Hawk, not from the Herd. The ratio of Hawks to Herd is as low among people with high IQs as with average IQs, as low among Ph.D.s as high school dropouts. And that is why intelligence is so rare and so valuable, especially when it is found in people like Galileo, who are bright, persistent and creative.
Those colleagues of Galileo at the University of Padua who refused to look through his telescope are quite properly held up for public scorn. Carl Sagan did a job on them in his PBS "Cosmos" series of TV programs about twenty years ago. This is ironic, since Carl Sagan (who died in December, 1996) was himself unwilling to "look through the telescope" (i.e., repeat the studies) if psychics or UFOs swim into view. Carl Sagan was in fact one of the "Grand Inquisitors" of our time, a member of CSICOP ("Psi-cops"), doing his best to prevent psychical phenomena or UFOs from becoming acceptable in academic circles. Carl Sagan called himself an exobiologist, while rejecting the only available source of knowledge of exobiology, UFOs. He refused to believe in ETI (Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) unless it sent him radio signals.
This is stupidity in search of stupidity. Sending a beacon out to an unknown universe might draw goblins, or other violent cultures little more advanced than ourselves. Fortunately, we have so far only been visited by anthropologists and a few biologists. No missionaries, no merchants, no desperate emigrants escaping a dying star, no Conquistadors or Saviors. There are reasons why civilizations have to outgrow violence before they can advance enough to make the "Journey of Light-Years." The distance between stars provides a natural quarantine for nasty little cultures like our own, until they have grown up morally and philosophically. Still, even a primitive culture like ours could launch an "ark" towards an interstellar destination, such as a radio beacon. And similarly, other primitive cultures could launch an "ark" towards us, if we should send out a beacon.
I think, my Kepler, we shall laugh at Mr. Carl Sagan, peering earnestly up at the sky with his radio telescopes, while UFOs rain down all around him. The question is not whether UFOs exist, but whether mankind is smart enough to recognize their existence. The search for signs of intelligent life in the universe must begin right here at home.
The trouble with Psi-cops like Carl Sagan, Susan Blackmore, James Randi, and Martin Gardner is that they follow Hume's rule, rather than scientific method. David Hume was an 18th Century Scottish philosopher, a friend of James Hutton, founder of geology, and of Adam Smith, founder of economics. Somehow, Hume never grasped scientific method, which his friends learned from Newton and Galileo.
Hume proposed the rule that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs," such as proof that fraud could not possibly occur. This is the slogan of the Psi-cops. This is an impossible requirement, one that no scientific study could possibly pass. If Hume's rule had been employed in the previous century against the discoveries of Galileo, Kepler and Newton, when they were as "extraordinary" as Psi or UFOs are today, science would have died stillborn, and we would still be burning witches and heretics. Scientific objectivity is all we ask. Anything less is unacceptable; anything more is impossible.
The rule of scientific method is reproducibility, to rule out fraud, incompetence, and hallucination, plus rigorous testing to rule out the alternatives, until only one remains. That's the rule followed by at least some UFO and Psi researchers, but not by the Psi-cops. If the Psi-cops have their way, science remains stuck where it is, with no hope of survival of death, no meaning to life, no way to solve social problems. A little knowledge really is a dangerous thing.
Many New Age people have already rejected science, and found themselves a guru. This is unfortunate, because it is only in scientific method that we find peaceful resolution of differences of opinion, rigorously resolved by putting the alternatives to the test of experience.
If we give up scientific method, some guru-disciple tradition will once more take over our civilization, as happened 2000 years ago, and another Dark Age is inevitable. The growth of cults and sects is a warning.
Carl Sagan also feared the end of civilization and a new Dark Age, because of irrationality. His implicit definition of "irrational" is "anything contrary to the reductionist worldview." Like the other psi-cops, Sagan arrogantly rejected the experience of ordinary people. The psi-cops badger and harrass scholars in the forbidden sciences, and attempt to get them fired from their universities. Silencing the new sciences is their goal. Thus they demonstrate their "extraordinary stupidity," in Galileo's sense.
Worldviews determine our sense of what is possible and impossible. For nineteen centuries everyone "knew" that the heavens were made of the immutable, imperishable fifth substance, not like earthly substances, which were subject to change and decay. That was the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic worldview. It was because Galileo's academic colleagues at the University of Padua "knew" the heavens were incorruptible that they "had no need" to look through the telescope, just as today's scientists "know" UFOs and psychics are impossible.
Galileo's observations of the phases of Venus provided the first rigorous refutation of the Ptolemaic Solar System. But at the time that was less important than the craters on the moon, and the spots on the sun, which showed corruptibility in the heavens. The Aristotelian worldview was the unquestioned backdrop of Galileo's day, as it had been throughout the middle ages, the Roman Empire, and the time of Jesus and the Church Fathers. But what everyone "knew" was false.
Today, what everyone "knows" is that everything is made of atoms, brought together by chance and causality into such things as human beings. This assumes we ARE our bodies. But if that were true, how could we go Out-Of-Body, a fairly common experience? We wear bodies, just as we wear clothes. And this conclusion is based on one hundred years of rigorous scientific research by the various Societies for Psychical Research. Reality is more than just physics. Worldviews are not discoveries. At best, they are working hypotheses, at worst intractable dogmas which produce the "extraordinary stupidity" of scholars. The worldview of Reduction has prevented acceptance of Psychical Research for one hundred years, and denied the existence of UFOs for fifty years.
True intelligence requires curiosity, especially about anomalies, and it requires a Mind open enough to be changed by experience. The Psi-cops do not have that quality.
The media should not accept the Psi-cop's claims to be experts on Psi or UFOs, when they have never tried to reproduce a single study of psychical phenomena or UFOs. The reality of UFOs is one of the best documented facts on record. Millions of people worldwide have had close encounters with them, in broad daylight, at close range. It requires extraordinary stupidity to ignore this vast body of data.
Copyright © Thales 1999
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