Enjoyed the show, but felt there are a few things worth mentioning.
First of all, I'm a huge fan of the Houdini-types who want to go in and flush out the phony psychics and those who are taking advantage of people. But some things said in this interview lead me to believe that the guest is more of a debunker than a skeptic. The organization hasn't found a SINGLE mystery? And when David points out one of many legitimate mysteries, they haven't looked into it. And probably won't.
I'm assuming the guest was referring to the whole god-helmet/rotating magnetic fields thing when he made the claim that "we now know what causes out of body experiences". That's a completely false statement. Persinger's helmet, though interesting, is a very controversial topic and not conclusive by any means.
And even if Persinger's helmet was not being referred to, apparently this quote bears repeating: "The feather can induce laughter, but the joke still exists." Anyone who can't grasp the concept behind that statement doesn't understand what it means to understand, and probably shouldn't be a scientific investigator. Vaguely simulating a phenomenon doesn't explain it, and it doesn't preclude other causes of the same phenomenon, one must actually understand all steps from cause to effect if he can honestly claim to know it.
Despite bold claims to the contrary, we actually do not know what causes out of body experiences, we do not know what causes precognitive dreams, and we do not know what causes "shadow people" experiences and what not. Because we don't understand consciousness, and might never understand it, these are legitimate mysteries.
Note: A "brain fart" is a completely meaningless statement, the term was invented as an excuse to discount mysteries and not think about them. It makes people dumber every time it is uttered.
Everyone lovvvves to talk the talk, ie "humans really don't know as much about the world as they'd like to believe", but no one that I know walks the walk. Everyone is way too eager to place mysteries in the "solved" box, even when the evidence is inadequate for any sort of conclusion.
True, conclusions make us feel intelligent and safe in a scary world, because that is their purpose. It all comes down to whether a person wants to know or whether a person wants to have the feeling of knowing. You can get the feeling of knowing for much cheaper than the cost of actually knowing.
This doesn't mean that I believe OOBE's and those other things are something magical. I don't believe anything because they are mysteries. As in unknown.
Well spoken David, the comments about evolution. It is not only religious people that are opposing Darwinian evolution, that's a tactical method being used by the scientific community to make people shut up and conform.
Firstly, evolution is a huge interest of mine... when I first started learning about evolution subjects I joined a Darwinian yahoo group and an ID yahoo group. When you strip away the semantics and fluff you get this: just as there is no support for an omnipotent God as the catalyst behind human evolution, there is absolutely no support for random mutation as the catalyst. This is the key factor in evolution, religious people have the agenda of injecting God into the evolutionary process, and the Darwinians have a definite agenda of injecting randomness into the evolutionary process. Think about it: An institution that comes into existence as an opposition to another institution naturally has an agenda that specifically opposes them.
Then again there are the sensible people: evolution obviously exists, but there is no reason to place either God or randomness in the position of the hand that guides it. Evolution at its center is still a mystery.
Even further, his comments on the bigfoot film. I'll be the first to say that it may very well be a hoax, but his idea of "evidence" is actually not evidence at all. As far as I know, the film-maker has never admitted that it's a hoax, a guy came forward and claimed he was the man in the suit. Does he even have the suit? Where's the film that recreates the footage with this hoaxer? After all the time put into this film, if it was conclusively proven a hoax, this re-creation would OBVIOUSLY have been made.
What if I come forward and claim that I was the real guy who spoke at the white house dinner in 2006 and I was just wearing a Stephen Colbert suit? You can't prove that I didn't... so it must be true.
Sorry but this skeptic has the same problem as the true believers: pretending to know things that he clearly does not.