We all know them: the professional sceptics who make a living debunking such things as the paranormal, uri geller, psychics and tarot card readers. Yet as soon as one generation of sceptics dies, their work, seemingly never finished, is taken up by a new generation. But just as the Gellers of this world can never convince everyone, neither can the sceptics.
By the way, for the record, I am sure that Geller is a fraud (I met an Israeli who knew him before he was famous and claims he originally did the psychic stuff as a magic trick...like Derren Brown he only became famous when he claimed it was FOR REAL.)
But really the reason the sceptics fail to convince is because they suffer from 'it's-nothing-but-itis". They are knee jerk reductionists. And just try telling a painter that red and green are 'nothing but different wavelengths' and you'll get an inkling of what's afoot. We can be sure of one thing- life is NEVER 'nothing but'.
The problem lies in what is going on. The sceptic is looking for a way to make the uncomfortable implications of the psychic go away. The sceptic is, in fact, a kind of believer. He or she has seen that if telepathy is true then it changes everything. It means that a lot of science is based on wrong assumptions- and that's too big a contradiction for their thin shoulders to bear. But a scientist needs broad shoulders; a good one will know half of what he took for gospel as a student will be overturned in his lifetime- or else be like Rutherford denying Einstein to his grave. And a shrug of the shoulders is all that is needed for something as peripheral to everyday life as telepathy.
For therein lies the rub- psychic phenomena are always singular- I have just read a very convincing case of an adopted boy who was suddenly plagued by dreams that his real mother was being plagued by bears in a cold northern place. His adopted mother was concerned and rang hospitals in Alaska which was all she could think to do. Finally she connected with the real mother who was dying of AIDS in...Alaska. So the son, who was able to finally meet his real mum, got to assuage his fears (to some extent) before she died.
But mostly this sort of thing doesn't happen, and science needs regularity to make its predictions.
Of course we all know science doesn't run as Karl Popper suggested- a single 'negative' where there should be a positive is airbrushed away- Ptolemaic astronomy was more accurate than Copernican, at first, owing to the number of ingenious workarounds that had been developed. So the sceptics shouldn't fear- they should have more faith in the stalwart strengths of science.
So a sceptic is revealed as someone who actually hasn't much faith in anything, but a lot of belief instead. Belief in this case means an intellectual drive to assert what ought to be the case. Whereas faith is a confidence that when something works you don't try to fix it, you use it.
We, the ordinary punters, torn between sceptics and psychics, don't need belief in 'our system'. We have faith in the world as a mysterious place that will always surprise us, but not every day. Especially if we live routinised lives within well worn boundaries.