My recent interview on the Buddhist Geeks web radio show (www.buddhistgeeks.com), noting scientific evidence for a Buddhist idea like reincarnation, has resulted in some spirited comments on their website. I think my response to these, dealing with the nature of science and whether there is really scientific evidence for something like reincarnation or whether [...]
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I have been having a discussion with some parapsychologist colleagues about whether or not the existence of psi argues for a duality of existence in the world, a “spiritual” level or reality as I argue in my recent The End of Materialism book. Some argue that materialism will eventually explain psi, while I call [...]
Continue reading about Promissory Materialism, “God of the Gaps,” and Pragmatic Interactive Dualism
I recently received a most surprising email from a young man from abroad, I’ll call him Aaron, regarding my recent book, The End of Materialism: How Evidence of the Paranormal is Bringing Science and Spirit Together. He wanted my permission to pirate it! Here’s his email, and my response. Interesting….
name: Aaron [...]
Continue reading about Letter from a Polite Pirate on “The End of Materialism”
For the past week I have been reading a ms. (the current working title is Straight Talk) sent me by P. M. H. Atwater, what is to be her final (and very big!) book on her years of investigations of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs). Atwater is a leading independent scholar in this area, and I’ve [...]
For years I’ve been part of a private discussion group of scientific parapsychologists, mostly experimentalists. Recently we heard from one of our members, Professor Brian Josephson, a Nobel prize winning physicist, that he and another physicist had been dis-invited from participation in a small physics conference this summer because the organizers learned he was [...]
I don’t seem to be able to make this come up as a response to the comment about whether a person with unusual experiences can also study them as a scientist, so I’ll add it as a new post here…
“Are you suggesting that even someone with anomalous perceptions can contribute to a scientific study of [...]
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Essence of Science, Essence of Common Sense
or
Science in a Nutshell
Funny how everybody tends to automatically equate science with physical data and physical theories. Partly a function of the enormous success of the physical sciences, of course.
This is a reminder I circulated to some parapsychologist colleagues who seemed to be falling into that common trap.
I’m [...]
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Recently I received an email from a scholar who will be reviewing my The End of Materialism book for a journal. He noted that:
In the book you say: “….genuine science [shows] that a wide variety of traditional religious views about reality are factually wrong; they just don’t stand up to empirical tests.” Can you [...]
Continue reading about Science and Religion, Fit and Non-Fit