James Randi, stage magician (“the Amazing Randi”), skeptic, and writer, died on October 20, 2020. He was someone I really admired. He took on nonsense and demolished it. He gave Penn and Teller their start. This post is about one of his books mostly so I can talk about him. The book is Flim-Flam!, published in 1982. I don’t think it’s currently in print, but used copies are easy to find.

He took apart many claims of paranormal phenomena such as astrology, fairy photography, and faith healing, using facts and logic. Sometimes this made him unpopular, but he had fun doing it.

He pointed out that even smart people (like you and me, right?) can be fooled. Scientists can be especially gullible because they aren’t used to dealing with nonsense and fakery.

Randi was famous for offering a monetary reward to anyone who could demonstrate paranormal abilities. Originally it was for $10,000, and later he increased it to a million dollars. In Flim-Flam, he wrote:

I have carried around with me ever since a check in that amount [$10,000], immediately awardable to a successful applicant. … The offer is still open, and will be during my lifetime. It is stipulated in my will that if the amount is still unclaimed and available upon my death, the same offer will be made by my estate in perpetuity.

The James Randi Educational Foundation has suspended the acceptance of applications, with certain exceptions, but will announce new protocols for applicants early in 2021.

I haven’t been able to find out whether Randi carried a million-dollar check with him after he announced the increase. For most people, that’s an awful lot of money to tie up in a checking account.

It bothers me that I can’t find a definition for “paranormal” in the book. If someone can reliably demonstrate an ability under controlled conditions, is it still paranormal? We can do things today which people once thought required magic. Hypnosis might once have been considered magical; today, psychologists understand it more or less. Anything that happens isn’t contrary to the laws of nature; if it seems to be, then either it didn’t happen or we’ve misunderstood nature.

If someone demonstrated the ability to read my mind without the aid of electronics (putting electrodes on my head isn’t properly paranormal), that would be impressive, but it would just be some human capacity that hadn’t previously had reliable documentation.

All I’m saying is that the term “paranormal” doesn’t tell us anything. It’s more productive to talk about specific claims and ask if there’s any reason to believe them. Fortunately, Randi does lots of that in Flim-Flam.

There are several ways to read the book. One is to carefully study the cases you care about and check the sources and methodology. That’s a lot of work, but if you’re actively engaged in the study of those claims, you need more information. His commentaries serve as just a starting point.

Another way is to read the book casually and pretend it’s made you an expert on these claims. Unfortunately, some “skeptics” do that. Armed with some superficial answers, they pretend to have unassailable knowledge. Randi ridicules his opponents after analyzing their claims in detail, so he’s earned the right to mock them. Unfortunately, some skeptics are really dogmatists, mocking anything that doesn’t match their worldview.

The way I read the book was to treat it as providing some interesting bits of knowledge and entertainment. Most of the claims he challenges aren’t ones I took seriously before, and I don’t find an unassailable refutation of them necessary. Astrology is pure silliness. Levitation by an act of will violates the known laws of physics. Fairies and the North American Bigfoot would have been reliably spotted, documented, and analyzed if they were real. I’m content to enjoy reading Randi’s rebuttals without getting in too deep. If a Bigfoot knocks on my door, I’ll figure it’s a late trick-or-treater until proven otherwise.

It’s fun to read the book on that level. Here’s a sample of how he treats astrology: “Some stars that we see in the night sky aren’t really ‘there’ at all; we see the light they emitted anywhere from a few years ago to several thousand years ago. Astrology would have us believe that if, at the moment of birth, the sun is aligned with a set of stars that aren’t even ‘there’ as we see them, one’s future or character will be different from what it would be if the sun were aligned with another set of not-there stars.”

Some of the claims which Randi wrote about circa 1980 have fallen out of style. Not a lot of people talk about the Bermuda Triangle anymore. Very few even know about the “fairy photographs” that impressed Arthur Conan Doyle. But astrologers and self-proclaimed psychics still get a living from the credulous, and faith healing continues to discourage people from getting legitimate medical care. Netflix still has a show about ancient aliens, though I prefer Star Trek.

People who tear down myths aren’t popular. Dickens had Scrooge say to Marley’s ghost, “You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!” Coming to believe in disembodied spirits was part of his reformation. Popular entertainment often denigrates reason. In Mary Poppins Returns, which I just watched a few days ago, the eponymous nanny pontificates that “people think too much” and “everything is possible, even the impossible.” She offers a one-way ticket to Fantasia. (But the songs are great.)

It takes reason and science to improve the human condition, and nonsensical claims often do harm. A lot of people don’t like to hear that, but they should. Let’s be glad there have been people like Randi to point out the difference between sense and nonsense.

For next week, I’m looking at Lyndal Roper’s biography of Martin Luther. It was a very useful book when I researched The Magic Battery.