COMMENT:Attacks "fundamentalist materialism," worship of the power and wisdom of science. CSICOP is seen as an exemplar of this mind-set, associated with authoritarianism, mind control, and censorship. Wilson uses "guerilla ontology" as a tactic -- constantly throwing out claims and arguments that may or may not be true, ostensibly to teach readers to think for themselves and not to trust any authority, even himself. Good advice, as Wilson misrepresents several of his examples of CSICOP perfidy. He accuses <a href="/bibq/martin,gardner">Martin Gardner</a> of "leading" the attack on Wilhelm Reich, of silence when the FDA burned Reich's books, and then announces that Gardner did, in fact, condemn the book-burning. Wilson asserts that James Randi made unsupported accusations of poor controls in the SRI testing of Uri Geller -- failing to mention Randi's extensive investigations of those experiments. The best example of shoddiness comes in his account of the `Mars Effect' fiasco, a case where CSICOP really did drop the ball. Sticking to previously published accounts would have made the skeptics look bad, but his account is hopelessly garbled, indicating lack of research into the matter.
DATE:19990701
KEYWORDS:skepticism
MISC:240p.
PUBLISHER:Falcon Press
SUBMITADDR:revpk@cellar.org
SUBMITNAME:Brian Siano
TITLE:The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science
