Summary of
PseudoSkeptic Fallacies
(Click below for examples)
- Characteristics and Behaviors
- New! Hijacking Skepticism to mean its opposite
- Selective Skepticism / Establishment Defenders
- Perpetual Denial of Evidence
- Double Standards, Contradictions and Lies
- Dismissing Anecdotal Evidence as Invalid
- Overgeneralizations and Distortions
- Cherry Picking of Evidence
- Straw Man Arguments
- Forcing Explanations That Don't Fit The Data
- Invisible Pink Unicorn / Santa Claus Gambit
- Occam's Razor
- Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence
- Fallacies of UFO Debunkers
"I shall not commit the fashionable stupidity of regarding everything I cannot explain as a fraud." - Carl Gustav Jung
Forcing Explanations That Don't Fit The Data
PseudoSkeptics are fond of giving explanations that do not fit all the data, and moreover refuse to provide one that does unless they can come up with a reductionist one. They will never accept a paranormal one that includes metaphysical dimensions because they believe it's impossible. Contrary to what they say, they are about beliefs, not facts or rationality.
This is because they are fanatics, and like all dogmatists, they have to face facts and evidence that they cannot logically explain away. Such is the curse and achilles heel of fanaticists who espouse extreme world views. Thus, when at a dead end, they are forced to either turn to denial, using ad hominem attacks, or insist on false explanations to dismiss what they can't accept. In doing so, their folly is exposed.
For example, there are many documented and anecdotal cases from reliable sources where a psychic or medium obtains a highly specific hit on a sitter that could not have been obtained from cold reading techniques, leakage or fraud. We are talking about unique or unusual facts or deep secrets about the sitter that cannot be determined from their appearance, speech, or public research, not generalities that apply to everyone. Skeptics are at a loss in such cases, so, rather than become open minded or admit that they might be wrong, they dismiss, deny and force false explanations into the incident. They will insist on cold reading, fraud, or that the sitter leaked out the info unknowingly. Even if the sitter is 100 percent sure that such didn't happen, or the circumstances render the skeptical explanations impossible, pseudo-skeptics will still insist upon them, thus revealing their weakness, closed-mindedness and fanaticism.
Likewise, their dying brain hypothesis for NDE's do not account for the cases where the experiencer is able to view details outside the room that they couldn't have known about which were later verified to be accurate. Or those where they were able to describe objects and conversations in the operating room that they couldn't have seen or heard. And of course, they do not account for NDE's that occur during flat brainlines and heartlines, as in the case of Pam Reynolds. And NDE Researcher and Parapsychologist Charles Tart for example was able to get a girl during OBE to read a five digit number just below the ceiling, which has confounded skeptics to this day. Nevertheless, skeptics insist on their explanation even if it doesn't fit all the data or evidence. That's why they are fundamentalists, not objective investigators or seekers of truth.
For more examples of survival consciousness data that do not fit the skeptics' explanations, see Eteponge's essay here.
And in regards to ghosts, their hallucination hypothesis doesn't explain the cases of multiple people who have seen the same ghost and described the same thing. Or the fact that credible down-to-earth people who were sober with no history of hallucination at all, could experience a ghost, among other things.
Also, their neurological explanation for sleep paralysis and alien abductions do not account for the fact that others in the room have seen or felt an "entity" while awake when the abductee or sleep paralysis sufferer was undergoing the experience.
In addition, their explanation for past life memories (imagination, forgotten memories, suggestions by a hypnotist, etc.) do not account for the remarkably specific memories that were verified to be accurate upon investigation, as in the example of this boy.
Simply put, if the data that doesn't fit into their hypothesis, they ignore it. And that is the mark of a belief-oriented closed minded fundamentalist, not objective open truth seeker.
It would seem that pseudo-skeptics hate mysteries and unexplained phenomena, and are very uncomfortable with it. Thus they are emotional and bigoted toward it, not objective, open or logical.
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