Gimme that New Age Religion

the Skeptic, Vol 14 No 2

by Sir Jim R Wallaby

(Sir Jim R Wallaby is President of Pseudonyms Anonymous)

Sometimes world changing concepts crop up in the most unexpected places. It was a letter to the editor of that fine publication New Scientist (April 22, 1994) that caused me to question all my long held prejudices about how the world actually operates.

Unusually (even perhaps uniquely) for that publication, the letter was anonymous and contained this explanation "My apologies for remaining anonymous. I am a ‘professional researcher’ with a string of letters after my name. My employers would not like this letter and jobs are hard to find these days. Anon"

The letter itself addressed a previously published review of a book about the theories of Rupert Sheldrake. (Sheldrake is the British scientist, whose proposed theory of Formative Causation [or Causative Formation - I’m never sure which is correct], suggests that a ‘morphic field’ exists in conjunction with all living things, which allows, among other effects, that once a task has been successfully conducted once by one individual from a given population, it thereafter becomes easier for other members of that population to do the same task, even though they have never had contact with the original experimenter.) At least that is what I take it to mean, although the Wallaby’s have never been scientific in any way.

But back to the letter. The anonymous writer, while conceding that Sheldrake’s theories appear to be ‘a little far-fetched’ goes on to describe one of his own experiences, in which he set out to measure some parameters and found his results to be inconsistent rubbish. After he went off to read about other work on the same problem, and, with no alteration in his testing apparatus, he returned to his task, to find that his results were now consistent with the previous research.

Interesting, but hardly world shattering. Well perhaps not to you Dear Reader, but to Anon and, by extension, to the scion of the ancient house of Wallaby, this event heralded an epiphany. He suggests that his theory is easily testable. "If what I am implying is true, all we need to see data taken before a theory has been worked out , and then examine the results to see if the earlier recorded data is in accord with the new theory."

It may still seem a little thin to you Skeptics, but hearken unto the evidentiary support he adduces (Language! I must stop associating with lawyers.)

"Look at pre-Newtonian ideas on the trajectory of projectiles. Early manuscripts report that projectiles followed nearly triangular paths; a projectile went up into the air until its energy ran out, then fell to earth vertically. You will see early religious tapestries showing just this, arrows sticking straight up from the ground without the slightest hint of a parabolic trajectory These guys were not stupid: they would have stood sideways on to the archer and seen the arrow’s trajectory from a distance."

And then he posed the hypothesis that dispelled the scales of scepticism from before my eyes. "What", he asked "is going on? Would it not be a dirty trick if every time a Newton or an Einstein comes along with a logical argument or theory, ‘nature’ obliges by falling into step with the great thinker. Did planets follow elliptical paths before Kepler?"

Let us consider the implications of that seemingly simple hypothesis. The world really was flat before Eratosthenes; the planets did follow epicycles and the Earth was the centre of the universe between the times of Ptolemy and Kepler; combustion was caused by phlogiston until Priestley discovered oxygen; the world was only a few thousand years old until Lyell, but then its age retroactively retrogressed to number in the billions; people were the result of special creation until Darwin came along, then they started evolving; ether did fill the universe until Michelson and Morley showed that it didn’t. I will leave it to the reader to extend these speculations into other areas. E did not = MC2 until Einstein said it did. (What it did =, I will leave to some other Great Thinker .)

What a theory! It explains everything. Nothing is wrong - any idea is (or was) right. But isn’t that the hallmark of a great religion, rather than a scientific theory? This, then is the answer. This is a tolerant faith that will unite all of humanity in the 21^st Century, because everybody’s ideas will be right and nobody will ever be wrong. All one has to do is to accept that old religious tapestries count as hard evidence, and surely that goes without saying.

I realise that Anon mentioned ‘great thinkers’, but this is a new, caring, non-confrontational sort of faith and it would be terribly politically incorrect to suggest that L Ron Hubbard was in any way inferior as a thinker to Albert Einstein or that Duane Gish could not hold his own with Charles Darwin.

Well the saintly Anon has convinced me. I am left with no doubts that the Messiah has come amongst us and I plan to get in on the ground floor as chief acolyte to the All-Seeing Anon. And I wish to allow you, my fellow former Skeptics, to join me in the Genesis of the all new, New Age, No Fault, Everything Accepted, No Belief Too Far-fetched to Believe, Evangelical, Apostolic Anonian Church.

Tenders for Cardinalcies and Bishoprics are now open (no reasonable offer refused).

Please send all donations (tithes) in small denomination, unmarked, banknotes to:

Vice-Pope Sir Jim c/- the Skeptics Post Office Box.