[John Freestone]

Ok ALG. I see we're coming to an impasse here. It looks to me like you're saying that people like me dismiss each single case as explicable by material science and fail to notice the great mass of cases being reported, and hence wrongly dismiss magic. I, as a sceptic, say that people like you accept single cases irrationally, ignoring materialistic explanations (such as the possibility that someone given a diagnosis might contract the diagnosed condition psychosomatically, for instance, which, if true, could turn "psychic healing" into something more like linguistic harming, which could be the basis of "cursing" people), and fail to notice the vast amount of evidence that the world is out there and immutable by will power.

I accept, of course, that the LOA could only be provable to oneself. I'm just astonished that you say so blithely "You would not lie to yourself, would you?". That is my whole point. You seem to trust your subjective impressions and have faith that you don't "lie" to yourself very readily...but you then use the opposite argument to question my relative confidence in objective reality: "sensory perceptions basically aren't terribly trustworthy".

If you can use self-delusion as a reason to doubt the material, objective world like that, I don't see why you suspend it when it comes to miracles, and for every claim that those kinds of phenomena are proven, there will be dozens of logical rebuffs, as you recognise yourself. You claim that you put in sufficient experimental controls to determine that you have psychic powers, but the thing you are studying is not discernable from self-delusion. If you think a blue feather and it appears, and then have to descend to the realms of rational, material science to establish whether it exists in the real world or not....well, it's moving outside your own cosmology as soon as you do that. A blue feather would be, like everything else, just your subjective creation, a thought, surely?

It seems to me that when you decide to believe in magic, it means suspending rational judgement, because rational judgement belongs to a "wrong" mindset, an illusion about reality. Reality is just what you're creating in your mind. Hence some of the resistance to sceptics like me - believers don't want to have their "positive" thoughts interrupted by my doubts. As a well-educated person on such matters, you must see that, and it's common in many religions. You have to give up doubt altogether, immerse yourself in faith. Maybe that's what I'm struggling to understand about LoA - so many believers seem to want to do experiments to prove that it works, as if it wasn't a religion, but a hidden science waiting for the world to discover it. When someone asks believers for evidence, they get told they can't have objective evidence, but must prove it for themselves, whilst also being sent off to websites where the proof is documented rigorously.

What you describe as a logical approach above beginning "1. Either LOA is genuine OR it is not..." is only one side of the logic, to me. You demonstrate your subconscious desire to believe this stuff when you say that the benefits of LoA would be so wonderful if it were true, then that this makes it imperitive to do experiments to ascertain the truth. We could invent hundreds of pleasant cosmological fictions to investigate. But your logic from this point only concerns what problems you might cause yourself if it's not real. By this time, you have departed from the kind of logic I was criticising, concerning the philosophy, actually discerning reality from illusion. The risk is not so much that an individual experimenter harms themselves by making silly decisions, but that they - and whole communities of like-minded folk - end up moving further and further from checks and balances (as their confidence in the Law increases), and recruit more believers with their blogs, when in fact they are what ordinary folk call "away with the fairies". I get the strong feeling here that believers are more fearful of making wrong career decisions and ending up less well off if their basic philosophy is wrong than that their basic philosophy might be wrong. It's like the ultimate materialism, ironically, that I come across here - "Look, I must be right. Look how much money I've got!" Is wealth the measure of the true believer now? At one time it was poverty. There's a good challenge. See if you can lose all your money by thinking it away. If the LoA is real, you can always get it back again.

Surely one has to decide between rationality, logic, science, removing subjective errors and all that, on the one hand, and belief-makes-real on the other? Testing belief-makes-real with solid science and rigorous logic... I don't get that at all.