Book: Reincarnation: A Critical Examination
by Paul Edwards (1996)
Edwards devotes to much space to irrelevant issues, or to irrelevant authors. For example, he talks a lot about Near-Death Experiences. But instead of performing a deep analysis of the works of highly respected authors in the field, like Kenneth Ring and Michael Sabom, he prefers to make lots of jokes and fun of the works of Kübler Ross and Moody Jr., who are considered very weak even by their own peers. Susan Blackmore, in "Dying to Live" (1993), did exactly the opposite, performing high quality skeptical analysis of the works of these authors. An update on that would be highly informative, but Mr. Edwards decided to give us only laughs instead.
In fact, it seems that Edwards' phobia of analyzing empirical evidence is a long lasting illness. He was criticised by philosopher Robert Almeder for this in 1997, and had already received this very same criticism by Almeder in 1990. Another lingering disease of his is his "reluctance to engage primary source material" (that is, he doesn't read and cite scientific papers, but popular books mostly), as anthropologist James Matlock put it in 1997 and again back in 1990. Both these 1990 comments refer to Edwards' four-chapter article published in the "Free Inquirer" magazine, in 1986-87, on the reincarnation hypothesis. That is where his book came from, apparently with very few additions, and possibly with no improvements... (easy money, huh?).
Edwards' analysis of the works of Ian Stevenson is a complete failure. Actually, his analysis "seems" to have some basis. The first time I read chapter 16 (on Stevenson), I thought: "Wow, that's devastating!". By the fourth time I read it, I would be saying: "This man (i.e. Edwards) is a fake!". If you read it really carefully, you will notice that he doesn't actually analyze the cases, or their empirical content, or the arguments for and against them. Strangely enough, he does make some deeper analysis of the weakest case reports, which led me to the conclusion that his problem is not incompetence, but unwillingness.
Some specific points are especially revealing. On page 140, he makes some unrespectful and uninformed comments about Stevenson's research on birthmarks. If Edwards were really a scholar (or even a decent popular writer), he would have made a review of the bibliography instead, and would have found an introductory article on this issue by Stevenson (Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1993). There, he would really have spotted a very serious statistical mistake that Stevenson commited, and that seems to have remained uncriticized by skeptics until 2002 !!! (by Leonard Angel). Again, looking for information about reincarnation "researcher" Banerjee, I could only find jokes, laughs, and gossip in Edwards' book. But when I read Matlock's (supposedly a "believer") bibliography review of Past Life Memory Case Studies (1990), I found the following comment about Banerjee: "Banerjee...was caught tampering with experimental data, (and) must be considered unreliable...(and) he has been written out of serious parapsychology.". Wow! So, who is the "skeptic" and who is the "believer" after all?
And what has Edwards to say about the so called "best cases" studied by Stevenson and colaborators? Are they really good? What are their weaknesses and strengths? Did he read them? The "answer" is on page 277. There, Edwards says: "Better perhaps; but not good enough.". So that is all our "Awesome Scholar" (as Martin Gardner labelled him) has to say? "Perhaps"!!?? The man simply didn't even read the cases! Again, on page 256, where he comments on Leonard Angel's critique of the Imad Elawar case, he only says that he "does not have the space to comment much on it". Of course he does not. He used up all his space with gossips and jokes about Kübler Ross and etc! Even the apparently stronger arguments that he seems to have (from "insiders who have dissented", Barker and Ransom) turned out to be very weak and even imprecise in light of my further readings on the subject.
Edwards' main theoretical and logical objection to reincarnation is the "modus operandi" problem. "How could reincarnation possibly happen?" The answer is given by Edwards himself, when he confortably decides to throw away any "modi operandi" concerns when talking about his own philosophical persuasion, that is, materialism: "How could the brain create counsciousness?" "Why not?" he answers!!! (page 294). Possible "modi operandi" constraints is an intellectually stimulating and most relevant issue. But it has to be approached in an informed, coherent manner, and not a là "Jimmy Swaggert on the Pulpit".
To me, the most revealing (and shocking) passage in this book is when, on page 134, Edwards brutally disrespects Scott Rogo, in a rude comment about his murder in 1991, still unsolved then, saying how Rogo might solve it by calling the police station himself! Rogo was almost an informant of Edwards. Many of the gossips Edwards used in his book he learned from Rogo. And Rogo still had relatives alive that might feel hurt by these crude comments from Edwards. That is basically the mistake many skeptics-materialists commit. They get so desperate to wipe out the very idea of life after death that they end up forgetting that there is indeed life "before" death. And also, there are feelings and hearts that deserve to be respected and cared for.
This book, therefore, is very good if you want material for criticizing the pathological phenomenon of pseudo-skepticism. It is also of some value for giving a frame for criticism on reincarnation research, but then you will have to read much further if you really want to have a good idea of what are the strengths and weaknesses in the empirical evidence for reincarnation. I have done this. And I have concluded that the evidence seems to be weak. But it is certainly there!
Book: The End of Certainty by Ilya Prigogine (1997).
This book will very likely prove readable by most general readers, like myself, provided the technical parts are carefully skipped, and the central ideas are correctly spotted. It truly presents essential insights to issues like: the emergence of complexity; self-organization; the nature of matter; determinism vs probability; and the validity of time symmetry in both quantum mechanics and classical mechanics equations. As to issues like the actual existance of a flow and arrow (direction) of time (which, by the way, is the very subject of the book) and the existence of free will, the book may be too far from conclusive...
It seemed to me (only top experts could really tell for sure) that Prigogine showed compelling evidence supporting the idea that, contrary to the prevailing notions in the field of physics, there is time asymmetry both in quantum mechanics and in classical mechanics. And also, that reality at both these levels is not deterministic, but truly probabilistic. He further showed that determinism should be replaced by a probabilistic account of events both in situations where we have finite knowledge about the initial conditions and in situations where we have infinite knowledge (we are done with Laplace's Demon at last!). This alone is already a breakthrough, even though probably not news to well-informed members of the physical sciences community.
I found Prigogine a little bit contradictory (it might be that Nature itself is contradictory in this regard) when talking about determinism/time-reversibility. Sometimes, I got the impression that it only exists in idealized (non-real) situations, and sometimes I understood it as if it does exist in certain specific (real) situations.
I also found his rejection of Gödel's time-reversible interpretation of Einstein's equations far too emotional, instead of being based on experimental-mathematical grounds. As far as I know, this viewpoint, too, has experienced considerable growth over the last 10 years or so (the studies about CTC - closed timelike curves), and it seems to be a quite respectable field of inquiry. Time-flow reversibility does not seem less crazy to me than the fact that we have to use imaginary numbers (that is, numbers that do not exist at all!) in theories that deal with some very basic properties and behaviors of matter, like quantum mechanics and chaos.
Even though physicists usually equal time symmetry (in physical equations) to time-flow reversibility, and asymmetry to irreversibility, I don't see why this has to be so. Nor does this book clarifies this issue any further to the layman (it is interesting to point out in this regard that even the probabilistic collapse of the wave function is considered by the prevailing views of physicists to be symmetrical/reversible, according to Penrose in The Empreror's New Mind). Our suspicions and complaints about the mysterious nature of time are very much justified: space gives us 3 dimensions, bidirectional and with no compulsory flow. Time, on the other hand, gives us just 1 dimension, unidirectional and with compulsory flow. At best, we can slow it down, by traveling close to the speed of light (quite comforting, isn't it?).Time alone is responsible for most of our losses in life (unless you get exiled or something...). I think that, interpreting "time symmetry" as "time reversibility", scientists have actually tried to solve the unsolvable.
In our quest to understand the Universe, we often find three kinds of questions: first, those that can be proved or disproved, like the old statements "The Sun revolves around the Earth" (disproved), and "The Moon revolves around the Earth" (proved). Second, questions that can be proved, but not disproved, like the existance of God or of life after death. Third, questions that cannot be either proved or disproved, like the existance of consciousness in other human beings than ourselves (or in dogs) and (to me) the actual existance of time flow.
Prigogine says that in this book he tried to follow (or discover?) a "narrow path" between utter determinism and total randomicity, probably hoping to find room for free will in between. Although I think he did a brilliant work, I feel that he got stuck in this Narrow Path. His work refutes determinism, but instead of presenting phenomena or advancing mechanisms to support free will, it only casts us into the depths of utter chance. In spite of that, when talking about self-organization in dissipative structures, Prigogine passes on the idea of "choice", even saying (more than once) that "matter begins to see" and that "the system chooses". This might ascribe to nature at its most basic structure the properties of "life" and maybe even of "consciousness", which might mean that we are at the verge of a revigorated return to the ancient ideas of hilozoism and panpsychism. Furthermore, this blurs the limits between emergence and reductionism, for it is very difficult to take a sound reductionist stand (or emergencionist stand) if we don't know what to expect of the world around us (we can't tell if something is emerging or just "arising").
Prigogine's appeal for sanity is both his virtue and his weakness, in a Universe that pays little heed to human's logic and causality. A Universe in which, regardless of being dictated by an authoritarian God or determined by blind and cold laws of nature, the only theory that may account for all that there is is the familiar and provincial B.I.S.O. theory. Namely: Because I Say So!
Book: Demon-Haunted World
by Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan (1997).
He has always been very superficial when criticizing the so called "pseudosciences", a term that, by the very way he uses it, only shows how his outlook on Science and on human Knowledge is short-sighted. Sagan sees Science as the supreme method for looking at and for understanding the Universe we live in, looking with despise on other ways of understanding reality (presently, I prefer to see Science as just one out of many different ways of grasping Nature's mysteries).
I thought that in "The Demon-Haunted World" he would do a better, deeper work, because that was the very purpose of the book: criticizing the pseudosciences and naive beliefs. But to my deep disappointment, he just repeated his superficial approach.
He does give some valuable information, like when he shows how hypnosis can be misleading (in cases of remembering allien abduction, recalling sexual abuse in childhood, or remembering having engaged in satanic rituals). But he fails to analyse the "pseudosciences" deeper. Only Astrology receives some concrete and sound criticism, when he says that it takes into consideration the precession of the equinox in certain situations and does not take it into consideration in others, and that Astrology does not take into account more recent findings of Astronomy, like pulsars and quasars.
Another very bad and dissappoint comment in the book (another example of superficiality!) is when he lists three things that he thinks might have some true basis: reincarnation; human mind influencing computers' processing; and telepathy (apparently, the skeptical readers missed that...!). He simply does not give any further information on that at all.
I now consider Carl Sagan a very superficial, uninformative, and misleading writer when arguing either for or against "pseudosciences" or any of our "Demon-Haunted World's" beliefs.
If you really want to get a true skeptical analyses on issues like these, Susan Blackmore's works are far more satisfactory. Spare Sagan's works for the very first (and clumsy) steps in scientific initiation...
Book: Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution by Gary Cziko (1995).
A Must! But far from flawless... -
November 22, 2001.
This book is surely a must for anyone interested in phylosophical discussions concerning "darwinian" (or better, neo-darwinian) evolution theory, and its potential to explain other fields where any kind of innovation is created. The author describes these innovations as "puzzles of fit" of an organism or of a system to another organism or system, and he brilliantly equals all these "fits" to "knowledge". Cziko reached a good level of quality in his transdisciplinary approach, putting together data from fields like evolutionary biology, immunology, neurobiology, animal and human learning, human thought and language, scientific knowledge growth, and cultural adaptation. For this, he no doubt deserves a four-star ranking. But then, there come the flaws...
The central issue in the book is that just any kind of innovation, puzzle of fit, knowledge growth, or whatever you call it, can only be achieved through a process very much like biological evolution as accepted by the neo-darwinian paradigm: cumulative blind variation followed by the survival of the fittest. Cziko also shows how explanations for these puzzles of fit have evolved in all fields from providential explanations (like in the book of Genesis, where things happened to achieve a pourpose previously devised), through instructionist ones (like Lamarck's "Use and Disuse" plus "Inheritance of Acquired Characters", where the environment would "force" the individual creatures to change just in the right, successful way, and then the creatures would pass these changes on to their offsprings), and finally to selectionist ones (Darwin's Selection Theory). He says that only selectionist explanations can give truly "scientific" and "naturalistic" accounts for these fits, without recoursing to miraculous schemes. In short: Cziko brings us the good news that not only are we merely machines (like we have feared ever since the mechanical physics of Newton), but we are blind ones too!
The starting point of his reasoning is evolutionary biology, and Cziko's understanding of it seems to me too narrow-minded, with a strong bias toward the old notions of New-Darwinism. Consequently, his report and deductions on it are misinformative. Evolution was (and, to a large extent, still is) thought to be based on "variation and survival of the fittest". But in the past the view of the causes of these variations were believed to be basically errors: DNA damage by the environment, and failure of the organism to correct damages or to make precise copies of the DNA. It's been a long time now that this view has changed dramatically, and organisms, even as simple as bacteria, are now known (from before 1990) to possess amazing control over the ways and the contexts in which these variations happen. They can trigger DNA mutation under appropriate conditions (stress, threats to survival), and even control which areas of the genome will be subject to change. This renders organisms much more "smartly" interactive with the environment as might be expected from reading Cziko.
So, what Cziko did not tell about the process of antibody creation by B-Lynphocytes is that when they undergo somatic hypermutation to fine tune their antibody production to the antigen, this hypermutation is, first, triggered by the interaction with the very antigen, and second, it is far from blind: the mutation happens only in a very restricted area of the chromosome, changing only the areas of the antibody molecule that interact with the antigen (and not even the whole molecule!). So this is a very "thematic" kind of mutation-variation; maybe "short-sighted", but surely not "blind"!
When he comments on the phenomenon of "directed mutation", the strange capability of many procarionts (like bacteria) to seemingly direct their mutation to the desired result, he takes a rather cynical and slightly arrogant stand, apparently rejecting the existance of the phenomenon itself, even saying "But let us continue to imagine for a moment that a bacterium was able to change just those genes regulating metabolism in just the right way to allow for the digestion of a foreign sugar". It seems that he read only two research articles on this, and not quite well, and draw much of his attitude towards the phenomenon from his academic-environment prejudiced and uninformed criticism. By the time he was writing his book , directed mutation had been fully demonstrated by many researchers, and not only by Cairns. Actually, even as early as 1984, four years before Cairns revolutionary and controversial paper on it, J.A. Shapiro had already shown the phenomenon fully (Observations on the Formation of Clones Containing araB-lacZ cistrons fusions. Molecular & General Genetics 1984;194(1-2):79-80), only in a much more discreet maner. By 1995, a wealth of information was already available, from researchers like Shapiro and B.G. Hall, among others, and now even eukariotes (yeast) are known to perform "directed mutation" (Hall BG. Adaptive Mutagenesis: a Process that Generates Almost Exclusively Beneficial Mutations. Genetica 1998;102(103):109-125.). Strikingly, this process shows some resemblance to human B-lynphocyte somatic hypermutation!
When Cziko moves on to the other areas, scientific knowledge growth, etc, the already "short-sighted" (and not blind) variation seems to have undergone a surgical operation on its eye and starts to see almost sharply. Also, the second step, that is, the survival of the fittest (in biology, through killing the non-fit) seems to change to a true "selection" process (choosing one among many, by identifying its desirable qualities, which is quite different from "survival of the fittest"). Even Campbell and Pinker, which he defines as fully (or almost) selectionists, seem to turn to rather providential viewpoints, like "innativism" and "constraints", for triggering and orienting the variation, and guiding the selection, not succeding in solving Meno's providential dilema: "...if you don't already possess the knowledge you are looking for, how will you know when you have found it?"
Cziko, like many, wrongly equals "scientific" and "naturalistic" explanations to "mechanical" ones, and since our mechanistic view of nature is basically deterministic, he only sees lamarckism as an instructionist process, not a "freely-willed" one, failing to address vital phenomena like human consciouness and apparent free-will.
Book: Psi Wars: Getting to Grips with the Paranormal by James E. Alcock, Jean Burns, and Anthony Freeman (Editors - 2003).
Book: Immortal Remains, by Stephen Braude. (2003).
Stephen Braude did an excellent work in
this book. Since this topic is amazingly vast, there is no escape from
making a highly "incomplete" work. Nonetheless, he managed to achieve a
level of quality that, in my view, makes this book a must in the field.
It did help me enormously, both with its empirical feedbacks and with its
theoretical ones. The main strength of it is its deep and detailed evaluation
and comparison of the "life after life hypothesis" (also known as "survivalist
hypothesis") vs the "super paranormality hypothesis" (usually known as
super psi or super ESP).
I would like to comment on some flaws, however.
The first chapter, "Preliminaries", gives a theoretical background
of the issues involved. It is a good chapter indeed, but I think it should
have been better. Braude makes a witty distinction between "epistemological
survival" vs "ontological survival" (a distinction that, curiously, I myself
had come to some time ago, in the form of "objective survival" vs "subjective
survival"). But I think he should have dealt more deeply with what is meant
by "survival", and especially HOW we survive both after death and BEFORE
death (probing these issues leads one to curious and insightful conclusions...).
Tightly linked to this previous issue is the question of "identity" or "what
we really ARE and what makes each one of us really US" (that is: what is
it to be an "individual"?). Further, I found him lacking for not dealing
with the problem of "what is consciousness?". There is a huge body of discussion,
both in phylosophy and in science, about the true nature of consciouness;
that is: is consciousness really produced by the brain (materialism) or
is it a fundamental element of the Universe (Brahmanist Panpsychism)? Many,
like me, claim that materialism is on very poor and even self contradictory
theoretical and logical grounds, and on rather cracked empirical grounds
too: almost a "Paradigm Lost". Also, some background on the current discussion
about the possibility of "machine consciousness" would have been handy.
Braude could have made his work more "acceptable" to skeptical readers.
For example, he treats ESP (extra-sensory perception) as a proved fact
(something with which I fully agree!), but he does not show WHY it is already
proved. It would have been easy to give a concise exposition of, say, the
current status of the experiments on "telepathy" using Ganzfeld protocols,
and therefore show why ESP is so strongly based and why and how skeptics
(CSICOP et al) have simply nothing to say contrary to it (James Randi,
Susan Blackmore, and Ray Hyman included...).
In the chapter on reincarnation and possession (chapter 6), Braude
says that Ian Stevenson has 33 cases of the "strongest" type suggestive
of reincarnation (page 182), which Braude called "early bird cases" (cases
with written records made BY THE RESEARCHER before attempts to identify
the previous personality). I believe this figure is wrong, and actually
it refers to the slightly weaker cases (maybe not so slightly...) where
there are written records before identification of the previous personality,
but not written down BY THE RESEARCHER: these records were in these instances
written down (and the previous personality found) usually by members of
the families involved. He comments on the Schouten & Stevenson 1998
article as if it compared only the strongest case types with the "weakest"
(cases with NO written records made by anyone before identification of the
previous personality), but actually this article does include the "slightly
weaker" case types that I mention above!
I didn't very much like the chapter 8 on "out-of-body experiences"
(including near-death experiences). Braude did not analyze very well the
data from Near-Death Experiences, both in its possible strengths and in
its possible weaknesses! He says, on page 274, that Pam Reynolds had a flat
EEG (and also no blood in her brain plus body temperature of 60 degrees
Fahrenheit - 15 degrees Celsius - and no brainstem activity) FOR ABOUT AN
HOUR. Also, he says that she did have veridical perceptions WHILE IN THIS
EXTREME STATE. Both these statements are incorrect. A careful reading of
the very same book that Braude cited for this (Light and Death, Michael Sabom,
1998, chapter 3) clearly indicates that this extreme condition probably did
not last longer than half an hour (I guess it actually lasted about 20 minutes
or less) and that she had ABSOLUTELY NO verifiable perception while in this
state! Surprisingly enough, this misreporting of the Pam Reynolds case is
extremely ubiquitous on the internet (including www near-death com). Braude's
is not the only scholarly work that misreports it. Van Lommel et al's article
(The Lancet, 2001), also does! (But Emily Kelly, Bruce Greyson, and Ian Stevenson
reported the case correctly in 2000, Omega Jounal of Death and Dying, vol
40(4) pp. 513-519, 1999-2000). At the same time, Braude did not mention some
potential strengths pointed out both by van Lommel et al (The Lancet, 2001)
and by Sam Parnia et al (Resuscitation, 2001). Further, I think Braude downplays
the significance of NDE cases for the survival issue. It is true that NDE
is not about "after death", but about "during dying" instead. However, it
is the only empirical data in this field that can possibly move us from
the "epistemological (objective) survival" arena into the "ontological (subjective)
survival" scenario.
Braude even comes to the extreme of considering that the evidence
from NDE-OBE "gives us no reason to believe that the mind is more substantial,
resilient, and self-sustaining than a fart" (page 276). I think it is too
extreme a comparison because he is comparing the mind with what we have
of most disorganized, volatile, and short living (gases). I know of no case
of anyone ever reporting being able even to sense (see, hear, etc) through
his/her farts...
Despite all these comments above, it is necessary to stress that
Braude's book is indeed a must in the field, and that although naturally
incomplete, it is a work that deserves to be... Immortal!
Well, I just want to warn the possible readers of this book of some problems with some of the "information" that Stenger conveys...
One good thing in this book is the fact that it fights the notion (the wrong and dangerous notion) that science HAS ALREADY proved the existance of God. The bad thing is that Stenger decided to transcend the boundaries of rationality, and ended up concluding that science HAS ALREADY proved that God does not exist! This is pseudoscience from him. (The very last thing that he says, on page 349, is: "The universe is not populated by mysterious forces, beyond our comprehension, that control our lives and destinies for some unseen purpose. Rather, thanks to science, humanity is in control and defines its own purpose.").
Chapter ten is by far the worst. It is entitled "The Breath of God", and in it Stenger decided to give an "informed" criticism about parapsychological research... I was amazed to see that Stenger didn't even read the very abstract of an article that he cited, about micro-PK and human influence on random event generators (Correlations of Random Binary Sequences with Pre-Stated Operator Intention: A Review of a 12-Year Program - PEAR, 1997). He says: ..."they find no difference between their data taken with (presumably) true random numbers generated by quantum noise and pseudorandom numbers generated by computer algorithms.". Actually, the authors claim, at the very abstract, precisely the opposite!
Also amazing, and disrespectful, is the careless way in which he comments on the book by parapsychological researcher Dean Radin, "The Conscious Universe" (1997). Stenger says that Dean Radin performed the metanalysis wrong in this book (which implies statistical incompetence from Radin and severly undermines all the arguments advanced in Radin's book); but actually, even the source for this information (renowned statistitian I. J. Good, writing in the journal Nature) withdrew this charge as back as 1998!
Further, Stenger clearly only read the abstract (!) of the article by Sam Parnia et al (journal Resuscitation, 2001), about their prospective study on Near-Death experiences in cardiac arrest patients, and as a result he ended up stating precisely the opposite of what the researchers actually claimed (again...).
There are many passages where Stenger strays from the truth:
1- He says that parapsychological research is not made with high-tech equipment (untrue).
2- He says that "No cognitive data or theories currently require the introduction of either supernatural forces or immaterial substances such as 'spirit" (untrue or misleading: consciousness is still the major weak point of the materialistic framework of science, which has prompted many "weird" theories or viewpoints from highly respected thinkers, like Erwin Schroedinger, Roger Penrose, Stan Franklin, David Chalmers, Benjamin Libet, etc).
3- He says that "No scientific field except parapsychology has experienced over 150 years of exclusively negative results without being dismissed as a lost cause.". Untrue: parapsychology is actually less than 150 years old, and, yes, it may be described as having mostly INCONCLUSIVE results (despite its many positive results, even by skeptic researchers like Stanley Jeffers in 2003 - Journal of Scientific Exploration), but it cannot be described as having exclusively NEGATIVE results.
4- He propagandizes that Susan Blackmore "has managed to maintain her good name", but actually Rick Berger caught her in serious fraudulent conduct ("A Critical Examination of the Blackmore Psi Experiments", year 1989, available on the internet), and Stenger quotes her "trustworthy conclusions" that "Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic..." (Blackmore words in year 2001!). But actually, in her response to Rick Berger (Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, vol 83, April 1989), Blackmore admitted that no conclusion should be drawn from her "Just a few years of careful experiments". She said then: "Nevertheless, I am glad to be able to agree with his final conclusion—'that drawing ANY conclusions, positive or negative, about the reality of psi that are based on the Blackmore psi experiments must be considered unwarranted'". If her experiments had indeed been "careful", we could draw negative conclusions from them. ( I carefully contrasted her response of 1989 with Berger's exposé in the same journal. Blackmore frauded indeed...).
With so much sloppy reading and faulty reporting in Stenger's work, I end up not being able to tell the difference between Stenger and the New Age Crackpots or the Intelligent Design Wedge Movement folks. And it makes me highly wary about the rest of the book, the parts about which I do not have the expertise to spot problems in...
As a matter of fact, Stenger seems to be engaged in some sort of Jihad-Materialism War against spiritualism. To me, it is clear that he is driven not by reason, but by blind emotion. The worst in it all is that he calls it science, when actually it is not...
I presented this criticism to him, in his email discussion group avoid-L. His feedback was very meager, to say the least (his actual words were: "I will check out the one or two items that are matters of fact. The rest is simply your opinions with nothing to back them up.". That is how Stenger evaluates pieces of evidence that he does not like...). I will post a page about it in the near future, in my site "Criticizing Skepticism" (page entitled: Criticizing Victor Stenger).