Curt - An interview with Dean Radin is long overdue. You can reach him through Institute of Noetic Sciences, http://noetic.org, where he is chief scientific officer.
The evidence for telepathy is overwhelming, as Turing noted, and the implications are not being recognized by mainstream physicists, precisely because they would overturn paradigms that are deeply embedded.
In the 1980s and 90s, Robert Jahn, a literal "rocket scientist" and Dean of Engineering at Princeton University, performed a long and rigorous series of experiments in parapsychology in his "spare time". https://www.pear-lab.com/ If Bob were still alive, he would be a logical person to interview.
What a wonderful compilation; thank you! Folks like these with enquiring personalities cannot help but realize, even if only as a gnawing uncertainty that hides beneath a false bravado of infinite confidence, that we don’t have a clue how and why we are here. The eldritch edginess emerges when that uncertainty rebels and pops out, even if only briefly, from the cellar in which it was so unfairly caged.
This whole article shows that intelligence, scientific success, and rational rigor do not prevent people from holding metaphysical beliefs, mystical interpretations, or speculative ideas. Yet that is exactly the kind of charitable openness not extended to regular people.
The list proves something subtler than “great thinkers believed strange things.” It shows that a person can be highly rigorous in one domain while remaining open, uncertain, mistaken, speculative, or even contradictory in another. So the correct response to an unusual claim is neither automatic reverence nor automatic dismissal. It is careful examination.
The irony is that this is exactly what we were just discussing. These people were allowed complexity. Their unusual beliefs are treated as interesting, contextualized, and worthy of charitable interpretation rather than as proof that they were cranks.
But when an independent person without the expected credential asks an unfamiliar foundational question, the same generosity often disappears. The idea is ampliatively translated into the nearest disreputable category before its actual content is examined.
Famous names do not make strange ideas true. But neither does the absence of a famous name make a difficult idea unserious. The same principle of charity should apply before reputation decides who is allowed to think beyond the accepted frame.
Intellectual charity should not begin only after history has supplied the thinker with prestige.
It's easy to dismiss "mystical interpretations" and "metaphysical beliefs". It's harder to find holes in the rigorous work that's been done demonstrating the reality of telepathy and precognition. Over and over, in many labs for 150 years.
I’m an old Catholic and a retired chemical engineer, so I come at this from two habits that do not always sit easily together: the Church taught me to take unseen realities seriously, and engineering taught me that reality pushes back whether I like it or not.
That is what I found most interesting in this essay. The surprise is not simply that famous rationalists had strange beliefs, or strange moments, or strange sympathies. The better surprise is that many of them seem to have kept separate drawers in the mind.
One drawer is belief: what I actually live by.
Another is warranted public claim: what I can responsibly say the evidence establishes.
A third is live possibility: what I cannot yet warrant, but also cannot honestly rule out.
That third drawer matters. A serious thinker should not collapse “unproved” into “false.” But neither should he collapse “meaningful to me” into “therefore true.” Much of the best thinking happens in that uncomfortable middle space, where an idea is allowed to remain alive without being prematurely promoted.
That is also how I understand the Catholic habit at its best. The Church does not usually recognize reality quickly. Its cycle is slow, sometimes painfully slow. That slowness can be a virtue when it protects against fashion, panic, and whatever the present age happens to be shouting. But it can also be a failure when the world has already pushed back and the institution takes generations to admit what practice has revealed.
So the issue is not “rationalists were secretly mystical” or “religious people were right all along.” The issue is whether a mind can stay connected to reality without flattening reality into only what its current instruments can measure. That requires humility in both directions. The skeptic has to admit that lack of present warrant is not the same as impossibility. The believer has to admit that conviction is not the same as evidence.
For me, the valuable thread running through these examples is not the paranormal or the theological content itself. It is the discipline of not forcing closure too soon. Some ideas are false. Some are true. Some are metaphors. Some are grief speaking. Some are real questions waiting for better tools.
The hard part is keeping them in the right drawer while still letting reality, over time, tell us when they need to move.
— M Raige, Mike’s byline for AI-collaborative writing he directs and reviews.
Outstanding rumination. Eloquent, and perceptive in your identification of the middle ground as the most fertile and challenging place to dwell. My grandmother used to say "moderation in everything". When I was young, I rolled my eyes. Now, as a practitioner of the middle way in the Soto Zen tradition, I know it's true. And it requires much more engagement than abandon or renunciation.
Curt, I've follow your more existential line of inquiry for a couple years now; longer than I have known about the Greek Orthodox Church Fathers. In them, however, I found a remarkably lucid and salient metaphysics that cuts through the usual assumptions that make people eschew Christianity. Saint Maximus, for example, has insights that I personally believe can be hashed out in today's vernacular with systems theory, information theory and complexity science. And where that is not the case, I think you'd be surprised about what the actual metaphysical commitments are, especially with respect to life after death, which doesn't look at like winged harpists in robes dancing on clouds, if you know what I mean.
The only genuinely logical footing to be found in rationalism is in post-rationalism. Rationalism is a culture built up to the edge of an imaginary wall and if you stretch it slightly too far in a variety of directions it snaps into nothing, vanishes into an unscienced ether, and startles the nerds. At high enough levels of intensity it clearly veers into form of religiosity but its nature as a culture mostly presents its adherents from acknowledging this
The only way forward is to advance post-rationalism, but as someone who has ben an advanced post-rationalist for years **of course** I'd think that.
I have categorised the names you mentioned according to the information provided, as follows
Agnostic C. D. Broad
Agnostic Charles Darwin
Agnostic Stephen Jay Gould
Agnostic J. B. S. Haldane
Agnostic John Stuart Mill
Agnostic John von Neumann
Atheist Richard Dawkins
Atheist Paul Dirac
Atheist Jürgen Habermas
Atheist G. H. Hardy
Atheist A. J. Ayer
Atheist Fred Hoyle
Atheist Thomas Henry Huxley
Atheist Karl Marx
Atheist Peter Medawar
Atheist Thomas Nagel
Atheist Friedrich Nietzsche
Atheist Bertrand Russell
Atheist Sewall Wright
Atheist Ronald Dworkin
Christian Richard Feynman
Deist Georg Cantor
Deist Antony Flew
Deist Martin Gardner
Deist Kurt Gödel
Deist Alfred Russel Wallace
Deist Ludwig Wittgenstein
Deist John Dewey
Deist Theodosius Dobzhansky
Deist Stuart Kauffman
Deist Michael Levin
Deist Roger Penrose
Deist Max Planck
Deist Karl Popper
Inconclusive Harry Houdini
Inconclusive Wilder Penfield
Inconclusive Erwin Schrödinger
Inconclusive Eugene Wigner
Inconclusive Edward Witten
Materialist Francis Crick
Materialist John C. Eccles
Materialist John Searle
Mysticism Isaac Newton
Mysticism Hans Berger
Mysticism Susan Blackmore
Mysticism Rudolf Carnap
Mysticism Freeman Dyson
Mysticism Sigmund Freud
Mysticism Iris Murdoch
Mysticism Wolfgang Pauli
Mysticism Carl Rogers
Mysticism Carl Sagan
Mysticism Michael Shermer
Mysticism Alan Turing
Positivist Nancy Cartwright
Positivist Noam Chomsky
Religious Hilary Putnam
Religious Srinivasa Ramanujan
Religious George John Romanes
Religious Albert Einstein
So we have 6 agnostics, 14 atheists, 1 Christian, 13 Deists, 5 inconclusive, 3 materialists, 12 favouring mysticism, 2 positivists and 4 religious.
Deism is the incorporation of the idea of God into a philosophy just as Aristotle did. So it is not religious and counts as a rejection of religion and so is atheism. Materialism and positivism are necessarily atheist and so in all we have atheists at 14 + 13 + 3 + 2 = 32.
We have 6 agnostics but agnosticism being half and half atheism is as untenable as atheism.
To claim to be an atheist, a godless person, is not coherent for if you “reject god” you must know what god is. If you know what god it then god is given to you. The verbal act of denial merely confirms god. It is funny how strident “atheists” never discuss what God is. This demonstrates that God is given to them.
12 others embrace mysticism [telepathy, etc]. This usually means some kind of New Ageism. I have no problem with mysticism in some forms but it is not philosophy. Telepathy might be true but, frankly, so what? There is not much philosophically you can do with it.
So altogether the bias is towards the nonsense and sterility of atheism. A pretty poor showing but these people are all taken from the Anglo-Saxon world. Inclusion of continentals would have opened up the debate to real Christians who are also true philosophers. If anyone is really looking for the nature of reality that is where you need to go
Legit, I also didn't know "eldritch" was an actual word... I just thought it was the name of the antagonist in Philip K Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch".
...
Which, apropos of nothing, was one of the few books that has made me feel borderline dissociative/depersonalisation while reading. Shoutout PKD, and everyone on this list who recognised that awe and terror are not rational.
It is very rare for me to encounter an English word that I have never heard before. Thanks for introducing me to 'eldritch'.
This is a great compilation. It's good to be reminded of the wide spectrum of views on a topic like this.
Curt - An interview with Dean Radin is long overdue. You can reach him through Institute of Noetic Sciences, http://noetic.org, where he is chief scientific officer.
The evidence for telepathy is overwhelming, as Turing noted, and the implications are not being recognized by mainstream physicists, precisely because they would overturn paradigms that are deeply embedded.
In the 1980s and 90s, Robert Jahn, a literal "rocket scientist" and Dean of Engineering at Princeton University, performed a long and rigorous series of experiments in parapsychology in his "spare time". https://www.pear-lab.com/ If Bob were still alive, he would be a logical person to interview.
This is a wonderful resource, thank you so much!
What a wonderful compilation; thank you! Folks like these with enquiring personalities cannot help but realize, even if only as a gnawing uncertainty that hides beneath a false bravado of infinite confidence, that we don’t have a clue how and why we are here. The eldritch edginess emerges when that uncertainty rebels and pops out, even if only briefly, from the cellar in which it was so unfairly caged.
Wow, what an interesting collection of aphorisms from some of the great thinkers. They cover a wide range of thought. Thanks.
This whole article shows that intelligence, scientific success, and rational rigor do not prevent people from holding metaphysical beliefs, mystical interpretations, or speculative ideas. Yet that is exactly the kind of charitable openness not extended to regular people.
The list proves something subtler than “great thinkers believed strange things.” It shows that a person can be highly rigorous in one domain while remaining open, uncertain, mistaken, speculative, or even contradictory in another. So the correct response to an unusual claim is neither automatic reverence nor automatic dismissal. It is careful examination.
The irony is that this is exactly what we were just discussing. These people were allowed complexity. Their unusual beliefs are treated as interesting, contextualized, and worthy of charitable interpretation rather than as proof that they were cranks.
But when an independent person without the expected credential asks an unfamiliar foundational question, the same generosity often disappears. The idea is ampliatively translated into the nearest disreputable category before its actual content is examined.
Famous names do not make strange ideas true. But neither does the absence of a famous name make a difficult idea unserious. The same principle of charity should apply before reputation decides who is allowed to think beyond the accepted frame.
Intellectual charity should not begin only after history has supplied the thinker with prestige.
It's easy to dismiss "mystical interpretations" and "metaphysical beliefs". It's harder to find holes in the rigorous work that's been done demonstrating the reality of telepathy and precognition. Over and over, in many labs for 150 years.
I’m an old Catholic and a retired chemical engineer, so I come at this from two habits that do not always sit easily together: the Church taught me to take unseen realities seriously, and engineering taught me that reality pushes back whether I like it or not.
That is what I found most interesting in this essay. The surprise is not simply that famous rationalists had strange beliefs, or strange moments, or strange sympathies. The better surprise is that many of them seem to have kept separate drawers in the mind.
One drawer is belief: what I actually live by.
Another is warranted public claim: what I can responsibly say the evidence establishes.
A third is live possibility: what I cannot yet warrant, but also cannot honestly rule out.
That third drawer matters. A serious thinker should not collapse “unproved” into “false.” But neither should he collapse “meaningful to me” into “therefore true.” Much of the best thinking happens in that uncomfortable middle space, where an idea is allowed to remain alive without being prematurely promoted.
That is also how I understand the Catholic habit at its best. The Church does not usually recognize reality quickly. Its cycle is slow, sometimes painfully slow. That slowness can be a virtue when it protects against fashion, panic, and whatever the present age happens to be shouting. But it can also be a failure when the world has already pushed back and the institution takes generations to admit what practice has revealed.
So the issue is not “rationalists were secretly mystical” or “religious people were right all along.” The issue is whether a mind can stay connected to reality without flattening reality into only what its current instruments can measure. That requires humility in both directions. The skeptic has to admit that lack of present warrant is not the same as impossibility. The believer has to admit that conviction is not the same as evidence.
For me, the valuable thread running through these examples is not the paranormal or the theological content itself. It is the discipline of not forcing closure too soon. Some ideas are false. Some are true. Some are metaphors. Some are grief speaking. Some are real questions waiting for better tools.
The hard part is keeping them in the right drawer while still letting reality, over time, tell us when they need to move.
— M Raige, Mike’s byline for AI-collaborative writing he directs and reviews.
Outstanding rumination. Eloquent, and perceptive in your identification of the middle ground as the most fertile and challenging place to dwell. My grandmother used to say "moderation in everything". When I was young, I rolled my eyes. Now, as a practitioner of the middle way in the Soto Zen tradition, I know it's true. And it requires much more engagement than abandon or renunciation.
Curt, I've follow your more existential line of inquiry for a couple years now; longer than I have known about the Greek Orthodox Church Fathers. In them, however, I found a remarkably lucid and salient metaphysics that cuts through the usual assumptions that make people eschew Christianity. Saint Maximus, for example, has insights that I personally believe can be hashed out in today's vernacular with systems theory, information theory and complexity science. And where that is not the case, I think you'd be surprised about what the actual metaphysical commitments are, especially with respect to life after death, which doesn't look at like winged harpists in robes dancing on clouds, if you know what I mean.
Curt, you might be the best to also interview Dean Radin - would be fun to compare our interviews later. (this one) https://thomasehmer1.substack.com/p/dean-radin-magic-and-what-it-means?r=67h18k
The only genuinely logical footing to be found in rationalism is in post-rationalism. Rationalism is a culture built up to the edge of an imaginary wall and if you stretch it slightly too far in a variety of directions it snaps into nothing, vanishes into an unscienced ether, and startles the nerds. At high enough levels of intensity it clearly veers into form of religiosity but its nature as a culture mostly presents its adherents from acknowledging this
The only way forward is to advance post-rationalism, but as someone who has ben an advanced post-rationalist for years **of course** I'd think that.
I have categorised the names you mentioned according to the information provided, as follows
Agnostic C. D. Broad
Agnostic Charles Darwin
Agnostic Stephen Jay Gould
Agnostic J. B. S. Haldane
Agnostic John Stuart Mill
Agnostic John von Neumann
Atheist Richard Dawkins
Atheist Paul Dirac
Atheist Jürgen Habermas
Atheist G. H. Hardy
Atheist A. J. Ayer
Atheist Fred Hoyle
Atheist Thomas Henry Huxley
Atheist Karl Marx
Atheist Peter Medawar
Atheist Thomas Nagel
Atheist Friedrich Nietzsche
Atheist Bertrand Russell
Atheist Sewall Wright
Atheist Ronald Dworkin
Christian Richard Feynman
Deist Georg Cantor
Deist Antony Flew
Deist Martin Gardner
Deist Kurt Gödel
Deist Alfred Russel Wallace
Deist Ludwig Wittgenstein
Deist John Dewey
Deist Theodosius Dobzhansky
Deist Stuart Kauffman
Deist Michael Levin
Deist Roger Penrose
Deist Max Planck
Deist Karl Popper
Inconclusive Harry Houdini
Inconclusive Wilder Penfield
Inconclusive Erwin Schrödinger
Inconclusive Eugene Wigner
Inconclusive Edward Witten
Materialist Francis Crick
Materialist John C. Eccles
Materialist John Searle
Mysticism Isaac Newton
Mysticism Hans Berger
Mysticism Susan Blackmore
Mysticism Rudolf Carnap
Mysticism Freeman Dyson
Mysticism Sigmund Freud
Mysticism Iris Murdoch
Mysticism Wolfgang Pauli
Mysticism Carl Rogers
Mysticism Carl Sagan
Mysticism Michael Shermer
Mysticism Alan Turing
Positivist Nancy Cartwright
Positivist Noam Chomsky
Religious Hilary Putnam
Religious Srinivasa Ramanujan
Religious George John Romanes
Religious Albert Einstein
So we have 6 agnostics, 14 atheists, 1 Christian, 13 Deists, 5 inconclusive, 3 materialists, 12 favouring mysticism, 2 positivists and 4 religious.
Deism is the incorporation of the idea of God into a philosophy just as Aristotle did. So it is not religious and counts as a rejection of religion and so is atheism. Materialism and positivism are necessarily atheist and so in all we have atheists at 14 + 13 + 3 + 2 = 32.
We have 6 agnostics but agnosticism being half and half atheism is as untenable as atheism.
To claim to be an atheist, a godless person, is not coherent for if you “reject god” you must know what god is. If you know what god it then god is given to you. The verbal act of denial merely confirms god. It is funny how strident “atheists” never discuss what God is. This demonstrates that God is given to them.
12 others embrace mysticism [telepathy, etc]. This usually means some kind of New Ageism. I have no problem with mysticism in some forms but it is not philosophy. Telepathy might be true but, frankly, so what? There is not much philosophically you can do with it.
So altogether the bias is towards the nonsense and sterility of atheism. A pretty poor showing but these people are all taken from the Anglo-Saxon world. Inclusion of continentals would have opened up the debate to real Christians who are also true philosophers. If anyone is really looking for the nature of reality that is where you need to go
Why would Sagan say that in a book about skepticism in particular? "they might be true"
Legit, I also didn't know "eldritch" was an actual word... I just thought it was the name of the antagonist in Philip K Dick's "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch".
...
Which, apropos of nothing, was one of the few books that has made me feel borderline dissociative/depersonalisation while reading. Shoutout PKD, and everyone on this list who recognised that awe and terror are not rational.