http://web.randi.org/the-million-dollar-challenge.html
1.1 How long has this Challenge been open?
The Challenge was first introduced in 1964 when James Randi offered
1,000 to anyone who could demonstrate paranormal powers in a controlled test. The prize has since grown to One Million Dollars.
1.2 How many people have applied for the Challenge?
Between 1964 and 1982, Randi declared that over 650 people had applied. Between 1997 and 2005, there had been a total of 360 official, notarized applications. New applications for the Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge continue to be received every month.
1.3 Has anyone ever passed the preliminary test?
No.
1.4 Has anyone taken a formal test?
Yes. However, the vast majority of applicants and claimants for the Million Dollar Challenge have not taken a formal test, because none of them have passed the preliminary phase of the Challenge.
![1,000 of his own money to the first person who could offer proof of the paranormal. During a live radio panel discussion, James Randi was challenged by a parapsychologist to "put [his] money where [his] mouth is", and Randi responded by offering to pay](http://theskepticalzone.com/wp/wp-content/ql-cache/quicklatex.com-ec92d1d7fdf8658bb2bb4d7995abaab6_l3.png "Rendered by QuickLaTeX.com")
1,000 to anyone who could demonstrate paranormal powers in a controlled test. The prize has since grown to One Million Dollars.I would generally think in light of this, paranormal phenomenon are mostly non-existent. I have a lot of skilled gambling friends (some have made millions) and the question of prayer or paranormal phenomenon occasionally comes up when they consider it as a possible angle to make more money. The consensus is that no skilled gambler made money using the paranormal or prayers.
Nevertheless, there are surprisingly modest numbers of Christians who are skilled gamblers who use mathematics to extract advantage in the gambling world. Perhaps the most known names are Doyle Brunson (became a Christian after miraculous healing) and Kevin Blackwood, the others are anonymous for good reasons.
It doesn’t seem that miracles follow any formula, but it seems there are events way out of expectation which some could call miraculous, imho. There was some paranormal phenomenon in my family. I don’t like to talk about it too much because it was creepy. Materialism was in many ways a safer place to be psychologically for me, and hence my interest in science rather than seances, but I think there is a sinister spiritual realm out there for sure which generally eludes the scientific method.
If there is an active spiritual realm out there, it is taking great pains to elude James Randi’s challenge, otherwise James Randi is right, there is no paranormal realm. Analogously, if there is an Intelligent Designer, like paranormal phenomenon, He is avoiding direct means of communicating His existence and has chosen to leave designs and remain mostly out of notice ever since the act of creating the designs. If the Intelligent Designer communicated through the heavens as in the account of Moses, we might not be having the debates we’re having…
I think highly of James Randi’s challenge and for its exposure of many charlatans. I think most religious beliefs are rooted in superstition, coincidence, irrationality and gullibility. I especially saw the casinos profiting from these human weaknesses, and I admit I indirectly profited by other people’s gullibility since I preyed on the casinos who preyed on the gullible.
That said, neither can I run away from personal experience or observation. I briefly met astronaut Charles Duke when he spoke at Campus Crusade for Christ. He walked on the moon, was an Annapolis Naval Academy and MIT Engineering graduate. He was a skilled fighter pilot and then found fame and fortune before becoming a Christian. After his conversion, he testifies of having his prayer for a blind girl answered by when her sight was restored. He probably wouldn’t pass the James Randi challenge either, but neither, given Duke’s career accomplishments, does he have much incentive to be making up fanciful stories, especially in an increasingly anti-Christian climate.
The most successful gamblers I know hate superstition and use of intuition, they love cold hard numbers and rationality. But still, many of the highly successful professional gambler’s I know are split over whether they believe in the paranormal or not. It seems this question is something all their high powered math cannot conclusively answer given the little evidence we have in hand.
Where exactly is that? I tried looking at the site but…
That’s an interesting take.
I don’t have much faith in faith, as it were, but I do think the placebo effect is absolutely real, and worth deliberately harnessing.
Curious as to your naked fallacious appeal to authority – do you think that because she is a tenured associate professor of biology at a secular university who got her PhD at an Ivy League School (UPenn) that she must be 100% correct? Are all people with similar credentials 100% correct, or just this one?
Perhaps Tomkins realized that it is much easier to be a geneticist with a creationist organization – little to no peer review, and a guaranteed accolade-spewing audience that will never question his conclusions. Tomkins did not fare so well at Reddit when a couple of folks saw through his antics. But I’m sure you can fawn over him citing his impeccable credentials as proof that his unorthodox and easily falsified claims are 100% true. That is what you do.
http://www.victorzammit.com/skeptics/challenge.html
Sam,
Tomkins fared poorly on reddit? They didn’t even try to address his paper with Tan, and the Chimp genome similarity argument wasn’t even properly represented. Instead amateurish consensus sequence comparisons were used instead of optimal slicing methods or NCBI trace archives.
If there is garbage, it’s surely not with Jeff work, but those who do Chimp human comparisons without accounting for methodology bias.
Sam,
Hello, Sam, and welcome to TSZ. Apologies that you got caught in the spam filter.
William J. Murray,
Bloody hell, William, the man’s a loonie!
Then it shouldn’t be hard to refute his evidence. Let me know when you pick up the cash. I’ll be expecting a finder’s fee.
William J. Murray,
There’s no chance of that. The “refutor” has to refute the contents of a book! I’ll get on with my life, I think.
William J. Murray,
Some of the “evidence” is easy to refute — indeed, it was refuted long ago:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=259321
but would you accept any sort of challenge from an obvious loon? I’ve had a look at a few random chapters from his book. They leave you speechless:
http://www.victorzammit.com/book/chapter09.html
How does one refute something that’s not even wrong?
William is a fan of Zammit:
William,
From what you’ve told us over the years, it’s clear that gullibility has been a lifelong problem for you.
Are you aware of that?
It’s very hard to refute a loonie, William. His challenge, as far as I can see, amounts to an invitation to “refute” a bunch of assertions that are supported only by anecdote. It’s probable that most of the reported experiences are believed, by their reporters, to be real. But unless someone presents evidence that is actually repeatable, under controlled conditions, it can neither be falsified nor verified.
So no, not easy. But he offers no good grounds on which to believe he might be right.
I didn’t expect there was. 🙂
At least you don’t disappoint in the quality of your responses. 🙂
Alan Fox,
What’s your strongest claim for undirected evolution Alan?
All still just “hearsay” Allan?
So why did you only quote the first sentence of it?
Why shouldn’t I only quote the first sentence?
What is your strongest claim for special creation?
Richardthughes,
The fact that there is no evidence for undirected evolution.
phoodoo, can I ask what you mean by “undirected evolution”? Do you mean that it is not possible for something to evolve unless somebody knows what it’s going to evolve into?
It would seem more appropriate for the materialists to explain what they mean by undirected evolution, or even just what they mean by evolution, because it is their (the atheists) definition which is so ellusive. It used to be they were talking about Darwinian evolution, but now that they know this is too absurd, they have switched to the term of a “modern synthesis” which all one can gather means is that any mechanism one can think of, but which remains purposeless ( or USED to be purposeless, but evolved into having a direction and a purpose on accident!) which we found out about later which causes an organism to change its form, that is evolution.
But for the theist or Idist the definition is much more straightforward. Undirected means evolution which has no plan, no purpose, no direction. It was an accidental result of random chemical splashes. This is of course the only kind of evolution one can cling to if one wishes to maintain their necessary desire for atheism. Its one giant accident.
I hardly see the point of arguing how much your side needs to maintain this. Of course they try to do so, while keeping the meaning as cloudy as possible to avoid being pinned down to a belief.
Phoodoo never answers questions, only asks them. This is a time honored creationist strategy. I have found the best way to proceed is only to answer their questions if they agree to reciprocate. Phoodoo won’t.
This is what happens when he does explain. Shockingly poor ‘understanding’.
I am convinced RichardHughes is an undercover theist mole, whose job it is to pose as a bumbling atheist watchdog, spewing out bad arguments at any turn, to demonstrate just how vapid the atheist movement is through exaggerated parody, which is mistaken as real by many casual observers.
He used to work for the Onion before he came here.
C’mon, no one in this day and age of easily accessible scientific information can still be so ignorant as to really think that’s how evolution works, can they?
Can they?
Given your habitual wrongness, Phoodoo, that’s unsuprising. Read any good articles lately? The whole thing, not just the extract? You know what you are.
Adapa,
Is he confused why there are still monkeys? 😉
You wouldn’t think so.
But clearly there are still plenty of people that do. But the Jerry Coynes and Pz Meyers and Richard Dawkins and Lizzie Liddles and the rest of the trove of atheists just can’t come up with another way yet-which still preserves their need for chaos as the explanation.
But I agree with you, who in the world would believe its undirected. Whew! You said it. Go figure.
Oh, we can “come up with another way” of describing evolutionary theory, yet again, phoodoo, but unfortunately, you, and others, still insist on misreading the description as:
What you miss, and it’s unfortunately very hard to state in such a way that you don’t miss, but I’ll try, is that “random chemical splashes” is NOT the only alternative to having a plan, purpose or direction.
For a start, chemistry itself is not “random splashes”. If you put a piece of sodium into a basin of water, what happens next will be anything but “random”. It will, on the contrary, be completely predictable.
Similarly, we can predict, each year, that highly non-random, and indeed, low entropy, phenomena called “tornados” will form spontaneously, without plan, purpose, or direction. The universe – the fabric of reality- is constrained by highly predictable forces that preclude “random chemical splashes”, and instead constrain the way atoms and molecules interact in such a way that instead of producing a uniform grey goo, as happens when a child randomly splashed coloured paints, instead produces a universe full of structure, from the sub-atomic to the supra-galactic scale. And that’s before we even consider biology.
So there is absolutely no reason to think that without “design” there can be only “random chemical splashes”. Unless you think that the fact that the non-living universe has such deep structure is also evidence of a designing mind. But that is not, then, an argument about evolution.
Lastly, I’d point out that whether or not you accept evolutionary processes as a scientific explanation for the diversity of efffective adaptations we observe in biological organisms, it has no bearing on whether atheism or theism are true.
phoodoo,
Wha? You claimed to ‘know people’ who have exposed Randi’s duplicity. Have you presented some evidence that I missed?
Victor Zammit. One million dollars to prove the negative. It is not, after all, sufficient to expose just one claim as mistaken or fraudulent.
Randi – one million dollars to demonstrate a positive, albeit with controls.
Yep, that’s exactly the same.
Allan Miller:
It’s apparent that you and everyone else has, to this point, entirely missed the point of Zammit’s challenge.
OK, I own up. I appear to have missed the point of Zammit’s challenge. Can you explain it to me, William?
Zammit’s challenge is deliberately structured and worded in a way that mirrors Randi’s challenge. It puts all of the burden on the applicant, removes them from legal recourse, puts the power to use any and all information/media/results as Zammit sees fit; and essentially puts himself and his own hand-picked judges in control of judging the preliminary entries and any final results. The entrant can either accept these protocols (and thus, they will be “mutually agreed to”), or they can go home.
Zammit himself explicitly states this in the challenge page I linked to above.:
Given that Zammit holds that the Randi challenge is a non-scientific hoax, why would he choose to mirror Randi’s structure and wording in his own challenge?
Sometimes it seems to me that aheists/materialists have zero capacity to recognize any subtleties whatsoever in any discourse. It’s like your understanding of incoming information is an utterly flat and sequential processing of strings of letters or words.
William J. Murray,
Likewise. It is incomprehensible to me how you can see identity between the structure of Randi’s challenge and Zammit’s, logically or scientifically.
Suppose we have a proposition that it is possible to move a pencil by mind alone. “Rondi” offers an opportunity to demonstrate the same under controlled conditions. “Zommit” offers an opportunity to disprove his extensive evidence of pencil-movement-by-mind-alone. There is a clear difference.
No, it doesn’t, William. Look at Allan’s example above. Or take this one:
Zammit type challenge:
A tells Z that she saw a large green dragon in her garden.
Z challenges B to prove that A did not, under any protocol that B chooses.
Randi type challenge:
A tells Z that she saw a large green dragon in her garden.
R challenges A to show R the dragon, under any protocol that A chooses.
Can you see that these two challenges have different structures?
Elizabeth,
Really?? What an amazing bit of insight, Zommits challenge IS NOT to demonstrate that paranormal phenomenon is true, it is to demonstrate that it is not true.
Now that we have gotten past this amazing discovery of yours, in WHAT OTHERS WAYS are their challenges different ? Is that the totality of your complaint of the differences? Because I think we can all, even William agree, that this is the one thing that is different. Are you suggesting that other than this necessary difference, there is a better way he could structure his challenge to mirror Randis?
Or are you content to just complain that Zommit isn’t offering a million dollars to prove paranormal activity is real?
EL:
In the first place, you have Zammit’s challenge wrong. Blatanty, absolutely, unbelievably wrong. All I can say is that you must not have read through his book that refers to the evidence that must be rebutted. He doesn’t collect all the data and research details in his book, he simply refers to it – sums up the evidence and refers the reader to the much more detailed information/evidence. The evidence he challenges to be rebutted is not comprised of “stories” or “anecdotes”, but data collected largely through scientific research.
Also, I explicitly detailed the mirrored structuring I was talking about, and then you go off on some tangent about a comparison of the logical/scientific structure (which you are so far off-base on wrt the science, I question if you read anything at all on the Zammit site) that had nothing whatsoever to do with what I said.
In essence, Zammit is asking challengers to scientifically rebut the scientific data that has been accumulated. There’s nothing non-scientific or non-logical about it per se, but the way he has worded and structured the approval and testing process is to reveal the problems in Randi’s challenge by mirroring it in his own challenge document.
I mean, seriously. It baffles me how you and others here can so erroneously respond to what are explicit, straightforward comments.
Why do we need other ways? That one huge fundamental difference, the idiocy of Zammit in demanding science prove a negative is plenty to make Zammit’s ‘challenge” worthless.
Anecdotal stories about ghosts and Psi power and other woo aren’t scientific evidence no matter how desperately you wish them to be.
Allan Miller said:
I didn’t say there was a similarity logically or scientfically in the testing. I said there is a similarity contractually, on what is necessary to apply, get approved, initially tested, abandonment of legal recourse, agreement to let a hostile entity use all data and imagery collected how they see fit, the power of self-appointed judges in determining outcomes, what the standard of “winning” is, etc., and what “mutually agreed-to protocols” really means in practice – accept protocols we are happy with or go home.
LOL! Here comes the famous “sure I said it but I didn’t mean it” WJM backpedal.
I agree completely. So does Zammit. Characterizing me as “desperate” doesn’t change that, nor does it change the state of scientific evidence for some psi/paranormal phenomena.
You haven’t presented any scientific evidence for your woo and neither has Zammit. That which is offered without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Elizabeth,
Gee Lizzie, you mean if you intentionally put sodium ( a designed substance?) into a basin of water you can predict what will happen, that this is comparable to the predictability of evolution? And both are examples of how you can produce structure, organization and consistency without design? Holy cow.
How about we start with the obvious problem first-you have no explanation for why sodium exists. Or why water exists. Or why you exist? Or why there are chemical properties to things that are consistent and predictable. Ok, nevermind, you are an atheist, you don’t need explanations for things, they just are.
Next problem, who is putting the sodium in the water? Why aren’t they putting fire into the water? Or playdoh? Are they putting it in there for a reason, or did it just fall in? Nevermind, you are an atheist, no need to know who or why.
Next problem, are you saying we can predict what can happen in evolution, if we just throw in the right ingredients? Then why haven’t we already started our own evolutionary chain of life, and made organic self driving cars that grow in corn fields? Don’t we already know the chemicals inside a human? Go ahead, make a new one.
Next problem, what the heck is your position-is life on the planet a result of guidance, non-guidance, accident, or just the inevitable result of ..of, the system that you refuse to consider why it exists because you are an atheist?
Final problem, is your inability to describe evolution, and the existence of complex life on earth as a result of guided design, or completely unguided happenstance, or are you trying to say there is another possibility that is neither guided nor unguided, but which uses terms which are so muddled that you can’t be pinned down on even having a theory, because, as an atheist who sees no purpose to the world, its best to describe it as neither guided or unguided, because then no one can challenge you on your meanings?
“Its like a tub full of salt water….that is what I would compare the guidance of unguided evolution…its, its emergence!
Geez, Lizzie, you really should collect that million dollar prize from Randi, Just say the words “emergence”, and “modern synthesis” and all of the problems of evolution disappear…like magic I tell you!! You just proved it. Go get your money!!
Adapa said:
Zammit doesn’t demand anyone prove a negative. He challenges them to rebut the evidence referred to in his book. If it is all anecdotal in nature, then it shouldn’t be a problem. Go collect your million dollars.
Or, of course, you could actually read a least part of the book, find an item the book refers to (it’s actually organized to make that easy to do), look it up, then rebut it here – or, explain why, in your opinion, it is “anecdotal” in nature and should be dismissed as significant evidence.