James Randi in Memoriam, 1928–2020

James Randi & the Skeptical Movement

In 1992 we founded the Skeptics Society and Skepticmagazine and publicly launched them on March 22 at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) with a lecture by James “The Amazing” Randi on “A Report from the Paranormal Trenches.” Randi’s talk started a tradition of monthly lectures at Caltech that continued through 2015 and now evolved into the Science Salon podcast, enabling us to reach orders of magnitude more people with our message on the value of science, reason, and skepticism.

That too was Randi’s life mission, so when he founded the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) we gladly gave him our mailing list so he could generate interest and support for his special brand of skepticism, and when JREF launched The Amazing Meeting (TAM) we once again supported it through our mailing list, advertising in Skeptic, and participation in nearly every single TAM over the years. In turn, for many years Randi penned a regular column in Skeptic (‘Twas Brillig) in which we gave him nearly free reign to talk about anything on his mind, which was almost always entertaining and educational. At age 92 Randi led a long life, and below Skeptic contributors and Junior SkepticEditor-in-Chief Daniel Loxton, an expert on the history of skepticism, puts Randi’s work into context. To that I would add a little more context, loosely based on passages from my book Why People Believe Weird Things, and a tribute I wrote to Paul Kurtz upon his passing in 2012.

Skepticism dates back to the ancient Greeks, well captured in Socrates’ famous quip that all he knows is that he knows nothing. Skepticism as nihilism, however, gets us nowhere and, thankfully, almost no one embraces it. The word “skeptic,” in fact, comes from the Greek skeptikos, for “thoughtful” — far from modern misconceptions of the word as meaning “cynical” or “nihilistic.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “skeptical” has also been used to mean “inquiring,” “reflective,” and, with variations in the ancient Greek, “watchman” or “mark to aim at.” What a glorious meaning for what we do! We are thoughtful, inquiring, and reflective, and in a way we are the watchmen who guard against bad ideas, consumer advocates of good thinking who, through the guidelines of science, establish a mark at which to aim.

The Enlightenment, on one level, was a century-long skeptical movement, for there were no beliefs or institutions that did not come under the critical scrutiny of such thinkers as Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Locke, Jefferson, and others. Immanuel Kant in Germany and David Hume in Scotland were skeptics’ skeptics at the birth of skepticism that was the foundation of the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment, and their influence continues unabated to this day. Closer to our time, Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley were skeptics par excellence, not only for the revolution they launched and carried on (respectively) against the dogma of creationism, but also for their stand against the burgeoning spiritualism movement that was sweeping across America, England, and the continent. Although Darwin was quiet about his skepticism of the new form of spiritualism spreading across the cultural landscape and worked behind the scenes, Huxley railed publicly against the movement, bemoaning in one of the great one-liners in the history of skepticism: “Better live a crossing-sweeper than die and be made to talk twaddle by a ‘medium’ hired at a guinea a séance.”

In the late nineteenth century the “Great Agnostic” Robert Ingersoll carried the torch of reason to century’s end, which was picked up in the first half of the twentieth century by the likes of Bertrand Russell and Harry Houdini, who stand out as representatives of skeptical thinkers and doers (respectively), railing against the irrationality and hucksterism of their age. Skepticism in the second half of the century began with Martin Gardner’s Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, launching what we think of today as “the skeptical movement,” which James Randi, Paul Kurtz, Martin Gardner, Ray Hyman, Carl Sagan and others so courageously organized and led to the end of the century, launching us into a new millennium of reason and science.

To that end, Randi’s talk that launched the Skeptics Society and Skeptic magazine at Caltech is a timeless talk that we are pleased to present in this issue of eSkeptic in video and audio formats, along with a transcript. And we intend this to start a new tradition of regular releases from our archives of the lectures that took place at Caltech, delivered by a pantheon of scientific luminaries and enlighteners, including Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould, Christof Koch, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, John McWhorter, Lisa Randal, Philip Zimbardo, Michio Kaku, Alison Gopnik, Leonard Mlodiow, Kevin Kelly, Sean Carroll, Kip Thorne, Nancy Segal, Patricia Churchland, Paul Churchland, Victor Stenger, Napoleon Chagnon, Donald Johanson, Susan Blackmore, Eugenie Scott, Jack Horner, Michael Ruse, Margaret Wertheim, Robert Zubrin, Seth Shostack, Gregory Benford, David Brin, Bill Nye, Paul MacCready, Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Crichton, Janna Levin, and many more.