E-mail David Christopher Lane
directly at dlane@weber.ucsd.edu
Reviewer: David Christopher Lane Publisher: UCSM Publication date: 1986
E-mail David Christopher Lane
directly at dlane@weber.ucsd.edu
I
want to go back to the home base now.
THE NEW AGE UNDER REVIEW Baba and I Dr. John S. Hislop is a remarkable person: intelligent, well-read, and extremely open-minded, and a seasoned spiritual seeker. Thus, it is difficult not to be impressed with his personal account of his relationship with the renowned Avatar Sathya Sai Baba of India. It is an easy reading book, filled with fascinating vignettes of Sathya Sai Baba's alleged miraculous powers and intense love for his devotees. However, there is a major problem with the book: the supposed evidence Hislop cites in support of Sai Baba's miracles (like materializing objects from thin air) has not been scientifically examined or tested. For instance, how do we know that Sathya Sai Baba is nothing more than a clever magician (as D. Scott Rogo, Amazing Randi, and others suggest)? Why doesn't Sai Baba materialize an object which is so totally beyond physical manipulation that even materialistic scientists would concede to its miraculous origins? Put bluntly, Sai Baba produces religious trinkets; he has never produced a billion dollars -- money which could be used for thousands of starving Indians. Why not? If we apply the principle of Occam's Razor and the suggestive accounts of Tal Brooke (author of the very controversial, Lord Of The Air ) the answer is fairly obvious: Sai Baba is not a man of miracles, he is a man of shrewd magic tricks. Now there is nothing wrong with a magician preaching love for God, but there is something reprehensible about a stage artist claiming his sleight of hand tricks are Divinely ordained. Hislop writes at length about the most extraordinary object Sathya Sai Baba has ever created for the joy of his devotees--a small cross with a miniaturized figure of Jesus Christ. According to Hislop, the object was constructed from the actual cross Jesus was nailed to. Sai Baba reconstituted the material from its disintegrated molecular parts. An incredible tale, no doubt, but where's the proof? The cross has never been thoroughly scrutinized by a team of qualified scientists. Moreover, even a cursory look at the cross (a photograph of it appears in Hislop's book) does not suggest a Divine origin; it looks like any other religious trinket--except that it is unusually small. The replication also has a major historical flaw in it as it depicts Jesus with nails in the palms of his hands. History tells us that people crucified in Jesus' time had nails driven in their wrists not their palms. Yet, despite the evidence to the contrary, Hislop waxes in eloquent prose about Sathya Sai Baba's amazing manifestations, forgetting in the process that "Amazing Randi"--the noted paranormal debunker--can also perform the same "miracles" Sathya Sai Baba can, although he does not claim Divine intervention. This is not to suggest that Sathya Sai Baba doesn't have good things to say about spirituality (he does), but only that there is no positive proof whatsoever to substantiate Sai Baba's Avatar status, except for the (scientifically) untested faith and testimony of his earnest devotees. I personally welcome the day when Sai Baba performs his miracles under scientifically controlled circumstances; then, and only then, can we make some rational pronouncements about his divine powers.
