Paul Kurtz

What distinguishes Kurtz from the other well known critics of the paranormal is that his lasting contribution was organisational. He founded Prometheus Books in 1969 to publish material commercial houses would not take; the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal in 1976, with an initial membership that included Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, Martin Gardner, Ray Hyman and James Randi; the Council for Secular Humanism; and the magazines Skeptical Inquirer and Free Inquiry through which both bodies spoke. His reasoning was that scattered individual rebuttals achieve nothing against a well funded and continuously produced stream of claims, and that the answer is a standing institution with a publication schedule of its own. He was a professional philosopher at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and his own writing centred on what he called the transcendental temptation, the persistent human preference for explanations that lie beyond the reach of any check. He treated that preference as a fact about people to be studied rather than a stupidity to be mocked, at least in his own books. The model has been copied widely since, and most of the national skeptical organisations now operating are built on the pattern he set in Buffalo in the middle 1970s.

The founding name of Kurtz's committee contained a promise: it would investigate claims of the paranormal. Almost immediately there was disagreement about whether it did. An early episode over a statistical study of astrology, in which the committee's own handling of the data was criticised by members and one prominent member resigned over it, established a pattern that recurred: an organisation constituted to test claims found that its public identity and its funding both rested on refuting them, and those are not the same activity.

Critics inside the movement, as well as parapsychologists outside it, argued that the group functioned as an advocacy body with an investigative vocabulary. Kurtz's own position was that scepticism means proportioning belief to evidence rather than denying claims in advance, and he repeated it often; whether the institution he built lived up to it is a fair question and one that the organisation has periodically asked itself. The committee dropped the reference to the paranormal from its name in 2006, becoming the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, in part to signal a wider remit. Kurtz left the organisations he had founded in 2010 after a dispute over their direction, and died two years later.