Was Edgar Cayce a Genuine Psychic or a Crackpot?

[ryzeg]

Let me start off by saying that I have never believed in miracles, superstition, pseudoscience, etc. In fact, it makes me sick to my stomache watching people on T.V. pretend to have such 'powers', or people who even talk about things defying reality.

I recently watched a documentary on Edgar Cayce on the History channel, and no matter how biased this show was about him, it still rattled my mind as to all of the evidence they have that support this nut.

Now, I don't want somebody to dismiss this as unfalsifiable as well as unprovable (which it obviously is, considering all the 'evidence' is based off of hearsay.) I know that. I want some skeptic's view on all the vast evidence that supports this guy - And how he could pull off such stunts with merely an 8th grade education.

Even if his "prophecies" were simply guesses, how did he make multiple REMARKABLE, 'one-in-a-gazillion' predictions that came to be true (examples include finding precisely where oil was located, secrets within the Great Sphinx of Giza, foreseeing the great depression four years in advance, etc.)

Mind you this all occurred in the early 20th century, not more than a hundred years ago.

P.S. Please only comment on this if you understand the history of this man. If I didn't know the story behind him, it would be easy for me to thrash the idea of a 'prophet'.

 

[Evo]

He didn't make any "REMARKABLE, 'one-in-a-gazillion' predictions that came to be true.

You should always do a search before you start a new thread, Cayce has already been discussed here.

https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=100567

 

[ryzeg]

How is finding exactly where oil is located not absurdly improbable? - And that is just one of many peculiar examples I heard on the History channel's show of him.

FYI I did search "Edgar Cayce" before posting and did not find that post. Shame on me.

From http://www.skepdic.com/cayce.html:

"Even though Cayce didn't have a formal education much beyond grammar school, he was a voracious reader, worked in bookstores, and was especially fond of occult and osteopathic literature. "

That itself could explain a lot...

I still do not dismiss Edgar as a complete "hoax", albeit maybe all his "readings" were complete rubbish. Maybe he did actually go into some 'trance' or whatever, and truly believed he was a prophet, but it does not necessarily suggest anything paranormal.

 

[Evo]

FYI I did search "Edgar Cayce" before posting and did not find that post. Shame on me.

The search function is flaky, it's better to search on a single word. I apologize for assuming you didn't search.

My mother was a true believer in Cayce and I was to blame. I read a newspaper article about him and gave it to her, knowing she'd be interested. He was an interesting character. I think he believed he had a special ability, but as more and more people started believing I think he felt (perhaps subconciously) that he had to produce more and more outlandish "readings' to keep people interested.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

Threads merged.

 

[rewebster]

Cayce is one of 'those' that stand out. I read a lot of the books about him, and in fact, I bought 10 copies of 'Many Mansions' to give away. One of the most interesting 'readings' is the 'smoke oil' one. He is fairly unexplainable for some of his insights, in a remarkable way.

 

[waht]

Nostradamus has foreseen nothing. His verses are all constructed in a vague language that you can fit to anything. No Nostradamian student has been able to say what his predictions meant before the facts. After something happens, they search all the quatrains until they find some that can be distorted in order to fulfill the fact.
If Cayce's predictions are of the same order, I am not surprised that they are considered accurate by believers.

Exactly!

No prediction is accurate enough to prove without a doubt an event was predicted.

This effect stems from nothing but the ability of humans to associate things. And worst, to deeply believe in those associations. Nostradamus's quatrains are a joke frankly, except for the fact some might be poetic in nature. If you try hard, you can associate any of his quatrains with just about anything. What is even more convincing is when a leading researcher in the area writes a book, or a show is made, then it sweeps a wider audience off their feet. A class of people that buys this also has a mind open to other possibilities, such as the supernatural, mysticism, voodoo etc, etc. What this tells you is your mind is associating just about everything with everything. In time, by laws of statistics, an event will come that will be close to the prediction. If you made more predictions, than chances are even great. This is the same things as if a monkey was punching random keys on a type writer for eons. One day the monkey would write a copy of "Hamlet" word for word.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

A post above was temporarily deleted.

In order to consider your points, we will need a reliable source to confirm each claim made.

 

[Chronos]

Edgar Cayce did not submit to any particularly rigorous tests of his predictions, which makes them suspect. He also lived in a time where anecdotal evidence ruled. His more 'out there' predictions [eg, atlantis] proved false. I think the lack of controls and abundance of after the fact fine tuning of his 'predictions' puts this in the realm of . . . Nostradamus.

 

[fillindablank]

Anecdotal evidence isn't necessarily wrong, nor is it necessary for it to have hard evidence to be correct. If anecdotal evidence was always dismissed out of hand we wouldn't have pain relievers like Aspirin. There are degrees of anecdotal evidence. If one or two people say it, that's pretty weak anecdotal evidence. If thousands of people say it then it starts to carry weight. There was no way to measure pain when Aspirin was discovered. It became a wonder drug from anecdotal evidence and it's a lucky thing for us that skeptics didn't rule the world or it would still be unknown. Look at marijuana, the evidence that it relieves nausea is anecdotal but there is a vast amount of it. It can't be measured but for people who have experience it is an indisputable fact. It's the same with Cayce. The evidence that he is psychic may be mostly anecdotal but there is a LOT of it, orders of magnitude more than any other I know of.

 

[BigFairy]

...crackpot in a sense