SOCIETY FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF CRITICAL THINKING
Secretary of ARP-SAPC and Editor of the magazine El Escéptico.
At the end of the seventies, Spain was experiencing a boiling point in matters such as parapsychology, ufology and the so-called "occult sciences", a sign of new times after the end of Franco's dictatorship, where these activities were not well received for being contrary to the Catholic faith that was the backbone of the regime. There were many fans of them and almost everyone considered them serious subjects, given that they occupied prime time slots in the media, especially in the slots dedicated to entertainment programs.
However, at least in the case of ufology, a group of followers began to question the veracity of the subject, given that, despite the time and effort dedicated to hundreds of investigations, they never found anything that did not have a rational explanation. They even saw how easy it was to deceive the gullible with some tremendously crude set-ups. Thus was born the Rational Alternative for the Investigation of the UFO Phenomenon (ARIFO), which lasted about five years, until they saw that ufology was little more than a social myth, and they began to look for other areas of interest, such as telepathy, telekinesis, Spiritism or astrology. Contacts with international collectives and personalities, such as Paul Kurtz and CSICOP, the French Rationalist Union and Henri Broch, as well as with the philosopher Mario Bunge, also began to intensify. The time had come, back in 1986-1987, to found the Rational Alternative to Pseudoscience (ARP).
With ARP, perhaps a more serious work began, with more or less frequent interventions in the media and academic environments trying to refute and give rational explanations to all those phenomena that were badly explained and tried to pass themselves off as inexplicable, organizing conferences and courses, and editing the pioneer publication of Spanish skepticism: La Alternativa Racional. This was a compendium of his own texts, press clippings and little else, a fanzine photocopied and stapled by hand, with a very limited distribution.
In the nineties a new step was taken: the criticism of pseudosciences was not enough; it was necessary to extend scientific skepticism to many more areas. This gave rise to the current name: Society for the Advancement of Critical Thinking (ARP-SAPC), where ARP has remained as a nostalgic memory of its former name, although without a concrete meaning. According to its statutes, the objectives are: to promote the development of science, critical thinking, science education, secularism and the use of reason; to promote the critical investigation of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims from a scientific and rational point of view, and to disseminate information on the results of these investigations among the scientific community and the general public.
Since then, the only significant change has been to add, in 2013, the promotion of secularism as one of its objectives. It should be noted that, at least in Spain, the skeptical movement has never been characterized by placing too much emphasis on criticizing religious-type ideas -as long as they are not attempted to be passed off as equal to scientific knowledge-, perhaps because in a Europe as secularized as it is today, religion has been increasingly restricted to the realm of personal beliefs and freedom of conscience, without such a profound social impact as in the past.
An important milestone in this journey was the publication, in 1998, of the first issue of the magazine El Escéptico, already in print and with a more professional look, of which 58 issues have been published and is still alive with a print run of about a thousand copies, all of them available on our website in PDF format.
Taking a look at it, you can see how our focus has been changing. In the first issues we collected works dedicated, for example, to clairvoyance, extraterrestrials, cryptozoology, the Holy Shroud or esoteric interpretations of the Bible or the Torah. These are almost all subjects that have been quite forgotten, displaced by everything related to pseudosciences associated with health, something that barely existed a few decades ago, apart from some folkloric village healer who was generally used only by people with few resources and little culture. We are also working on everything related to the new sectarian movements, pseudoscientific pedagogies or conspiracy theories (anti-vaccine movements, anti-antenna telephony, climate change denialism...), as well as the manipulation of history, especially with political motivations. All this in collaboration with other groups that have emerged in recent years, such as the Círculo Escéptico, the Association to Protect the Sick from Pseudoscientific Therapies (APETP) or RedUNE (Network for the Prevention of Sectarianism and Abuse of Weakness).
Although we understand that our work is still necessary, so it is not among our plans to dissolve, the popularization of science is living a golden age in Spain with considerable echo in the media, even if it is in somewhat hidden pages or in difficult schedules in the case of radio and television. A fundamental milestone in this has undoubtedly been the covid pandemic, which has required clarifying many doubts and combating a lot of misinformation. We should also point out the change in mentality that is taking place in the academic and professional world, traditionally on the fringes of these matters, perhaps because they underestimate their importance, and which is being translated into concrete initiatives, such as the observatory of pseudotherapies and health sects of the Organisation of Medical Associations or the CoNprueba [WithProof] plan of the Spanish Government.
Pseudoscience, although it has not disappeared, far from it, is being relegated to social networks, where it continues to win by a landslide: getting a few hundred views on our YouTube channel is considered a success, while any guru gets his nonsense followed by hundreds of thousands of people. And another aspect that we have not yet solved is the gender gap in the skeptical movement, traditionally dominated by men. In ARP-SAPC, less than 20% of our members are women. However, pseudosciences, especially those associated with health or New Age mysticism, are overwhelmingly followed by women, although their leaders and manipulators are mostly men.
All the information concerning ARP-Society for the Advancement of Critical Thinking can be consulted on the web site www.escepticos.es.
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