The phenomena that I have observed around Shanthamma do not seem to be reproducible. She doesn't seem to have entire conscious control over what happens, and I notice that, very often, she too seems curious to know the contents of a bundle that appears in her hand. In materialising small figurines she seems to partly will it, yet even there she does not seem to have control over what appears.
In my efforts to relate these incidents to my friends, the majority of whom are profoundly sceptical of these things, I seem to encounter a solid wall that prevents me from arousing adequate interest in these matters. Many of them believe these to be the work of a 'magician' or a 'trickster' who uses methods of optical and other illusions to produce an effect of these things materialising, but these objects do not actually materialise but are made to appear so by trickery.
For a person like me and several others who have been intimately associated with Shanthamma, we are convinced that there is no trickery involved but that these objects genuinely materialise. What convinces us of her honesty are the transparency of her expression; her body language; the circumstances of her life and the plain open way in which she discusses these things. Quite often people around her would have noticed just two or three seconds earlier that she would be empty handed but the next moment she would be in possession of a fairly large bundle that would have been impossible for her to conceal. Most of the sceptics would say that such things are impossible and do not fit into the modern scientific world-view.
As a somewhat feeble response I copy and paste with requisite modifications the comments of some thinkers that I found in Wikipedia under the heading of 'Scientism':
1.Scientism refers to a belief in the universal applicability of the scientific method and approach, and the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion of other viewpoints.
2. The totalizing view of science is as if it were capable of describing all reality and knowledge, or as if it were the only true way to acquire knowledge about reality and the nature of things. I stress this to highlight the possible dangers of lapses towards excessive reductionism in all fields of human knowledge.
3. People who idolize science and its methods are also guilty of border-crossing violations in which the theories and methods of one (scientific) discipline are inappropriately applied to another (scientific or non-scientific) discipline and its domain. The word Scientism has been used for any attempt to claim science as the only or primary source of human values (a traditional domain of ethics) or as the source of meaning and purpose (a traditional domain of religion and related worldviews). Philosopher of religion Keith Ward has said scientism is philosophically inconsistent or even self-refuting, as the truth of the statements "no statements are true unless they can be proven scientifically (or logically)" or "no statements are true unless they can be shown empirically to be true" cannot themselves be proven scientifically, logically, or empirically.
4. E. F. Schumacher in his ‘A Guide for the Perplexed’ criticized scientism as an impoverished world view confined solely to what can be counted, measured and weighed. "The architects of the modern worldview, notably Galileo and Descartes, assumed that those things that could be weighed, measured, and counted were more true than those that could not be quantified. If it couldn’t be counted, in other words, it didn’t count."
5. In his essay, ‘Against Method’, Paul Feyerabend characterizes science as "an essentially anarchic enterprise" and argues emphatically that science merits no exclusive monopoly over "dealing in knowledge" and that scientists have never operated within a distinct and narrowly self-defined tradition. He depicts the process of contemporary scientific education as a mild form of indoctrination, aimed at "making the history of science duller, simpler, more uniform, more 'objective' and more easily accessible to treatment by strict and unchanging rules.
6. “Science can stand on its own feet and does not need any help from rationalists, secular humanists, Marxists and similar religious movements; and ... non-scientific cultures, procedures and assumptions can also stand on their own feet and should be allowed to do so ... Science must be protected from ideologies; and societies, especially democratic societies, must be protected from science... In a democracy scientific institutions, research programmes, and suggestions must therefore be subjected to public control, there must be a separation of state and science just as there is a separation between state and religious institutions, and science should be taught as one view among many and not as the one and only road to truth and reality”.
— Feyerabend, Against Method, p.viii
I draw upon these statements of intellectuals only to highlight that these remarks may be profoundly true and meaningful especially after my experiences with Shanthamma and Shirdi Sai Baba and various phenomena that seem quite inexplicable. Partially in humour I propose the term 'Gap Positivism' in my theorizations of these phenomena because, while logical positivism insists that knowledge is derivable either from mathematical or logical deductions and empirical observations that depend on sensory perceptions, these phenomena that always seem to happen pointedly and specifically only when one is not observing, yet happening in a manner so as to preclude the possibility of fraud, the term 'Sensory Gap' seems the most fitting!
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