Psi, or psychic powers, exist.

In this round, I will either quote or give a gist of my opponent's previous contentions, and then respond accordingly. My opponent first said "do not use the fact that I started this debate to make it easier for you" This is my opponent's response for my request that he provides evidence that "psychic powers" exist, and I added that the burden of evidence is heavier on his side. This is not taking an advantage of the fact that my opponent is the instigator of this debate. If he started the debate and his position was that psychic powers don't exist, I would not request him to provide hard evidence for that. Thus, this has nothing to do with the fact that he started this debate. The real issue here is that my opponent is claiming that something controversial as a fact, and that is why he has a heavier burden of proof. If elucidate this point, if I go about claiming tooth fairies exist, people would not feel the need to provide evidence to disprove that, but instead, would ask me for evidence instead. What this all boil downs to is that if my opponent fails to provide sufficient evidence, he should lose this debate. I on the other hand, only have to state that the lack of evidence is the evidence for nonexistence. Moving on, the main evidence my opponent provides in support for the existence of psychic ability is the Stargate Project. However, there are severe problems with claiming that the Stargate Project proves the existence of psychic powers. My opponent first claimed that they had a success rate that was notable. This is very debatable (and because the results were so inconclusive, the project was canceled eventually). What happened was, after gathering all the results from the project, the CIA submitted their data to American Institute of Research for evaluation. The two people appointed by AIR who analyzed the data were Jessica Utts and Ray Hyman. While Utts said that the psychics were able to make predictions 5 to 15 percent accurate above mere chance, Hyman said that to claim psychic power exists from this project "is premature, to say the least". They both concluded that more investigation would be necessary to "legitimately claim the existence of paranormal functioning". Finally, the evaluation by AIR recommended a higher level of critical research and tighter controls of the project, and it is as this point that the project was terminated. Indeed, the Stargate Project was not a well conducted experiment at all. There was not a "control" group, in which people make random predictions so that the "psychic predictions" and the random predictions could be compared. This really is a major problem, since random predictions could be count as "accurate" if it is general enough. In fact, a lot of the predictions made by the psychics were very general, makings "accurate hits" not very impressive. Utts herself admitted that "subject reports included a large amount of irrelevant information, and when reports did seem on target they were vague and general in nature". From these facts, we surely CANNOT assert that this project "proves" psychic powers exist. My opponent asks me, "which is more likely: Very high luck, or some largely undiscovered talent of the human brain being put to use". I will respond to his question with another question of mine. What is more likely? A poorly conducted research produced unreliable results, or that our currently mainstream scientific understanding of biology and psychics is wrong? At the very least, we can say that the project gives evidence that suggest the existence of psychic powers, but we cannot say it "proves" psychic powers existence, considering how weak the evidence really is. Lastly, my opponent made the argument that many people believes that psychic powers exist, therefore psychic powers exist. I quote my opponent, "Why would humans believe in something that has no proof? [...] The answer is: Because there is proof". My opponent might rethink this argument if he actually realizes how many "facts" we humans once believed in great numbers, yet no one believes in them now. One example is the "flat earth theory". It was a widespread belief that the earth is flat prior to the 4th century BC. However, we now all know that the earth is round. What this shows is that we should not judge how "true" something is by counting how many people believed it. We should instead, focus on the evidence. In this case, there are other reasons why people would believe in the existence of psychic powers other than the fact that there is evidence for it. People might believe it because they had personal experiences that they would take as evidence, they might believe it because they would like to believe they can have psychic powers, etc. Regardless, if there really is good evidence for the existence of psychic powers because of EVIDENCE, most people who should believe in this should be scientists (although the opposite is the reality), and the study of the psychic phenomenon wouldn't be considered as pseudoscience to the mainstream scientific community. So to wrap up, I have showed that "Project Stargate" does not prove psychic's power's existence. I have also showed that just because there are people who believe psychic powers does that mean there are evidence. In order for my opponent to win this debate, he should provide better evidence that I cannot refute, and counter my argument successfully that the number of people who believes a statement to be true is irrelevant as evidence. my resources: http://www.harrisinteractive.com... http://www.time.com... http://en.wikipedia.org...