Stigmatist's Video - What are your thoughts?

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If you think one anonymous forum poster’s unsubstantiated assertion that this doctor “attended the University of San Andres in La Paz, in Bolivia” is somehow evidence, you are sorely mistaken. That is called hearsay.

The only evidence you have referenced worth even one grain of salt is the link to one scholarly article that references this doctor in a Colombian journal of unknown reputation. There is no sane world where this one article erases the mountain of reasons I have carefully laid out for doubting the academic claims of this man.

You said “the town of Wheil, Germany may not exist, but the town of Weil am Rhein, Germany exists.” Guess what? I checked into that possibility. There is no institute of higher learning in that small German town. Not one. So what exactly is the good doctor referring to, Windfish? Do we just ignore all these unsubstantiated claims based on your one mention of the man in one article?

Here is a claim for you. I am a renowned Chef. Please explain to me how you are going to prove that is not true without an argument from silence? Your logic terms are being used to support an illogical premise; that it is somehow irrelevant that almost every academic claim this man has made is unsubstantiated. It is simply silly to argue that that fact does not matter. It is equally silly to suggest that an unwillingness to answer when and where he earned his degree is not suggestive of deception. Keep in mind, I am not the only one to have asked, so your suggestion that my haughty attitude is the problem does not fly. Believe me, Tim Francis and Ron Tesoriero would have LOVED to have shut me up with the answer to that question. They could not get the answer. The delightful JohnJones was unable to get that answer…and he tried hard.

I have contacted The Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County as well as the American Psychological Association to determine when and where it was first possible to earn a PhD in clinical psychology in Bolivia. In the latter case, I had to leave a message with a woman who will not return till the 20th of this month. I look forward to sharing that information.

I did a google search of the doctor on the Bolivian version of google and found forum threads in Spanish of people expressing the same doubt and asking the exact same questions I am asking. Where is the evidence this man is what he claims to be and has accomplished what he claims to have accomplished?

Your large font response does not lessen the paucity of your evidence that this man should be trusted. Does anyone else on this thread think Windfish has closed this case?

I am truly curious.
 
Sgroh, this has become hopeless. I suppose I continue now only to clarify for others the path through your paranoia.
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Sgroh:
If you think one anonymous forum poster’s unsubstantiated assertion that this doctor “attended the University of San Andres in La Paz, in Bolivia” is somehow evidence, you are sorely mistaken. That is called hearsay.
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In addition to lacking critical thinking skills, you also lack reading comprehension skills. This is what I wrote:

Windfish said:
Post #23 of this thread provided an independent academic source that repeated Castañón-Gómez’s credentials. Sgroh, you have not addressed that, either.
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So. We see that I am not referring to an “anonymous forum poster’s unsubstantiated assertion,” but to an independent academic source that was found by an anonymous forum poster.
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Sgroh:
The only evidence you have referenced worth even one grain of salt is the link to one scholarly article that references this doctor in a Colombian journal of unknown reputation. There is no sane world where this one article erases the mountain of reasons I have carefully laid out for doubting the academic claims of this man.
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What you have carefully laid out is, in fact, a scaffolding of paranoia and suspicion. That you have not been able to verify fact X through your limited search does not mean that fact X is untrue. It merely means that you have not been able to verify fact X.

Let us say that fact X is the fact of Castañón-Gómez’s credentials. We have an independent academic source that says he is a doctor in neuropsychology. This gives us warrant to think fact X is true because the silence about fact X has been broken by a relevant source. Inexplicably, though, you think that the silence about facts Y and Z somehow undermines our warrant about fact X. This is a non sequitur - it simply does not follow.

Silence does not trump evidence. That you have not been able to verify facts Y and Z does not at all undermine our warrant for fact X, concerning which the silence has been broken. Again, it merely means that you have not been able to verify facts Y and Z. So if fact Y is that he spoke at Georgetown and fact Z is that he spoke at the North Pole, the mere fact of your search turning up silence concerning these facts does not trump the ‘noise’ or lack of silence about fact X.
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Sgroh:
You said “the town of Wheil, Germany may not exist, but the town of Weil am Rhein, Germany exists.” Guess what? I checked into that possibility. There is no institute of higher learning in that small German town. Not one. So what exactly is the good doctor referring to, Windfish? Do we just ignore all these unsubstantiated claims based on your one mention of the man in one article?
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To answer your question, no. Pursue these claims, if you want. I said as much in my previous response to you. If you would like to follow up on these peripheral facts, by all means, do so. However, the fact of Castañón-Gómez’s credentials has been attested by a relevant source. So that matter is settled. If your search to verify these peripheral facts finds nothing but silence, as explained, it does nothing to undermine the warrant we have concerning the fact that started this discussion in the first place: his credentials. Arguments from silence, fallacious as they are, do not trump evidence.

I think this discussion has run its course, Sgroh. Often, the reasons before our eyes are not as persuasive as the reasons in our heads, as we imagine them. Bias is very powerful, and it can lead us to privilege silence over hard evidence. And it can lead us to overstate our research, making us jump to illicit conclusions. Good luck.
 
There is a note on the video that reads: ‘Science tests faith’.

We know from Scripture that we are told: “Do not put the Lord your God to the test”.

I’ll go with that.
 
Nice to see somebody else make a comment.

I was poking around the journal that mentions Dr. Ricardo Castañón Gómez

It looks like a serious journal. Also the school his name was in appears legitimate. I just don’t see any red flags. I can’t imagine how he could be listed in these places and not have his PhD.

However I bet he ticked off many people by being involved in alleged miracles so I am sure there are plenty of atheists criticizing him.
 
Anyone who purposefully seeks media attention, IMO, is not acting with humility - this being a very Christian-specific virtue.
 
Well…I give up. You cannot reason people out of positions that reason did not get them into.

For anyone who stumbles upon this long thread I offer my final words: It was NEVER my responsibility to prove that Dr. Ricardo Castañón’s credentials were real. The burden of proof lies with the person making the claim. Windfish has gone on and on about “arguments from silence”…but, again, we (the people of this forum) are not the ones making the claim…we are the ones being asked to believe that claim. Please consider this analogy: None of you have any intellectual reason to believe that I am a renowned Chef. Windfish cannot prove that I am not a Chef. He should not need to…the responsibility is mine to prove it. If I made a long string of claims about my achievements as a Chef would you accept one mention of me in an article (no matter how prestigious) to verify all my claims? That would be a piece of good evidence, I agree. However, what if I had displayed behavior that was not in line with the truth of my claim? What if the people who worked with me for years had no idea when and where I went to culinary school? What if you asked me personally and I sent you a 14 page paper full of outrage that you would dare question me…yet I never answered your simple question? I imagine that might give you cause for concern. What if I claimed that I had cooked at prestigious restaurants all over Europe yet I would almost never list the restaurants and the few I did list had never heard of me…or didn’t even exist (ie. Weil Germany)? What if I had a personal facebook page where you had found an even longer list of my accomplishments and I denied that I created it or had any control over it…yet it was taken down immediately after you confronted me? You would be foolhardy to swallow anything this Chef served up until he cleared up that credibility problem…and this analogy is an EXACT depiction of what had occurred investigating this doctor. If you can’t smell deviousness at this point, you cannot be helped.

Some of the people on this thread have wanted to believe in the doctor from the beginning. He is being used to provide scientific substantiation to a miracle that they want to believe in. That is human nature and I understand the impulse. My starting position, however, was neutral. I began researching this man simply to determine IF his credentials were real. Here we are literally half a year later and still there is NOT ONE person who has uncovered when or where this man earned his degree. Anyone on this thread could have shut me up long ago with the answer to those two simple…utterly basic questions. No one can find those answers…anywhere…through research, questioning those who worked with him…or even through direct questioning of the man himself.

If Windfish tries to suggest that the long list of academic claims were not made by the doctor himself, this too belies belief. He lists these claims on Amazon, on the Global Catholic Media network website I posted…and numerous other catholic websites that you can easily discover on your own. He listed them on his Facebook page before he yanked it down. He claims he had not control over it (we are to believe that random fans created it I suppose). He had no control…AND YET it came down as soon as I confronted him.

I have done my best to protect parishioners from people I feel I have shown to be deeply questionable. You will have to decide if Windfish’s one piece of evidence (a mention in a Columbian scholarly article) trumps all I have presented. Keep in mind…the burden of proof lies with them, not me. God Bless.
 
Attempted to respond to you today, John…but was met with this message:

“JohnJones has exceeded their stored private messages quota and cannot accept further messages until they clear some space.”

If you are able to clear out some space, we could resume correspondence.

THANKS - Steve
 
Dr. Castanon’s response to Steve is here. Since it is referenced a number of times, I thought it best that it be posted.
 
Hy guys, I have found this thread very entertaining. I am an italian man and sorry in advance if my english is not so perfect.

I would like to add a new information about Castanon Gomez; we know that he claims that he studied also in Germany and in Italy and that he published a lot of articles on scientific matters. In his response to mister Sgroh Castanon Gomez provided some evidence of his scientific articles during his staying in Germany. Now I would bring to your attention this web page: uim.mi.it/Rivista2.htm . It is about an italian journal on psychology, that was pubblished from 1972 to 1987; among the various articles that are listed in the page there are two ones authored by Ricardo Castanon Gomez, (written in 1975 and in 1979). This is perfectly consistent with the information available on internet about Castanon Gomez’s biography. I don’t know if the Rivista internazionale di psicologia e ipnosi was a peer reviewed paper, but for sure I found that the author listed in the page were doctor (I looked for some of them on google and in all the cases I found them to be doctors).

After reading all the thread, my idea is that Ricardo Castanon Gomez is not a liar, nor (of course) a great scientist (as he admits). Ok we don’t have the direct evidence of his Phd, but, seriously, do you find this strange considering that we are talking of a man that studied in Bolivia (and than Italy and Germany) during the 70s? I don’t know how it works in the US, but here in Italy Universities don’t show at all the list of people graduated in the past. It could seem quite strange that Castanon Gomez refused to provide any evidence on this topic in his long email, but - sincerely - he justified his behaviour and I would be really happy to se the mail that Sgroh sent to him (I bet that it was not so kind and polite). All the other information (that he wrote various books and several articles on scientific matters) are widely proven, by his own answer and by the documents cited in this thread.
 
I have found some other institutional information about R.Castanon:
  • researchgate.net/publication/26597578_Historia_de_la_psicologa_en_Bolivia: this is an article of the Rivista Latinoamericana de Psicologia, where we can read that in 1975 la Universidad Catolica Boliviana founded the CIOP (Centro de Investigacion y orientacion psicologica) and Ricardo Castanon was the director. Ricardo Castanon, in the same year, also founded the Revista Boliviana de Psicologia
  • coedu.usf.edu/zalaquett/PsiAmericas/2-Bolivia-pp-47-65.pdf : in this article pubblished by the University of South Florida that deals with the history of psychology in Bolivia, we can find the name of Ricardo Castanon cited in page 54 among the pioneer reasearcher on clinical psychology in Bolivia
  • upsa.edu.bo/index.php/es/facultades/25-adicionales-fhc : here we can find a conference held by Ricardo Castanon in the Universidad Privada de Santa Cruz de la Sierra in Bolivia
  • dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/3988051.pdf : this article published by the Revista Neuropsicología, Neuropsiquiatría y Neurociencias cites Ricardo Castanon Gomez as the leader of the first cohort in Neuropsychology in the Universidad Católica Boliviana “San Pablo”,
 
I think that, after all, there is no reasonable doubt about the credentials of Ricardo Castanon. Such a shame not to read mister Groh’s reply on this…
 
Thank you Alesa for your posts *(I haven’t finished reading everything yet, just wanted to quickly let you know that it hasn’t fallen on deaf ears or anything). *🙂

God Bless You

Thank you for reading
Josh
 
Thanks Alesa for sharing those links!, I think that closes the thread leaving completely no doubt about Dr Castanon Credentials.
Since I am 100% fluent in Spanish I can verify the veracity of authentic quotes on those Journals.

Mr Sgroh, not because is not english, does not mean is not valid.

God Bless You. 👍
 
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