The seventh part of CJ’s ongoing attempt to sort out his ideas on the paranormal and the nature of psychical research is a response to a piece by another blogger on the subject, Higgypop. Higgypop in his piece states that after over a century of investigation, psychic researchers have still been unable to provide proof that ghosts exist. They then go on to suggest that perhaps it’s time the scientific approach to the paranormal pursued by ASSAP and others is abandoned, and researchers instead should concentrate on what the experience of seeing a ghost means to the witness. Here they compare this approach with religion: no-one demands scientific proof of the existence of God. Rather they accept that it is based on faith, personal experience and scripture. So it should be with psychical research. And maybe, if this approach was adopted, psychical research could become academically respectable. This leads CJ to defend ASSAP by pointing out that the society already does this. Since its foundation by Gurney, Myers and co., psychical researchers right up to the present day have been as busy looking through sources like the Census of Hallucinations for the personal impact and meaning ghost sightings have to the people who experienced them as they have looking round haunted locales and setting up experiments to ascertain whether or not they really are haunted. CJ also examines the difference between science and religion and whether ghosthunting, as it is popularly done, is really a form of religion masquerading as science, before turning to a discussion of the methodological foundations of science.
Higgypop is generally right in that people don’t demand that religious belief rest on the same foundations as experimental science. However, for several years after 2007 members of the New Atheist movement founded by Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, the ‘Four Horsemen’ as they styled themselves, did just that. Religion was angrily dismissed as nonsensical because it did not rest on science, which they declared was the only way to gain objectively truthful information about the cosmos and its objects. This was just a rehash of the old Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle of the 1920s. They too declared that metaphysical statements – that is, statements about God, the afterlife and the supernatural – were absurd and nonsensical because unscientific. This statement is self-contradictory, because in dismissing metaphysics they made a statement about metaphysics. It was also somewhat counterproductive. Many people did come out and declare themselves deconverted to atheism thanks to reading Dawkin’s book The God Delusion and other similar works, but the sheer venom and abuse they heaped upon the religious turned many other atheists, from a gentler, more traditionally Humanist strand of unbelief against them. The Australian journo Kim Sterelny describes how shocked he was at this vitriol in his introduction to his book Darwin Wars, about the feud between Dawkins and the late Stephen Jay Gould over the nature of evolution. The British TV presenter John Humphries also describes his shock and revulsion at the vicious rhetoric used by the New Atheists in his book on agnosticism, In God We Doubt. Humphries had considered himself an agnostic for very many years, but came to the conclusion that he didn’t believe the Lord existed after all. Then he came across the virulent invective of the New Atheists, which revolted him so much he went back to being an agnostic.
Despite the arguments of the New Atheists, CJ rightly points out that scientific Empiricism is only one approach to investigating the universe. Another is history. Experimental science can’t tell you if the Battle of Waterloo took place. It also, as CJ says, can’t tell you whether your mother or the cute guy down the road you fancy loves you, or if God and the supernatural exist. Instead you look at such disciplines as history for the Battle of Waterloo, personal experience for your mother and the lad, and philosophy, history, textual criticism and archaeology for the existence of God. Archaeology is a science, and it can certainly help you investigate the Battle of Waterloo, not least by corroborating the descriptions of the Battle in the history books. But without books on the Napoleonic Wars, all the archaeological investigation of the battlefield could tell us would be that there had been a battle there in the early 19th century. It could not tell you why it was fought, who commanded the armies or place it into context in the changing political, religious and social conditions of the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Despite this, there are some forms of religion and mystical investigation that claim to rest on a scientific foundation. When Spiritualism emerged, it claimed unequivocally to provide proof of the existence of an afterlife, and hence it attracted the attention of scientists and philosophers, as well as radical social thinkers like the founder of British socialism. The terminology it uses in its services still reinforces this view of itself as rational and scientific. Instead of a sermon as in Christian and Islamic worship, Spiritualists instead talk about ‘the philosophy’.
CJ then goes on to make the distinction between psychical research and ghosthunting, at least as it is done at the popular level. This was the subject of a fascinating talk by one of ASSAP’s other members, a lady with a very senior medical background, at the annual ASSAP conference one year. Psychical researchers follow very carefully scientific protocols. In the case of ASSAP, they include both believers and sceptics, and consider alternative explanations for the phenomena they investigate, such as various forms of sleep paralysis, misperception, the effects of ultrasound and other possible causes on the witness, and possible fraud and deception. And as CJ also says, you can also find them poring over the literature of ghost hauntings and other paranormal phenomena. Indeed, Magonia and the small press UFO magazine, Strange Daze, founded by Dave Newton, used to make jokes about the accusations by their opponents that they spent all their time in libraries and their armchairs reading rather than being out in the field looking for mysterious lights in the sky and talking to UFO witnesses.
Ghosthunters, on the other hand, follow the vigil tradition that go back to Elliot O’Donnell and in literature to Edward Bulwer-Lytton, the writer who gave us The Last Days of Pompeii and the early SF novel, The Coming Race, about an underground super race, the Vril, gifted with strange electrical powers and preparing to rise up at some point in the future to overthrow and supersede humanity. Such vigils, carried out according to proper scientific methodology like Harry Price’s Investigation of Borley Rectory and those done according to ASSAP guidelines in CJ’s view can indeed add much to our understanding of the ghost phenomenon. I don’t dispute this, just as I don’t dispute his description of ghosthunting as ‘spiritualism on the hoof’.
The medical lady, whose talk on this very subject I attended, made a very similar point. Popular ghosthunting, at the level of a myriad blogs and internet sites and trashy TV programmes, isn’t about objectively investigating the phenomenon. This has the unfortunate possibility of concluding that despite a site’s reputation, there may be nothing supernatural going on there at all. No! Instead, the researchers have decided already that ghosts exist, and it’s all about gathering proof. To do that it uses the paraphernalia of gadgets like EMF meters and supposed ‘ghost detector’ apps on mobile phones. They record footage of anomalous movements and sights they believe are ghosts, and post them up on their internet sites. And oh yes, there’s also the merchandising, such as caps, sweatshirts and other items branded with the name of their group. And anybody who is not convinced by their supposed proof, and states objections to it is a ‘hater’.
What is worse is that often they have a completely cavalier attitude to the safety and wellbeing of the people whose homes they enter in their quest for the supernatural. Respectable psychic investigators are very well aware that they have a duty of care towards the percipients. The sceptical Magonians have pointed out that most people don’t want to be told their house is haunted, but want a rational explanation for the phenomenon. If they are happy with being told that it really is haunted, they want the investigators to send the spook on its way, or put them in contact with someone who can. Instead, there have been cases where irresponsible ghosthunters have told families that they’ve got a portal in their house through which demons are arriving. They can’t close it themselves, but would previously have put them in touch with a shaman who could. They’re unable to do that anymore, ’cause he’s moved away. It would be no bad thing if more ghosthunters were aware of the effect their experiences had on them. As for the adoption of this as one of the aims of psychic research, in reminds me of John Spencer’s witness-led investigations of UFO percipients. This concentrated very much on the effects UFO encounters had on witnesses, some of whom developed psychic powers, or believed they had, as a result of their encounters. The investigators therefore followed the witnesses’ desires over how to proceed.
CJ doesn’t go into these unsavoury aspects of popular ghosthunting, but instead explains why people have regarded it as scientific, or quasi-scientific, rather than as another variety of New Religious Movements. Conceptions of religion are strongly influenced by religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam. These are faiths which have a scripture, a set body of doctrine and forms of worship and ritual. But a religion like Hinduism and new religions like Wicca are much more diverse. There is so much variety of faith and practice in Hinduism that scholars have described trying to define it as like sieving spaghetti. So much so that it has been described not as single religion so much as a continuum of related sects.
There is a similar variety in forms of Wicca, from the division between the Gardnerian and Alexandrian forms of religion. One is based on the teachings of Gerald Gardner, the other Alex Saunders. It’s also highly individualistic, so that Wiccans away from the covens – solitaries, as they are called – are free to invent their own forms. There is, or has been, a central text, the Book of Shadows, but practitioners of the religion are invited to write their own versions of it, including their rituals, beliefs and experiences. Popular ghosthunting is therefore similar in that it is a doctrineless religion that nevertheless seeks to put it practitioners in contact with the supernatural. In this respect, it’s rather like how the ‘Wickedest Man in the World’ Aleister Crowley defined ritual magic: ‘the methods of science, the aims of religion’.
There is considerable discussion on the nature of science by philosophers, or even that there is any such thing as science as a single intellectual discipline. Many languages, such as German, don’t refer to science but ‘the sciences’ because of the differences between them. Biology is different from the hard, mathematical sciences like physics and chemistry. And at university level, mathematics is more like one of the arts. Modern science, however, follows the methodology laid down by Francis Bacon in the 17th century. The scientist begins by observing a phenomenon. S/he then formulates a theory to explain it, and then devises an experiment to test this theory. This is the methodology that has allowed humanity to build every more intricate machines, taken us to the Moon and treat and cure terrible diseases.
CJ makes the point here that science is a methodology, not a body of knowledge, as its conclusions are always provisional. We can be sure of some, such as that the Earth orbits the Sun, but others may be changed as more information turns up. For example, Pluto was considered a planet, but has had its status downgraded to dwarf planet because of the discovery of similar objects like Quaor further away from the Sun in the Kuiper belt.
CJ also states that science is also informed by philosophical empiricism and rationalism. Empiricism is the philosophical school that promotes the acquisition of knowledge through sense experience. It assumes a mechanistic universe running according to laws that are logical, comprehensible and unchanging. Experiment is therefore viewed as an excellent way to gather knowledge about the cosmos. This also allows us to share information, and build on our knowledge. Scepticism is a vital part of this process through the careful testing of truth claims and is central to the scientific method.
Coupled with this approach is rationalism. This states that truth can be attained by proceeding logically from fundamental principles, axioms, that are self-evidently true. Examples of this approach are the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza and the mathematics of Rene Descartes. CJ could also have added the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, who believed that philosophical truth could also be gained through following the mathematical approach of geometry. Rationalists also argue that Empiricists are wrong in their assumption that the world is unchanging. Coupled with this is the problem of induction discussed in the 18th century by the Scots philosopher David Hume. This states that even if the same process or phenomenon is observed a myriad times, there is no guarantee that it will still be the same the next time it is observed. This mixture of rationalism and empiricism has given science tremendous explanatory power and technology. However, it also has clearly defined limits, and there are different philosophies of science.
He gives as an example of the debate over the limits of science the statement the great philosopher, Karl Popper, made about evolution. He denied that it was science, but history. If evolution was wound back and then proceeded again from the very beginning, very different creatures would arise and the history of life on Earth would be very different. It was not predictable, as science assumes, so was history rather than science proper. This greatly offended evolutionary biologists, and Popper was forced to retract this argument. The palaeontologist Steven Jay Gould also held the same view that very different creatures would evolve if the history of the Earth started again, although he had no doubt that evolution was science. However, he did have some connections with the people arguing for Intelligent Design – that neo-Darwinian view of evolution, which stresses random mutation and natural selection – cannot fully explain evolution, and that certain aspects appear consciously designed.
Intelligent Design is dismissed as a form of Creationism by the vast majority of modern scientists, but nevertheless it remains true that science has its limits. Philosophers have stated that science owes its explanatory power to the fact that it asks very specific questions. Science is limited to the observable universe. It can suggest that there are other universes, but these so far exist purely as mathematical theories and not science, unless a means is found by which these theories can be empirically tested. Science also discounts the supernatural, which is the proper domain of theology as they exist beyond our universe. The theory of the multiverse, as it has been formulated, states that there may be other universes with different laws. For these to exist, there must also be a set of laws allowing them to be generated, and which govern the establish of their natural laws. Carl Sagan talks about this in his book Cosmos, which accompanied the blockbusting science series of that name. If this were the case, Sagan states, then metaphysics would refer to a real scientific process.
From here, CJ moves on to Hume’s ‘On Miracles’ which defines a miracle as an arbitrary suspension of natural law. CJ considers that a good definition, but many Christian theologians would disagree. The Greek terms for miracles in the New Testament, unlike other Greek terms for the same thing, do not imply that Christ’s and God’s miracles are arbitrary. Some theologians consider that miracles are the suspension of one set of natural laws through the supervenience of higher laws. Such arguments aside, miracles count as supernatural because, as CJ says, science studies and places emphasis on the natural laws and regularities of the universe. From there CJ goes on to discuss the difference between the paranormal and supernatural. Paranormal creatures, if they are physical entities in this universe, can nevertheless be studied and incorporated into science. Supernatural entities obey no laws, and so are outside the realm of science. This is close to Richard Dawkins’ idea of the ‘perinormal’. Perinormal entities, according to the evolutionary biologist and broadcaster, are entities that are currently outside science, but if they exist, are nevertheless natural entities and phenomena which science could incorporate if one was caught and subjected to proper studies.
CJ then talks about the simulation theory of Nick Bostrom, and its similarity to classical theism. Bostrom believed that as computational power grew, it would be possible to produce a computer simulation of the world that would be indistinguishable from the reality. CJ, following the arguments of, I believe, Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, states that, as far as the entities in such a simulation are concerned, the programmer is God in that he is almighty, omniscient and outside of time and space. The laws of nature become the code governing this reality. Salvation becomes being saved, as when a gamer saves the game he has been playing. If we are in a simulation, we can hope for salvation and an afterlife if we are saved when we die and transferred to another simulation. He also wonders if we are supernatural beings incarnate in the world our senses observe. Both this possibility and that we are in a simulation are both possible. A few years ago something like the simulation hypothesis was explored in one of Stanislaw Lem’s short stories. This was about a computer scientist who set up just such a simulated world populated by intelligent beings, whose metaphysical conversations about the nature of their reality and whether there is a creator the scientist observes. The ending of one of Gregory Benford’s Galactic Centre novels has its hero apparently saved on computer in such a simulation. He is uneasy, as however comfortable and realistic his environment is, based on his memories, it is not the real world of those memories. Then there is the idea in The Matric Reloaded that what the inhabitants of this virtual reality perceive as supernatural entities, such as ghosts, are glitches in the operation of the Matrix rather than supernatural entities.
CJ goes on to state that science is based on methodological naturalism. To gain objective knowledge about the world as it is requires assuming that the laws of nature don’t change, and so rule out miracles, God and the supernatural. If the rules of the universe change, then our science as the study of the universe would also change, and we would be as unable to determine whether such a change had occurred as we would if the world had been created last Tuesday.
CJ correctly states that methodological naturalism is very often confused with ontological naturalism, atheism, as working assumptions are confused with ultimate truth. This is also true. But he states that Higgypop is correct to say that there are other ways of investigating the universe.
CJ concludes
‘However we are ASSAP- the clue is in the name and we will explore the Paranormal scientifically, and we will amass data and evidence. In fact we can combine this with the experiential approach he calls for, by Qualitative research of the type ghost researchers have worked on since 1888 on the reports of experiences. That is probably more scientific than anything we see on our screens as “ghosthunting”.’
Looking through CJ’s essay, it’s clearly that some highly speculative scientific theories are indeed taking on some of the aspects of religion. Multiverse theory is a case in point. If there are other universes, governed by other laws, they are, by definition, supernatural as they are outside this universe and its set of laws. The British Fantasy author, Michael Moorcock, has tackled this problem in his novels. His heroes – Corum, Erekose, Jerry Cornelius and most famously, Elric of Melnibone, are all incarnations of a central character, the Eternal Champion, who takes various incarnations across the multiverse to fight evil in the constant war between Chaos and Order. In this multiverse, the various magical items and weapons wielded by the hero have powers only in the universe in those particular stories. They are both supernatural and natural in the sense that they are the products of natural, scientific laws.
The ASSAP approach similarly assumes that, even if some entities are supernatural, they nevertheless have aspects that make them amenable to scientific study, as CJ has shown in his suggestions for testing the telepathic theory of ghosts. And he is definitely correct in that, when combined with the other approaches suggested by Higgypop, the result is going to be more scientific and academically rigorous than the type of ghosthunting now haunting our TV and computer screens.
For further information, see: https://jerome23.wordpress.com/2024/05/20/ghosts-working-notes-part-7-a-response-to-higgypop-on-science-and-ghost-hunting/
Higgypop’s post is at: https://www.higgypop.com/news/time-to-stop-seeking-scientific-proof/
Tags: Aleister Crowley, Alex Saunders, ASSAP, Baruch Spinoza, Battle of Waterloo, Borley Rectory, carl sagan, Census of Hallucinations, Christianity, christopher hitchens, CJ, Computers, Corum, Cosmos, Creationism, Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin Wars, Dave Newton, David Hume, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Elliot O'Donnell, Elric, Empiricism, Erekose, Fantasy, Francis Bacon, Gerald Gardner, Gergory Benford, Ghosthunting, Ghosts, Gurney, Harry Price, Higgypop, Hinuism, Humanism, In God We Doubt, Intelligent Design, Jerry Cornelius, John Humphries, John Spencer, Karl Popper, Kim Sterelny, logical positivism, Magonia, Metaphysics, Michael Moorock, Miracles, Multiverse, Myers, Natural Selection, Neo-Darwinism, New Atheists, New Religious Movements, Nick Bostrom, Paranormal, Psychical Research, rationalism, Religion, Rene Descartes, richard dawkins, Ritual Magic, sam harris, Science Fiction, Simulation Theory, Society for Psychical Research, Spiritualism, Stephen Jay Gould, The Coming Race, The God Delusion, The Last Days of Pompeii, The Matrix Reloaded, Thomas Hobbes, UFOs, Vienna Circle, Wicca
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