This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 4, Issue 2, from 1990.
TH Huxley once said that in every branch of science he had explored, at some stage or other he came across a barrier labelled: ‘No thoroughfare. Moses.’ In Huxley’s day, the parsonry saw science as a camp full of subversives, who needed to be constantly watched. A wall was put up around it – not to keep people from getting in, but to make sure that no one got out and wandered into forbidden areas. The paths that led into areas unconnected with physics and chemistry were blocked by Moses barriers.
I wonder how surprised Huxley would have been to learn that in the 20th century, Moses barriers had moved inside the camp wall, and were trying to rope off sizeable areas within science itself. The barrier-guards no longer find it prudent to openly ally themselves with gods or religious sects. These days, their badge of office bears one of the most ominous of four-letter words: PARA. Their areas of expertise are said to be para-physics, parapsychology, the paranormal.
So far as one can tell, the prefix para- seems to mean ‘sort of’. They insist that their areas of study are scientific, but they will point out to inquirers that the PARA badge carries a special dispensation: their work begs to be excused from the rigors of objective testing. We are talking about the para-thinkers.
You know you’ve stumbled into a Moses barrier when a practitioner of alternative medicine tells you that a control group is not an ‘appropriate’ way of checking out their particular claim. (‘No thoroughfare’.) You can still hear claims that there are areas where science simply cannot go. As it was once expressed by Sir Oliver Lodge: ‘To explain the psychical in terms of physics and chemistry is impossible’. It is also impossible to explain it in terms of plumbing, though why this should be held against plumbing it difficult to say.
The paras are still living in the days when scientists were expected to know their place, and that place was well away from the human mind and body. Paras of time past would tell you that liverwort cured diseases of the liver, because the leaf was liver-shaped; and that the celandine flower cured jaundice (the juice is yellow, you see). This was the doctrine of signatures. Obviously, the Almighty had set his sign upon certain objects, and given us a heavy hint as to which was which by providing the object with a similar shape or colour to the ailment.
Homeopathists may not speak quite so often of the Almighty these days, but the Law of Similars is still alive and well under their tender care. The most effective medicine known to the older theology was holy water – a liquid whose purity was such that it was thought to be as highly diluted as any homeopathic draught. Even so, some ritual gestures were considered necessary to clinch matters. In those times, some reverential hand-waving did the trick. Today the agitation is performed with the container actually in the hand until succussion is complete.
In the mid-19th century, some young women in the French village of Morzine claimed to be possessed by the devil; speaking in tongues, and reading the secret thoughts of people around them. A certain Dr Tissot arrived from the medical faculty at Dijon, and invited the women to dine with him. Unknown to them, he added large amounts of holy water to their food and wine. The women went right on being possessed, and some of them went into convulsions for his benefit. When Tissot published the results of his simple test with control group, the clerics told him that this only showed how cunning the devil was, by hiding the effects of the sudden arrival of the holy liquid. As the result of the test was not to their liking, they dismissed it. In this as in many other matters, the clerics’ role has now been taken over by the paras.
Modern faith healing of course is no more than the divine touch, with the religious trademark still showing under the new label. Henry the Eighth and Queen Elizabeth the First were dab hands at this sort of thing. Charles the Second (described by Andrew D White as ‘the most thoroughly cynical debauchee who ever sat on the English throne before the advent of George the Fourth’) laid his healing hands on almost a hundred-thousand folk. In no other reign were so many people touched for scrofula (‘the king’s evil’), and in no other reign were so many cures vouched for.
But the bills of mortality offer a sad reflection on the para-thinking of the time, because in no other reign did so many people die of the disease. Not many members of royalty gave a patient the blessing that William the Third is said to have offered: ‘God give you better health and more sense’. Nevertheless, at the end of the Black Death, a huge proportion of the property of every European country was in the hands of the Church. In fact the whole evolution of modern history may have been largely affected by this transfer of wealth to the para-thinkers of the 14th century.
It explains the remark of the ecclesiastic who said, ‘Pestilences are the harvests of the ministers of God’. People just insisted on pouring money into the coffers of the agencies that made the loudest claims of the paranormal. Does this have a familiar ring? No one who wishes to be taken seriously uses the term miracles any more. Out of sight perhaps, but not out of mind. The trick is to switch in a para-label, and hope that no one will notice the difference. Because in the field of the paranormal, scientific laws are still claimed to fail in association with particular people.
The parallels with religion are too many and too various to be entirely coincidental. Often, the only changes are the labels. The evil eye is no longer with us, but hostile vibes are still available to account for demonstrations that don’t work. One label that has survived the crossover is the term ‘believer’. Paranormalists and the religious both refer to themselves in this way. But the atheist’s label has been exchanged for skeptic. An agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions. He has never had a satisfactory answer to the question: ‘What are you agnostical about?’ In matters paranormal, his place has been taken by the sympathiser with the permanently ‘open mind’. To the question ‘What would disprove your belief?’ both the 19th century divine and the modern paranormalist have the same response: silence.
I sometimes think that the paras would like to be able to speak of ‘converting’ people. They would certainly not seem out of place knocking on doors in the wake of Jehovah’s Witnesses. But no. They have learned the trick of science-talk. (I have a fantasy of a paranormalist ringing my doorbell and asking, ‘Don’t you think it’s time for a paradigm shift?’) The religious-minded operate in two worlds, with one set of responses for ritual occasions, and a different set for dealing with the real world. In religious contexts, they pray to a listening divinity, but when real things need to be achieved, they get on with the job like the rest of us, just as if the gods had all broken their hearing aids. Even the most religious-minded architect does not include in his contracts a clause saying that owing to the possibility of divine intervention, he cannot be held responsible for the finished work. In like manner, the paranormalist forgets his faith as soon as something practical needs to be done.
You will have noticed that the telepathist has only one surefire way of communicating at a distance: he uses the telephone. And out here in the real world, clairvoyants achieve some of their greatest successes in keeping their names off the lists of lottery-winners. The paranormal apes religion even in the matter of duplicating its failures. Religion is not an independent source of knowledge: by definition, no system of dogma can ever light upon new information of any kind.
The paranormal is sometimes characterised as producing genuine information, even to the extent of being usable against an enemy in wartime. Dr SG Soal once asked his star subject Basil Shackleton to mark the card-guesses that he felt especially confident about. The upshot was that, in spite of Shackleton’s high scores, he hadn’t the faintest idea when he was guessing right or wrong. If Shackleton had been responsible for directing missiles at radar targets that he identified as ‘friendly’ or ‘hostile’, his decisions would have been catastrophic – about as useful as having a group of clergymen praying to the Almighty for information on the enemy’s gyroscopic systems.
Religion has laboured for centuries under the delusion that the mind is a thing, and that the soul is one of its aliases. Not to be outdone, the para has taken over the notion, and claims to have put the mind to work, even sending it over long distances to contact other minds. It sometimes seems as if the para still sees the mind as vaguely hanging around the brain like a medieval halo. It is as though, when you stopped your car, you expected to see the aura of its speed hovering over the hood (otherwise, where did the speed go?). The spiritualist takes the notion even more literally and claims to be in touch with with the bodiless mind (But why only the mind? Where did the indigestion go?).
Outside of church communities of course the soul has long been booted out the front door. But it has re-entered by the window, in a teeshirt that bears the word SPIRIT. In fact investigation of the spirit’s survival after death was the motive for establishing JB Rhine’s laboratory at Duke University. The Society for Psychical Research was set up to demonstrate the survival of the soul empirically. Its first president, the Cambridge philosopher Henry Sidgwick, claimed that there was plenty of evidence ‘to establish the independence of soul and spirit’. Indeed, Frederick Myers said in his presidential address that the very aim of the Society was to supply a ‘preamble to all religions’. And he claimed, ‘Thus we demonstrate that a spiritual world exists’.
In more recent times, parapsychologist Charles Tart has gone on record as saying that parapsychology fits in with ‘spiritual views of the universe’. Religion has long snatched at any morsel of evidence that seemed to be in its favor, and poopoohed any data that refutes. It is no longer alone. When Margaret Fox produced unaccountable thumps, this was hailed as sure proof of the existence of a spirit world. But when she pointed out (and indeed demonstrated) that her big toe was the true fountainhead of spiritualism, her evidence was dismissed out of hand.
In short, the paranormal has taken over from religion the claim that its subject matter is non physical – on the basis of no evidence whatever. The result (and the intention?) is simply to remove it beyond all hope of experimental investigation. It might well have been a parapsychologist who said that if there are phenomena ‘which cannot be made to fit into the framework of Naturalism, Naturalism as a philosophy is overthrown’. In fact they are the words of Dean Inge, the Christian mystic who was dean of St Paul’s Cathedral until 1934. And he was wrong. The words need to be changed to read: ‘If any phenomenon contradicts Naturalism, then Naturalism fails.’
If the paras ever wish to be taken seriously, they are going to have to cut free of the religious habit of beginning their inquiries from an assumption of dogma. Every serious investigation begins with ‘I don’t know’. Bertrand Russell made the point long ago: ‘The method of ‘postulating’ what we want has many advantages; they are the same as the advantages of theft over honest toil’.
