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Should skepticism about the paranormal be extended to all supernatural beliefs? The examples of parapsychology and "intelligent design" creationism show that skeptical critiques often undermine religious claims of much broader significance.
Skeptics of paranormal claims usually try to debunk weird stories. If we come upon a poltergeist tale, we try and see if it fits the pattern of a teenager fooling the surrounding adults. Casting a doubting eye over séances, we might get involved with claims about life after death, or we might take on fundamentalism when defending biology against creationists. But we are reluctant to set forth a larger view of the world, to mess with religion in any deeper way. Plenty of fringe-science matters — Bigfoot, alien spaceships, homeopathy — have little to do with whether any supernatural reality exists.
Nevertheless, questions about religion regularly arise in skeptical circles. Skeptical Inquirer issues about science and religion are very popular. After all, why should we deny that spirits haunt houses, but stop when it comes to gods and demons? What makes God, the ghost in the universe, immune to skeptical criticism?
Now, there are plenty of practical reasons a skeptical organization might have to keep away from explicitly religious debates (Kurtz 1999). There might even be an important intellectual difference between skepticism about ghosts and the gods. Plenty of skeptics and scientists argue that religion is not about empirically testable realities, perhaps because, if understood properly, religion is only concerned with issues of morality and meaning (Gould 1999). Paranormal skepticism, in turn, should be limited to testable claims.
Trying to nail down a satisfactory definition of either science and religion and then drawing a clear boundary to separate them is, however, a dubious task. Finding a sharp philosophical distinction between science and non-science does not seem feasible, however much skeptics like to invoke falsificationist ideas. And religion, for its part, is too broad an enterprise to confine to moral philosophy. Even the most liberal of religions present us with an anthropomorphic view of the world, where deep down, the nature of reality is itself mind-like or in some way answers to deep human needs (Guthrie 1993). Our sciences have much to say about such claims (Edis 2002), and criticism of the paranormal also plays a role.
Paranormal beliefs do not arise arbitrarily; they are almost always similar to supernatural ideas found in religions worldwide. We do not see any bizarre belief about, say, our internal organs rearranging themselves while we sleep (Boyer 2001). But even many fringe beliefs which do not appear supernatural, like that in alien visitors, quickly develop religious overtones; tales of alien abductions in the night blend into classic tales of visitations from higher spiritual realms (Lewis 1995). So criticism of paranormal and fringe-science claims invariably engages deeply religious themes. Even when dissatisfaction with mainstream science is a driving force behind a fringe belief, the reason for this resentment is usually that modern science has demystified the world, driving away the supernatural.
This is not to say that critiques of the paranormal are automatically also criticisms of religion. Even if God is the biggest paranormal claim of all, just because it is such a grandiose claim, an adequate critique has to touch on all aspects of our knowledge about the world — it cannot be just another debunking enterprise. However, it is also true that skepticism is more than an enterprise of declaring "insufficient evidence" for extraordinary claims. We make such judgments against a background of "normal" knowledge, of the strange but naturalistic world portrayed by modern science. Skepticism involves positive claims about the nature of our world, and it is but a small stretch from these to a comprehensive naturalism with no ghosts, big or small.
Let us see how this applies, in the context of two of the major paranormal and fringe-science claims of our day: parapsychology and "intelligent design" creationism.
From its beginnings in the 19th century, psychical research has been a quasi-scientific quest for the soul, a defense against encroaching materialism (Oppenheim 1985). Our religions usually picture a hierarchical, top-down world where a non-material mind acts from above and gives shape to mere matter. So the notion of a soul or some sort of consciousness beyond the brain which can act on matter has always been prominent in the parapsychological imagination.
Parapsychology can also be understood in more neutral terms, as an investigation of consciousness-related anomalies. However, parapsychologists are very selective about the "anomalies" they care about. Consciousness has plenty of mysteries, enough to keep cognitive and brain scientists busy for many centuries yet. But parapsychologists do not try and explain vision or attention or awareness; they chase after bent spoons and precognitive dreams. Psychic phenomena are interesting precisely because, if real, they would force us to refer to spiritual realities in explaining our world.
The connection between psi and religion becomes clearer in some contemporary theology. Liberal religions typically avoid conflict with science; indeed, in political battles over evolution in education, liberal clergy are the best allies of scientists. However, it is not unusual to find liberal theologians who are sympathetic to parapsychology, hoping it can provide a way to transcend a narrowly naturalistic view of the world (Stoeber & Meynell 1996, Griffin 1997). Psychic phenomena allows religious philosophers to talk of minds independent of brains, of "agent causation" from above, of an anthropomorphic world in which meaning is the fundamental reality.
Skeptic or true believer — most of us these days claim to base our views of psi on the evidence rather than on its religious implications. Gary Schwartz, for example, has recently claimed to experimentally demonstrate that some mediums have communicated with the dead (Schwartz 2002). Critics have responded, pointing out that Schwartz’s tests allowed cheating easily (Randi 2001), and that his work does not fit the requirements of good experimental methodology (Hyman 2003).
In fact, skeptical critiques most often follow these lines. If the evidence in question is the spectacular performances of a superpsychic, a magician such as James Randi can be very effective in detecting cheating and in producing similar effects through conjuring techniques. If, on the other hand, the evidence consists of laboratory studies presenting small but statistically highly significant deviations from chance expectations, an experimental psychologist such as Ray Hyman can often produce a detailed technical and methodological critique to explain why these results cannot be taken at face value.
In either case, critics point out how reports of psychic phenomena do not stand out from among the ordinary mistakes and hard-to-explain happenings which we expect to see in a unmagical but complicated world. When a conjuror duplicates a spectacular performance by a psychic, we do not necessarily find out exactly how the psychic performed his feat, but we see that it is very likely to be a trick. Similarly, the statistical miracles of laboratory parapsychologists do not stand out. While they report very high statistical significances, identifying almost certain deviations from chance expectations, their effect size is typically very small. As even physical scientists who have the luxury of studying very simple systems know very well, doing experiments is dirty work. We can never control everything, or anticipate all possible ways of going wrong. So marginal effect sizes are never impressive (Edis 2002).
This helps us understand the importance of naturalistic "normal" background expectations when debating the evidence for psi. A psychic miracle is negatively defined — it is what violates these expectations. However, in a complex world, this background is considerably fuzzier than the precise 50% we might compute as the chance expectation for a coin flip. So a psychic guessing right 80% of the time under reasonably controlled conditions is much more likely to be demonstrating a true miracle than one who manages only 51%. And a skeptic examining a report of 51% success — better than chance! — need not find the precise flaw in the experimental design, or figure out how exactly trickery may be taking place. It is enough to note that the result does not stand out against the kind of deviations from 50% we can get in ordinary circumstances.
Much the same is true when we consider strange experiences which we are regularly tempted to say are paranormal events. Near-death experiences, spirit possession, past-life memories and many other peculiar phenomena suggest a disembodied spirit as an obvious explanation. But as we learn more about mainstream psychology, about our brains, such phenomena no longer stand out in a naturalistic world. Skeptics need not just declare "unproven" when confronting claims that such experiences are supernatural. We do not know everything we would like about NDEs or about how hypnotherapy helps construct false memories. But we know enough to be confident that there is nothing magical about them; they are fascinating phenomena which can teach us a lot about our brains rather than about a spirit realm.
Indeed, a very good reason to remain skeptical of psi, over and above the success of any debunking efforts, is what we have learned about our brains and our very much embodied minds (Beyerstein 2001). If psychical research is a quest for the soul, then there is less and less for a soul beyond the brain to do these days. And since parapsychology is the most prominent research program seeking evidence of a spirit realm, the failure of parapsychology further strengthens the case that our minds — awareness, intelligence, emotions, the works — are products of physical brains and no more.
In that case, paranormal skepticism gives us powerful reasons to doubt the existence of any supernatural reality. Religious views of our world are top-down, where mind is the creative force giving shape to matter. Our gods and demons are persons; our religions imagine that down deep, reality is fundamentally personal. If we cannot find magic even in our minds, it becomes hard to avoid the conclusion that we live in a bottom-up, naturalistic world.
Another major dispute at the fringes of science also involves themes of soul and spirit. "Intelligent design," a new version of creationism which avoids blatantly sectarian claims like a young earth, attacks Darwinian evolution by claiming only a designing intelligence could be responsible for the complex information embodied by living organisms (Behe 1996, Dembski 1999).
The endless war between creation and evolution may appear to be a clear example of a conflict between science and religion. However, it also exemplifies harmony between science and liberal religion. Skeptics defending mainstream biology depend on the support of liberal clergy. Religions which are flexible in interpretation, and are more focused on moral concerns than on strict doctrines, get along with science much better than their fundamentalist cousins.
Intelligent design advocates, however, try to appeal to a broader base than just fundamentalists. They are preoccupied with biology only because Darwinian evolution is central to the task of explaining complexity and creativity by purely natural means. The core ideas of the intelligent design movement are common to many religious traditions; these are the grand themes of complexity being ultimately due to design, intelligence as a separate principle beyond chance and necessity, and matter being given shape from above by minds not reducible to mere mechanisms (Dembski & Kushiner 2001). Like parapsychology, intelligent design is a defense of the soul; it just emphasizes intelligence rather than a mystical consciousness. It stands against research in artificial intelligence and the physics of complexity as much as it denounces Darwinian evolution.
From an intelligent design perspective, the problem with evolution is not so much with the idea that humans and cockroaches share a common ancestor as with the notion that evolution is driven by nothing but mindless mechanisms (Behe 1996, Dembski 2002). They argue that Darwinian variation-and-selection cannot be truly creative, that complex information comes from intelligence alone.
Old-fashioned creationists agree, naturally. But even liberal religious thinkers who vigorously affirm the common descent of organisms often engage in vague speculations about information being infused into our world by a divine intelligence (Polkinghorne 1998, Haught 2000). Intelligent design proponents differ only in being much more concrete — they say they have scientific evidence or even mathematical proof of their claims.
Now, we can find much to make us suspect intelligent design is not a legitimate scientific enterprise. The quality of intelligent design "evidence" is barely a cut above old-fashioned creationism, and it has lead to no real research accomplishments — only plenty of popular and political posturing. Even so, it is not enough for skeptics to just rule intelligent design out of bounds. The best case against creationism has never come from consulting philosophical checklists laying down the properties of a "pseudoscience" but rather from seeing how wonderfully evolution succeeds in explaining life (Edis 1998). And with intelligent design, we need to address the very legitimate question of how we can create information through chance and necessity.
Fortunately, we have a good answer. We know how Darwinian mechanisms can create new information. Moreover, Darwinian thinking is no longer confined to biology. Most importantly, cognitive science and artificial intelligence research today recognizes Darwinian mechanisms as vital components of our own intelligence. So a skeptic criticizing intelligent design creationism can point out, not just that the history of life does not require intervention by a supernatural designer, but that intelligence itself is fully part of the natural world, not a separate principle (Edis 2001, 2002).
Doing so, however, means confronting religious perceptions of our world — perceptions shared by many more liberal thinkers as well as the religiously conservative. It means saying we are not here by design, that intelligence is natural, that even creation stories featuring a remote God acting indirectly are likely false and not just unscientific. After all, any notion of divine creativity, including those where God does not crudely intervene in the world, relies on some degree of analogy to how our own intelligent designs come about. If intelligence itself can be reduced to chance and necessity, emerging in a bottom-up fashion, how can such an analogy even get started?
There is no single theme uniting the beliefs inhabiting the borderlands of science. Tarot readings and Loch Ness monsters do not have a lot in common, aside from being rejected by the scientific mainstream. Nevertheless, it is striking how often fringe beliefs take on a religious coloring, trying to affirm a sense of magic in the world. Denying the paranormal means rejecting the miracle stories generated by the many religious movements surrounding us, from the bleeding statues of conservative Catholics to the psychic healings of New Agers.
So critiques of paranormal and fringe science have a part in a wider debate about whether there is any spiritual reality at all. It is not the only strand in this debate; traditional philosophical arguments over the gods usually spend little ink on miracles, preferring armchair expeditions into metaphysical never-never-lands. However, especially for those of us who find such metaphysical disputes sterile, questions about the paranormal have a very important part to play in the debate. Enterprises like parapsychology and intelligent design express some deep intuitions about how spiritual realities should touch our lives. Their failure is significant.
None of this means that skeptics of the paranormal must get involved with the more political and ideological aspects of religion. Neither does it mean that the mythical "consistent skeptic" must necessarily deny the gods as well as ghosts. After all, even an important part of the debate over religion is only a part. It does, however, mean that paranormal skepticism weighs in on the side of a scientific naturalism which exorcizes all the ghosts from our world.
Taner Edis is assistant professor of physics at Truman State University, and author of The Ghost in the Universe: God in Light of Modern Science (Prometheus 2002).
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| Last modified: 25-Apr-2003 |