A Whole New Level of Weirdness: Book Review of “Live Pterosaurs In America” (3rd Edition)

So it all started with a rather romantic notion. I have often joked that I will give up spook investigation and take up Mermaid Investigations; let’s face it, the field is less crowded. And then it occurred to me – were there not in 19th century America reports of real live flying Pterodactyls over Texas, originating as journalistic yarns and in the infamous lying contests? I vaguely recall having a book as a child in which there was a picture, daguerreotype style, of some cowboys  holding a shot pterodactyl by a barn. Actually I soon found out, chatting about with friends on Facebook, that I may have be suffering from a False Memory – lots of other people remember the same picture, or something similar, but no one has ever been able to find it again. It seems the photo is as mysterious as Live Pterosaurs. In fact a photo that seems to be the one mentioned is doing the rounds — but it is nothing like my recollection. Then you can easily find a shot that was staged for a recent documentary (scroll down the page to see it though worth enjoying whole article) — again clearly not the mystery photo. After much reflection I have come to the conclusion the book I read in the 1970′s probably referenced the alleged photo, and I came to believe I had seen the actual photo in the book – I think that entirely possible. Still it is all rather interesting, if only in demonstrating just how questionable memory can be.

from Wikimedia: South Bank London Exhibit for 350th Anniversary Royal Society

Anyway, do these things really still fly? I want to believe in big flying dinosaurs roaming the skies, but experience and common sense argue against it. So far I have never been chased by one as I wander through town. Still, I figured I knew a bit about them — as a child I was rather obsessed with dinosaurs, as many young boys are, and read everything I could find on them, and I thought I knew about Pterodactyls, Pteradnodons  and a few others like the Rhamphorhyncus. So I recalled they were all Pterosaurs, and looked up the Order. First surprise is technically they were not dinosaurs at all (and neither were plesiosaurs and various other marine reptiles).  Secondly there were incredibly diverse, and many of them looked nothing like the beasties I think of when I hear the word “Pterosaur”.  And thirdly, they are very definitely extinct, dying out 65.5 million years ago, but already in decline by then. So sayeth the Wikipedia article – I did not research any of this throughly.

Interesting, but rather lacking emotional satisfaction. I wanted to read about people who had been chased by pterodactyls! So I started to Google for any eye witness testimony, uncovered a funny but utterly unconvincing YouTube video, and then suddenly found that there actually was a “Living Pterosaur” research community, a fringe even within cryptozoology. Even better, there were several books. Most of the research appears to be on “Ropens”, allegedly living Pterosaurs in Papua New Guinea. Now I’m afraid I have not read anything on that, and can’t really comment, for as I browsing I spotted a book “Live Pterosaurs in America” by Jonathan David Whitcomb, a nonfiction analysis of actual sightings in the USA.  This I had to own, so I immediately ordered it from Amazon, and a few days later it was mine! And you know what — I’m glad I bought it, and have enjoyed reading it.

The book contains 35 contemporary eye witness accounts from the USA of what appear to be live pterosaur sightings, and a great deal of analysis. Undeterred by the intrinsic seeming absurdity of believing that Pterosaurs can remain undetected in the USA (which as Whitcomb points out is a fallacious argument: they have not remained undetected at all, or he would not have eyewitness testimony — “largely undetected” perhaps?) the author has actually taken seriously and tracked down people who claim to have seen these things, talking to them on the phone and by email. He is not alone – as well as the various expeditions to PNG to look for the alleged pterosaurs there, there appears to be a small but very active research community looking for live pterosaurs  in the USA. I get the impression form the book it is rather competitive, and political, and perhaps as backstabbing as any other part of cryptozoology seems to be — but then again maybe not. You see Whitcomb, and the majority of the researchers are Creationists, and not shy about proclaiming the fact.

So here I am, a very convinced “Evolutionist” who has written a great deal on Darwin, Chambers, Russel Wallace etc reading a  book on Live Pterosaur sightings by an out loud and proud Creationist.  And you know what? It really makes no difference to the case. So Whitcomb believes in living pterosaurs? The sceptics who attack his research are equally convinced they are extinct. It’s an issue it is rather hard to maintain a strict impartiality on. To be honest, I have no problem with people holding strong beliefs on any issue, so long as they are aware of them and their potential biases, and so long as they declare them openly. I worked out Whitcomb was a Creationist by a third of the way through his book, but the last couple of chapters make it totally explicit. I was rather amused that he agrees with Dawkins that it is impossible to hold a considered Theistic Evolution viewpoint, and I was too tired to really get what he thinks of  I.D – it is a good thing I gather, but not Creationism, as far as he is concerned — but I am convinced that the Creationist beliefs of the living pterosaur folks are going to stop a lot of people in the UK at least from even bothering to look at their stuff, which is a shame. You see I think you might have to be a Creationist to actually stick your neck out and look for these wonderful flying beasties, and if they do exist it would be no surprise if only the “Creation Scientists” went looking for them. Creationism actually does not play much of a role in the theories in the book, and I’m still very vague about what exactly a living Pterosaur would prove from a Y.E.C perspective, but I am happy to put away any prejudices and read the book on the strength of the evidence and argument provided, and lay aside my philosophical and scientific differences with these guys. If they can convince me of living pterosaurs, I guess they might convince me of other stuff Let’s face it, convincing me pterodactyls are swooping over California as I type is going to take a lot.

The book. Click on the link for the website.

And ultimately, I am afraid I still doubt it is true. However, I am more open to Pterosaurs in other parts of the world than I was before, and I am much more open to the possibility of live Pterosaurs. I actually find it hard to type those those three words together “possibility” + “live” + “pterosaurs”, so strong is my ingrained prejudice against the case. After all, during my dinosaur phase (aged 5-10 roughly) the one thing I knew absolutely was that they were all extinct. (and watching the USAF fly overhead,  and listening to the Cold War sabre rattling, I gloomily pondered as a very young child how soon humanity might join them; vague fears that still manifest sometimes today )

Whitcomb’s eyewitnesses don’t really convince me greatly, though they are at the heart of his case. 35 is really not very many, and given there are radio controlled Pterosaur models out there, some of the sightings do seem to be questionable. The testimony given is rather bare, culled from emails, but it could be that Whitcomb’s writing style (generally readable, occasionally jars, perhaps a cultural thing) without all the usual journalistic fluff  like “Ada was just putting the kettle on as sunshine played across the blinds…” — none of that in Whitcombe’s reports, just his questions asked and the answers rendered verbatim — doe snot really sell the witnesses. He is definitely sceptical of the testimony he receives, and shows critical thinking about testimony issues, and I must say is an intelligent bloke by the sound of his book.

Nope, my problem is that thousands of Americans have reported being abducted by Flying Saucers. Dozens of people in the UK in the last decade have reported seeing leprechauns or fairies. Bigfoot is still big in the USA; and mystery black cats, usually pumas, roam across the British countryside.  As to ghost sightings, well they are so common as to pass without remark.  Now I’m not a priori dismissing any of these ideas, and I have certainly spent a good part of my life working on the ghosts issue. My point is that people seem to have a huge range of high strangeness encounters with very odd entities. I would be rather more surprised if no one at all was seeing Pterosaurs in the USA. I do wonder if any have been reported in the last century or this in the UK?  The fact people experience something,and it seems very real to them, does not necessarily tell us anything about its ontological status. While Whitcomb addresses hallucinations as an explanation for experiences and dismisses it, well I’m not so sure as I know hallucinations can be surprisingly common in the sane from the medical literature, and ultimately I agree with Whitcomb it does not explain collective cases (ones with multiple witnesses) well.  Note I’m not actually proposing any mechanism for the weird Fortean encounters – people have proposed all kinds of explanations from ultraterrestrials to demons to irruptions of the unconscious in to normal life (I guess all three might be the same thing!?) — I’m just noting that it seems hard to accept the evidence for living pterosaurs as more compelling than say the evidence for alien abduction or phantom black dogs. In terms of quantity, and richness of the testimony offered, I must say it seems rather less, by an order of magnitudes in the first case and a great deal compared with Black Shuck.   Still, if one of Whitcomb’s witnesses was right about what they saw, and it was a physical real living beastie, well his case wins. I really want it to be true, because — well living Pterodactyls, how cool?

So if I am not that impressed by the individual witness reports, why do I think Whitcomb’s book is worthwhile and interesting? Because while the individual cases are perhaps weak, he draws a good statistical case that something is going on from his tiny sample. Put simply, the physical traits of the pterosaurs described by the witnesses do not seem to reflect the  Hollywood stereotype of the pterodactyl we all know. There are different types of creature which emerge from the data, and the majority have attributes which are surprising. I won’t discuss what these are here, because it makes faking easier, but you can find out by buying  his book. Unfortunately the  descriptions could be just down to a misremembered mismatch of picture of pterosaurs in books, and yet if you accept his hypothesis that not one but two and perhaps several species of Pterosaurs have survived in the USA, well then I guess it’s a good argument. However witnesses vary greatly in physical descriptions – wing spans he cites in the stats section range from 2 to 30 feet, with a bizarrely even distribution. I say bizarre because I would have thought hoaxes and hallucinations would have been clustered more in the larger range, and ditto if common sources like movies or dinosaur documentaries informed the sightings. The even distribution may well be down to the actual problems of identifying the wing span of a bird in flight – try it, I’m rubbish at judging height, and you have little to compare it with. Misidentification of birds or bats is not ruled out by the data, and some of the sightings were close and on the ground, but still I am rather surprised at the distribution of estimated wing spans.  Something that Whitcomb does not address is the range of colours seen – browns, tans, greys and black predominate, but one brightly coloured alleged pterosaur stood out as fairly convincing for exactly this reason. As no one knows what colour they were, the lack of agreement among witnesses is worrying if these are real creatures.

Another interesting feature is that witnesses reported they either definitely did not have feathers or probably did not have feathers. This may be down to Whitcomb’s selection criteria; he states he does not investigate reports of feathered sightings, leaving that to bird watchers. Now recently I have read in the media reports of new fossil pterosaurs with feathers, but tracking down the reports has shown these are proto-feathers, the bristles already known to be a feature of pterosaurs, just more evolved. It may provide some evidence for the currently heretical idea that birds may have evolved from pterosaurs not dinosaurs, or it may be an interesting case of parallel evolution (or Creation, if you are a Live Pterosaurs investigator )  but it is not a fatal objection – pterosaurs were not feathered, though with 65 million years to evolve they might not look much like the fossils we have (Whitcomb interestingly holds an Old Earth, Young Life model of Creationism, not YEC).  He makes the rather good point that a lot of witnesses actually were not sure if the thing had feathers or not, but were inclined to say not.  I think that certainly does reduce the likelihood of hoaxing – a hoaxer’s story or a hallucination would surely definitely not have feathers, but it does not rule out genuine misidentification of big birds.

I still have not really made much of a case for why I found the book engaging, but the answer is that Whitcomb surprised me. A number of the sightings suggest bioluminescence. I really did not expect that. Glow in the dark pterosaurs in the USA? It just gets weirder. I was not particularly convinced by the chapter linking pterosaurs to the Marfa Lights, but they hypothesis linking bioluminescence to bat hunting activities made sense I guess, and this very unexpected aspect of the sightings really did make me think he could be on to something. I found this feature by far the most intriguing: if I was going to invent a pterosaur story it would never occur to me to say the creature glowed, flickered or shone in the dark! It is apparently a feature of the PNG reports, so I guess people who have read Whitcomb’s book on that may add such a detail, but it really is rather odd.

I think by this time if you have read this far you will want to see an actual witness report.  here are a couple of extracts from Whitcomb’s blog, the first from Virginia, the second from Georgia.   They give you a pretty good feel for Whitcomb’s  terse style, and his rather short reports on what was seen. I am delighted howver to see he has set up a game camera in a  Southern California site, and is getting lots of shots – maybe one will show the elusive pterosaur seen by the witnesses in their backyard. I certainly shall follow his Live Pterosaur blog in the future.  However again we see another niggling problem for me — if all the sightings were in say Nevada, I could buy it much easier than I can the idea these things live all over the USA but never get photographed. OK, there are rare big animals like as Whitcomb points out mountain lions that are rarely seen, but they don’t flap around in the sky! If nocturnal predators, maybe, just maybe. I would not stake my money on it, but I’m not the expert.

Nobu Tamura’s beautiful reconstruction of a pterodactyl from Wikimedia.

So in conclusion, what do I think of the book? It’s not polished, it’s not gripping at least in style (though the accounts are fascinating and Whitcomb makes some clever arguments) and it’s all way beyond my boggle threshold: I’m slightly more inclined to believe in live pterosaurs in the USA now than before I read it (which is to be fair not very surprising at all, given my ***almost*** complete disbelief before I read the book) , but I’m afraid I think the possibility is still very very remote they exist, but it certainly is worth investigating, and I must applaud all the work Whitcomb and colleagues put in. I fear many sceptics won’t even bother to go look for themselves (unless we get sightings in the UK that is not an option for me) or bother to carefully read Whitcomb’s book and look at his case.   It is definitely worth reading, and well argued in the main. I would recommend buying his book available from Amazon.co.uk here  for under £9.  I’m humble enough to admit my opinion on the matter is pretty worthless, as I have not read the literature, have not investigated a single sighting, and know almost nothing about pterosaurs living or fossil.  A sceptic of living pterosaur claims who does know his stuff is palaeontologist  Glen Kuban and has his critique of living pterosaur claims can be found here. I found him from Whitcomb’s book, and I still think you should read the book as well as Kuban’s page,  just in case you were planning some lazy debunking.

I may be a sceptic at heart, but I have no simple answers to what people are experiencing. The 35 cases Whitcomb gives may be the tip of the ice berg – he has estimated I believe 14,000 sightings in the USA, but I think that is extrapolation based on the fact most witnesses won’t come forward.  You don’t hear a lot about local newspaper reports of pterosaur sightings though, and one thing that would be really interesting is if anyone could search archives for such, and link them on a web page.  I respect the work and dedication of these chaps, and one thing I am certain of.

I still want to see a living pterosaur, because it would be a mindblowing thing to witness! I just hope they are real

cj x

A 5 million dollar question: Is Life after Death real? The Immortality Project.

Today I should be working, but about the time I’m writing this my Becky is finally submitting her PhD thesis at Coventry University, entitled something like A Century of Apparitions: The Census of Hallucinations in the 21st Century. I have read the Abstract, and got to look at a few pages last night and it looks very interesting, and annoyingly looks like it may disprove one  interesting hypothesis I had developed, at least based on one chart I saw in the content analysis section. (Becky was too tired to discuss it!)  Once she has had her viva and made corrections, I will read the whole thing, but for now congratulations to Becky on getting it all done.  Becky’s Ph.D  thesis was made possible by generous funding from the SPR, and I know she wants to rework the whole thing for publication in the JSPR or PSPR.

Why do I mention this?   Well another funding story caught my eye this morning, on the Facebook at Paranthropology,  where the excellent Nancy Zingrone commented, and then at Roy Stenman’s blog Paranormal Review.  It seems the Templeton Foundation are putting 5 million dollars in to a research programme, but not just any research programme –

Newswise — RIVERSIDE, Calif. — For millennia, humans have pondered their mortality and whether death is the end of existence or a gateway to an afterlife. Millions of Americans have reported near-death or out-of-body experiences. And adherents of the world’s major religions believe in an afterlife, from reincarnation to resurrection and immortality.

Anecdotal reports of glimpses of an afterlife abound, but there has been no comprehensive and rigorous, scientific study of global reports about near-death and other experiences, or of how belief in immortality influences human behavior. That will change with the award of a three-year, $5 million grant by the John Templeton Foundation to John Martin Fischer, distinguished professor of philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, to undertake a rigorous examination of a wide range of issues related to immortality. It is the largest grant ever awarded to a humanities professor at UC Riverside, and one of the largest given to an individual at the university.

The full story is here – do read it! Now I know humanities are suddenly fashionable, at least in the UK and we are now treated like the cool kids in uni, ending 90 years of humanities and social science types being seen as not real academics by Science, Medicine and other numerate types — a rather odd trend, but apparently a real one. I think the rampant Scientism of the 2000′s has caused a reaction; but even so, it’s rare and rather wonderful to read of an award of this scale being given to a philosophy department. I expect Richard Dawkins will be unimpressed!

Anyway, I can imagine my friends broadly agreeing on something. The atheists and materialists will say “what a waste of money — it is all bunk”. (I hope to be proved wrong though!) My fellow Christians and folk of other faiths will say “we know we survive death, why not spend the money on medicine, feeding the hungry or getting clean water for the millions living in poverty?” (or so I hope, because that was my first thought).  My scientifically orientated friends will know just how many areas a few hundred thousand dollars could help with.  However, none of these are the real reason for my unease, though I am not sure the question needs so large a sum when people are starving and dying of preventable diseases or suffering injustice or poverty in this life which we all know exists.

No, my real issue is that the plans seem seriously odd. Let’s look at the Immortality Project page. All good and worthy stuff, and great news for philosophers and  theologians. Now I sometimes wear one or the other of those hats, and I have no issue in principle with allocating resources to these areas, and while I’m surprised that spending money on translating American philosophers in to German, and one hopes vice versa, is seen as a pressing issue in survival research I am utterly amazed at one thing.

Since 1882 psychical researchers have worked constantly on exactly this issue, and the SPR have published millions of words, including all manner of top rate scientists and philosophers writings on the area. Yet I see nothing on any of this work? Let’s look again at the Press Release

Anecdotal reports of near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences and past lives are plentiful, but it is important to subject these reports to careful analysis, Fischer said. The Immortality Project will solicit research proposals from eminent scientists, philosophers and theologians whose work will be reviewed by respected leaders in their fields and published in academic and popular journals.

I nearly spat my coffee all over my keyboard. The cat is still holding his paws over his ears from my indignant yelp. The bolding above is mine, obviously, but really, how can anyone write this?

For 130 years exactly this kind of work has been going on, and being published in the peer reviewed parapsychological and psychical research journals. This has been an interdisciplinary research programme, involving doctors, neurologists, psychologists, philosophers, theologians, and many other brilliant thinkers. I believe the SPR has had 8 Nobel Prize winners as Presidents, though Tom Ruffles will doubtless be able to correct me if I am wrong. Believers, sceptics and agnostics alike have attended annual conferences, study days and monthly lectures, and published millions of words in the JSPR and PSPR, That’s just the SPR. On top of that we have the Parapsychological Association, the ASPR, and many many more groups and research institutions. With I believe 13 postgraduate research centres studying these issues in UK universities alone, it seems bizarre this has all been dismissed as anecdotal and by implication lacking careful analysis.  Now hopefully parapsychology is included under scientists mentioned: but I can think of an awful lot of established research centres from the Alister Hardy Research Centre now at the University of Wales, to the KPU at Edinburgh, to Lund University, to the SPR, ASSAP, the ASPR and Scottish SPR, through to Chris French’s APRU at Goldsmith’s, who all deserve a slice of that money. What about Atlantic University? Coventry? Bucks New University? Northampton? Middlesex? The Rhine Research Centre?

Yes I know the plan is to bring philosophers, medical men, theologians and scientists together to study the issues, but surely the Templeton Foundation must realise that the SPR and PA conferences already do just this? Yes there are other aspects mentioned, which fall under sociology and psychology of religion in the main, but those are already represented at the psychical research conferences.

I have tried for twenty years to get funding to study survival and immortality. On paper I look like a good candidate – not up to Stephen E Braude or Anthony Flew’s level, or the wonderful and sadly departed David Fontana, and Christopher Moreman is the current expert here, but hey I’m passionate, hard working and my academic background is in exactly these fields. Given half the money is going on grant awards, I should be sensible like everyone else will be, and keep my head down and hope for funding and be delighted the subject will finally be investigated with lavish funding. I’m not going to. I’m going to howl in protest that there is no mention of any of the above peoples work, or the recent large scale scientific projects on NDE, contemporary scientific research on OBE, in fact just a general suggestion, if I do not infer to much, that the subject has never been academically or scientifically investigated rigorously before. If there is a life after death you can test it empirically now: Myers, the Sidgwicks, Podmore, Gurney, William James et al will be spinning in their graves!!!

I’m going to suggest that rather than funding two new conferences, the PA and SPR conferences, or even the ASSAP conference, could have benefited. I’m going to make a noise about this, because I’m frankly offended. I need about $15,000 maximum for my PhD fees: $5 million is probably more than the SPR has spent on funding research in the area in I know not how many years, possibly since 1882. In an area starved of funding, this is indeed welcome news, but not if the research effort ignores “controversial” areas like psychical research.

Maybe I’m being too hasty. I though of writing to Professor Fischer to express my concerns, but than thought I’d post publicly, and now.  I’m tempted to create a detailed bibliography of research on human survival, NDE, OBE and other peer reviewed articles of relevance, but today I am very much pressed for time. SO I write these words, and realise that once again my outspoken nature when I perceive injustice may debar me from any of the Templeton loot. So be it: I have in the past been a big fan of the Foundation’s work, and I am absolutely delighted for  Riverside and Prof. Fischer, but this press release has done nothing but arouse my fears that psychical research and 130 years of serious academic study is to be side-lined in a project designed to re-invent the wheel.  I look forward to future statements however that will hopefully allay these suspicions, and show that those who have worked in this area for their whole academic lives will not be, once more, overlooked.

I wish everyone involved in the project the very best, and desperately hope my reservations prove unfounded.

cj x

Ghosts, God and the Trouble With Ghosthunters.

Right, a quick post today, which will cheekily incorporate in the second half a re-post of some material I posted years ago on this very topic, because let’s face it, no one is going to click on a link to read another entry. Many of you know I have great respect for the sceptic writer/researcher Hayley Stevens, especially as she constantly manages to actually get out there and do real research, and to write more than I can. I put it down to my age – “it’s never how it used to be/what happened to all that energy?” Today Hayley has written an interesting piece on a site for young atheists, skeptics and freethinkers, The Heresy Club. I had to have a nose, despite being neither young, nor as it happens an atheist.

As usual Hayley’s article is excellent, well written and informative, and deals with real issues – an issue I care deeply about, the damage that poor research ethics in amateur ghost groups can do when they are let loose in private houses or even businesses and upset or scare people badly. Now I’m not going to quote Hayley’s article in full, because I want you to go read it for yourself. Do that now. No summary I give would be fair, because she makes several points.

However I am notoriously contrarian (freethinking?) so I’m going to disagree with one fundamental thing Hayley wrote, which is at the heart of the article for me, as an Anglican and a “ghosthunter” of sorts. She writes –

Looking back now, on those early years, I can see that the whole culture surrounding ghost hunting that I became involved with was a mish-mash of religious practices and beliefs that were all geared towards convincing the people involved that their very soul was in danger from evil at all times, and that invisible enemies were around us just waiting for us to mess up so that they could attack us psychically.

Now given in the past I have suggested that ghosthunting groups do sometimes take on the attributes of a religious group, and in fact enjoyed once a great discussion on the phone with Jeff Belanger where we talked about this, I can’t disagree too strongly. However, s always I’m going to raise issues.

Number one is the fact that in the sociology of religion defining what a religion or religious group is really proves difficult. Patriotism, political parties and ideologies, even perhaps scepticism or atheism are defined by some as having the same kind of principles involved, and hence “secular religions”. I don’t mean by this the people who used to turn up to sneer on Richard Dawkin’s forum and say “Atheism is a religion: he is your guru.” I’m talking about serious academic sociologists desperately trying to pin down what defines something as a religious behaviour. I happen to have spent a lot of my life as an academic studying religion: so I’m not going to get sidetracked in to a huge discussion of this, which would bore everyone. However it raises another point, which Alex Gabriel has already highlighted in the comments much better than I ever could! We can clearly see the Roman Catholic Church, or the CofE, or various other religions denominations are “religious” because of what they do and their detailed creeds. Yet those groups inpose really strict behavourial codes and ethical requirements on their members, and while I may claim to be an Anglican, many Anglicans might say “hey CJ you are not – you don’t go to Church enough/have shabby morals/dabble in the occult” or whatever. We know what these groups stand for – they are authoritarian in a real sense, and people who don’t do the “right” things get kicked out, or told they are “bad” members of the group.

Now some religions have very little in the way of formal dogmas, theology, doctrine and imposition. Hinduism is incredibly diverse, and hard for me to comprehend as a religion cos I’m used to this rather more authoritarian structure, but there are core beliefs, and social measures to ensure consistency of practice as far as I can see. Wicca is perhaps the best example of a theological anarchy – the various “wiccan denominations” have core theological beliefs, but those outsoide of the formal coven-structures, which in the 90′s I think though do not know comprised most of the self-proclaimed adherents of the Wiccan religion could believe an incredible diversity of things about the nature of the divine, afterlife, and karma etc. This “folk wicca” ran the risk of being mistaken for the coven traditions, and just because a complete loony did something vile in the name of the religion, well it was not in any way the fault of any other adherents of that faith. As Alex Gabriel wrote

“You hear a lot from New Agers and ecumenicals, don’t you, that the coercive and oppressive elements of religion are all from the institutional structures? But this is a brilliant example of how bad beliefs themselves can be oppressive.”

Yes I agree totally, well said Alex, and I’m no fan of heavy authoritarian religion, but I am painfully aware of the dangers posed by liberty of conscience. I absolutely hold the principle of freedom of religious belief and non-belief, but as anyone who knows me know I distinguish between beliefs and practices/behaviours. If a practice is illegal, and damaging to others, your freedom of belief does not make it right in my mind. Still we could disagree on this and still we are no closer to my actual issue with Hayley’s article.

Many ghosthunting groups do adopt a sort of “folk spiritualism”, and in some cases other religious beliefs, In the USA we see a lot of very religious ghosthunters – they often term themselves demonologists, and look at things in terms of a very religious paradigm, because the base culture there is profoundly religious compared with the UK. Yet in all my ghosthunting experience nearly none of the participants have been Christian believers, or held to any of the other mainstream faiths — with the exception of David Carter-Green, and on the social and academic side David Sivier. And in fact, belief in the paranormal does not seem to map well to what most people would see as “religious belief” in any way — in fact quite the opposite.

Now years ago I wrote a piece I consider one of the most important ton this blog, called “Are Education and Atheism Enemies of Reason”. The title was half joking half serious, but it’s so directly relevant to what we are talking about here i’m going to reproduce it before moving on to discuss the implications…

“The majority of Britons believe in heaven and life after death, new research suggests.” The BBC News story here is well worth reading, and shows some interesting things. Firstly we are a lot less sceptical about New Age ideas and certain fringe practices like astrology and tarot cards than we used to be – what Randi’s people categorize as “woo”. However we are more sceptical about certain aspects of the supernatural than a decade ago in 1998 – in short popular belief in the supernatural is constantly waxing and waning; I think I could have told you that. The popular culture of the 1970′s was far more sympathetic to parapsychology say than the 90′s were – and yet the 2000′s saw a sudden interest in Spiritualism connected with certain TV shows.

I have a rather heretical thought about ‘paranormal’ beliefs, and their relationship to atheism. I originally posed a question on Professor Dawkins forum as it was inspired by his show The Enemies of Reason. I am sure the Professor has better things to do than answer my questions though, (and he didn’t) and so I have revised it and asked it here.

I had been reading The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener (1983) by noted mathematician, science writer and skeptic Martin Gardner. In 1976 Martin Gardner was a founder member of CSI(COP), which has done a great deal over the years in debunking paranormal claims and fighting the rise of superstition. Many readers of this blog may have his enjoyed his Fads & Fallacies In the Name of Science.

In Chapter 3 of The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener – “Why I am not a Paranormalist” – Gardner mounts a blistering attack on superstition. It contains many of the themes touched in Dawkin’s The Enemies of Reason, and one curious disagreement.

Martin Gardner, 1983 wrote:

As always with such manias, causes are multiple: the decline of traditional religious beliefs among the better educated, the resurgence of Protestant Fundamentalism, disenchantment with science for creating a technology that is damaging the environment and building horrendous war weapons, increasingly poor quality of science instruction on all levels of schooling, and many other factors…

I found that first bit fascinating. Now Gardner is not Fundamentalist obviously, he is not a Christian, though he is a Fideist rejecting all special revelation, but remaining a theist. Like most scholars he sees Fundamentalism as arising recently (within the last century pretty much) and a bad thing– but he regards the “decline of traditional religious beliefs among the better educated” as a key factor in the rise of pseudo-science, cults and superstition?

It in no way justifies religious belief, but it is very interesting as a claim. OK, so I doubted. Gardner is a theist – he must be biased. What are his sources? Luckily he references them. It is the article Superstitions Old and New by William Sims Bainbridge and Rodney Stark in The Skeptical Inquirer, Volume 4, Summer 1980.

Gardner says they

…reported on their surveys of how beliefs in certain aspects of the current occult mania correlated with religious faith. They found people with no professed religion were the most inclined to believe in ESP and extraterrestrial UFOs. Paranormal cults were strongest in areas where the traditional churches were weakest.

Never trusting anyone’s opinions I have just been through the Sheep/Goat tests from my 1993 Paranormal Beliefs Survey of attendees at a lecture series in Cheltenham. The test used by the group was an early Sheep/Goat test which measured some religious claims as well as paranormal ones. Later we adopted the 1979 New Australian Sheep/Goat Test by Michael Thalbourne, but this earlier version suited my purposes. There were 83 respondents, and while I have not had time to perform a proper statistical test – the data is on stapled questionnaires, not in electronic format and it’s too late to type it all in tonight – there does appear to be a very strong correlation between non-belief in God and belief in UFOs as alien visitors, and between non-belief in Jesus as divine and belief in both ghosts & magic, to give a few examples. I recall now being once asked asked if many parapsychologists were Christian – and I said none at all that I knew of, they were all atheists. I have just looked at my “psychics” who I sometimes work with on testing – only one identifies as Spiritualist, two as atheist (Atheism is VERY common among Spiritualists following the example of Arthur Findlay – indeed Roll’s Campaign For Philosophical Freedom is an atheist organization which makes Dawkins look like a vicar) and seven “none”; six more are unclassifiable.

Not one professed belief in any “orthodox” faith. Now I’m sure Dawkins would regard my Anglicanism as just as much superstitious woo as does say crystal power, so this is a false distinction to him: but the evidence seems to suggest to me that the modern irrationalist supernaturalism is inversely related to traditional (non-fundamentalist) religious beliefs. I think whoever misquoted G.K. Chesterton was right, even if as is possible Chesterton never actually said it “when a man stops believing in God he does not believe in nothing: he believes in anything”. Correlation is not causality – and of course the better educated college students are more likely to believe in ghosts etc -

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/060121_paranormal_poll.html

assuming the Skeptical Inquirer is cited correctly! So perhaps the increase in woo is just a by product of the decline of traditional religious belief, increased secularism and atheism, and better education? The evidence certainly seems to point that way???

I find this both interesting, amusing, and deeply ironic.

So I wrote a few years back, and I have discussed at length elsewhere the issues. What concerns me is that actually while Hayley as a rational sceptic may be an excellent investigator, “atheism” as a non-belief does not actually necessarily imply scepticism of any claim but the existence of a God. There are plenty of loony and not bright atheists, just as there are plenty of loony and thick as two short planks Christians out there. Furthermore, rationality does not always map to good personal ethics, as I think we all recognize, and even rational people make mistakes – though like the Christians who confess they are crap at it by definition (we are all sinners), they may spot the problem and be able to do something about it.

Still, it’s peoples right to believe what they like, and no one has a monopoly on how to investigate spooks etc, or say what we should believe. The actions/behaviours/practices which are damaging to others should however clearly be subject to scrutiny, and I’m absolutely in favour of higher ethical standards in the field. I just don’t think that religiosity, in the normal sense, is much to do with a lot of this — and I hope I have somehow made that point. Yes my personal research ethics may be terrible, as I often joke, but that stands completely independent of the actual religious framework I exist within (Church of England liberal, in case you wondered.)

So as Martin Gardner said, I think the decline of traditional religious belief may actually underlie, rather than be the opposite of, this explosion of popular ghosthunting. Still a great article by Hayley, and got me thinking as normal. Now I really must go do some work!

cj x

Half- Baked Review: What has Philosophy Got to do with Religion?, a talk by Mark Vernon

I often get invited to events through groups I have joined on Facebook or my membership of email lists, and have only the very vaguest idea of who it was who asked me. Tonight was one of those – my Facebook page announced that I had said I would attend a free lecture on “What has Philosophy Got To Do With Religion?”, and given that one of my standard responses to people asking me “what do you do?” is “er, philosophy of religion” (– it makes them go away I find, and sounds better than “hunt ghosts and argue on the internet”) — well I felt kind of obliged. The fact the lecture was taking place within a gentle stroll of my house probably helped too.

“Why do I go to lectures?” would be a more useful session for me to attend, given that I invariably fall asleep, or become incredibly bored, or gaze out the window and think about when this room was the SU Bar, and Roger Puplett used to rip his shirt off while playing Van Halen’s Jump as last record of the night, and … see?!! I have the attention span of a newt on uppers: I find it hard to sit still for 5 minutes, and almost impossible to go two minutes without asking a question. It’s bad enough when I’m lecturing, I get bored by my own lectures, and tell the audience that frequently.

Well given I hate sitting through lectures, was stuck by a hissy radiator turned on full blast that slowly baked me and the room was too full to sneak out to get a drink, I should have hated this. Given Mark Vernon announced that his talk had three parts, and would last 45 minutes, and that after two parts were on 45 minutes and he stopped to ask if he should proceed, hell I should have been crawling up the walls. Yet so effective a speaker is Vernon that we all asked him to continue, and I’m sure would have stayed much longer if it was not for the heating stuck on (I crept out to the SU bar and got a drink at the beginning of questions, but returned to loudly ask more as is my nature )

Vernon read his presentation: a long introduction on Aurignacian art, which I was confused a little by the relevance of, then a rather succinct but fun critique of EvoPsych stuff on religion, and Hyper-Sensitive Entity Detection stuff like Dennett’s ideas, and those of Bruce Hood – he has more time for Scott Atran, but still regard him as wrong from what I can make out — and a short but well aimed attack on over generalising modular mind theorists (folks like Steven Mithen?), with some interesting research cited. I would hesitate to use as Vernon appeared to (in passing, as a minor point) Developmental Psychology as a way to judge how early human psychology evolved; but compared with some of the problems with the Evo-Psych approaches, that is easily forgiven, and I may have misunderstood. It was really hot, and the radiator was annoying me with its hiss, burble, hiss, while slowly cooking me. I wished more of my friends from Skeptics in the pub were present (any of them actually) — some Skeptics often seem to buy wholesale highly questionable EvoPysch “just so” stories without any real effort at critical analysis or awareness of the problems with them in my experience, just as earlier generations of rationalists embraced Frazerian and Comptean ideas of Religion with equal fervour. (Occasionally one sees all three argued in the same forum thread on certain New Atheist sites… ) Mark Vernon’s objections would have perhaps made it clear that these theories are not just contested, they are highly controversial, even among Evolutionary Psychologists and evolutionary biologists and morphologists, let alone cognitive scientists.

I found it hard to concentrate because of the heat, but Vernon kept me listening, and I was particularly interested in some of the paleontologist Simon Conway-Morris’s ideas. Graham Budd had mentioned him to me recently, and I will definitely look up his work, and would have by now if Wikipedia was not down today in protest over SOPA. Vernon acts as a great introduction to others ideas: he seems astonishingly well read, ad his reading particularly showed in the second part, which was on being good without God.

I have long been of the opinion that one can be good without God – inevitably the Euthyphro Dilemma came up in the questions, but agree with Vernon the best modern explorations of the issue are by Richard Holloway. It was in this section the temperature finally proved too much for me, and I began to think about a question the friendly gentleman from the Bible Society sitting in the row in front of me had asked me before talk began about how authentic a lot of ‘Celtic Spirituality’ was to the historical roots. Not sure how we got on to it, but I’m quite sceptical on the issue, and I started daydreaming about writing a blog piece on it, only to reconnect with the talk somewhere about Iris Murdoch on morality, God and Truth and have no idea what was going on. Fortunately as part 3 commended I was on safer ground – for now Vernon turned to the soul, and the question of post-mortem survival.

Vernon made some excellent points about afterlife in various religious traditions, and the development thereof, but this will be very familiar to anyone who has read my review of Christopher Moreman’s Beyond the Threshold and hence lost some of its force which I think lay in how surprising these things are to most people. Ditto with Vernon’s emphasis on Reconstituitionalism, the merging of the soul with a new body at Resurrection, as being the New Testament view of afterlife. (As I remarked in questions, one of them. I think there are at least two, if not three views of life after death in the New Testament writings, by no means necessarily incompatible). There was a brief discussion of the odd character of the resurrection appearances, which always reminds me of a wonderful passage from Tyrell’s Apparitions I think, but I will leave that to a later post as I have been planning to explore it for years. Anyway I don’t agree Reconstituionalism is the only viable reading of the NT texts on afterlife, but it is certainly a strong theological tradition, and the great sceptic and CSICOP founder member Martin Gardner (who hoped for life after death himself) gives an excellent overview of it on his The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener. as I recall. Vernon gave a good overview of Aquinas I think, not that I have ever managed to really grasp Aquinas on the Soul or Life after Death, not least I suspect because some of his ideas are actually contradictory, or divergent. This has inspired me to take another look.

Anyway I had never heard of Mark Vernon before tonight, but excellent speaker, and I will check out his books, such as his latest “How to be an Agnostic”. His website is here, do go take a look. and do catch him at one of his upcoming event s listed there – well worth seeing.

As an aside, I was shocked to learn that despite the Premises and Services Agreement between the University and the Student Union that was agreed when I was there, the SU has now lost control of the bars at the University of Gloucestershire, which are now run by a third party company. None of this was reported in the local press or even on the uni website as far as I know; I have been assured by a friend that a deal was struck to protect the Student Welfare aspects of the SU’s work, which was always funded by the profits from the bars and Summer Balls in the past. I won’t mourn this change, it may be for the better, and my loyalties lie with the College of St Paul and St Mary and CGCHE, predecessor institutions, but I was very surprised to hear from the staff the SU bar was no longer that, while getting a drink.

Ah well, the room TC007 where we had the talk was once the SU Bar, before it moved upstairs to its present location, so change can be good I guess. I recalled sitting there tonight walking in there in 1987, and being hit on the head by an ashtray and nearly knocked out when I first entered the room; and then 1992, and watching the news coverage of the LA riots which was playing on the big screen, Hugh and I (with severe sunstroke) danced 17 minutes to Sister Ray by the Velvet Underground before I vomited in a loo that once stood roughly where I was sitting tonight, and collapsed there with a terrible headache. Now it’s a bland lecture room. Such are memories – inappropriate, intrusive. Years ago I taught in a uni classroom that had previously been a female friend’s dormitory room – that jarred, and was almost awkward. Who says there are no ghosts?

cj x

When Psychics Fail — Beyond Sally Morgan

OK, last week I wrote a short piece on Sally Morgan, in which I critiqued the evidence that she was using a well known fraud trick, that is having accomplices gather information in the crowd (or prepare information from public sources like newspapers), and then being fed it by hidden assistants using a radio connection. (I almost wrote “wireless” there for “radio”; astonishing how the meaning of that word, so common in my youth, has changed forty years on!). I doubted this partly on the fallibility of witness testimony, partly because the Theatre manager had came forward with a fairly convincing “alibi” involving two theatre techs being overheard being the cause of the whole matter. I lay out all the facts as I had them in my previous piece, which may be worth reading as it links to the RTE broadcast and the Irish Independent article, if you have not been following the case.

Well Sally Morgan has now issued a statement, categorically denying fraud — you can read it here.

Sally Morgan

It does not actually say anything new; and certainly does not come any closer to proving she possesses a genuine “paranormal gift”. I guess the only way she could convince us all of that would be to undergo some kind of scientific test – after all plenty of protocols for testing psychics and mediums exist, and if I ever have time I will write on them here.

Still, today one person who has been involved in testing psychic claimants in the past, the excellent sceptic Professor Chris French wrote a short piece on The Guardian site. I note with approval that like my earlier piece on Sally he mentions perfectly natural ways in which people might convince themselves they are psychic, though he does not go in to as much detail as I did in mine. It’s a good piece, but part of it caught my attention…

This episode is reminiscent of the exposure of faith healer Peter Popoff by James Randi in 1986. Popoff would wow his audiences by giving specific and accurate details of their medical problems before claiming to cure them with his divine powers. This information was, according to Popoff, provided to him directly by God. It was certainly an effective technique, as at this time Popoff was raking in around $4m per month (tax-free) from his poor, sick and uneducated followers.

Randi, with the assistance of investigator Alexander Jason, convincingly demonstrated that Popoff was actually receiving the “divine” information from his wife via a hearing aid. Following his exposure on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Popoff declared bankruptcy in 1987.

In a more rational world, that would have been the end of Popoff’s career as a faith healer. Sadly, we do not live in a rational world. Popoff is back, earning more than ever by fleecing his flock using exactly the same techniques that Randi exposed, plus a few new ones, such as the sale of “Miracle Spring Water”. According to ABC News, Popoff’s ministry received more than $9.6m in 2003 and more than $23m in 2005. In that year, Popoff paid himself and his wife a combined total of almost a million dollars (not to mention two of his children receiving more than $180,000 each).

Since the heyday of mediumship during the Victorian era, exposure as frauds has typically done little to diminish the popularity of alleged psychics in the eyes of their followers.

There is of course a caveat offered at the end of Prof. French’s piece –

Phone-in caller Sue, who believed that Morgan had psychic powers before her experience at the theatre, described herself as being “totally disappointed” and insisted that she would not be attending such shows again. Maybe some of her friends and others sitting near her that evening will follow suit. Sadly, however, history suggests that most of Sally’s followers will continue to adore her and pay the high prices demanded to see her in action.

Prof. Chris French

Watching ‘Nationwide’

I immediately began to question this. Does exposure as a fake always result in people continuing to believe, regardless of the evidence?

My first thought was of the cultural studies writer  Stuart Hall and David Morley, who if I recall correctly argued that when provided with something like a television programme (the original research was the study Watching Nationwide, on the show which brought us skateboarding ducks…)

– people do not simply respond  by accepting the “story” as given. Some will buy in to the “dominant” reading, and enjoy or accept it as given: some will “negotiate” what it means, framing what is presented in terms of their own lives and own experience, and some will create “oppositional” readings. There is  a short wikipedia discussion here.  I often find this quite a handy model to look at things.

Whereas the dominant motif in most media coverage is “so called psychic Sally Morgan was caught in fraud”, and let’s face it most people will have a good laugh and think little more about it, there have certainly been some negotiated readings. As someone interested in both critical thinking and psychical research I offered my alternative reading of what happened in my last blog piece, and Derek Walsh who is clearly extremely unsympathetic to psychic hocus pocus offered an excellent sceptical appraisal of the dominant sceptical message on his blog here in a great example of scepticism squared – when a sceptic applies scepticism to the sceptical consensus, something which is eternally necessary, but rarely makes you friends…

But it is the “oppositional” readings, the defenders of Sally Morgan who really caught the attention of the sceptic world. And let’s face it, some of them really are incredibly dedicated, indeed I think they I will use the word “devoted” to the cause.  Want to  have a look at some? Try Sally’s facebook pages! I note with interest it is her birthday today, and I sincerely hope she has a lovely day. (These things are never personal to me, despite my strong distaste for fraudulent psychics who should be prosecuted as the money grabbing vultures preying on the vulnerable they are — and after all, I am not personally convinced of fraud, or of her psychic gifts, which may place me in a minority of one! )

So in this instance an awful lot of believers in Sally are refusing to accept the evidence of fraud, and carry on believing. And to be fair, I don’t think that is actually as silly as it sounds. Firstly as Derek and I have both pointed out, the evidence for fraud is actually not overwhelming – there are other explanations, and the theatre has leapt to her defence.  Sue she is a big name draw, but I’m pretty sure that theatre in Dublin does pretty well anyway, and is hardly likely to be “in on it”.  If even a handful of sceptics are not sure she actually cheated, well, I can hardly blame her devotees for questioning it?

What if Sally WAS ever caught?

So let’s try a thought experiment: imagine Sally has been caught cheating, absolutely blatantly, flagrantly, and beyond a shadow of a doubt. I don’t know much about the Popoff affair, but I do remember a case many years back when a young “physical medium” called Lincoln was caught in very embarrassing circumstances when the lights went unexpectedly up on his seance, back in 1993. Tony Youens maintains a superb archive on this here, with the full text and many related articles. Yet Lincoln went on to a successful TV career, and is still today a major figure in the world of these stage show psychics, now doing mental not physical mediumship (albeit now known by another name: though forever plagued by jokes like “Colin is not afraid to blow his own trumpet!”).

As with Popoff, exposure seems to have done him no harm at all, though he did spend almost a decade away from the public eye? I don’t actually know much about Popoff, and the circumstances, but yes he bounced back like Alan Partridge.

So we would expect that even if Sally was caught, then she would be back on the scene within a decade, and perhaps as popular as ever? Why? Are people inherently gullible?

Um… I might have left it there if Tracy King had not questioned this on Twitter. I knew instantly she was right: for every big name caught out who bounces back, there are others who slink away and quit the limelight.

When Prophecy Fails…

Certain texts that would be considered obscure at best by non-academics take on a life of their own in popular culture, and in certain subcultures. One of these, When Prophecy Fails (1956) by Elliot Aronson, Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter is a book that few in sceptical and atheist circles can fail to have heard of. The book is a sociological study of a UFO cult whose leader predicted a cataclysmic event, a flood that would embrace their city. The flood failed to materialize — and the cult kept right on believing.  I think it’s important for people to check the facts, and the wikipedia account is very good.  Now there is one real critique of the book, which is very simple; as you will have seen from the Wikipedia page if you had a look, in the view of the people involved the prophecy did not actually fail, they had saved the world by the faith, averting the cataclysm.

Some of you may recall the incident I am fond of mentioning when I was a young student at university and the Christian Union outing was called off after the bus broke down before we departed, and the various members of the C.U leadership offered contrasting theological explanations. That is the nature of theological talk, to explore why things are in terms of God and the universe I guess.  I found it all fascinating, and rather unconvincing — did God really want us to stay and spend the day on evangelism to our heathen fellow students, or was it really the Devil trying to thwart us? I thought the bus had broken down…

Anyway, we recently saw an example of this when Mr Harold Camping’s much publicized prophecy of the End of the World failed to manifest.   The bad news is he has revised his prediction to October 21, 2011 so folks we have just a month left. Um, assuming no particle physics disaster or asteroid strike I’m going to enjoy writing on the 22nd October about what he says next! Strangely there has been very little academic discussion of how his followers have responded beyond the immediate disappointment; I suspect an awful lot have drifted away, but I can neither conform nor deny it. Yet this is all very familiar to those who follow such things -  if any one really has read this far, they may well want to acquaint themselves with The Great Disappointment.

So yep, I think most sociologists of religion agree with Festinger, who also gave us the concept of cognitive dissonance – and while I have critiqued When Prophecy Fails in the past, and equally have critiqued the idea of cognitive dissonance (favouring Bem’s alternative Self-Perception Theory) many of my critiques are actually of the rather shoddy precis of the book one sometimes finds in sceptical articles and books. Festinger et al were much more careful in their claims, and the Wikipedia article gives the conditions for faith in the prophet to “survive” the disappointment –

Festinger stated that five conditions must be present, if someone is to become a more fervent believer after a failure or disconfirmation:

• A belief must be held with deep conviction and it must have some relevance to action, that is, to what the believer does or how he behaves.
• The person holding the belief must have committed himself to it; that is, for the sake of his belief, he must have taken some important action that is difficult to undo. In general, the more important such actions are, and the more difficult they are to undo, the greater is the individual’s commitment to the belief.
• The belief must be sufficiently specific and sufficiently concerned with the real world so that events may unequivocally refute the belief.
• Such undeniable disconfirmatory evidence must occur and must be recognized by the individual holding the belief.
• The individual believer must have social support. It is unlikely that one isolated believer could withstand the kind of disconfirming evidence that has been specified. If, however, the believer is a member of a group of convinced persons who can support one another, the belief may be maintained and the believers may attempt to proselytize or persuade nonmembers that the belief is correct.

In the case of Sally Morgan number 5 is true: her supporters help each other maintain their faith, that much is clear. I’m not convinced any of the others are, so perhaps we do not need to look to Festinger after all for an explanation.

Other sociologists of religion have argued that when an adherent of a faiths faith is weakest, they are prone to proselytizing more, buoying up their faith by convincing others. Maybe! I think we actually face slightly more complex issues here….

Counting Crows…

Firstly, there are allegations she was caught cheating, but it’s far from clear, and a reasonable person could doubt this as I have already stated. Secondly, the believers are by their nature already disposed to belief in life after death and psychics I assume, and very few of them will place their faith in one psychic alone. Even if Sally is caught cheating, there are still thousands of other psychics, and the Problem of Induction tells us that one psychic being a fraud in no way means all are: after all as William James famously stated, the claim “all crows are black” is falsified if we find a single white crow. (James believed he had in the form of the medium Leonora Piper).  Spiritualists certainly acknowledge the existence of fake psychics and fraudulent mediums, so one being caught is no problem to them, just as one failed Christian sect’s prophecy is no issue to the rest of the Christian world.

Beyond this, we have to consider what would happen if a personal friend was accused of a serious crime (something like this is currently occurring on the JREF, a miserable business we will pass over beyond noting the potential parallels). Many will spring to their defence, some will renounce them, and some will wait further developments.  There is nothing unique in the way Sally’s adherents are reacting right now, we can all do it when our beliefs are challenged…

So Can Sceptics Win?

No matter how many psychics get debunked, others will step forward. No matter how good the evidence against a fraud, some people, but not I am convinced most, will continue to believe. So is there any point in pursuing the frauds?

My answer is a resounding “Yes!”.  It is in no ones interest to have vulnerable individuals preyed upon by the pond scum who represent themselves as psychic and offer false comfort while using fraudulent means. While there may well be very real benefits to the grieving in seeing a psychic, no matter how much we may question the morality of it all, the frauds are just that – frauds and criminals.  Whether a sincere but deluded individual is better than a fraud is a tricky question, but my personal belief is yes, there is  a huge difference, though I understand others may disagree. Are there real psychics? I can’t discount that possibility; my personal experience suggested it could be, but I honestly don’t know.

So it is really important for sceptics to challenge these people. I’m not sure it’s safe, rewarding or sensible, but it has to be done. I’m not convinced on the current evidence that Sally Morgan is either a) psychic or b) guilty of fraud, and I make no claims to have a real knowledge of her case, but as even spiritualists and psychics acknowledge wholeheartedly there are  lots of scam artistes and conmen and conwomen out there teaching critical thinking and sceptical approaches does no harm to anyone.

Most people will not make their minds up on psychics, life after death, mediumship, or any of these issues based on the academic or scientific evidence. Given there is very little mainstream discussion of the topics, and the journal articles are hard to come by, and the sociology and religion texts fairly obscure, it’s hard even for someone passionately interested to make a rational evidence-based decision on these matters, so we tend to go on the other type of evidence, personal experience. I hope my musings on all this help people to gain a slightly broader perspective, and to think a little deeper about it.

So why have I written all this?

A while ago when I interviewed Dr Matthew Smith on this blog we noted how we live in a very unfashionable neighbourhood indeed, what one of us (I forget which!) termed “the uncomfortable middle”. That is neither of us is wholly “woo”, if such a creature exists, or wholly “sceptic”, if such a thing exists.  Back in the days of the old Most Haunted Forum on Living TV’s site I watched as “parties” formed, one “skeptics”, the other “believers”. There is a polarization of views, and a growing culture of sceptics (who also fight among themselves, argue and debate) and believers (who also fight among themselves, argue and debate). Seeing that I regard scepticism as a methodology, and  belief in any given proposition an outcome, well I don’t see them as really opposed, but you would never get that from reading much written by either side. Venom, hatred and antagonism are all too common: and both “sides” close ranks. And then, when something like this happens, well the sceptics tend to say “I told you so” and the believers say “all sceptical lies”, and people stop talking. Real research does not fall victim to this, but the rhetoric of subcultures fighting for the hearts and minds of the masses do.

I encourage everyone to take a step back, take a deep breath and try to lose the vitriol. Britain is a sceptical country: and no one is going to stamp on you if you believe in fairies here, either.

And on that note I willonce again wish Sally morgan a very happy birthday, and “peace to all people of good will on Earth.”

cj x

Responding to Hayley: The Medium & The Message Revisited

OK, two things. This will be short, because I’m writing it in a break. I will not have time to do the issues justice, but at least it won’t drag on.

Secondly, I have not blogged on events in Norway, because others have said it all better I’m sure. With Lisa planning to emigrate there permanently, and her and Lloyd recently back from Oslo I hear a great deal about Norway, and sometimes read NRK and listen to Norwegian radio  online, and events utterly shocked me. I think everyone in the world must be encouraged by the words of Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg

“We meet terror and violence with more democracy and will continue to fight against intolerance”

My thoughts are with my Norwegian friends; stoic, calm and sensible, they seem to be getting on with making a better future, from the comments i have seen on Facebook and Twitter. I can not begin to deal with this horror properly, so I simply acknowledged it as best I can here, because to write anything at this time seems trite and banal. So with that caveat, I’ll blog on unrelated matters. However I am sensitive that talking about mediumship and life after death can be insensitive faced with mass grief and bereavement, so you may wish to return to this piece later.

I read a couple of interesting pieces on Hayley Steven’s blog today — the first on a BBC TV show she was originally due to be part of, the second a follow on piece. They are both worth reading. I can’t intelligently comment on the first, because I have not yet had a chance to watch the show. You can see it here, the piece on psychics is maybe half way through I think.  I may do so in the next day or so if time permits, but I am sadly very busy.  Hayley’s second piece however does raise issues I feel I should respond to.

There has been a lot of stuff written about the “ghostnobbergate” silliness, and Professor Brian Cox’s comments after claims that an episode of the Infinite Monkey Cage comedy show on the radio lacked “balance”, the impartiality required by public broadcasters. If you missed it all, there are a couple of articles on this blog, and  Hayley and Roy Stenmen both covered it in depth too.  I only mention this because in some ways this seems to follow up from that: in the light of global and domestic news, the situation in Greece, the USA, Norway and especially East Africa it all seems so petty, but perhaps these things serve to amuse and distract us from the horrors of the world, so I make no apology for talking about it.

Defining Our Terms

The core of the discussion in Hayley’s second post is a disagreement between herself and a representative of the Spiritualist National Union about whether the BBC was substantially in error in said programme as representing in representing a number of people as “mediums” who the SNU would instead dismiss as “psychics”. This may seem like  a bizarre row, because perhaps in common usage the terms are synonymous; but in fact a medium is almost by definition (at least etymologically) someone who acts as a channel for communications (almost always purportedly from the dead), and in fact when we talk about the medium of television, or the media, we use this term in the same way. So a medium is someone who talks to the dead.

The SNU - click for link

So what is a psychic? Well psychic just refers to the soul or mind, and technically a psychic function is just a mental process: dreams are psychic, perception is psychic, memory is psychic and so forth. In the 19th century the term “psychical” was coined for purportedly paranormal powers, to differentiate them from these normal psychic processes we all know. That is why I once tried to win a bet I could show “psychic powers” on Bad Psychics by offerring to do mental arithmetic – because by definition I am completely correct.  The dictionary gives

1. Of, relating to, affecting, or influenced by the human mind or psyche; mental: psychic trauma; psychic energy.

However, in popular usage the term psychic has never caught on, and really it is only used by me sometimes on this blog, and in the name of the Society for Psychical research, or in papers where the two classes of mental activity are discussed, and by people playing Scrabble...

So I’ll use psychic in the popular sense in this piece; and the SNU argument is that psychics are not mediums, and the two should never be confused. Psychics can include a huge number of claims — seeing the future (precognition), reading minds (telepathy), seeing at a distance (clairvoyance), or even effecting matter (psychokinesis); they come in all shapes and sizes from Astral Travellers, Psychic Detectives, Tarot card readers to the psychics who for only £15 a minute will tell you your ex-boyfriend still really loves you and secretly longs for reconciliation (which may or may not be true.)  But these powers are not “talking to the dead” – and mediums and psychics are distinct categories in theory, and indeed I can think of very few who want to claim to be both — Derek Acorah is the first I can think of who billed himself as a “psychic medium”.

Now I’m running short of time and I can’t recall if I have blogged before on the different Spiritualist groups in the UK here, and there history — suffice to say I am not a Spiritualist, and my personal distaste for mediumship is well known, though my opinions on the evidential issue are hopefully open minded.  Suffice for now to say the SNU represents a large group of UK Spiritualists, who follow a strict code, have formal training, and as befits a religious group licensed ministers (platform mediums).

I may be out of date on the organizational aspects, but the SNU really dislike psychics, who “give mediumship a bad name”, and I doubt the psychics are fond of the SNU. In recent year we seem to have seen an explosion of psychics,  many of whom also feel they can speak with the dead, but a drop in support for traditional Spiritualist churches; I blogged on this here.

But once you are clear on the difference between a psychic and a medium, well then it all gets confused. Because most SNU mediums will accept they have psychic powers, which they attempt to ignore, and many psychics claim to also possess mediumistic abilities, but simply do not see themselves as part of the SNU, and hence never join.

I am aware that to many of my readers this must all seem completely insane, and that none of this may be real, but bear with me…

Psychics and Mediums

So first obvious question — why do mediums not like, or want to be psychic? If you remember Derek Acorah in Most Haunted used t talk about “residual energy”: that was a psychic function, where he picked up the “energies” from the past, a form of retrocognition.  This was a distraction over his “real work”, talking to the spirits. It’s the difference between seeing Professor Brian Cox on the TV recorded last Tuesday,  and meeting him down the pub and chatting with him. If this was the only theoretical issue with psychic powers for mediums, well that would not be too bad. In fact being “sensitive” to atmospheres might even help a medium I guess.

It is not the only problem though. There are two far worse issues. The first revolves around Telepathy, mind to mind ESP.

Imagine Aunt Maggie has departed, and buried the family silver. You go to a medium, he tells you it’s under the apple tree, you dig it up, everyone is happy. To many people this would appear clear proof of the mediumistic hypothesis – the medium spoke to Aunt Maggie.

What if we allow for psychism, that is use of psychic powers though? Well maybe a neighbour saw Aunt Maggie bury it, and in fact the medium is not a medium at all: they got the information from the neighbour (who is still alive) mind, using psychic powers – in this case Telepathy?Then this seemingly watertight case does not actually show any proof for life after death.

It gets far worse. Firstly most examples of supposedly “successful” mediumistic contacts with the dead are not like this. Instead they are more like this

Medium: I’m getting a “Johnny”. He liked to eat chocolate buttons in bed and put them in your belly button, and frequently dressed up in a giant pink rabbit costume for Halloween!

Client: Yes he did!

Now clearly this is not evidentially as strong as proof for life after death, even if every word is true, because the client (traditionally called a “sitter”) knew all the facts the medium told her. The medium could potentially be using ESP — telepathy in this case, to read the clients mind, and then receiving the information as if it was from “Johnny”, who is actually no more than a method for the mediums telepathy to present itself to the conscious mind.

So in fact we have a catalogue of almost contradictory marvels — if you allow for ESP (psi), it becomes almost impossible to prove mediumship. And hence the huge rift between the ESP hypothesis in the main laboratory parapsychologists, and the life after death believing mediums. In an early post on this blog I showed how this works — almost any evidence that seems to allow for life after death can instead be explained away by a suitably unlimited “Super-ESP”.

The psychic could have seen in to the future when the silver was discovered, seen in to the past when Aunt Maggie buried it, read the mind of someone who knew where it was, or someone who knew them who has telepathically transferred the knowledge, etc, etc. In fact I used exactly this scenario in an online corse I once led, and saw huge number of ways in which pyschic powers could explain the scenario without life after death being invoked emerge from the students.

So if you actually believe in ESP, and psychics, mediumship is much harder to prove. The SNU has always known this – the SPR raised the Super-ESP problem as early as the late 1880′s, and so mediums are taught to disregard, and indeed avoid using their ESP powers, as part fo their training, instead focusing on talking to the dead and furnishing evidence for post-mortem survival ( even though if you accept the reality of psychic powers it is horribly difficult if not impossible to prove that is what you are doing, many mediums say they can tell the difference.)

And if that is not bad enough, there is another older controversy hinted at in the discussion on Hayley’s blog, when Sam says “personally I do not believe mediums can see the future”. And predictions of the future is  certainly not a claim the SNU would endorse, but to understand why we have to go back to 1938/1939, as Hitler makes increasingly belligerent moves and war seems inevitable.

The spirits were wrong about Hitler's plans

Even them no one believed that mediums could tell the future (though psychics theoretically might by a process called precognition) – but it was widely believed in many spiritualist circles that Spirit could. And Spirit kept assuring circles that war would not happen, Hitler would back down and negotiate, and the Second World War would never happen. And of course they were right, and peace prevailed. Er, sorry, no they weren’t. War broke out as pretty much everyone but Spirit and the editors of Two Worlds magazine  (one of the spiritualist papers of the day) expected, in September 1939.

The prophecies had failed: a theological crisis followed. And what happened? Well, basically it was accepted that Spirit could not see the future any more than we can. I think most mediums accept this now, so don’t take your dearly departed’s advice on whether to take that new job, unless you would accept it if they were sitting in the room with you now and knew what you do. 

So again, the SNU are not going to like psychics much, who makes exactly these fortune telling claims all the time.

And finally, there is one rather practical more reason why the SNU don’t like being conflated with “psychics”.  A lot of psychics are utterly disreputable sleazebags, and out to make money, rip off the vulnerable, and generally are slime. (I once famously insulted a commercial “psychic” with the line “I am glad you are so “spiritually evolved”, it rather explains what you were doing for the four billion years of human evolution since pond scum you somehow missed out on.” ) I can be rude at times. The SNU are a religious, regulated body, who deeply resent being conflated in the public mind with these people.

Responding to Hayley

Hayley is one of the sharpest and best sceptical commentators out there, and in her piece makes it clear that the issue here is very simple: to complain about the BBC misrepresenting mediums some have is scarcely fair, given that they have merely reflected a popular understanding and popular usage of the terms. After all, many psychics do claim to the talk to the dead, and far from all mediums are members of the SNU – the Christian Spiritualists are another large UK spiritualist denomination, and there are others.  The BBC can not realistically be held to blame for this confusion in the popular mind.  And I agree with Hayley; it is up to the SNU to clarify their position, and educate the public on their beliefs, etc, with the vital caveat I still have not viewed the show.

I’m typing at a tremendous pace and am almost out of time – but I think the issue is wider. Who is a “scientist”? What enables one to use that title? A BSc? A PhD in some science? A job in a scientific career? What makes one a “climate scientist”? There are controversies there; some people we see representing themselves as scientists are actually pundits, or science journalists, or simply science fans?

Hayley Stevens, excellent investigator & sceptical blogger (photo from her linked blog, used without permission so don’t copy it)

Who is a “sceptic”? Am I, a religious believer who accepts some paranormal phenomena is really a sceptic? What about the “global warming sceptics”? the “9/11 sceptics/ Truthers”? “the Birthers?”  They all are sceptical of something, but in the circles Hayley and I move in “sceptic” actually means, as in most Skeptics in the Pub people, supporters  of mainstream scientific/political/medical orthodoxy?  Does Hayley not feel a little sympathy for the SNU when they complain about misrepresentation of psychics and mediums, when I am sure she would not want to be associated with the tinfoil hat brigade who call themselves “skeptics”?” ( I have never forgotten the first time I was asked b some one “so you are a skeptic, you think the government did 9/11 then?” — very close to the endless times that because I am a Christian I have been mistaken for a Creationist, or because I’m a parapsychologist I have been mistaken for an ESP believer.

But am I a Parapsychologist?

Work calls, and I may just have time to format this and add a couple of pictures, but I just said I was a parapsychologist. Am I? What do you all think? I doubt Prof. Ian Baker would think I am: my lab work is very limited. Am I really just a presumptuous ghosthunter, or a “paranormal journalist”, a fortean, or a skeptic? Sure I have done a few methodologically sophisticated studies, and have some publications. But my first degree was in a totally unrelated discipline, and I have no academic credentials in the field. By the generally accepted definition I am not — I am not a full member of the Parapsychological Association, hell not being a student and having no money I’m not even an associate member, and I don’t think I have the publications to be elected yet, but heck I could not afford the fees for the accreditation even if I somehow maned to churn out ten high quality papers this year.

So no, I’m not a parapsychologist, except in my own loosely defined sense of “someone who knows the other people in parapsychology and some of them might know who I am, vaguely, as an irritant”. Ironically, my girlfriend, doing her PhD in the field is well on the way to it. But when I am described on TV as a “parapsychologist” I don’t split hairs on this issue, though maybe i should, given the utter woo that is frequently passed off as by “parapsychologists”, people who I have never heard of and who have not to the best of my knowledge ever published in the peer reviewed journals, and the bizarre belief of many “skeptics” that parapsychologists are somehow synonymous with “paranormal believers”, and that we all believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Out of time, but hope amused

cj x

On Being A Sceptic: the Third Sermon of the Reverend Jerome

OK, I think some people are genuinely puzzled by why suddenly CJ the ArchWoo-id of the Dawkins forum has mentioned he sees himself as a sceptic. I therefore have posted the third of my series of Sunday Sermons i wrote for that forum several years ago, in the hope it will clarify much. Of course I hold some religious and paranormal beliefs — I see scepticism as a methodology, not a conclusion! The sermon format was because there was a rule against religious proselytism and sermons on the forum, so I set out to playfully break it — and my user name was Jerome there, so I put my opinions in the fictional Reverend Jerome s mouth to keep up the joke. The reference to Scrubbage minor is actually a reference back to my second sermon I have never posted on the blog, and a few bits may reflect forum in jokes… But for “scepticism as religion” this may take some beating…
Good morning all. It will come as no surprise to regular attendees here at St. Dawkens that I am late: I do wish however that the parish newsletter would stop referring to me as the “late Rev. Jerome”. I am not quite ready for the Elysian fields yet.

Today is of course the feast of three of our most important saints, and that shall set the tone for this mornings discourse, away from the “niceness of God”, and in to more controversial territory. I think we all must first pause for a moment, and meditate silently upon the Bearded One who watches over us — St. James the Randi (1), whose thaumurturgical miracles are known to all of us, and let us first praise his works –

Priest: May he deliver us from Woo.

Congregation: Long live the JREF challenge!(2)

Let us not also forget St. Shermer(3) and St. Gardner(4), for all three have brought much light in to the world, and helped defeat the foul darkness of superstition. And remember that you too are called to be a light unto the world, and to bring joy and knowledge where there was ignorance and despair, and to smite evil. And let us pray briefly for the Queen, and Her Government, who have recently passed a most righteous bill, which maketh fraudulent practices of this sort illegal, and allows the smiting of Evildoers.(5)

And on that note, let us sing Hymn number 451, God Save the Queen, to the exuberant tune of the Sex Pistols. And yes I am aware Scrubbage minor is incarcerated in a straightjacket this week. After last weeks accident I did not want him to face temptation again…

This week I wish us to turn our attention to matters of Doubt and Faith. This morning, I plan to discuss why Doubt is a Virtue, and encourage us in our Scepticism — and in this evening sermon I shall turn my attention to Faith.

Now I am sure we have all sat through many long and tedious sermons on the value of doubt – was it not instilled in us as children, that our teachers should be questioned, authorities constantly checked for signs of pompous glib ignorance and all we were taught checked carefully for signs of underlying ideological bias? If not it bloody well should have been, for that is what differentiates education, which leads to questioning and allows us to learn, from indoctrination, which tells us that “this is how things are and you better believe it johnny or you will get a clump on the head.”

Now of course children have a pernicious and innate tendency to trust adults — something I have noticed many times, and despite our best attempts to teach them that this is dangerous – and if a lady in a sleigh offers you turkish delight to get in her sled for a ride, or a leering old perv offers you sweeties to get in his car, you know the correct answer I’m sure — tell them to F*** right off, shout loudly and run like hell. Still, trusting adults serves a useful purpose – when Daddy says if you put your hand in the fire you will get burned he means it, and you must as a child listen. Well unless you are Thomas Cranmer.

 

Dave D's wonderful illustration of me from his blog (linked)

So as children we have a pernicious but actually valuable in survival terms tendency to trust at least some adults. And the sad thing is, some children never grow out of it. As Paul wrote
“Brothers, stop thinking like children. In regard to evil be infants, but in your thinking be adults.”(1 Corinthians 14:20)
or to put it another way “Wise up, sucker.” (I have no idea why he was under the misapprehension children were not evil, huh Scrubbage?) Be as, the carpenter said, “As Wise as Serpents, as Gentle as Doves.” In short, use your brains. Otherwise you are going to get fleeced, the fate of most of those who follow shepherds.

Right, so once we are adults, we should be sceptical. It’s our duty and responsibility. And furthermore, without doubt how can we progress? If any here are inclined to agree with me without thinking it through, I must say — I have some prime Attractive Wetland in Florida you might wish to invest in?

Still, Scepticism is much misunderstood. Often when Bob tells us that the reason he was found with his trousers down in the attractive widow Jenkins bedroom by his wife, it was because indeed his belt had failed, his motorbike subsequently struck the good widows fence, and he was hurled bodily through her open bedroom window and just happened to end up on top of her in the compromising position in which he was found, well we like his good wife doubt. I’m sure Bob’s explanation was a perfectly reasonable one, as we all agree, but rightly we question…

Too often scepticism is regarded as mere “nay saying”. There are no ghosts, ghoulies, or invisible pink unicorns. UFOs did not abduct Edna Mullins along with the Church Missionary Fund, and leave her on a beach in Majorca, but sadly kept the money. Some have even doubted my explanation about that unfortunate episode with the supermodel, the clothesline and the riding crop — all perfectly innocent, despite the video. The camera frequently lies, and I’m sure you accept the testimony I was watching the Grand Prix with my good friend Max at the time…

NO, scepticism is NOT simply saying “No” or being a professional contrarian.The sceptic is the person who questions, without pre-judgement, every issue. They make a considered judgement, based upon the evidence presented for and against the claims, and the rational coherence of this, often tested against their own experience. Of course sceptics usually disagree with one another — because all of this requires a subjective input — but what form of knowledge does not?

Of course there are pseudo-sceptics, heretics I’m afraid, who differ from this path of righteousness. I plan an open air barbecue and marshmallow toasting this Wednesday, to which any who hold this position are cordially invited. Bruing your own stake – er I mean steak… The a priori sceptic denies that a certain category of phenomena are at all possible, and will consider no evidence whatsoever in support of that hypothesis. Hence we can see that blind faith and dogmatism persist, even after religion has declined! These folk often assign a value of impossible to anything put in the category “paranormal”. As the category is so wide and nebulous as to include all manner of silly things, I am not surprised, but clearly the truth of otherwise of each phenomena therein should be tested on its own merits. If I do not believe in Werewolves, that tells me nothing of the reality of Giant Squid. I recall some sceptics who claimed ghost hunters were creating “orbs” with Photoshop a few years back. Piffle! The orbs were there, and perfectly natural. A good explanation was not long coming, and the phenomena ceased to be regarded by any intelligent person as “paranormal” in almost all instances. Yet a priori scepticism had made some people blind to the real causality – they were right they were not paranormal, but completely wrong in their reasoning!

Nope, the true sceptic keeps an open mind, questions authority, and doubts. Of course we accept certain doctrines on faith — my knowledge of physics suggest to me that it would be unnecessary to study every perpetual motion device suggested, unless the inventor can show me how it breaks the Holy Writ of Physics. If my understanding of the doctrines of physics are wrong, then I rejoice to have been proven wrong, and we can all benefit, and move on, building better models and increasing our understanding.

Now how do I decide which doctrines to accept on faith? I note that a huge body of work by learned divines exists, building upon the work of earlier divines. In Physics the doctrines are built upon for the most part things one can test oneself, and where it goes beyond that in to speculatively theology, as in Quantum Mechanics and Cosmogeny, we can at least test the maths by seeing how it relates to what we already know. That is the great thing about Science — it’s claims are provisional, and change with new data, and testable, and provide us with useful benefits in terms of technology. I will talk more about these issues in tonights sermon on faith however.

So, as I have rambled on long enough – doubt is a virtue, and scepticism a wonderful methodology for testing ones claims, and approaching truth. The process is never ending, and yet that does not prevent us reaching provisional conclusions, or making judgements on how we see the evidence – we are not forever trapped in Fortean (6) agnosticism.

As a final word however: beware hypocrisy! For if we are truly sceptics, then we must be willing to openly question our own Sacred Dogmas, and barbecue our won Sacred Cows. Even those Holy Doctrines which seem most certain to us, like the Laws of Physics, must be revised in light of new evidence – for if we had piously accepted Newton or Galilieo or Darwin as the final Prophets in their fields, where would be now? Questioning those eminent Holy men led us forward, and Fort was right to remind us those damned uncomfortable facts are exactly what lead us in to questioning, and overthrowing accepted wisdom with new and exciting breakthroughs.

So Doubt is a virtue, and i am minded of the words of Aleister Crowley, who wrote
““I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning.”

Tonight we shall discuss why Faith too is a virtue.

We shall end with Hymn no 21, “Mr. Crowley” by the Right Rev. Ozzy Ozbourne.

Thank you!

Sermon Footnotes

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Randi
2. http://www.randi.org/
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shermer
4. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Gardner
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fort

JSPR January 2011: Religious Experience, Mysticism & the Psychical Researchers

In a recent post I bemoaned what seemed to be a general ignorance of the literature of Religious Studies and Religious Experience among parapsychologists; I suggested this originated in the emphasis on studying religion as part of sociology these days, and of studying parapsychology as a subset of psychology. I was horrified to attend a mini-conference where terms as basic (to someone like me from a religious studies background) as “gnosis” seemed unfamiliar; and in my review of Christopher Moreman’s excellent book Beyond The Threshold I praised him especially for his willingness to cross-disciplinary boundaries here, where I feel there is a great potential for research, in how these different unusual states correlate.  I concluded my review –

This books importance lies in reminding and introducing psychical researchers of the huge amount of work by scholars of religion, and in particular religious experience, since William James seminal The Varieties of Religious Experience (James 1902). Given the overlap in subject matter between some of the research conducted in parapsychology units today, the work being done by religious research units such as the Alister Hardy Trust, and the worrying extent to which the discipline of Religious Studies appears neglected or even unknown by many parapsychologists, this book is both timely and important.

Well I now see that critique was far from justified – having picked up my copy of the JSPR Vol75.1, No. 902, January 2011 at last I find that ironically that review is carried alongside three papers which demonstrate exactly what strong work has been recently done in this area, and is ongoing. While I was aware of David Luke’s work on psychedelic consciousness the papers by Paul Marshall, and Gerhard Mayer & Rene Grunder came as a delightful surprise; and the irony  of the review I wrote with those harsh words being published in a special edition of the JSPR being dedicated to such matters has not escaped me!

Furthermore, two of the papers come from the annual Exploring the Extraordinary conference at York which I have long wished to attend; this is run by the Anomalous Experiences Research Unit (AERU) and I actually met many of the lovely folks from there at the conference where I developed a misguided sense of lack of knowledge of the field of religious experience amongst psychical researchers. So I owe them an apology, a big thumbs up, and have revised my opinions — it seems there is a strong research in this field after all: something I knew formed part of the MSc at Coventry University (Hume & Lawrence) but which I felt was generally neglected. As so often I was wrong, and I withdraw my critical remarks. I have not so far read completed reading the papers, but they look very interesting indeed. I just felt an apology to those whose research I had accidentally overlooked was clearly in order first!

I’d also like to take this opportunity to recommend the fascinating blog by Jason Wingate, Lightning in an Oak Box. It’s a thought provoking, well written exploration of many themes related to this area, and the transpersonal. Do take a look!

cj x

The Triumph of Skepticism?

There are few things more annoying than Christians in the USA who claim to be a tiny persecuted minority; but it’s an idea that goes back a long way, to the Apostolic age, when persecution was real and rife. There are three things that annoy me about “we are victims” claims by American Christians – firstly, they tend to originate from sects who hold almost everyone else, even their fellow Christians, to not be “True Christians” ( I let God decide who is on His side myself); secondly Christianity is still overwhelmingly dominant in the USA, and can be oppressive to non-Christians; and thirdly there are still Christians in many other parts of the world dying in significant numbers, being imprisoned or tortured, for their faith.   The so called “culture wars” of the USA pale in comparison. I’m not saying Christians are not persecuted in the U.S. note — some may well be — but the Christian majority there has done it fair degree of shin kicking and hate-mongering over the years, deplored by the vast body of believers as it may be.

The UK is VERY different from the USA in this respect — a mere handful of my friends hold any religious faith, and Christians are actually probably a minority, not that you could tell by the census data. At least the type who go to church on a Sunday are — three out of my immediate circle meet that description, and I think in that respect I may be unusual — I may know more practising Christians than most of the readers of my blog here in the UK. Still this post is actually about the “UK Skeptic Movement”, not about religion, and therefore I won’t dwell on it too long. The one thing I will say to my US fellow believers who yearn for a return to religious education and school prayer — look at the USA, where these things do not exist, and the UK, where they are still mandated by law? Which is the more secular country? By far the UK: we may know more about religion, but we are far less likely to practice one?

So what has all this got to do with Skepticism (yes I know that is the American spelling, but it’s what most sceptical groups here use) in the UK? I actually think British Skeptics may end up like American Christians, complaining of a persecution that does not exist, and with messianic and apocalyptic motifs in their thinking and writing, unless they realise a very simple fact. They won many years ago — the battle for the public’s mind is over, done and dusted.

Now let me be clear – that does not mean that scepticism is pointless, or not urgently needed. The battle in the medical world for evidence based practice, the need to fight the false marketing claims that permeate our culture, attack media hysteria, and  continue the brilliant sceptical research in parapsychology, anomalous experience etc is pressing and real — I still think Skeptics in the Pub etc do a great deal of good, in exposing people to new and useful information — but gals and guys, you are not the persecuted minority. We do not face an imminent dark age of woo and superstition. We face a declining health system, economic misery and appalling poverty, educational standards and public health problems, but we are fighting to get them fixed. Crystal power, reincarnation, and people frittering away their life savings on quack cures is not about to cause the end of all we know. Because most people in the UK are fundamentally sceptical, cynical, and questioning nowadays, or so I believe.

Yes we all know people who embrace some outrageous woo – sadly it goes hand in hand with the end of institutionalised religion. What we have to remember though is that the battle has been hard fought, but rationality and scepticism have often won. I’m not a fan of much of what passes for Skepticism these days — too often I find myself wondering about what seems to be ideologically driven denialism, rather than actual research or fair critique — but I have seen both sceptics and believers in various things frothing with anger at each other. Hey dudes, we all have our biases, and our idea of prior probability, and often we get angry when deeply held beliefs are challenged and stop listening. That’s true of human beings – it’s a human thing.  But Skeptics are supposed to question and doubt, and I think sceptics are just as prone to in-fighting and argument as any other group, so the believers need not fear some monolithic ideology of ridicule developing to crush them – there will always be intelligent sceptics in the “Skeptic  Movement” who will question allegedly sceptical research as much as they question “woo”. It’s why I put “Skeptic Movement” in quotes – because really it’s just a  bunch of people who share some interests, and who talk to each other, and have a kind of loose tribal loyalty that falls apart as soon as you put them in a room together. It’s a social phenomenon, not a cult. There are no rules, doctrines or dogmas, just a  lot of Doubting Thomases who enjoy critical thinking, and sadly all too often mocking those whose ideas they don’t understand and whose research they have not read. But on the whole they are decent, kind, and intelligent folks – much like most of our age group in the UK?

Now most of you will be shaking your heads by now – my believing friends wondering if I have lost the plot, given how fiercely I argue my corner for various beliefs against the “Skeptic Movement”: my sceptical friends thinking I have lost the plot, because the battle against woo remains white hot. Well stop and think — when did you last see major woo on TV, on any of the terrestrial channels? In my case it was some nonsense talked about the non-existence of a Davidic Kingdom on a Biblical archaeology show — sure it may not have been much of a kingdom, but it existed as even minimalist like Finkelstein admit — we have some archaeological evidence for it. I’m sure I have seen tons of crap about new wonder beauty treatments on the adverts, but on the whole, you have to go to cable to get real woo these days, to the ghosthunting and paranormal shows that even dedicated ghosthunters and psi-researchers like me, and let’s face it even the Little Woggle Spiritualist Ghost Group or whatever, think are utter nonsense, though occasionally entertaining!

OK, so why do I claim the sceptics have won the fight for public consciousness? Let me quote myself from comments on a previous post “However market forced DO influence what is produced, and Wiseman signed a five figure book deal at Frankfurt. Good for him! However I fail to see how we can argue that sceptical books outsell paranormal ones now. Let’s take two excellent sceptical books — Paranormality and Bad Science — both Amazon Top 10 bestsellers. Currently it is at 206. the wonderful Bad Science, two years after its release is at 281. The best selling psychic woo book is at 1,206! The first actual parapsychological book I find, on NDE, is at 43,319, and though much woo can be found before, and the first hard core academic parapsi book is Irwin & Watt’s Parapsychology (despite heavy plugging by me) which comes in at #13,472. I think this tells us something about the influence and market for sceptical books in the UK, as opposed to the market for woo and academic parapsychology??? The fight for sceptics to be heard has long since ended, and I would say among readers is done and dusted?”

So let’s try an experiment. Let’s look at books by Goldacre, Wiseman, Dawkins, Randi and Shermer – sure all heavy hitting public intellectuals — and then look at books by the household names of the paranormal — Derek Acorah, Colin Fry, Most Haunted, TAPS (the American ghost group who have their own popular TV show) and Lord help us Sylvia Browne. Who will rank highest in this top ten? I’ll take the first book listed by each, and use today’s sales rankings.

Richard Wiseman, Paranormality, (2011), #202

Ben Goldacre, Bad Science, (2009), #285

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion, (2007), #481

Colin Fry, By Your Side, (2010), #8,955

Sylvia Browne, Life on the Other Side, (2004) #29,835

John Edward, Infinite Quest, (2010) #67,128

Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things, (2007)  #78,740

TAPS, Seeking Spirits, (2009) #94,292

Derek Acorah, The Psychic World of …, (2005), #146,886

Most Haunted , Official Guide, (2005), #213,332

James Randi, Flim Flam, (1994), #261,312

Look at the sales rankings. Now the problem is the way publishers work books sell in volume initially, then tail off. I can’t do a  proper analysis of total units sold, as Amazon do not give away that data — but we can try dividing the sales ranks by number of years since published? Still the picture is clear – bear in mind the huge gap between the highest ranked book sales and the lower ones — scepticism sells in the UK market??

I’ll write more on this I am sure, but I’ll throw it open to discussion now…

cj x

On Thin Ice? The Blessed Bishop of Lincoln!

Well snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow. The roads were impassable, or so the media said, in large parts of the country.  Panic buying has set in in some places, as the tabloids helpfully said, reassuring the public with useful headlines about food running out in the shops and causing much more.  In short much like last winter!

So it comes as a relief to hear that the Church has at last decided to lend a hand, and the following rather fun story from the BBC last week made me smile.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lincolnshire-11805752

The Bishop of Lincoln will bless Lincolnshire’s gritters in the hope of cutting the number of winter crashes.

The Right Reverend Dr John Saxbee, who retires in January, has blessed the county’s fleet each year since 2003.

He said past ceremonies had been followed by a reduction in road deaths, which was “perhaps not a coincidence”.

The blessing takes place at Sturton by Stow on 7 December, with church leaders simultaneously carrying out ceremonies at the county’s other depots.

Bishop Saxbee said: “These annual ‘Blessing of the Gritters’ events have coincided with a dramatic reduction in the number of fatalities on Lincolnshire’s roads.

“Perhaps that is not a coincidence, and as I look to my retirement in January I hope and pray that driving carefully and arriving safely will continue to matter to all who use our road network in the years ahead.”

Well, I’m all for the Bishop! Such a blessing, regardless of his rather hedged comments on whether it is efficacious or not – and let us face it, it raises so many theological questions I’m not even going to start – does something to make the Church relevant, and if it does have a positive effect on road safety statistics  then even better!  On sceptic forums however the response has been a bit more reserved, even unkind. I think the issue is that people have read the service as some kind of magical rite, and felt that it was supposed to have a definite effect. I think if it did, we would all be out praying right now.

Cheltenham High Street, January 2009

Amusingly a lot of  folks have pointed out that correlation is not cause, and have looked for other reasons for the decline in road traffic fatalities in Lincolnshire; the truth is that the picture there is similar to the general decline across the UK, for which we can all be thankful.  Being CJ I set about investigating.

 

Ok, from the Department of Transport figures to 2008, being all I have easy access to, Lincolnshire Road Deaths, and after the slash / Norfolk road deaths and then the / third set are Suffolk road deaths. I chose Norfolk & Suffolk as similar terrain in part, and as far as i know the bishops there do not bless the gritters!

1999 – 104 / 71 / 48
2000 – 71 / 75 / 56
2001 – 84 / 75 / 53
2002 – 91 / 77 / 43
2003 – 104 / 62 / 60 * blessing starts winter 2003
2004 – 77 / 63 / 42
2005 – 69 / 53 / 36
2006 – 66 / 66 / 47
2007 – 79 / 56 / 39
2008 – 51 / 38 / 31

I have no later data. What is clear is a) Lincolnshire has a higher rate of fatalities than East Anglia does, but all three are in decline.

Not wanting to try and work out which 2003 deaths were before the blessing and which after, I just did the obvious simple maths – average of deaths prior to 2003, and post 2003.

Lincolnshire

Preblessing 87.5
Post-blessing 68.4
Drop of 22%

Now the two un-blessed counties!

Norfolk

Preblessing 74.5
Post-blessing 55.2
Drop of 26%

Suffolk

Preblessing 50
Post-blessing 39
Drop of 22%

Conclusion: Blessing, while admirable and worthy, has not resulted in any effect on road deaths as far as I can see in the county. Still good publicity for road safety awareness.

Well, I guess my research is a bit coarse – one would not expect gritters to have much effect on road deaths except in the winter, and I could therefore say take fatality numbers in November, December, January & February for each county.   I only note this because my methodology is a bit crude, and could in theory be masking an effect, as I’m testing total RTA fatalities per annum per county, rather than the actual “claim” made, in as far as there was one.

So as a prayer experiment a negative, but I still thank God for Bishops like Lincoln who actually do something and care about real issues, and long may he be blessed.

cj x