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Jacob's Ladder
Patrick Allen
A paper delivered at the Sixth Ecumenical Conference for Christian
Parapsychology, at Lincoln, on 9 September 2003. Patrick Allen has
worked in advertising, teaching and nature conservation. His interest in
the paranormal was sparked by a series of precognitive dreams about
horse racing. He is not the first, though, to have learned (from painful
experience) that some Higher Law prohibits profit. He now lives in
Cambridge.
A paper delivered at the
Sixth Ecumenical Conference for
Christian Parapsychology, at Lincoln, on
9 September 2003. Patrick Allen has
worked in advertising, teaching and
nature conservation. His interest in the
paranormal was sparked by a series of
precognitive dreams about horse racing.
He is not the first, though, to have
learned (from painful experience) that
some Higher Law prohibits profit. He now
lives in Cambridge.
My text is taken from the
voluminous writings of the Blessed
Richard Dawkins: ‘The paranormal is
bunk. Those who try to sell it to us are
fakes and charlatans.’ So, fellow fakes
and charlatans, how should we respond?
Well, for the moment I am going to turn
aside from the barbs of the amiable
professor (which is not necessarily the
same thing as turning the other cheek)
and suggest that for us there is a more
worrisome foe. And one closer to home.
Indeed a fifth column in our midst.
Many Anglican clergy,
probably a majority, are to a greater or
lesser extent sceptical of and often
downright hostile to the paranormal in
any of its many-splendoured forms. But
what is Christianity, for heaven’s sake,
shorn if its paranormal essence? To find
champions of the godly in bed with
arch-foe Richard Dawkins is unsettling,
to say the least. For in the words of
another fervent atheist, Matthew Parris,
writing in The Times last August,
‘Stripped of the supernatural, the
Church is on a losing wicket.’ Parris is
surely right on this one.
Perhaps it shouldn’t
surprise us that in an increasingly
secular age, congregations are
shrinking. They do not readily trust
such utterly paranormal events as, for
example, the Resurrection – especially
when they learn from a poll of 2000
clergy that one-third of Anglican male
priests and one-half of women priests
are themselves sceptical. (In
parenthesis it should be said that we
should not look to the Catholic Church
as a natural ally, only last February a
proclamation from the Vatican thundered
against New Age heresies – once again a
target broad enough to include our own
highly respectable Fellowship.)
Of course we must recognise
that proof of biblical happenings after
2000 years is not possible. Our belief,
our Faith, cannot be underpinned by
proof – in the modern-day sense of the
word. On the other hand belief in
certain facets of the paranormal,
extrasensory perception in particular,
no longer requires faith. It simply
requires an open mind – that is, one
that is not invincibly hostile – which
is prepared to look at the evidence.
While scepticism is healthy, even
necessary, it should not, as it commonly
is, be rooted in the insistence that
phenomena, to be acceptable, must abide
by the laws of physics as currently
understood.
Leaving to one side
anecdotal evidence, some of it
remarkably solid, laboratory evidence of
ESP is now overwhelming. Charges of
fraud, or flawed design, or naïve grasps
of statistics can no longer be made to
hold water. The sceptics’ fall-back
strategy is simply to ignore the
findings, thus ducking the challenge
they pose to orthodoxy. About once a
fortnight (or so it seems), yet another
book from yet another expert purporting
to have solved such knotty conundrums as
the workings of the mind or the mystery
of consciousness receives rave reviews
from camp followers and prominent
display in the classier bookshops. But
consult the index to see how that
plaguey ghost in the machine, the
paranormal, is dealt with and you’ll
either draw a blank – no mention
whatever, entirely ignored – or find it
brusquely dismissed. A typical example
(this one from a book called The End of
Science by the American science writer
John Horgan) runs as follows: ‘If you
truly believe in modern physics, you are
unlikely to give much credence to ESP.’
Which must be distressing news for all
those true believers in physics and ESP
– a number which includes the physicist
and Nobel laureate Brian Josephson.
Every now and then a book
does surface which demonstrates
irrefutably the reality of ESP and which
cannot be shunted aside. Or can it? A
few years back saw the publication of a
book which the Scientific and Medical
Network (not known for being a bunch of
scientific illiterates) made their Book
of the Year. It was called The Conscious
Universe. The conscious universe – what
sort of mystical nonsense is that? But
beneath the title was an even more
inflammatory subtitle: The Scientific
Truth of Psychic Phenomena. The truth of
psychic phenomena! The scientific truth!
This is worse than mystical nonsense –
it is dangerous nonsense. Fire the
heretic! Well, in Good Queen Mary’s days
this would, quite literally, have been
his fate. But public burnings have gone
out of fashion and so the author, Dean
Radin, an entirely reputable American
professor of psychology, was ‘simply’
given his marching orders: immediate
dismissal from his university
research-and-teaching post – without
explanation. But silence can be
eloquent. And shooting the messenger
bears its own message.
To the orthodox scientist,
perhaps the most vexing aspect of
Radin’s book is, paradoxically, the
highly conservative means by which the
‘scientific truth’ of psi is
established. It is in the experimental
laboratory that Radin, with the help of
such unmystical tools as random-number
generators, uncovers the evidence for
the belief enshrined in his book’s
provocative title – evidence amounting
to odds of billions to one against
chance. The Gaia hypothesis - which
regards the Earth in its totality as a
living, self-correcting organism – is an
outrageously mystical concept. A
conscious universe goes one better – or,
as many would see it, one worse.
Prominent, even eminent,
physicists are fond of telling us that a
Theory of Everything is just around the
corner, and that thereafter it will only
be a matter of mopping-up operations.
(And of course we shall then know the
mind of God – a jokey remark, because we
shall then know there is no God to have
a mind.)
Now the notion that
physics has already solved all the big
issues has been around for a very long
time. Here, for instance, is a
pronouncement of Nobel laureate Albert
Michelson:
The more important
fundamental laws and facts of physical
science have all been discovered and
these are now so firmly established that
the possibility of their ever being
supplanted on consequence of new
discoveries is remote.
And when was this
ringing declaration of certitude made?
Over 100 years ago – in 1902, before the
birth of Relativity or Quantum
Mechanics.
Back to Richard Dawkins for
a moment. Oxford’s genial Professor for
the Public Understanding of Science,
think of him what you will, is smart
enough to have realised that religion
and the paranormal are linked. Expose
the paranormal as fraud or vacuous
wish-fulfilment and you will have sawn
off the lower rungs of the ladder that
reaches to the heavens. A solid prop to
faith will be no more. And demolition of
faith is his primary target.
Now it has to be admitted
that the mockery of the anti-God
crusaders is hitting home. People worry
that science has exposed traditional
belief as old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy,
absurd. No matter that apparently 57% of
Americans think that the world was
created in a week (though a more careful
reading of Genesis would tell them that
they are wrong; God only needed six
days), the ‘thinking’ classes are
increasingly inclined to view theistic
or paranormal talk as empty, indeed
disreputable, chatter. The word
‘rational’ has come to mean ‘that which
is in accord with orthodox science’. Now
my Oxford Dictionary defines rational as
‘sensible, sane, moderate, not absurd,
foolish or extreme’. How does the
paranormal, or at any rate its
mainstream laboratory findings, stack up
against this definition?
‘Sensible, sane’?
Eminently so, I would say: the evidence
is overwhelming. ‘Moderate’? Well, no -
revolutionary, in fact. Moderation is a
good thing – in moderation. But stick
religiously to moderation and your
journey’s end will certainly not be
anything so implausible as, for example,
E=mc². How about ‘not absurd, foolish or
extreme’? Plainly, given the weight of
the evidence, belief in the paranormal
is not absurd and not foolish. Rather it
could and should be rationally argued
that it is absurd and foolish to
disbelieve. As for ‘extreme’, well, the
paranormal is extremely inconvenient to
moderate scientific opinion. It is the
black hole in the centre of orthodoxy,
the big bang that explodes the hope that
the Holy Grail of a Theory of Everything
will be unearthed any day now. The
paranormal is a real pain and not one to
be carefully examined and found wanting
(that might be a bit risky) but
rubbished unexamined with extreme
polemic.
This is dishonest – and
quite contrary to the spirit of science,
which requires that the quest for truth
be pursued wherever it may lead, no
matter how disturbing to cherished
beliefs. And yet these ‘charlatans’ are
allowed to get away with it – and have
been for a very long time.
Founded in 1882 by academic
luminaries, and with a membership that
included an impressive roll-call of the
great and the good, the Society for
Psychical Research has been around for
more than 120 years. During that time a
weighty body of evidence has been
amassed. But with what effect in the
wider world? Distressingly little. The
media are not shy of the issue. But for
them a century and more of
well-documented data might as well not
exist. Instead of tackling the
fascinating issue of the how of ESP and
the philosophical fall-out of the
paranormal, the media’s invariable
starting – (and indeed end -) point is
that dreary ground-zero question: ‘Does
ESP exist?’ And to help us make up our
minds we can be sure that sooner or
later the Amazing Randi will be called
on to tell us it’s all nonsense.
Or if he’s not available,
there’s always Susan Blackmore whom I
heard say on the radio quite recently:
‘There is no evidence for ESP.’ Now she
knows that’s not true. She’s been in the
game for decades. All right, so her own
laboratory research has been negative –
so she says. In The Conscious Universe,
though, Dean Radin tells us that he has
looked at the laboratory research done
by Susan Blackmore for her doctoral
dissertation. Of the nineteen psi
experiments she undertook, fourteen were
negative, but five were positive – that
is to say, ‘statistically significant’
at odds against chance of 20-1 or
better. But while she adjudged her
results overall as failing to
demonstrate ESP, Radin’s analysis points
to a very different conclusion. The odds
against chance of notching up five
successful experiments out of nineteen
is 500-1. (Certainly a punter who backed
nineteen horses, with five of them
winning at 20-1 or better, would do very
nicely. A £1 bet on all nineteen would
net a profit of at least £86!)
But if Radin found that
Blackmore’s results were positive, why
did she decide they were not? Could it
be – wicked thought – that before
embarking on her doctoral research she
was given to understand by her
‘respectable’ university that a negative
finding would not be held against her?
A few years ago I heard her
lecture in Cambridge. Afterwards I asked
her whether she’d been to Professor
Morris’s laboratories in Edinburgh where
hugely impressive chance-defying results
have been achieved and where visiting
sceptics have been unable to fault
experimental arrangements. ‘No,’ she
admitted, she hadn’t been. ‘But if you
did go,’ I said, ‘you’d expect to find
some experimental design-flaw, I
suppose,’ ‘Yes,’ she replied –
heroically!
Another who would seem to
have taken great care to safeguard
unbelief is the former Dean of Chapel at
Emmanuel College, Don Cupitt. I once
cornered him (rather unsportingly) at
some social gathering and asked him how
he would feel if compelled to accept the
reality of ESP. His jaw dropped. ‘I
would be appalled,’ he said, and shot
from the room.
What are these people so
frightened of? A nasty attack of
cognitive dissonance can be painful, of
course. But that’s their problem, isn’t
it? Well, yes, but alas it’s also ours.
Because, ironically, despite ever
stronger evidence that they are wrong,
the nay-sayers are, as I see it,
becoming ever more strongly entrenched
as the spokesmen for and guardians of
right-thinking thought. Waiting
patiently for a paradigm change is like
waiting for Godot. But worse, because
the anti-God crusaders are being allowed
free rein to spread their gospel of a
world whose author is chance and death
is the end.
Insofar as they have heard
of Near-Death Experiences, these are
explained away as simply being the final
meaningless flickerings of a dying
brain. Brain science just might
(perhaps) be able to account for the
oft-reported and so-welcoming Being of
Light. But, as we have learned from
earlier speakers at this conference,
conversations may be overhead or things
seen while out-of-the body which could
not possibly have been overheard or seen
from within the body. (‘Lucky guesses’,
says Susan Blackmore, predictably.) And
how can neuroscience begin to explain
the supremely positive life-changing
attitude to life – and to death – in so
many of those who return (often most
unwillingly) to their earthly bodies,
bringing with them an ineffable sense of
having tasted a deeper reality whose
hallmark is oneness and love? The
Near-Death Experience tells us that
consciousness is not indissolubly bonded
to body. And this bodiless state is one
of unworldly bliss. Usually.
Not invariably, though. A
prominent exception to the rule is the
experience of Professor A.J. Ayer. One
day in 1988 he choked on a piece of
salmon, was rushed to hospital and
‘died’. That is to say, his heart
stopped for four minutes. However he was
resuscitated to find his good friend,
Beatrice Tourot, waiting by his bedside.
He told her he had met the Masters of
the Universe, two beings from whom
emanated no welcoming white light but a
bright red light that was painful even
when turning away from it. She reports
that he was ‘deeply shaken by his
experience’ (as well he might have
been!), feeling that ‘his world view had
been thrown into doubt’. For a time he
admitted to being a bit more ‘wobbly’
about the existence of an after-life.
But in due course he recovered his lack
of faith and became a ‘born-again
atheist’. His recovery, though, was not
total. His friends now found him much
nicer!
It was back in 1981, in a
lecture delivered at the Mystics and
Scientists Conference, that Professor
Charles Tart, scourge of the timidly
orthodox and a tireless proponent of
what might be called a new ‘science of
spirit’, came out with a heartfelt
lament:
People have a hard time
talking about Near-Death Experiences,
particularly if these experiences happen
in a hospital. Some of the hardest
people to tell them to are doctors.
Doctors are chained to the scientific
tradition where such experiences are not
allowed to happen or must immediately be
dismissed as craziness. But who are the
hardest people of all to tell these
Near-Death Experiences to, the ones who
most resist hearing about them? Priests
and ministers. Priests and ministers do
not want to hear about spiritual
experiences. It might not be a proper
spiritual experience.
Of course that was
twenty-two years ago. Since then, things
have surely moved on a bit. After all,
in recent years the evidence has been
piling up apace. Surely not even the
ranks of Tuscany, today’s doctors and
priests, can scarce forebear to cheer.
Well, if so, the cheering
has been pretty muted. The September
2002 issue of THE CHRISTIAN
PARAPSYCHOLOGIST had a most interesting,
if depressing, article by Dr Anton-
Stephens, a retired consultant
psychiatrist. His theme was not just the
medical profession’s over-concentration
on the material world to the exclusion
of the spiritual but the reluctance (as
he witnessed it time and again) of the
clergy, in general, to offer more than
platitudes to the dying or the bereaved
– with never a mention of Near-Death
Experiences and their relevance to the
prospects of survival. Few priests of
his acquaintance even know of the
existence of our Fellowship. ‘I find
myself wondering,’ writes the good
Doctor, ‘whether a banner or two, a
trumpet blast, even a neon display now
and again, might not come amiss. Is it
unreasonable to ask that we be taken
notice of?’
No, it is surely not
unreasonable. Indeed I would go further.
In the present climate of doubt,
ignorance and militant atheism (dressed
up as rationalism), we surely have a
duty to give a blast upon the trumpet –
even if it is immodestly blowing our own
trumpet. It might not bring the walls of
Jericho crashing down but it sure as
hell would put the skids under the
gospel of scientific orthodoxy with its
insistence, put across with missionary
zeal, that Earth has not anything to
show more fair than the grey barren
flatland of the soulless New Jerusalem.
The woods of Arcady are dead
And over is
their antique Joy;
Of old, the world on
dreaming fed;
Grey Truth is
now her painted toy
The sombre musings of the
poet Yeats are the mast to which the
guardians of orthodoxy have nailed their
gloomy colours. We as a Fellowship,
though, have good reason for believing
that the truth is not grey. Far from it.
We reject orthodoxy’s myopic monochrome
vision as being cripplingly restrictive,
deeply dispiriting and – the crunch
point – wantonly heedless of the
evidence.
Finally, back to our
starting point. The bottom rung of the
ladder to heaven is the paranormal.
Those masquerading as rationalists are
energetically striving to saw it off.
They must be vigorously expelled, their
rationalist posture exposed as
irrational. Will they be converted? No
of course they won’t. invincible
scepticism is…invincible. But trust once
broken is not easily repaired. And when
the public at large comes to understand
that they have been wilfully misled on
the issue of the paranormal, they will
not, I believe, be exactly queuing up
to buy from the same untrustworthy
hucksters brazenly peddling the Death of
God. A nice double whammy, in fact.
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