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Is There a Spirit World?
In the cloudy heights
Live the gods.
Valhalla is their home.
They are spirits of light.
—Richard Wagner, Siegfried, Act I, Scene 2
 
All theists agree that God is a spirit. An atheist does not need to deny that there are spirits. There could be a multitude of spirits and no God—that seems to have been the opinion of the majority of humans throughout most of history, if we restrict the word ‘God’ to the God of classical theism.
Yet anyone who denies that there are any spirits automatically denies that there’s a God, and, like most atheists today, I do deny that there are any spirits.
Let’s first look at direct evidence of spirit activity. Today many theists or generic believers in a spirit world appeal to near-death experiences as evidence, while very few now appeal to ghosts, spirit séances, or demonic possession.
In considering all such phenomena, there are two ways to proceed. We can collect anecdotes and compile a lot of evidence indicating the existence of phenomena that are difficult to explain if we don’t accept the existence of a spirit world. This kind of thing is being done all the time, and is obviously worthless. The problem is that anecdotes get better with retelling and remembering. There is an inbuilt tendency to turn an account into a ‘good story’, by emphasizing confirming aspects and overlooking awkward aspects. The media routinely do this with ‘the news’, but we all do it; it’s only human.
What is needed is to interrogate all the witnesses, looking for fraud or flights of fancy, and setting aside anything that is unreliable (for example, because it was not recorded as having been observed until weeks or months after the event).

Near-Death Experiences

Sometimes someone suffers an injury, comes close to death, and is apparently unconscious, but later recovers. And sometimes someone who survives this experience tells a story like the following:
I seemed to be hovering outside my body, observing what was going on, including the efforts of doctors to save my life. I felt an overwhelming sense of peace. I saw a dark tunnel and at the end of it a light. Many incidents from my life were swiftly re-enacted in my memory. I had a strong sense of making a decision on whether to ‘return’ to life or not. A being dressed in white appeared and informed me that it was not yet time for me to go. The whole episode was intensely vivid and ‘real’—much more ‘real’ than a dream—but also somehow different from ordinary waking life.
In some cases, individuals who have undergone a near-death experience, though formerly skeptical about religion or afraid of death, find the experience transforming, and become committed to some religious organization or ideology. In other cases, people report merely that they have become less afraid of death.
Near death experiences are one type of out of body experiences. The experience of floating above one’s body and being able to witness it as if from outside also occurs in other cases, without any suggestion of being near death. It is sometimes prompted by heavy doses of drugs like marijuana, but most people who take such drugs do not have out of the body experiences and most people having out of the body experiences have not taken any such drugs.
What catches the imagination of journalists, of enthusiasts for the paranormal, and of some theists, are reports that the ‘disembodied’ person, floating above their body, is able to accurately describe what is going on. Newspaper accounts often emphasize that the person witnesses accurate details that they could not possibly have known about if the experience were purely imaginary. They may, for example, give precise descriptions of the conversation of the doctors and of the equipment in the emergency room. A much cited example is that of Maria, who in her wanderings outside her body, saw a tennis shoe stuck in the third-floor ledge of the hospital building, with a worn patch by the little toe and the lace stuck under the heel. Later an investigator, after a very thorough search, found the tennis shoe, just as described! Or so the story goes.
These references to external corroboration show that everyone understands what would count as evidence in this area. If people really could leave their bodies and float away, visually perceiving things without the use of their eyes, as demonstrated by their ability to accurately describe things they could not have otherwise known about, this would indicate an unknown aspect of human beings which would open up a marvelous new field for investigation and overturn many assumptions scientists have made.
There’s abundant evidence that out of the body experiences, including near-death experiences, actually do occur. People are not making up these experiences: they are real. Though details of the experiences are colored by prevalent beliefs, some features of the experiences are common across different cultures and at different historical periods, as anyone who has read The Egyptian Book of the Dead and The Tibetan Book of the Dead already knows. But as to whether some part of the person has really left the body, and is able to accurately describe what happens from a vantage point outside their body, here there is no good corroboration. Years of investigation by researchers have failed to verify a single well-documented case of any such phenomenon. This is, of course, rather sad. But it is true.
The experiences can be explained by various physiological causes, such as deprivation of oxygen to the brain.86 But what of the supposed accuracy of observations made by people undergoing these experiences?
When investigators have followed up and interviewed the subjects of experiences and other witnesses, they have found that accounts in newspapers and in books committed to belief in a spirit world tend to omit contrary facts and over-emphasize confirming facts. For example, a person while out of the body may describe a number of details, some of which would be easy to arrive at by guesswork and some of which are incorrect, and perhaps one or two of which are both unusual and accurate. A newspaper account will fail to mention the incorrect observations, and report the correct ones as though they were typical. This occurs because an inexplicable or paranormal event is, in journalistic terms, ‘a good story’, whereas someone’s imagination playing tricks on them under the impact of unusual stresses to the brain is not much of a story.
Some cases of correct observations can be explained by the fact that people judged to be ‘unconscious’ may not be completely closed off from picking up some clues. Unconsciousness is a matter of degree, and it has been shown that people under anesthesia, or otherwise supposed to be unconscious, do sometimes observe what is going on near them, or what is being done to their bodies. For example, a person who correctly reports ‘seeing’ the doctors doing something to a part of her body might in fact be able to sense that medical procedure through the affected body part, and then translate this into a ‘vision from above’ in which they imagine themselves seeing the doctors do something in that area.
As for the really striking cases of accurate observation, like Maria and the tennis shoe, it has never been possible to confirm any such case.87 Investigators have always found that the original witnesses are untraceable or refuse to be interviewed, or that the episode was enhanced by whoever reported it. I’m sorry, I really am.
An account of investigations into near-death experiences is given by Susan Blackmore. Blackmore herself had an intense out of the body experience in her youth, and went on to become a research psychologist, devoting decades of her life to research into out of the body and near-death experiences, and other paranormal phenomena. Her book, Beyond the Body (1982) became the standard work on out of the body experiences, and then her book Dying to Live (1993) became the standard work on near-death experiences. She started out with a strong inclination to believe in the possibility of paranormal phenomena, but gradually came to the conclusion that no convincing evidence for such phenomena can be found.
It has recently been reported that out-of-body experiences can be produced by electrical stimulation of a specific region of the brain,88 though the findings of a single study like this should be viewed with suspicion until it has been confirmed independently.
If any good evidence that near-death experiences were accurate, in the sense that the personality was leaving the body and roaming around able to observe what was going on, this would compel us to take more seriously the hypothesis of an afterlife. It would not, however, be very congenial to traditional Christianity or Islam. Near-death experiences, with the same overwhelming sense of peace, security, and freedom from anxiety, occur to individuals of all religious affiliations and none. Hellish experiences have been reported, but are very rare (and confined to cases studied by those investigators committed to a belief in Hell). The notion that nearly everyone is going to Heaven regardless of their prior religious affiliation is quite popular today. But it is very much at odds with both the New Testament and the Quran. Furthermore, if there were an afterlife, it would not by itself indicate the existence of a God.

GHOSTS

Close study of hauntings or reported appearances of ghosts have failed to find any serious evidence of anything that lacks a natural explanation.
Both Britain and America have a classic case of haunting, in both cases thorough investigation showed that the haunting was due to fraud. The British case was the haunting of Borley Rectory, popularized by psychic investigator Harry Price in the 1940s. It was later shown that Price and the wife of the rector had staged many of the ghostly doings, and Price lavishly embellished other reports he received.89 The American case is the ‘Amityville Horror’. Six people were murdered in a house in Amityville, New York, in 1974. A couple who later moved into the house reported terrifying and spectacular manifestations of supernatural entities. It was later shown that the entire Amityville episode was a money-making scheme concocted by that couple in collaboration with the lawyer who had defended the 1974 murderer.90

SPIRIT SÉANCES

There was a huge boom in spiritualism from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1920s. It was repeatedly demonstrated that mediums who could produce appearances of spirits on stage were doing this by trickery. The most publicized exposure—though it was only one of many—was the sustained effort by the superb stage illusionist and escapologist Harry Houdini. Large cash prizes were awarded (and are still there for the taking) for anyone who can generate these effects in a way which cannot be exposed by practiced stage magicians.
Most Christian denominations have always denounced spiritualism and have usually claimed that the effects are produced, not by the spirits of deceased relatives, but by demons masquerading as these departed souls. This theory is equally contrary to the evidence. The effects are produced by unscrupulous trickery, to make money from credulous dupes.

DEMON POSSESSION

Demon possession continues to occur in communities where belief in possession remains powerful. Observers are sometimes impressed by the fact that the personality of the possessor is so different from the personality of the possessed person. A similar phenomenon occurs in some cases of ‘multiple personality disorder’, where no one claims that demon possession is involved. That a person can switch from one personality to another doesn’t seem to demand a supernatural explanation. If the alleged possessing entity demonstrated knowledge the possessed person could not have acquired, this would be evidence of something very unusual, perhaps showing the existence of a spirit world. But no such case has been documented.
The general conclusion on all these different types of spirit manifestations is that investigators looking for spirits have failed to find them. The more precise their instruments and the more fore-armed they are against fraud (perpetrated by fleshly humans), the more thoroughly they are able to rule out any indications of spirits. Spirits, then, either have almost nothing to do with the physical world, or they are shyer than hobbits, and especially liable to be scared off by scientific scrutiny.
Researchers into spirit doings, if they are at all rigorous, always find one of the following three outcomes:
1. The reported phenomena do not occur when the investigators are looking.
2. Strange phenomena are observed, but they can be explained by non-spirit causes other than deliberate fraud.
3. Strange phenomena are observed, but are results of fraud.
It’s a reasonable surmise, and I believed it’s the truth, that these three categories exhaust the phenomena.
Purported spirit activity belongs to a broad class of reported occurrences that used to be labeled ‘supernatural’ and are now usually called ‘paranormal’. I don’t like either of these terms. If the phenomena do really exist, then they are natural and even ‘normal’.
So-called paranormal activity encompasses a range of very different phenomena, all more or less independent of each other. For example, astrology could imaginably be real and telepathy (‘extrasensory perception’, a form of ‘psi’) not real, or the other way round. The evidence so far indicates that neither of them is real. Neither of these two, or of many other paranormal claims, has anything inherently to do with spirits or with God.

What Are Spirits Like?

Sometimes the spirit world is seen as rather like the physical world, only in a different area of reality, separate from the physical world. A wraith or phantom is supposed to look and sound like a living human body. Folklore has it that a ghost usually or routinely cannot interact like a physical body with other physical bodies. For example, in many ghost stories, the ghost can be seen and heard, but not touched.
If the intangible ghost looks and talks like a human, does it have the internal physiology of a human? Does it eat, breathe, and defecate? The spirit world of Miyazaki’s Spirited Away seems to be a fully realized physical world, but (to employ the conventional terms of fantasy fiction) on a different plane or in a different dimension from our familiar physical world. Movement from one plane to the other is rare and unusual; normally the two planes co-exist, the spiritual plane imperceptible to those in the familiar physical plane.
There are different views on the relation of spirits to bodies. Some people seem to think that the human personality is the spirit, with the body worn like a suit of clothes. Others take the view that something essential to our identity is inherently bodily. Aquinas famously stated: “I am not my soul,” and one strand of Christian tradition views bodies as essential for the expression of the soul.
While some early Christians thought of the resurrected Jesus as a phantom, and some thought he had always been a phantom, the belief of the sect of Christianity which managed to displace all the others and become Orthodoxy was that ‘resurrection’ meant literal bodily resurrection. Jesus’s body disappears from the tomb; it does not remain there while his ghost appears to others. The resurrected Jesus eats and drinks, and asks Doubting Thomas to feel the wounds of his crucifixion. These elements of the story may have been added precisely because of sectarian disputes with Christians who held a more ‘spiritual’, less carnal, conception. The book of Revelation foresees a literal bodily resurrection, in which bodies are recovered from burial in the ground and from drowning at sea, and brought back to life.
There’s no mention in the Torah of a general resurrection of the dead. It makes its appearance in later Hebrew scriptures, such as Ezekiel and Daniel. The mainstream of Judaism before the appearance of Christianity, known to Christian tradition as “the Pharisees,” had come to accept such a resurrection and this belief was incorporated into Christianity. Such Jewish and Christian thinking sees it as very important that the actual physical substance of the dead persons shall be restored to them, something that now seems outlandish, because we know that every atom in our bodies is periodically replaced. Aquinas felt obliged to argue in detail that, even in the hypothetical case of a man who ate nothing but the flesh of other humans, it would be feasible for every human body to be literally reconstituted and resurrected.
Maimonides held that people in the afterlife don’t have bodies. To reconcile this with the general resurrection, he maintained that those resurrected continue to live for a while, and eventually die, whereupon their spirits enter the afterlife. Christians have usually held that the resurrected are given new bodies, “spiritual bodies,” dispensing with some bodily functions such as eating, but still possessing some sort of physical body for all time. Catholics, for example, hold that Jesus even now has a body, though not one that performs embarrassing functions. If the resurrection body is an utterly new body, we wonder why Jesus’s crucifixion wounds persist in his post-resurrection body.
If we move away from the quasi-physical spirit-world of traditional Christianity, and yet accommodate such phenomena as ‘seeing ghosts’, we arrive at the idea that ghosts look and sound like human bodies and yet lack internal physiologies. Why, then, would they look and sound like live human bodies? Why would they nearly always appear clothed?
An obvious answer would be that ghosts have a human bodily appearance because that’s the appearance they had in their former earthly life, or perhaps in the case of non-human spirits like angels, they can adopt a human or quasi-human appearance, the better to communicate with humans. Perhaps ghosts are a projection of what we consider the mental. In other words, the ghost of a dead person is that person’s mind, or a projection of the mind, and the way we see the ghost is as that person’s mind visualizes itself, like Neo’s “residual self-image” in The Matrix.
One conception of the relation of spirit and body is that the spirit is like a software program. The program can only be run on some piece of hardware (a body), but it could conceivably be filed away when no body was available, and run on a different body at some later date. It could even be destroyed and then reconstituted, provided someone knew all the code. But we have no confirmation of this: we haven’t found any database where everyone’s souls might be on file.
The world of subjective experiences—the world of hopes, fears, dreams, emotions—does certainly exist. The capacity to love other people exists, and the ability to respond to music exists. These things comprise what some people call ‘the soul’. But, as far as we have been able to determine, these things are entirely dependent on the continuing existence of intact brains. If, for instance, the brain is damaged, the subjective experiences can become restricted, and if the brain is very badly damaged in specific ways, these experiences fizzle out completely, as far as we can tell. If the brain is deprived of oxygen for a few minutes, the person has gone, forever beyond recall. Alzheimer’s Disease is a disease of the brain, and it leads to the disappearance of all fine and noble qualities formerly manifested by the body’s occupant (however passionate and virtuous the occupant may have been before the onset of the disease).
Where has this person’s spirit gone? Where’s the flame of a candle once it’s been blown out? The believer in a spirit has to maintain that the spirit still exists, only its ability to use the body as its instrument has been lost. (It seems to follow that we could dispose of that body without doing anything wrong, but the believer in spirits rarely draws this conclusion.) The brain damage is like the damage to a radio that prevents it from picking up broadcasts, though the broadcasts are still out there. This would be a reasonable hypothesis to pursue if we had some way of detecting that broadcast signal, but we don’t.

God’s Brainless Mind

If the core notion of a spirit is a disembodied mind, then we have to consider the possibility that there just are no spirits: that the universe is completely empty of minds, except where these happen to spring into existence in association with brains. No one is likely to dispute that this is true of other subjective experiences: pain or the sensation of being tickled do not exist all by themselves before animals develop nervous systems, and the sensations yellowness or blueness do not exist all by themselves before animals develop eyes.
The problem for people who insist that there are spirits is that these spirits are always totally undetectable. The spirit world is supposed to interact with the non-spirit world in numerous and definite ways, yet aside from the assertion that these interactions occur, no other spirit activity is observed. This somehow doesn’t seem very likely.
Spirits are supposed to have something to do with the thoughts that go through people’s minds. But if this is true, one way of thinking about spirits is closed off: we can’t say that they don’t have physical effects. Spirits, then, must be able to affect physical events in regular ways. But in that case, it becomes simply astounding that spirits apparently never have any other physical effects, beyond those that we assume to fill in the gaps in our knowledge of how thoughts relate to events in brains. If we were to propose searching for spirit activity using highly sensitive instruments, in the way that scientists searched for the cosmic background radiation, believers in spirits would laugh at us, and say that we hadn’t gotten the point. But why are they so sure that spirits will never have detectable physical consequences, if they also believe that spirits routinely and reliably have physical consequences in our brains?
Most versions of theism propose that God is a bodyless and therefore brainless mind. At one time some people thought they might be able to locate God’s enormous brain. We tend to smile at this, yet no one has ever observed a brainless mind. All the minds of which we have any knowledge are somehow intimately associated with those body parts we call brains.

A Parable of Reflections

We sometimes see reflected images, in mirrors, water surfaces, and the like. Suppose an ideological movement were to arise, called Reflectivism, contending that what we see in these reflections is a glimpse of a superior world, even the fundamentally real world, while our apparently ‘real world’ is actually generated by the world seen in reflections, and dependent upon it. We ought to govern our lives by paying close attention to what we see in the reflected images, since these are more momentous than anything on this side of the reflective surface. The actual real world, the origin and source of our seemingly real world, is the looking-glass world. How could we conduct a discussion with the Reflectivists?
• We could point out that the world behind the surface seems to tally quite well with the world this side of the surface. The Reflectivist will respond that this is just what we should expect, if the world on the other side generates the world on this side.
• We could then say that in some respects the world on the other side is not quite so crisp and clear as the world this side, and is sometimes distorted. But (the Reflectivist will point out) this could be due to our imperfect way of looking, our enslavement to the depraved point of view that over-rates the ephemeral world on this side. What look like distortions are really glimpses of a higher reality.
• We could argue that the world on this side is here all the time, while very special conditions are required to make the world on the other side appear. The Reflectivist’s answer is obvious: the world on the other side is there all the time, in fact it was there before the world this side, brought it into being, and will outlast it. But special receptive conditions are needed on our side so that we can peer into that more wondrous other world.
• We could say that there really is no ‘other side’, and look behind the surface (at the back of the mirror, for instance), to reveal that the reflected objects aren’t really there, but the Reflectivist will tut-tut and say that this isn’t the way to look, and simply exposes our obsession with the superficial.
• We could assert that we know the laws of optics, and we can therefore explain how the image apparently on the other side is produced, without there really being another side. To this the Reflectivist has two replies. First, any little detail of the reflective image we couldn’t fully explain would be cited as proof that our much-vaunted laws of optics don’t tell the whole story. Second, the Reflectivist would say that these optical laws are indeed the laws governing our ability to get in touch with the real world on the other side. These optical laws are therefore all very well in their way, but what appalling arrogance to suppose that they can truly get to the heart of what is going on, behind the mirror!
Asked to comment on this parable, the believer in spirits would point out that the laws of optics are very well understood whereas the laws governing the relations between consciousness and processes in the brain are still largely a mystery.
This is perfectly true, but so far, neuroscience has not turned up anything that indicates generation of thoughts from something located outside the brain. We can easily imagine that in the future, brain scientists might begin to make discoveries which would compel them to entertain the hypothesis that consciousness is projected into brains by spirits. This would be a reversal of direction: up to now, science has kept shrinking the area of observed reality in which spirits might be hiding. If it did happen, it would be wonderful and exciting, like all those revolutionary occasions when scientific investigation opens up a whole new world of knowledge. But it hasn’t happened yet.

Can Science Explain Everything?

Theists commonly say that science ‘can’t explain everything’. How arrogant it would be to suppose that it could!
In the English language, there’s a common tendency to use the word ‘science’ to mean empirical science, and even more narrowly, empirical science as it applies to aspects of reality which do not involve the effects of consciousness. Thus, ‘science’ may be taken to mean physics, chemistry, astronomy, and biology, but not economics, psychology, or history—which empirically investigate human activities—nor logic, mathematics, or philosophy—which are not empirical disciplines at all. Science thus defined also excludes such pursuits as interpreting Moby-Dick or the U.S. Constitution.
Can physics, chemistry, biology, and the like explain everything? Of course not, and neither should the specific techniques of these disciplines be uncritically copied by other disciplines. We don’t want people to use Bunsen burners or particle accelerators to decide whether Hamlet’s madness is entirely feigned or to identify the causes of the French Revolution. Each area of reality should be investigated by appropriate methods.
There’s a broader sense of the word ‘science’, more closely corresponding to the scope of the German word ‘Wissenschaft’, which includes these other disciplines. It includes the social sciences, mathematics, and philosophy, as well as the natural sciences. Science, in this broader sense, is concerned with getting at the truth, finding out about reality. Science in this sense does not exclude any detectable phenomena from consideration. Some branches of science, as a matter of practical convenience, may of course give up on an endless quest for phenomena which have so far not been detected.91
Various arguments are offered for the existence of God. Sometimes, more rarely now than in the past, the arguments make claims which physicists, chemists, or biologists are competent to test. More often the arguments are of a very general nature which does not lend itself to empirical testing. This means that the arguments can be tested by philosophical reasoning (most often metaphysics, but occasionally other branches of philosophy, such as epistemology or ethics).
Theists often suggest that since empirical natural science can’t explain everything, something is left over for metaphysics, which they then equate with religion or ‘the spiritual’, which in turn they identify with theism. But the correct response to this is straightforward: we do indeed need metaphysics, and within metaphysics atheism is a possible theory, which happens to be true.
A commonly held view is that science excludes certain kinds of question from the outset. It doesn’t, for instance, acknowledge the existence of miracles, and so miracles, if they occur, are to be investigated by different methods. Both theists and scientists often give voice to this view. I think it’s mistaken. Science doesn’t usually investigate miracles for exactly the same reason that it doesn’t usually investigate the once-popular canals on Mars: because preliminary investigation has drawn a blank, and it therefore looks very much as though there is nothing to investigate.
Many of the types of phenomena now accepted within ‘science’ are areas which people in the past might have considered supernatural, paranormal, or occult. Gravity was once viewed with suspicion because it involved action at a distance, regarded as occult. (Galileo refused to accept that the Moon caused the tides, partly because of this distaste for occult qualities.) Magnetic fields and hypnosis are examples of areas which were once viewed with a similar kind of suspicion. Blindsight, in which people who believe that they are blind can see things, without being aware that they can see them, has recently been demonstrated to be a reality.
If we tried to explain these phenomena to someone living in, say, ancient Egypt, he might easily conclude that we were talking about something spiritual or supernatural. The reason that gravity, magnetic fields, hypnosis, and blindsight are no longer viewed as ‘non-material’ is because they have been found to exist. Their effects are detectable; they can be investigated. When some people unwisely say that ‘science is only concerned with what is natural’, this means no more and no less than that science will not expend resources on investigating entities which are totally undetectable by any means whatsoever. But this follows trivially from the fact that science is serious about getting at the truth. It’s quite wrong to infer that there is some area of reality which science would refuse to investigate if the opportunity arose.
The fact that phenomena which would once have been considered occult are now embraced by natural science illustrates that even natural science does not permanently and irrevocably rule out any imagined entity. But obviously, if science is to make progress, to extend our acquisition of true or approximately true theories, it must arrive, at least provisionally, at conclusions which deny the existence of some entities. Science, as the pursuit of truth, would be nothing but a sham if scientists were not allowed to arrive at the conclusion, on the basis of their enquiries to date, that certain types of entities just don’t exist. No one reproaches natural science with narrow-minded dogmatism because it denies the existence of the philosopher’s stone, phlogiston, the ether, protoplasm, or the life force. To spend time and money on endlessly searching for
Sidebar: Natural and Supernatural
Theists sometimes say that science is committed to a naturalistic or physicalist worldview. Some theists think that this is a prejudice on the part of scientists. Other theists say that it’s only right: the scientists are experts on the natural or physical world, while other people (usually the theologians of whichever sect the theist adheres to) are experts on the spiritual world.
Some scientists are quite ready to let the theists have the spiritual world, because they see it as a tactful way to avoid any appearance of a conflict between ‘religion’ and ‘science’, which they feel would be bad for the social status of science.
How do we mark the distinction between natural and supernatural? There are two ways we might do this:
1. We might count as supernatural all those entities which proponents of the supernatural call ‘supernatural’. So, spirits of all kinds, demons, jinns, poltergeists, God, godlings, and angels would be included in the supernatural.
2. We might try to define the difference between ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’. For example, we might say that natural phenomena conform to laws of nature whereas spiritual phenomena don’t.
Now let’s consider the spirit world, first as demarcated in #1 and then as demarcated in #2.
 
My opinion about spiritual or supernatural entities as demarcated in #1 is that they don’t exist. This is the conclusion of past investigations. So far, all serious attempts to detect any spirits have drawn a blank. At any moment this conclusion might be overturned by new evidence.
There are numerous episodes in the history of science where a whole new world of enquiry is opened up by the demonstration that hitherto denied phenomena do, after all, exist. There was a time when scientists did not believe that rocks fall from the sky, or that continents move. There was a time when scientists did not suspect that there were types of light (infra red and ultra violet) invisible to human sight, though visible to some other animal species. Prior to 1895, scientists had no suspicion of the existence of x-rays or any other nuclear radiation. There’s no reason to assume that the age of big surprises is past.
So the non-existence of spirit and other supernatural phenomena is not something we have to accept before we begin to investigate the world around us. It’s something we have to accept, provisionally, after we have done a lot of such investigation. In the sense of #1, then, ‘naturalism’ is thrust upon us by the evidence, but we are not wedded to it at the deepest level. We don’t believe in ‘the supernatural’—for exactly the same reason that we don’t believe in cold fusion. If new evidence came to light, we might be forced to accept that spirits exist and that ‘naturalism’ (defined in this way) is false.
Now consider the matter in terms of #2. Here, I maintain that we cannot define the ‘supernatural’ because there can be nothing outside nature. I am definitely not saying that there can be no spirit world because it would be outside nature. I am saying that if there is a spirit world, and it is just the way believers in the spirit world say it is, then it can only be part of nature. It must operate according to regularities which we call laws of nature (though they might be laws very different from those we now apply to non-spirit reality).
This is clear just from what believers in the spirit world tell us. Consider ghosts. They appear to humans and they often appear in human form. Obviously, spirits could not appear to humans unless those spirits conformed to regularities, and somehow those regularities in the spirit world could be made to mesh with regularities in our physical world. The spirit world, then, cannot be totally chaotic or without any order. Its laws may be very different from what we now call the ‘physical’ world, but this is what we would expect: so are chemical laws very different from electromagnetic laws.
these entities would be pointless. Exactly the same goes for gods, angels, and demons.
At one time it looked as though telepathy (extra-sensory perception) might be demonstrated to exist, but more stringent attention to experimental design has eliminated the earlier positive (though very slight) results. It now seems clear that they were bogus: there’s no such thing as telepathy. But if telepathy had been shown to be real, no one would have cared that it was not ‘material’, it might even have been redefined as ‘material’ or ‘natural’, just as hypnosis has been. If poltergeists were demonstrated to exist, they would probably come to be seen as ‘material’; be that as it may, no scientist would say they should not be investigated because of their supposed non-materiality. Blackmore was behaving in exemplary ‘scientific’ (that is, honest and reasonable) fashion when she compared and tested all the theories of out-of-body and near-death experiences), including the frankly spiritualistic ones, before deciding that these experiences must have their basis in human physiology.
Sometimes people who say that science is committed to a naturalist ideology have in mind the fact that in various branches of science there are conventions limiting what may be accepted as evidence. For instance, in most areas of physics and chemistry, it’s accepted that an experiment must be capable of being repeated many times under strictly controlled conditions for its results to become accepted. However, in such disciplines as astronomy and history, there is no such requirement. The conventions shift from area to area, and which conventions are best for a particular problem is always a matter open for discussion and review.
We can imagine a race of beings who would be curious about the world around them without being able to perform experiments. They might be a species of fish, unable to manipulate materials to any appreciable extent, but intelligent enough to conduct discussions about the behavior of water, rocks, and other observable things. In testing their speculations about physics and chemistry, they would be confined to sporadic, uncontrolled, observation, much as ancient astronomers were. Though unable to perform repeatable experiments under uniform conditions, they would (provided they had excellent memories) be able to develop a steadily improving theory of physical reality. Over time they would tend to converge on the same theories formulated by human scientists on dry land, though in some cases probably by different routes.
People sometimes say that science searches for laws, and miracles, being exceptions to laws, are therefore outside the domain of science. But first, science does more than search for laws. The discovery that the Moon’s light is the reflected light of the Sun was, in its day, a great scientific achievement, but it is not a law. Much of science is not laws or putative laws. Second, if there are miracles, they must conform to laws, even if these are laws of which we do not currently have any inkling. If there’s a spirit world, it’s a world with its own spirit laws.
A miracle is sometimes defined as a contravention of laws of nature, and this is assumed to occur because of intervention by God, who can over-ride laws of nature. This definition, however, is a recent development; it is certainly not the way miracles were seen by the authors of the Tanakh, the New Testament, or the Quran. In the Ancient world it was widely believed that miracles could be performed by a number of powerful prophets, priests, or magicians. According to the gospel story, Jesus, when accused of casting out demons with the help of the Prince of Demons, replied to his detractors by asking, rhetorically, how their favored magicians were able to cast out demons (Matthew 12:27-30; Luke 11:19-23; see Ehrman 1999, p. 198). The miracle-worker Jesus did not challenge the factual claims made for his competition.
But isn’t there a fundamental clash between science, with its search for regularities, and the miraculous doings of an omnipotent God? Not in principle. Science is very used to the procedure of finding a supposed ‘law’, which then turns out to hold only under special circumstances, not under all conditions. In such cases, science looks for a wider law to explain all the observations. If theism were correct, then that wider law would be that whatever God wills happens. This would be the one universal regularity with no exceptions. It would be the true ‘theory of everything’.
Nothing prevents a scientific-minded person from entertaining such a possibility, and nothing would prevent such a person from reaching such a conclusion—nothing except the actual evidence.
POSTSCRIPT TO PART III
Bad or Feeble Arguments Against God
In this book I’ve gone briskly through the most important arguments for and against the existence of God, to explain why we can reasonably conclude that God does not exist. It’s only fair to mention a few arguments employed by atheists which I regard as inadequate or worse.
One of the reasons why atheism is getting more of a hearing right now than it did a few years ago is the murder of innocent civilians by Muslims in acts of terror such as 9/11. The three spectacular best sellers advocating atheism (The End of Faith, The God Delusion, and God Is Not Great) all rely heavily on the claim that murder and other wicked deeds are the fruits of theistic belief.
If it’s true that theism leads to mayhem, this would do nothing to show theism false. But the atheist may say that the God theory is false on other grounds, and that the appalling consequences of theism are mentioned only to show that this is an urgent issue. Yet it doesn’t seem to be true that theism has exceptionally bad consequences, by comparison with other ideologies. Communists have tortured and killed far more people in the name of Communism than Christians in the name of Christ or Muslims in the name of Allah. Ideological commitment can encourage people to perpetrate enormities, but it doesn’t seem to make much difference whether the ideology includes belief in God.
Furthermore, the story that Muslims commit suicide bombings because they think this will give them the regulation seventy-two virgins in Paradise is entertaining for the American public but has little to do with reality. As Robert Pape has shown in careful detail, suicide bombers reflect all kinds of personal backgrounds and beliefs, and many of those of Muslim background are far from devout. The single organization perpetrating the most acts of suicide terrorism is the Tamil Tigers, made up entirely of atheists from Hindu backgrounds.92 Suicide terrorism always has a political program. It is a response from militarily weak ethnic communities to setbacks inflicted on them by much stronger forces.
Some atheists try to show the influence of ‘religion’ in atrocities where its involvement is not obvious. But the same argument can work the other way: ‘religion’ is often largely a badge of ethnic or national identity, and much ‘religious’ conflict is fundamentally a manifestation of nationalism.
A popular theme of atheist propaganda is that the person being addressed (usually a Christian) doesn’t believe in Zeus or Allah, so it is only taking it one step further to disbelieve in the Christian God. I grant that something similar to this may sometimes be useful as a rhetorical goad to get people to look at the fleeting nature of all ideologies, including theistic ones, and mentally to step outside their own cultural milieu. But it doesn’t cut very deep. Christians, of course, do believe in Allah, which is simply the Arabic word for ‘God’ (Arabic-speaking Christians call God ‘Allah’—what else?). God, Allah, and Yahweh are just different labels for the same hypothetical entity.
Even Zeus could be defended as another label for God, by claiming that he is more powerful than the Greeks supposed. It was presumably this train of thought which led Kierkegaard to say that a man who worships an idol in the right spirit may be worshipping God. But can the Christian God really be the same as the Jewish and Muslim God, if he is ‘three persons in one’? Yes, just as many people can agree on the existence of some historical personage, while only some of them adhere to the theory that this personage was a case of multiple personality disorder.
An atheist argument that was popular sixty years ago, but no longer, is that ‘God’ is a meaningless expression. You will still come across this claim, arising from the philosophical theory known as verificationism, in some older books. It was popularized in Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic, but was only briefly held by some philosophers. The verificationists hoped to get rid of metaphysics, leaving only logic and empirical science. However, metaphysics is here to stay. Even empirical science cannot do without metaphysics.93
The argument of the verificationists was that a statement which appears to make a factual claim is strictly meaningless if it cannot in principle be verified by observation—by the evidence of our senses. Statements containing the word ‘God’ are thus meaningless; they are strictly speaking mere nonsense. The Ayer of 1936 held that theism and atheism are both untenable, since asserting or denying the existence of God are equally meaningless utterances. But if atheism means ‘lacking any belief in God’, then atheism should not have been ruled out, as not believing in something meaningless does not commit the non-believer to any meaningless utterances.
To see what’s wrong with verificationism, consider this question: When some of the ancient Greeks (folks like Democritus and Epicurus), over two thousand years ago, put forward the theory that matter is composed of atoms, was this meaningless? It did not seem then as though anyone would ever be able to see or otherwise observe an atom. If it was meaningless at that time, then it must have become meaningful at some point in history, but it would be difficult to agree on exactly when that was. To take a contemporary example, is the theory of superstrings meaningless?
It’s true that I have shown that the God of classical theism is self-contradictory and therefore cannot exist. I would say that ‘God’ is incoherent, but I do not accept that an incoherent assertion is meaningless. For example, ‘There is a way of squaring the circle’ is incoherent, but not meaningless.94 My claim of incoherence is based on logical contradictions, not on lack of verifiability, and I don’t say that ‘God’ is meaningless.
Some atheists claim that they do not know what is meant by the word ‘God’. This was the position of the nineteenth-century atheist Charles Bradlaugh (who was forcibly prevented from taking his seat in the British Parliament because of his atheism). But as I have tried to show in this book, there’s no problem about knowing what’s meant by ‘God’. ‘God’ certainly means different things to different people, and some people may hold unclear notions of God, but each concept of God can be spelled out and examined.
Some discussion by atheists suggests that belief in God is ‘irrational’, and tries to lay down criteria of rationality, by which theism can be excluded. Occasionally, theists return the favor and contend that atheism is itself irrational. Discussions of the irrationality of theism or atheism are often associated with discussions of what we are rationally entitled to believe.
However, belief is always involuntary. You can’t choose to believe one thing or another. The evidence strikes you a certain way, and you spontaneously reach a conclusion: you can do nothing about that. And you shouldn’t try. You can certainly study logic and philosophy, and thus improve your skill at detecting bad arguments. You can also search for new factual evidence. These accomplishments might cause you to evaluate evidence differently so that you find yourself with new beliefs, but you can’t guarantee in advance which of your beliefs will have to be jettisoned following this process of self-education. You can never choose your beliefs, though you can choose to pretend that your beliefs are other than they really are.
‘Irrational’ is often used to mean ‘ill-advised’, ‘unwise’, or ‘mistaken’. In this sense, if we pick holes in an argument, say, for the existence of God, we add nothing by then saying that this argument is irrational. There’s something wrong with the argument, that’s all, and if that’s so, we can say what’s wrong with it. But if ‘irrational’ is to mean more than that, it suggests that we can classify whole categories of quite persuasive arguments as more than just mistaken, as evidence of some kind of intellectual sickness. I think this is muddled and encourages a dogmatic outlook.
Some atheists try to suggest that theism is unsound because of the motives leading people to accept it. This atheist stratagem is actually quite rare: theists often respond to it where it doesn’t exist. For instance, Freud gave an explanation—a pretty ludicrous one—for the origin of theistic ideas, and theists often treat this as an argument for atheism. Freud, however, probably thought atheism sufficiently warranted by the findings of natural science, and was taking atheism for granted when he attempted to explain theism’s supposedly unconscious psychological origins.
On the rare occasions when any such argument is deployed against theism, it commits the Genetic Fallacy—trying to discredit a belief by making a claim about how its adherents came to hold it. The history of how someone came to hold a belief has no bearing on whether that belief is true or false.