Compulsive need for certainty —Unable to tolerate and enjoy ambiguity
Premature generalization —Derives from compulsive need for certainty
Compulsive attachment to a generalization —Ignoring information that contradicts beliefs you’re attached to
Denial of ignorance —Inability to admit “I don’t know” or “I was wrong”; need to look smart and tough
Denial of doubt —Refusing to admit puzzlement, doubt, confusion
Inflexible need to be tough, powerful, fearless, hard nosed —Can lead to counterphobic defense mechanisms
Only dominant, masterful, controlling; never noncontrolling, noninterfering, receptive —Overmasculine, lack of versatility, rigidity
Rationalization masquerading as reason —The classic “I don’t like that fellow and I’m going to find a good reason why”
Intolerance of ambiguity —Can’t be comfortable with the mysterious, the unknown
Need to conform, to win approval —Be a member of the in-group
Grandiosity, egotism, arrogance —Often a defense against deeper feelings of weakness, worthlessness
Fear of grandiosity, egotism, arrogance —Evasion of one’s own growth
Overrespect for authority —To be approved of by great men and considered a loyal disciple
Underrespect for authority —Compulsive rebelling against authority, inability to learn from elders
Compulsive rationality —Inability to be wild, crazy, intuitive, risk-taking when it’s appropriate
Intellectualization, blindness to nonintellectual aspects of reality —Satisfaction with naming rather than experiencing
Intellectual one-upmanship —Impressing people with your brilliance without regard to truth
Rubricizing, inaccurate categorizing and stereotyping —Easier than deep perception and thinking
Now let’s look more specifically at the dismissal of spirituality by scientism.
While this may seem odd to say, I’ve been personally bored for decades with the controversy about whether or not psi perceptions, aspects of the human mind that I’ll argue for throughout this book, provide a sound basis for openness to the reality that at least some of the spiritual really exist. Indeed, I often feel that my parapsychologist colleagues who are still trying to provide evidence for the existence of basic psi phenomena, well-meaning as they are, could better spend their time on more fruitful pursuits, such as how psi abilities work, as well as their applications and implications for spirituality. I’ll make some remarks about skepticism and pseudoskepticism so you can understand my position.
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SKEPTICISM (1646): (1) an attitude of doubt or a disposition to incredulity either in general or toward a particular object. (2) The doctrine that true knowledge or knowledge in a particular area is uncertain; (b) the method of suspended judgment, systematic doubt, or criticism characteristic of skeptics. (3) Doubt concerning basic religious principles (as immortality, providence, and revelation). Synonym: “uncertainty.”—Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th ed., s.v. “skepticism”
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I often think of myself as a skeptic in the sense of the second dictionary definition given in the inset box, namely that in many areas of life I’m unsure that our apparent knowledge is really accurate or complete, and I’d like better knowledge.
When people tell me about “psychic experiences” they had, for example, I listen carefully. Sometimes I then agree with their characterizations of the experiences as psychic; sometimes I suggest that they might be more plausibly explained as unusual experiences but not necessarily psychic; sometimes I indicate that it’s a judgment call as to whether or not they were psychic experiences, because I could argue it either way but there’s no definitive aspect to firmly place them in the psychic or nonpsychic category. Often, for the most interesting cases, I just suspend judgment; I don’t know what to make of the experience. Sometimes I think that the personal growth possibilities in the experience are much more important to follow up on than categorizing it as genuinely psychic or nonpsychic. Or I read about colleagues’ experiments to see how they might interpret the outcome the way they did but am skeptical that there isn’t an alternative explanation that’s also plausible, given what we currently know.
Being skeptical in general, or, at least where it matters, being a “skeptic,” is a rational and sensible strategy in life. There’s a lot of things we think we know that we may well be mistaken about. Being a skeptic is also an honorable, high-status social role, especially in intellectual circles. We tend to think of skeptics as smarter and sharper than those who just unquestioningly accept whatever they’re told. Being a skeptic implies being a smart person who has looked more closely than most usually do and has investigated things more thoroughly, because he or she wants to know the truth, or at least a better approximation to the truth, about these things. You might characterize me as a skeptic about materialism, for example; not that I doubt the reality of the material world, but I doubt the kind of thinking that demands that everything must be totally explained in conventional material terms. I’m rather skeptical, in general, of any claim that everything can be explained in terms of any one particular system of thought; are we really that clever? And yes, my ego does think I’m pretty sharp for being like this.
The proper understanding and functioning of skepticism is greatly confused, though, by the existence and activities of numerous pseudoskeptics, people who claim to be skeptics—people interested in getting at the truth while doubting that current explanations are really adequate—but who are really adherents to and advocates of some other belief system that, they believe, already has all the necessary truth. Such pseudoskeptics call themselves skeptics because of the high prestige of that term, rather than more accurately labeling themselves as, say, “Believers in System M” who don’t like the facts or ideas you’re talking about and want to discredit you to defend System M. They’re debunkers, missionaries, advocates. Believers, however, isn’t a high-status word in intellectual circles, so they prefer to call themselves skeptics.
I have no difficulty relating to people who honestly label themselves believers in some system. If people say to me, “My religion R teaches such and such, and therefore, you must be wrong in what you say about X, even if you seem convincing,” I accept that as their honest position. We can openly agree to disagree, but we’re not fooling ourselves or anyone else about the nature of our disagreement. We’re not doing science; we’re doing personal beliefs. Dealing with a pseudoskeptic about parapsychological findings, however, is usually very frustrating.
The typical pseudo skeptic will argue that your parapsychological results must be wrong and the result of sloppy experiments, wishful misinterpretations, or downright dishonesty by your subjects or even by you, because what you’re claiming is scientifically impossible.(1) The pseudoskeptic thus casts himself as not only a seeker of truth but also an expert in the relevant scientific disciplines for judging your work.
What makes someone a scientist, an expert in a particular discipline? I’ll illustrate this from my own discipline, experimental psychology, which I know best, but this is typical of most scientific disciplines.
First, you complete, with high grades, a major in psychology as part of your undergraduate college education. Then follow three to five years of graduate school, which involves reading, analyzing, and criticizing hundreds of primary sources, journal articles rather than textbooks, and usually comprehensive examinations, both written and oral to satisfy the faculty that you both know the field factually and can intelligently reason about it. Graduate school is also often an apprenticeship as well as an education, in that you work closely with one or more faculty members on their research projects. For most, the doctoral degree is then the end of formal education, and they go on to teaching, clinical, or research positions, but for many, as in my own case, the doctoral degree is followed by a two-year postdoctoral fellowship, working closely with, and under the supervision of, an accomplished researcher in your specialty to further hone your skills. Such formal credentialing as a scientist in your field qualifies you to start working in it. How accomplished you actually become will then usually be judged on your research output, primarily published technical articles in journals where articles are accepted for publication only after being refereed and vetted by other acknowledged experts in the field, as well as books. So with the formal training, the advanced graduate degree, and a track record of publications in refereed journals, you become an expert in your field.
I have the credentials and this kind of track record in several areas of psychology, so I can speak with some expertise about aspects of these areas. That doesn’t mean I know everything about those fields or that I can’t be wrong about things in them, just that I’m much better informed than people with no training and experience in those fields.
Now would you like to hear me rant about how I’m skeptical of current directions in cancer research? Or the safe design of nuclear reactors? Or the best medical treatments for the common cold? Of course not! Although I am a good speaker, and know how to act as if I know a lot (and try never to fake it like that), I’d be lying if I presented myself as a qualified skeptic with respect to those fields. I don’t have any formal training in them, and I certainly have no track record of refereed publications there; indeed, I’ve never done any relevant experiments at all. My practical knowledge of those areas is as lacking as my theoretical knowledge.
But, I might tell myself (although probably without admitting it to you), I don’t need to bother getting the formal training, reading the experimental literature, or actually doing any experiments, because I already know that what those investigators are doing is impossible, so why should I waste my time? This is what I mean by saying that the pseudoskeptics aren’t actually skeptics in a genuine sense; they’re believers in some other system, out to attack and debunk what they don’t believe in while trying to appear open minded and scientific, even though they’re not.
Bringing this back to parapsychology, in the fifty years I’ve been studying and working in this field, there have been lots of attacks on it from pseudoskeptics. These debunkers are sometimes high-status scientists in other fields, but they don’t bother to actually read the published reports of the experiments in parapsychology’s refereed scientific journals, much less get their hands dirty by doing any experiments themselves. Indeed, I can only think of one longtime pseudoskeptic who has shown some knowledge in demonstrating he has actually read many of the reported studies, and too many colleagues have told me about times they got him to admit in public debate that he was wrong about some point, only to find him making the same point in his next public talk or article. It’s discouraging.
Various media love to report on these controversies stirred up by pseudoskeptics, and usually give the pseudoskeptics high, “expert,” status and make the arguments sound serious, either because (1) the people running a particular reporting medium are themselves pseudoskeptical, committed to scientistic materialism, (2) as cynical media people have put it for decades, controversy sells more newspapers than accurate reporting, or (3) both.
This is not to say that there haven’t been occasional serious shortcomings in parapsychological research, especially in some of the earliest research going back more than a century, when we were still learning how to do it the best way. Such real flaws, though, have in almost all cases been discovered and corrected by the people working in parapsychology, not the pseudoskeptics. (For those interested in the sociology and psychology of science in this area, I recommend articles by Collins and Pinch 1979, and Hess 1992.)
Let’s look more systematically at material and spiritual views of human life to clarify where they conflict and what kind of evidence we would need to support the usefulness of some kind of spiritual view.
Figure 3.1 maps a totally materialistic view of life and consciousness. We start with the most fundamental and real at the bottom of the figure: matter, energy, space, and time. Because they’re what’s most real in this view, indeed the only things that are “really” real, I’ve put them in the heaviest, boldest type in the figure. It’s assumed that everything arises from the laws governing matter, energy, space, and time, so the best understanding of all of life that we can ever get will spring from our understanding of these most fundamental factors.
Within this material, reality, over time—zillions of years, to put it crudely—particular phenomena and configurations of the fundamental reality happen. I almost said “evolve,” but materialists might object to the implicit implication of purpose in the unqualified word “evolution.” It all just happened—the interactions of the phenomena we normally think of as physics and chemistry, the way the fundamentals of material reality manifest at this time in the history of the universe. A subset of chemistry and physics gave us biology. Again there’s no “reason” as in having purpose; it’s just the way things happened. Since we usually think of ourselves as the smartest beings in the universe, it’s natural to see this as “evolution,” but again it wasn’t an evolution guided by a purpose, intending toward some goal; it just happened.
In a relatively short period—hundreds of millions of years—compared to the history of our universe, the materialist view goes on, particular physical and chemical events happened that we refer to as life and biology. Materialists reject the idea that there’s anything special about life, something as real as matter but of a different nature, a “life force,” or vitalism. Vitalism is a kind of dualism, so it can’t be correct; there’s nothing but material reality. Life simply means that when you get just the right combinations of physics and chemistry, you get self-sustaining, self-reproducing actions that constitute life as we know it.
Eventually, that life electrochemical reaction gets complex enough that we talk of brains and then the human brain. It’s still basically controlled and limited by the laws of matter, and there are lots of direct material influences on its functioning during life, ranging from crude mechanical forces like a blow on the head to chemical inputs in the forms of foods, drugs, hormones, and so on. Curiously—and this is a real puzzle to materialists although they usually ignore it—this human brain develops consciousness, a mind or awareness that often believes that it isn’t limited to just the material dimensions of life. Consciousness just emerges, it’s believed, from the system properties of the brain. Although it’s an item of faith in materialism that physical science will someday be able to explain exactly how consciousness arises from the physical structure and functioning of the brain, and so explain it “away,” currently we have no useful scientific theory that does anything like that, so the appearance of consciousness from the purely physical processes of the brain is called the hard problem among contemporary researchers. This faith is frequently expressed in the extreme form by saying we know that the brain is responsible for consciousness. What we know in terms of essential science, of course, is that the brain is importantly involved in consciousness as it manifests in ordinary life, but that’s not the same thing as knowing that the brain creates consciousness.
This emergent consciousness, an epiphenomenon in philosophical terms, a secondary manifestation of the really primary physical functioning of the brain, is subject to influences we normally classify, for convenience, as psychological, such as language, psychological and sociological events, and the whole cultural milieu in which our personal history evolves. But while it’s convenient to talk of psychological and cultural factors at present, the dream or goal of materialism is to ultimately explain these, too, in terms of physics and chemistry, the most real, the only ultimately real, aspects of matter and energy. Thus today it may be the best we can do to explain someone’s behavior using concepts like, for example, “He had a difficult childhood without adequate role modeling by his father, and this resulted in neurotic complexes.” Ultimately, as good materialists, we want to be really precise and “scientific” by explaining the same behavior as something like, “excitatory activity of such and such chemical and electrical value in neural network #4,567,322 spreading to neural network #34,567,935 resulted in the behavior we observed.”
Some of the emotional implications of a totally materialistic view in particular have, hopefully, emerged for you from doing the Western Creed exercise in chapter 1.
Figure 3.2 contrasts the material view with a kind of generalized spiritual view, generalized to include the basics of what I know of the essences of world religions rather than sticking to any one spiritual system.
We again have all the elements of the materialist view, because I don’t think any major spiritual system would be naive enough to ignore the importance of physical laws, and the structure and functioning of the brain and body in affecting us. But I’ve drawn “mind” in with large, bold letters as an independent reality of its own, just as important as matter, energy, space, and time. That’s not to claim that mind isn’t affected by the operations of the physical brain; it clearly is, in a multitude of ways. (2) But mind, as we ordinarily know it, is here considered an emergent of both the operation of the physical brain and inputs from and outputs to something else, the qualitatively different realm postulated by emergent dualism. To be comprehensive, I’ve represented this something else as being psi (?) inputs and outputs in general (detailed in later chapters) and, specifically, spiritual inputs and outputs in particular, using the Michelangelo painting. (I use the Michelangelo painting for artistic reasons, not because I believe Christianity has a better understanding of the spiritual realm than other religions do.)
Now, we come again to the crucial question of this book. We can conceptualize a dualist view of reality and draw nice diagrams about it, but is it real? From the materialist’s perspective, aren’t we, at best, just wasting our time in idle speculation or, at worst, indulging in fantasies that make us less able to survive in the real world? Or, to indulge in the materialistic dream, aren’t we just exciting activity of such and such chemical and electrical value in neural network #4,567,322 spreading to neural network #34,567,935, and so on?
What would constitute strong scientific evidence that we need a wider, dualist perspective, and to consider some reality of a fundamentally different nature than material reality, along with material reality? And what would this different view look like?
As a general start, in table 3.2, I’ve compared the material and a general spiritual view on six aspects of life, starting with the ways we can get information about the world and act on it, going on to our purpose in life, who we believe we are, our life span, and how we contact and interact with other beings. You can see that the general spiritual view includes all of the factors in the material view but adds ways of sensing, acting, and interacting with other “beings” over a longer and wider time span than the materialist view. These extra possibilities include various forms of psi (?)abilities, such as ESP to gather information about the world, and PK and psychic healing to affect the world and create a bigger sphere of action: a “spiritual world” and possibly a much longer life span through postmortem survival or reincarnation to act in. We’ll discuss these different forms of psi abilities in detail in later chapters. But how do we get scientific evidence to show we’re not just speculating?
listed as Function, Material View and Spiritual View
Information input —Five senses, mechanical sensory amplifiers, and reasoning vs Five senses, mechanical sensory amplifiers, reasoning, and ?
Action on world —Muscles and tools vs Muscles, tools, PK, psychic healing, “spirit” intervention, and action on “spirit world”
Identity —Biological ego and body, and psychological overlays vs Biological ego and body, psychological overlays, and “soul”
Purpose —Survival; no ultimate purpose vs Spiritual evolution
Life span —Sixty to eighty years vs Sixty to eighty years; postmortem life, reincarnation, or both
Contact with other beings —Through physical senses vs Through physical senses and direct psychic contact