SUNDAY, 19 JANUARY 2025

My Sun sign is Cancer, I have Moon in Aquarius, and Scorpio rising. How do I know this? Because as a late teenager and a young man in my early 20s, I became obsessed with astrology, and I can still remember where all of the other planets are in my birth chart even though it is at least forty years since I’ve looked at it. At the time I also read Tarot cards and used the I Ching, plus I was interested in lots of other paranormal phenomena such as ESP, telepathy and clairvoyance. Then I gradually lost interest as the years went by and my opinion swung towards scepticism about these things, apart from the I Ching, for which my admiration continued to grow, and which I still regularly read and consult. These days, though, I use it more as a guide to living than as an oracle.

I think it’s fair to say that this younger version of me wanted the paranormal to be real. This was part of who I was, and who I still am as a person: I have always had poetic leanings and a deep need to be creative and I suspect that anyone who writes poetry or creates artworks must have some kind of yearning to step outside the monochrome everyday world at times and enter the technicolour realm of Oz. Also, late adolescence was a very difficult time for me as I struggled to adapt to adulthood, and I found in astrology and related beliefs some kind of gentle nudge towards the person I might with good fortune become as an adult. Fifty years on, I am much less certain about the paranormal. I imagine sceptics would shake their heads at the gullible youngster I used to be, but be happy to hear that I’ve seen the folly of my ways and given up this other-worldly nonsense and replaced it with good old common-sense materialism. I’d argue, however, that committed physicalists have an impulse similar to mine, but in the opposite direction: their psychology requires that material reality is the only reality there is. I suspect they see themselves as paragons of logic and rationality in a world of deluded fantasists, but like all of us they have their psychological reasons for what they choose to believe. Despite what the economists say, there are limits to the rational potential of human beings.

However, sceptics basically talk sense when they argue that, from a logical perspective, it is hard not to be dismissive of claims for the paranormal. Take astrology, for instance: how can Neptune from all its millions of miles away possibly influence what is happening here on Earth? This would break all known rules of physics and everyday experience. I know some advocates of the paranormal like to point to quantum mechanics and say this has been a game changer, and that theories such as the uncertainty principle and phenomena like quantum entanglement render things like astrology more credible. But these advocates are usually not scientists and they are drawing on things that they don’t really understand as a convenient way of justifying their beliefs.

One of the biggest problems about examples of the paranormal such as telepathy and clairvoyance is that most of the evidence is anecdotal and therefore cannot satisfy the exacting requirements of science. For example, there are many stories of twins separated by thousands of miles suddenly knowing that one of them is in mortal danger: when one twin is having a heart attack and the other twin feels a terrible pain in the chest at exactly the same moment. The first obvious possible explanation for this is deception or hoax, although I personally feel that there are too many tales like this for them all to be the work of liars. But even if the people involved are sincere, they may have slowly added details to the story over the years or unconsciously embellished it to make the timing more exact. Ultimately, these anecdotal claims have nothing concrete we can point to as clear proof that they are true. Another common anecdote is someone saying they dreamed of an air disaster only to wake up to face headlines about an airplane crash. But the obvious rejoinder is that every night billions of people dream, some of them will dream about a plane crash, and occasionally a plane will crash. It might look spooky but it seems reasonable to conclude that the most likely explanation is probability and/or coincidence.

Because of these difficulties, attempts have been made to put the study of the paranormal on a more scientific basis through laboratory experiments. One of the most famous series of these were those done by J.B.Rhine at Duke University in North Carolina, involving the use of Zener cards (cards with symbols on the back) to test for telepathy and clairvoyance. Rhine originally published what seemed like amazing results to prove that some individuals really had an uncanny ability to predict what the next unknown card would be. His results were never replicated, though, and modern opinion rejects them on the grounds of sloppy methodology and poor use of statistics, plus a naive trust in his subjects which didn’t make sufficient allowance for the likelihood of cheating. Other famous research, in astrological circles this time, was the work of Gauquelin, a French psychologist, who seemed to show that there was a correlation between the position of planets in a person’s horoscope and their likelihood of success in a specific career. Again, though, these were not replicated by other researchers, and methodological and statistical weaknesses were again advanced to discount the results.

One problem that I personally have about many of the claims for the paranormal is that they are often so trivial and banal. Uri Geller, who was famous when I was young for bending forks and spoons was a perfect example of this. He was claiming special psychic powers that broke all the known laws of physics, but was he using these special powers to cure cancer or eliminate world hunger? No, he was bending cutlery. So people like me who want to keep an open mind about the paranormal have to admit that the field is full of charlatans and fakes, whether they be mediums conjuring up ectoplasm while communicating with the dead, or trained magicians using their dark arts of distraction and their sleight of hand to fool us. It is very telling that these people can never reproduce their magic powers when a working magician such as Randi is watching (which they always put down to the negative vibrations caused by sceptical onlookers). It all reminds me of the old cartoon of a notice on the door of a psychic consultant: ‘Closed due to an unforeseen emergency’.

Another problem I have is that claims for the paranormal normally come with a load of baggage about religion or ‘spirituality’. We are always being sold more than a mere phenomenon – for example, the ability for one mind to ‘read’ another without any physical contact – but an emotional package that seeks to provide solace from a life that is often hard to bear with promises of a better world somewhere out there in the ether. But why should the paranormal have to be supernatural? Why can’t it be nature that we don’t yet understand, as has happened throughout human history, where trial and error made us able to use natural forces that we couldn’t begin to explain? Also, the label ‘paranormal’ bundles together a range of disparate phenomena which might be better studied and tested individually. Avid believers in the paranormal tend to believe anything which can’t be easily explained, whether it be skies that rain frogs, ghosts that haunt buildings, spiritualism, cartomancy, numerology, or a host of other mysteries that we can’t fathom or things that we can’t even prove exist. But these things should be studied as discrete phenomena, not as a bag of spooky conundrums. The fact that there are almost certainly occasions on which it does rain frogs should have no bearing at all on the possibilities of telepathy or the ability to predict the future by reading palms.

So far I have sounded like a total sceptic and any new atheist reading this would probably nod their head in agreement. However, I want to go on to look at some of the problems with what I have just written. There is something rather facile and convenient about immediately grasping at obvious reasons to prove that claims for the paranormal are false. Just because something might be a hoax does not prove it is a hoax. Just because people who claim to have been abducted by aliens might be the victims of hallucination does not necessarily make them so. There is a QED quality to many of the common refutations of paranormal claims, plus often a thinly disguised contempt towards ‘ordinary people’ and the value of the evidence they offer. A good example of this is when sceptics dismiss the accounts of local people who claim to have sighted a creature in Loch Ness by suggesting that they have seen a floating branch, as if these yokels who walk past the loch on a regular basis are incapable of recognising a log on the water when they see one. Broadening out to more general consideration about the evidence for the paranormal, freakish coincidences will clearly happen, as will events with a probability of millions to one, but an unthinking, automatic assumption that anything which breaks the rules of a materialist universe must of necessity be faulty or due to pure chance rests on a personal metaphysics and not, despite the confidence of physicalists, on a proven, built-in premise of existence.

Similarly, it seems unfair to demand that the paranormal pass laboratory tests which are not suited to its exploration. For example, if telepathy happens, the anecdotal evidence that exists suggests that this often occurs in moments of great emotion or stress. Nothing could be farther from that than sitting in a lab going through packs and packs of Zener cards in a process that has no urgency at all for the person being tested. Meanwhile, science itself has a range of methodologies; a cosmologist or a zoologist has very little use for the kind of experiments in a lab that are often demanded of the parapsychologist, and yet no one is suggesting that their disciplines are not valid sciences. Cosmologists and zoologists are just two of the many types of scientists who have to use a radically different methodology from the hypothetico-deductive model based on experiment. Why should the study of parapsychology not be granted a similar leeway?

So in my opinion any scientist who says that paranormal phenomena cannot be real simply because they are impossible is indulging in tautology and, I would even suggest, being unscientific, since their view is based on an underlying metaphysics which they are unwilling to open up to challenge. Scepticism should work both ways: things like hoaxes, hallucinations, coincidence, and distributions of probability should not be a get-out-of-jail card automatically produced to trash claims that physicalists deem to be impossible simply because that’s the way reality is. I accept that there are some things of which we can perhaps be certain – for example, the principle of non-contradiction – (although even this might be uncertain in a universe that is fundamentally random), but I would counter that disagreements about the paranormal should be empirical rather than ideological in nature. But once we enter the realm of metaphysics, from the point of view of the non-scientist, or perhaps I should more accurately say the non-physicist, why should I believe, for example, that the concept of a multiverse is any more credible than that of a creative God since I have no proof of either? In my opinion, at this level we can only speculate and our human ability to reason breaks down as inadequate, perhaps forever, but certainly given our current state of knowledge.

Ultimately, and somewhat ironically, therefore, I find myself largely in agreement with those scientists who argue that it is not worth spending precious time, money and resources on studying the paranormal, but for very different reasons. They consider it a waste of finite resources because the paranormal is almost certainly hokum, while I arrive at this point from a belief that the ‘scientific method’ is not capable of this task and cannot give us any useful answers. I know this sounds defeatist but I can’t see any way around the enormous difficulties of research into the paranormal. Personally, I have a problem only when scientists categorically state that any belief in the paranormal must of necessity be rank nonsense; if they do this, I don’t see how they are behaving any differently from a credulous believer who simply knows that these phenomena are real even if they cannot offer any strong evidence for them. At heart we all have our core beliefs, our ways of seeing and conceptualising the world, and we continuously confirm them to ourselves throughout our lives. In my opinion, no one, not even the most objective scientist, is exempt from this innate psychological bias.