Alvin Plantinga on Why Darwinist Materialism is Wrong: A review of atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel's book Mind and Cosmos

Alvin Plantinga

Thomas Nagel

Thomas Nagel is an atheistic philosopher of exceptional intellectual honesty and integrity. At variance with other scientific naturalists, Nagel is not acritical nor credulous when it comes to the problems of materialism and Darwinism. On the contrary, he explicitly submits these fashionable metaphysical assumptions of contemporary atheism to rigurous philosophical criticisms. (Please read this post on Nagel, atheistic wishful thinking and the "Fear of God").

Nagel has shocked the philosophical community with his recent book "Mind and Cosmos", in which he argues that the Neo-Darwinian materialist conception of nature is probably false.

Philosopher Alvin Plantinga wrote a review of this book, published in "New Republic" website:

Why Darwinist Materialism is Wrong

by Alvin Plantinga

ACCORDING TO a semi-established consensus among the intellectual elite in the West, there is no such person as God or any other supernatural being. Life on our planet arose by way of ill-understood but completely naturalistic processes involving only the working of natural law. Given life, natural selection has taken over, and produced all the enormous variety that we find in the living world. Human beings, like the rest of the world, are material objects through and through; they have no soul or ego or self of any immaterial sort. At bottom, what there is in our world are the elementary particles described in physics, together with things composed of these particles.

I say that this is a semi-established consensus, but of course there are some people, scientists and others, who disagree. There are also agnostics, who hold no opinion one way or the other on one or another of the above theses. And there are variations on the above themes, and also halfway houses of one sort or another. Still, by and large those are the views of academics and intellectuals in America now. Call this constellation of views scientific naturalism—or don’t call it that, since there is nothing particularly scientific about it, except that those who champion it tend to wrap themselves in science like a politician in the flag. By any name, however, we could call it the orthodoxy of the academy—or if not the orthodoxy, certainly the majority opinion.

The eminent philosopher Thomas Nagel would call it something else: an idol of the academic tribe, perhaps, or a sacred cow: “I find this view antecedently unbelievable—a heroic triumph of ideological theory over common sense. ... I would be willing to bet that the present right-thinking consensus will come to seem laughable in a generation or two.” Nagel is an atheist; even so, however, he does not accept the above consensus, which he calls materialist naturalism; far from it. His important new book is a brief but powerful assault on materialist naturalism.

NAGEL IS NOT AFRAID to take unpopular positions, and he does not seem to mind the obloquy that goes with that territory. “In the present climate of a dominant scientific naturalism,” he writes, “heavily dependent on speculative Darwinian explanations of practically everything, and armed to the teeth against attacks from religion, I have thought it useful to speculate about possible alternatives. Above all, I would like to extend the boundaries of what is not regarded as unthinkable, in light of how little we really understand about the world.” Nagel has endorsed the negative conclusions of the much-maligned Intelligent Design movement, and he has defended it from the charge that it is inherently unscientific. In 2009 he even went so far as to recommend Stephen Meyer’s book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design, a flagship declaration of Intelligent Design, as a book of the year. For that piece of blasphemy Nagel paid the predictable price; he was said to be arrogant, dangerous to children, a disgrace, hypocritical, ignorant, mind-polluting, reprehensible, stupid, unscientific, and in general a less than wholly upstanding citizen of the republic of letters.

His new book will probably call forth similar denunciations: except for atheism, Nagel rejects nearly every contention of materialist naturalism. Mind and Cosmos rejects, first, the claim that life has come to be just by the workings of the laws of physics and chemistry. As Nagel points out, this is extremely improbable, at least given current evidence: no one has suggested any reasonably plausible process whereby this could have happened. As Nagel remarks, “It is an assumption governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis.”

The second plank of materialist naturalism that Nagel rejects is the idea that, once life was established on our planet, all the enormous variety of contemporary life came to be by way of the processes evolutionary science tells us about: natural selection operating on genetic mutation, but also genetic drift, and perhaps other processes as well. These processes, moreover, are unguided: neither God nor any other being has directed or orchestrated them. Nagel seems a bit less doubtful of this plank than of the first; but still he thinks it incredible that the fantastic diversity of life, including we human beings, should have come to be in this way: “the more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes.” Nagel supports the commonsense view that the probability of this happening in the time available is extremely low, and he believes that nothing like sufficient evidence to overturn this verdict has been produced.

So far Nagel seems to me to be right on target. The probability, with respect to our current evidence, that life has somehow come to be from non-life just by the working of the laws of physics and chemistry is vanishingly small. And given the existence of a primitive life form, the probability that all the current variety of life should have come to be by unguided evolution, while perhaps not quite as small, is nevertheless minuscule. These two conceptions of materialist naturalism are very likely false.

But, someone will say, the improbable happens all the time. It is not at all improbable that something improbable should happen. Consider an example. You play a rubber of bridge involving, say, five deals. The probability that the cards should fall just as they do for those five deals is tiny—something like one out of ten to the 140th power. Still, they did. Right. It happened. The improbable does indeed happen. In any fair lottery, each ticket is unlikely to win; but it is certain that one of them will win, and so it is certain that something improbable will happen. But how is this relevant in the present context? In a fit of unbridled optimism, I claim that I will win the Nobel Prize in chemistry. You quite sensibly point out that this is extremely unlikely, given that I have never studied chemistry and know nothing about the subject. Could I defend my belief by pointing out that the improbable regularly happens? Of course not: you cannot sensibly hold a belief that is improbable with respect to all of your evidence.

NAGEL GOES ON: he thinks it is especially improbable that consciousness and reason should come to be if materialist naturalism is true. “Consciousness is the most conspicuous obstacle to a comprehensive naturalism that relies only on the resources of physical science.” Why so? Nagel’s point seems to be that the physical sciences—physics, chemistry, biology, neurology—cannot explain or account for the fact that we human beings and presumably some other animals are conscious. Physical science can explain the tides, and why birds have hollow bones, and why the sky is blue; but it cannot explain consciousness. Physical science can perhaps demonstrate correlations between physical conditions of one sort or another and conscious states of one sort or another; but of course this is not to explain consciousness. Correlation is not explanation. As Nagel puts it, “The appearance of animal consciousness is evidently the result of biological evolution, but this well-supported empirical fact is not yet an explanation—it does not provide understanding, or enable us to see why the result was to be expected or how it came about.”

Nagel next turns his attention to belief and cognition: “the problem that I want to take up now concerns mental functions such as thought, reasoning, and evaluation that are limited to humans, though their beginnings may be found in a few other species.” We human beings and perhaps some other animals are not merely conscious, we also hold beliefs, many of which are in fact true. It is one thing to feel pain; it is quite another to believe, say, that pain can be a useful signal of dysfunction. According to Nagel, materialist naturalism has great difficulty with consciousness, but it has even greater difficulty with cognition. He thinks it monumentally unlikely that unguided natural selection should have “generated creatures with the capacity to discover by reason the truth about a reality that extends vastly beyond the initial appearances.” He is thinking in particular of science itself.

Natural selection is interested in behavior, not in the truth of belief, except as that latter is related to behavior. So concede for the moment that natural selection might perhaps be expected to produce creatures with cognitive faculties that are reliable when it comes to beliefs about the physical environment: beliefs, for example, about the presence of predators, or food, or potential mates. But what about beliefs that go far beyond anything with survival value? What about physics, or neurology, or molecular biology, or evolutionary theory? What is the probability, given materialist naturalism, that our cognitive faculties should be reliable in such areas? It is very small indeed. It follows—in a wonderful irony—that a materialistic naturalist should be skeptical about science, or at any rate about those parts of it far removed from everyday life.

This certainly seems right, and perhaps we can go even further. Perhaps it is not initially implausible to think that unguided natural selection could have produced creatures with cognitive faculties who are reliable about matters relevant to survival and reproduction. But what about metaphysical beliefs, such as theism, or determinism, or materialism, or atheism? Such beliefs have little bearing on behavior related to survival and reproduction, and unguided natural selection couldn’t care less about them or their truth-value. After all, it is only the occasional member of the Young Humanist Society whose reproductive prospects are enhanced by accepting atheism. Given materialist naturalism, the probability that my cognitive faculties are reliable with respect to metaphysical beliefs would be low. So take any metaphysical belief I have: the probability that it is true, given materialist naturalism, cannot be much above .5. But of course materialist naturalism is itself a metaphysical belief. So the materialistic naturalist should think the probability of materialist naturalism is about .5. But that means that she cannot sensibly believe her own doctrine. If she believes it, she shouldn’t believe it. In this way materialist naturalism is self-defeating.

II.

THE NEGATIVE CASE that Nagel makes against materialist naturalism seems to me to be strong and persuasive. I do have the occasional reservation. Most materialists apparently believe that mental states are caused by physical states. According to Nagel, however, the materialistic naturalist cannot stop there. Why not? Because the idea that there is such a causal connection between the physical and the mental doesn’t really explain the occurrence of the mental in a physical world. It doesn’t make the mental intelligible. It doesn’t show that the existence of the mental is probable, given our physical world.

Some materialists, however, seek to evade this difficulty by suggesting that there is some sort of logical connection between physical states and mental states. It is a logically necessary truth, they say, that when a given physical state occurs, a certain mental state also occurs. If this is true, then the existence of the mental is certainly probable, given our physical world; indeed, its existence is necessary. Nagel himself suggests that there are such necessary connections. So wouldn’t that be enough to make intelligible the occurrence of the mental in our physical world?

I suspect that his answer would be no. Perhaps the reason would be that we cannot just see these alleged necessities, in the way we can just see that 2+1=3. These postulated necessary connections are not self-evident to us. And the existence of the mental would be intelligible only if those connections were self-evident. But isn’t this a bit too strong? Why think that the mental is intelligible, understandable, only if there are self-evident necessary connections between the physical and the mental? Doesn’t that require too much? And if intelligibility does require that sort of connection between the physical and the mental, why think the world is intelligible in that extremely strong sense?

Now you might think someone with Nagel’s views would be sympathetic to theism, the belief that there is such a person as the God of the Abrahamic religions. Materialist naturalism, says Nagel, cannot account for the appearance of life, or the variety we find in the living world, or consciousness, or cognition, or mind—but theism has no problem accounting for any of these. As for life, God himself is living, and in one way or another has created the biological life to be found on Earth (and perhaps elsewhere as well). As for the diversity of life: God has brought that about, whether through a guided process of evolution or in some other way. As for consciousness, again theism has no problem: according to theism the fundamental and basic reality is God, who is conscious. And what about the existence of creatures with cognition and reason, creatures who, like us, are capable of scientific investigation of our world? Well, according to theism, God has created us human beings in his image; part of being in the image of God (Aquinas thought it the most important part) is being able to know something about ourselves and our world and God himself, just as God does. Hence theism implies that the world is indeed intelligible to us, even if not quite intelligible in Nagel’s glorified sense. Indeed, modern empirical science was nurtured in the womb of Christian theism, which implies that there is a certain match or fit between the world and our cognitive faculties.

Given theism, there is no surprise at all that there should be creatures like us who are capable of atomic physics, relativity theory, quantum mechanics, and the like. Materialist naturalism, on the other hand, as Nagel points out, has great difficulty accounting for the existence of such creatures. For this and other reasons, theism is vastly more welcoming to science than materialist naturalism. So theism would seem to be a natural alternative to the materialist naturalism Nagel rejects: it has virtues where the latter has vices, and we might therefore expect Nagel, at least on these grounds, to be sympathetic to theism.

SADLY ENOUGH (at least for me), Nagel rejects theism. “I confess to an ungrounded assumption of my own, in not finding it possible to regard the design alternative [i.e., theism] as a real option. I lack the sensus divinitatis that enables—indeed, compels so many people to see in the world the expression of divine purpose.” But it isn’t just that Nagel is more or less neutral about theism but lacks that sensus divinitatis. In The Last Word, which appeared in 1997, he offered a candid account of his philosophical inclinations:

I am talking about something much deeper—namely, the fear of religion itself. I speak from experience, being strongly subject to this fear myself: I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.... It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that.

Here we have discomfort and distress at the thought that there might be such a being as God; but this discomfort seems more emotional than philosophical or rational.

So is there a strictly philosophical problem with theism, according to Nagel? As far as I can see, the main substantive objection that he offers is an appeal to that notion of unity. A successful worldview will see the world as intelligible; and intelligibility, as Nagel conceives it, involves a high degree of unity. The world is intelligible only if there are no fundamental breaks in it, only if it contains no fundamentally different kinds of things. Descartes, that great dualist, thought that the world displays two quite different sorts of things: matter and mind, neither reducible to the other. Nagel rejects this dualism: his reason is just that such dualism fails to secure the unity necessary for the world’s being intelligible.

Yet is there any reason to think that the world really is intelligible in this very strong sense—any good reason to think that there is fundamentally just one kind of thing, with everything being an example of that kind, or reducible to things that are? Here three considerations seem to be necessary. First, we need to know more about this requirement: what is it to say that fundamentally there is just one kind of thing? It is not obvious how this is to be understood. Aren’t there many different sorts of things: houses, horses, hawks, and handsaws? Well, perhaps they are not fundamentally different. But what does “fundamentally” mean here? Is the idea that the world is intelligible only if there is some important property that houses, horses, hawks, and handsaws all share? What kind of property?

Second, how much plausibility is there to the claim that this sort of unity really is required for intelligibility? Clearly we cannot claim that Descartes’s dualism is literally unintelligible—after all, even if you reject it, you can understand it. (How else could you reject it?) Is it really true that the world is more intelligible, in some important sense of “intelligible,” if it does not contain two or more fundamentally different kinds of things? I see little reason to think so.

And third, suppose we concede that the world is genuinely intelligible only if it displays this sort of monistic unity: why should we think that the world really does display such a unity? We might hope that the world would display such unity, but is there any reason to think the world will cooperate? Suppose intelligibility requires that kind of unity: why should we think our world is intelligible in that sense? Is it reasonable to say to a theist, “Well, if theism were true, there would be two quite different sorts of things: God on the one hand, and the creatures he has created on the other. But that cannot really be true: for if it were, the world would not display the sort of unity required for intelligibility”? Won’t the theist be quite properly content to forgo that sort of intelligibility?

III.

I COME FINALLY to Nagel’s positive thesis. Materialist naturalism, he shows, is false, but what does he propose to put in its place? Here he is a little diffident. He thinks that it may take centuries to work out a satisfactory alternative to materialist naturalism (given that theism is not acceptable); he is content to propose a suggestive sketch. He does so in a spirit of modesty: “I am certain that my own attempt to explore alternatives is far too unimaginative. An understanding of the universe as basically prone to generate life and mind will probably require a much more radical departure from the familiar forms of naturalistic explanation than I am at present able to conceive.”

There are two main elements to Nagel’s sketch. There is panpsychism, or the idea that there is mind, or proto-mind, or something like mind, all the way down. In this view, mind never emerges in the universe: it is present from the start, in that even the most elementary particles display some kind of mindedness. The thought is not, of course, that elementary particles are able to do mathematical calculations, or that they are self-conscious; but they do enjoy some kind of mentality. In this way Nagel proposes to avoid the lack of intelligibility he finds in dualism.

Of course someone might wonder how much of a gain there is, from the point of view of unity, in rejecting two fundamentally different kinds of objects in favor of two fundamentally different kinds of properties. And as Nagel recognizes, there is still a problem for him about the existence of minds like ours, minds capable of understanding a fair amount about the universe. We can see (to some degree, anyway) how more complex material objects can be built out of simpler ones: ordinary physical objects are composed of molecules, which are composed of atoms, which are composed of electrons and quarks (at this point things get less than totally clear). But we haven’t the faintest idea how a being with a mind like ours can be composed of or constructed out of smaller entities that have some kind of mindedness. How do those elementary minds get combined into a less than elementary mind?

The second element of Nagel’s sketch is what we can call natural teleology.His idea seems to be something like this. At each stage in the development of our universe (perhaps we can think of that development as starting with the big bang), there are several different possibilities as to what will happen next. Some of these possibilities are steps on the way toward the existence of creatures with minds like ours; others are not. According to Nagel’s natural teleology, there is a sort of intrinsic bias in the universe toward those possibilities that lead to minds. Or perhaps there was an intrinsic bias in the universe toward the sorts of initial conditions that would lead to the existence of minds like ours. Nagel does not elaborate or develop these suggestions. Still, he is not to be criticized for this: he is probably right in believing that it will take a lot of thought and a long time to develop these suggestions into a truly viable alternative to both materialist naturalism and theism.

I SAID ABOVE THAT Nagel applauds the negative side of Intelligent Design but is doubtful about the positive part; and I find myself in much the same position with respect to Mind and Cosmos. I applaud his formidable attack on materialist naturalism; I am dubious about panpsychism and natural teleology. As Nagel sees, mind could not arise in our world if materialist naturalism were true—but how does it help to suppose that elementary particles in some sense have minds? How does that make it intelligible that there should be creatures capable of physics and philosophy? And of poetry, art, and music?

As for natural teleology: does it really make sense to suppose that the world in itself, without the presence of God, should be doing something we could sensibly call “aiming at” some states of affairs rather than others—that it has as a goal the actuality of some states of affairs as opposed to others? Here the problem isn’t just that this seems fantastic; it does not even make clear sense. A teleological explanation of a state of affairs will refer to some being that aims at this state of affairs and acts in such a way as to bring it about. But a world without God does not aim at states of affairs or anything else. How, then, can we think of this alleged natural teleology?

When it comes to accommodating life and mind, theism seems to do better. According to theism, mind is fundamental in the universe: God himself is the premier person and the premier mind; and he has always existed, and indeed exists necessarily. God could have desired that there be creatures with whom he could be in fellowship. Hence he could have created finite persons in his own image: creatures capable of love, of knowing something about themselves and their world, of science, literature, poetry, music, art, and all the rest. Given theism, this makes eminently good sense. As Nagel points out, the same cannot be said about materialist naturalism. But do panpsychism and natural teleology do much better?

Nagel’s rejection of theism does not seem to be fundamentally philosophical. My guess is this antipathy to theism is rather widely shared. Theism severely limits human autonomy. According to theism, we human beings are also at best very junior partners in the world of mind. We are not autonomous, not a law unto ourselves; we are completely dependent upon God for our being and even for our next breath. Still further, some will find in theism a sort of intolerable invasion of privacy: God knows my every thought, and indeed knows what I will think before I think it. Perhaps hints of this discomfort may be found even in the Bible itself: 

Before a word is on my tongue, you know it completely, oh Lord....
Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

This discomfort with theism is to some extent understandable, even to a theist. Still, if Nagel followed his own methodological prescriptions and requirements for sound philosophy, if he followed his own arguments wherever they lead, if he ignored his emotional antipathy to belief in God, then (or so I think) he would wind up a theist. But wherever he winds up, he has already performed an important service with his withering critical examination of some of the most common and oppressive dogmas of our age.

Alvin Plantinga is professor of philosophy emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and is the author, most recently, of Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford University Press). This article appeared in the December 6,  2012 issue of the magazine under the headline “A Secular Heresy.”

A.C. Grayling vs Peter S Williams, the God Argument book and the poverty of contemporary atheistic philosophy of religion

 

I've been delaying posting because, as I explained in my last post, I'm busy in personal projects which include "hands-on" investigation of putative paranormal and supernatural phenomena. The results of this research will be published in the future in a series of posts, or perhaps in a new blog specially created to that effect.

In this moment, I want to comment briefly about a book that I've just finished to read: atheist A.C.Grayling's The God Argument.  

This is one of the worst books that I've read regarding the "God topic". The book is full of fallacies, inconsistences and misunderstandings of the basic arguments for God's existence.

I'll review the book in detail in the future, but just as an example: In page 77, he says:

explaining something by something unexplained amounts, obviously, to no explanation at all

But this is "obviously" and simply false. You can explain X by invoking Y, even if in that moment Y remains unexplained. A couple of examples:

1-AIDS was explained in 1983 as a disease caused by a virus (HIV), but in the time HIV remained unexplained (i.e. its origin and cause was unknown in 1983). Did such fact prevent medical scientists to explain the cause of AIDS in terms of HIV?

2-The Big Bang theory explains the origin of the material universe. But the cause or origin of the big bang is itself still unexplained (in fact, hardly any naturalistic explanation will succeed, because it is nature itself = the material universe itself which began to exist, and you cannot explain the absolute origin of matter appealing to a material cause).

3-Suppose, for the argument's sake, that the afterlife is empirically proven to exist beyond of doubt and to the entire satisfaction of "skeptics" like Randi, Dawkins or Keith Augustine (e.g. in cases of NDEs under laboratory conditions). In this case, "survival of consciousness" would be the best explanation of such NDEs, but consciousness itself would remain unexplained (= where consciousness come from? Why does it survive death? What or who caused it? Is it uncaused? Where it goes after leaving the body? Is consciousness eternal? Is consciousness an emanation from God?). In order to the accept that "survival of consciousness" is the best empirical explanation of NDEs, you don't need an explanation of consciousnss itself.

In other words, you don't need an explanation of the explanation in order to accept an explanation as the best. Otherwise, it would lead to an infinite regress, and nothing whatsoever (including AIDS, the Big Bang, evolution by natural selection, etc.) could in principle to be explained, because nobody possess an infinite number of explanations.

As Oxford atheist philosopher Daniel Came comments:

an explanation to be successful we do not need an explanation of the explanation. One might as well say that evolution by natural selection explains nothing because it does nothing to explain why there were living organisms on earth in the first place; or that the big bang fails to explain the cosmic background radiation because the big bang is itself inexplicable

Grayling's fallacious principle, if applied consistently (and not only against theism) would destroy science. As philosopher William Lane Craig comments (on Dawkins' use of Grayling's fallacious principle, which is rampant among atheist pseudo-intellectuals and other contemporary irrationalists):

Grayling's fallacious principle is a fine example of what researcher Dean Radin has called "uncontrolled criticism":

It is commonly thought that all criticisms in science are equal. This is not so. In fact, criticisms must have two properties to be valid. First, it must be controlled, meaning that the criticism cannot also apply to well-accepted scientific disciplines. In other words, we cannot use a double standard and apply one set of criticisms to fledgling topics and an entirely different set for established disciplines.

Radin's principle of "valid criticisms" apply in general, not only to science. You cannot swallow a bunch of scientific theories which invoke "unexplained" causal entities (e.g. HIV in the case of AIDS in 1983), and in the same time to complain that theism is not an explanation (e.g. of the absolute origin of the material world, of consciousness in the world, of spiritual and religious experiences, of the fine-tuning of the universe, of an objective realm of moral values, etc.) arguing that God itself is an unexplained causal entity.

You don't need an explanation of the explanation in order to accept an explanation as the best.

See other examples of Grayling's reasonings in this short video of a debate with Christian philosopher Peter S. Williams:

Authors like Grayling are telling examples of the intellectual, philosophical and moral poverty of contemporary atheism, and their fate will be, eventually (when the most sophisticated defenses of theism become well-known to the public), permanent extinction and rejection from the literary world.

Delaying posting...

Some people have written to me asking for the reasons of my recent absence of the "blogging" world.

I've been busy traveling to a couple of countries (and studying directly a bunch of interesting things, including long visits to so-called "haunted houses", where I'm trying, using my own money and resources, to record some objective, convincing, tangible evidence despite the silly opposition and pessimism of some people...), but also, when time and place is available, reading carefully some recent books and papers on analytic philosophy, Historical Jesus scholarship, martial arts books, survival research and other things which are interesting to me.

Also, I'm using my own interdisciplinary research methodology. For example, in the so-called "haunted houses or places" which I'm visiting and studying, I'm looking for evidence not only of the alleged phenomenon itself, but of other phenomena which could be (or not) related to it, like ufological phenomena. For example, I'm trying to discover if UFOs sightings are, somehow, connected with "haunted places", so trying to establish an informed dialogue between parapsychology and ufology.

Also, I'm trying to see whether so-called "ghost" phenomena, provided they're reasonably confirmed to exist in the cases that I'm observing, are responsive to prayings and religious methods (or if they could be explained with religious categories, like so-called demonic phenomena), so establishing a dialogue not only with ufology, but with theology and the long spiritual traditions of religions too.

As I've commented in my previous posts, there is a amazing lack of connection, communication and fruitful feedback among professionals of parapsychology, ufology, religion (and many other fields). Nobody seems to be interested in integrating these fields into a more widely informed and interdisciplinary research programme, so the insights of one field are rarely, if ever, used by the other fields.

All of this "informal", purely personal (for the sake's of my own curiosity), pilot study is very time (and money) consuming, but it is a great personal experience, with a lot of FUN.

So, stay tuned... more of "subversive thinking" soon.

Interview with Chris Carter on his book Science and the Afterlife Experience. Reflections on the survival vs the Super-ESP (or Super-Psi) hypotheses

This is my second interview with philosopher and writer Chris Carter. In this interview, Carter comments about the so-called Super-ESP or Super-Psi hypothesis, which is one of the main competing hypotheses of the survival hypothesis. I thank Chris for accepting again the interview. Enjoy.

1-Chris, in your previous book (Science and the Near-Death Experiences) you discuss the evidence for survival of consciousness based upon near-death experiences. In your lastest book (Science and the Afterlife Experience), you discuss other lines of evidence for survival like reincarnation and mediumship. According to your opinion, if we were forced to choose one single category of survival evidence to make the case for the afterlife,  does the best scientific evidence for survival come from NDEs, mediumship, apparitions of the dead or reincarnation research?

In my books I cover evidence from five very different lines of evidence, and all of them are impressive.  But the single most impressive line of evidence supporting survival comes from alleged communication from the deceased via talented human mediums.

 

There are several reasons for this:

s   First of all, the level of detailed information in the best communications is astonishing.  Not just facts unknown to anyone present which are later verified, but also, in the best cases, the communication is unmistakably from the perspective of the deceased, or serves purposes which are clearly those of the deceased, but which are contrary to those of the sitters. Furthermore, I document several cases in which the communicating entity displays aspects of the deceased persons’ personality, which are easily recognized by surviving friends and relatives, and are vivid enough to convince surviving friends and relatives that they are indeed communicating with the deceased.  Finally, in some of the most remarkable cases, high level skills are demonstrated – skills which the medium does not possess, but which required the deceased person communicating years of practice to acquire.

s   And second, in the best cases of mental mediumship, everything the medium says or writes is recorded.  In other words, the records are permanent and objective, and can be studied and analyzed by anyone at any time.  Unlike some of the other lines of evidence, the question of mistaken eye-witness testimony simply does not arise.

However, the evidence for survival does not come only from mediumship, but also from near-death experiences, death-bed visions, children who claim to remember previous lives, and from reports of apparitions.  All of these lines of evidence, all very different from each other, all point in the same direction.

2-In our previous interview, we discussed briefly about the problem of falsifiability of the transmision theory vs the production theory of consciousness. Some philosophically trained readers have complained that I didn't formulated my question correctly.  They suggest that, given your Popperian position on the philosophy of science,  the correct, straightforward question to you would be this: If the survival hypothesis is a scientific hypothesis, what empirical fact or "observational data", if found, would logically refute/falsify the survival hypothesis?

The celebrated philosopher of science Karl Popper was once asked a similar question, to which he replied, “I’ve thrown students out of lectures for asking more intelligent questions.”

Perhaps I’m being too harsh on some of your “philosophically trained readers.” But if they had read my original reply more closely, or if they had studied Popper’s ideas more carefully, they would not ask such a question.

The question assumes that the proposition “at least some human minds have survived past the point of biological death” is a scientifichypothesis: it is not.  It is a hypothetical statement regarding a possible fact, and not a hypothetical statement regarding a universal relationship between facts.

We need to be clear here on what we mean by “theory,” and what we mean by “fact.” For instance, gravity is a fact of nature, yet we have theories of howgravity works. Similarly, evolution appears to be a historical fact – after all, there is the fossil record. Yet we also have theories of how evolution works.

Scientific theories are not speculation about particular facts; they are tentative explanations about how certain facts fit together. When Isaac Newton proposed that a planet and the sun are attracted by a gravitational force that is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them, he proposed a relation between masses and distances—a relation that of course became celebrated as the Newtonian theory of gravity.

Now theoretical statements, or scientific theories, have a certain logical asymmetry.  Consider the statement, “all swans are white.”  It relates two facts – a species of bird and its color, and it predicts that all swans that we see will be white.  It is therefore a (simple) scientific theory, and is capable of being tested.  But testing means only that we can prove it false, and not that we can prove it true.  For neither ten nor ten thousand white swans logically implies that the next swan we see will be white.  However, a single black swan logically proves the statement false.

As Popper pointed out on so many occasions, this means that our scientific theories forever remain hypotheses, conjectures, capable of being proven false, but never capable of being proven true.

Some will quibble here about the nature of testing: for instance, observations can be mistaken, and fraud is always possible.  We may wonder if the bird we see really is a swan, if photos have been doctored, if people have lied, and so forth.  But all of this is completely beside the point.  The point is, once we are convinced beyond all reasonable doubt that the black specimen before us is indeed biologically a swan, then the statement “all swans are white” is logically proven false.

The situation with factual hypotheses is very different.  Statements such as “I weigh between 70 and 72 kilograms” or “the earth is spherical” can be proven false, and can also be proven true beyond all reasonable doubt (it is generally agreed that only statements of logic and mathematics can be proven beyond all conceivable doubt).

However, some factual claims also have a logical asymmetry, but it is the reverse of the situation with theoretical claims.  Consider the factual statement “biological life exists somewhere else in the universe.”  In principle, this can be proven true with a single observation.  But unless we are granted god-like powers, we humans can never prove it false: even if we could scour the universe at near light-speed, we could never be entirely sure that life has not developed somewhere.

Now, the statement “at least some human minds have survived bodily death” is not itself falsifiable. After all, even if we had absolutely no evidence for survival, it could very well be that their consciousness survived the death of their bodies. We could say we have no evidence; but we could not rule out the possibility on logical or empirical grounds.

But the opposite statement, “No human minds have survived bodily death”most certainly is capable of being proven false by evidence. And it is important to remember that the falsification of a statement implies the truth of its negation, even if its negation is not directly falsifiable.

One final point: the criterion of falsifiability is a criterion of demarcationbetween scientific and non-scientific theories, and not a criterion of meaning, or of importance.  Scientific theories, factual statements, and philosophical ideas may all be important, or trivial.

3-Related with the previous question, some philosophical critics of the survival hypothesis argue that good scientific hypotheses must have predictive power in order to have explanatory force. They argue that the survival hypothesis is not scientific in this sense. In your opinion, has the survival hypothesis specific and novel predictive power? If not, in what does its explanatory force consist and in which sense it is a scientific hypothesis? If so, which specific bits of observational data follow deductively (or even probabilistically) from the hypothesis of survival?

First of all, the survival hypothesis in fact does have “predictive power.” It predicts that the consciousness humans now experience will continue after the death of their bodies.  This prediction is corroborated by the NDE, again and again.

But there are several issues raised here.  First of all, again, the survival hypothesis in the narrow form I stated earlier is not a scientific hypothesis, but a hypothetical statement of fact.

Second, I take issue with the statement “good scientific hypotheses must have predictive power in order to have explanatory force.”  Hypotheses must make predictions that are capable of being tested in order to be considered scientifichypotheses.  Progress is only possible in science if our theories are capable of being tested.  What exactly they explain is a separate issue.

Survival provides a simple and concise explanation for the data from near death experiences, death bed visions, children who remember previous lives, apparitions, and cases of seeming communication from the dead via human mediums.  If that’s not “explanatory force”, then I don’t know what is.

4-Related to the previous question, some critics have also posed a more specific open challenge to scientific survivalists: If the survival hypothesis has testable, predictive consequences (as some survivalists think), could you just mention three (3) fairly specific, non-trivial, novel deductive consequences of the survival hypothesis (that match fine-grained descriptions of the empirical data), where these consequences are not also deductive entailments of any known rival explanatory competitor (e.g. super-PSI)?

 

Again, I disagree with the premises of this question.  Survival is a straightforward inference from the data; the evidence for survival of human personality has been documented for thousands of years, and survival was always a simple and straightforward inference.   Explanations in terms of extra-sensory perception were proposed as alternatives to the inference of survival, starting in the late 19^th century, mostly by those opposed to the idea of survival on ideological grounds. 

When explanations in terms of ESP were proven false by the data – such as the data from the so-called proxy sittings, which eliminated the idea that ESP between medium and sitters could explain the results – the hypothesis was not abandoned.  On the contrary, it was supplemented with various ad hoc auxiliary assumptions in order to render it unfalsifiable.  In other words, it was turned into an ideological excuse to not accept the data that proves materialism false.

Extra-sensory perception, super or otherwise, utterly fails to explain several features of the best cases, as documented in my book Science and the Afterlife Experience.

Finally, Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona performed a test of the predictive consequences of survival versus super-ESP.  He first performed some preliminary measurements of correlation between the brains of medium and sitter before and during a reading.  He would have them chat for 5 or 10 minutes prior to the reading, and measure correlations of brain activities.  On the super-ESP hypothesis, one would then expect that as the medium starts the reading, he would be more focused on the sitter, so as to extract information from the sitter’s brain (subconsciously or otherwise).  On the survivalist hypothesis, the medium is turning his attention away from the sitter to the communicating spirits, and so one would expect brain correlation between sitter and medium to decrease.  The latter was observed.

5-Philosophers of science discuss the problems related with the explanatory virtues vs epistemic values when choosing among competing explanations for a given set of data. For example, sometimes two competing hypotheses have the same explanatory power, but they differ in others aspects like simplicity, internal and external coherence, systematicity, conceptual cost and so forth which favours one hypothesis over the other.  In this sense, philosophical critics have posed another challenge to scientific survivalism:  Can you explain how you arrive at judgments concerning the evidential probability of survival based on attributions of the alleged explanatory power of the survival hypothesis and/or the failure of competing hypotheses to deliver the explanatory goods? 

First of all, there are very few historical examples of two competing scientific hypotheses making the same predictions, and I can think of only two examples.  In both cases it was eventually shown that the two theories were identical, but were expressed using different mathematics. (The most famous example is from the early years of quantum mechanics.  Schrodinger’s wave equation and Heisenberg’s matrix mechanics were competing theories that made identical predictions. Schrodinger later showed that they were equivalent).   So, this scenario is mostly an invention of philosophers, not something scientists actually encounter

And again, I disagree with the premises of this question.  Although some philosophers of science may discuss the problems related with the “explanatory virtues versus epistemic values” when choosing among competing explanations for a given set of data, no working scientists engage in such nonsense.

For a theory to be scientific, it must be capable of being tested.  So, if we are dealing with two competing scientific theories – say Newton’s and Einstein’s theories of gravity – we should be able to devise a test which will refute at least one of them.  Such a test was in fact performed by the Eddington expedition during a solar eclipse, and the data provided was in agreement with Einstein’s theory, and contrary to Newton’s.

On the other hand, if we are dealing with a non-testable – that is, a philosophic – theory, then our evaluation criteria are different.  We need to ask:

1)     Does it solve the problem?

2)     If so, does it do so simply, or in a complicated and contrived manner?

3)     And finally, is it consistent with other beliefs which we have good reason to consider true?

   

For the philosophic statement “all human minds survive death” we can answer “yes” to all three questions.  For explanations in terms of super-ESP, only the answer to the first question is “yes.” 

6-The critics also say that scientific survivalists have never presented a positive argument for survival of consciousness. All of what they do  (so argue the critics) is to mask the massive difficulty of presenting such positive case appealing to two questionable strategies:  a) to present a bunch of apparently anomalous data, and b) to label traditional criticisms against the competing explanatory competitors which allegedly fail to account for the data. What do you think of this criticism? Is it possible to provide a positive argument for survival of consciousness which is not limited to the above two strategies alone?

Frankly, I have no idea what this means.  Anyone who reads my work can see that I do much more than “present a bunch of apparently anomalous data.”  As for the statement in part b, I find it utterly incomprehensible.   

7-In your book, you argue that one major objection to the super-PSI hypothesis as an explanation of the best cases suggestive of survival is that the evidence for the existence of PSI of the required power and range to explain the best cases is practically non-existent (so, the burden of proof is on the advocates of super-ESP to provide such evidence).  However, some recent defenders of the super-PSI hypothesis have challenged that objection and have argued that the examples of super-PSI (that is, of forms of PSI of the required extraordinary power and range) are precisely the cases suggestive of survival.  According to these critics, the super-PSI hypothesis is precisely and fundamentally the exclusive appeal to efficacious living agent psi to explain ostensible evidences for survival. What do you think of this reply by the defenders of the super-PSI hypothesis?

First of all, I use the term “Super-ESP,” not super-PSI.  Psi includes not just extra-sensory perception, but also psychokinesis, and since I do not discuss physical mediums, any discussion of psychokinesis is irrelevant.  We need to be clear that we are talking here about perception, extra-sensory, super, or otherwise.

Now, actually, what I said in my book was this:  “Evidence for the existence of ESP of the required power and range is practically nonexistent. Defenders of the super-ESP hypothesis are hard-pressed to find any such examples – outside of cases of apparent communication from the deceased.”  And so defenders of the super-PSI hypothesis have not challenged that objection, but have simply agreed with my statement.

The fact that they cannot find any such cases demonstrates the purely ad hoc nature of the super-ESP “explanation,” because of the utter lack of any independent evidence for super-ESP. If super-ESP as an explanation is to be scientific, then it would predict the demonstration of such wide-ranging, virtually-unlimited powers in instances in which we are not dealing with evidence of apparent survival.

If the function of super-ESP is the use of its virtually unlimited powers by the subconscious mind to surreptitiously protect us from the fear of death by fabricating elaborate evidence that seems in every respect exactly as if the deceased are visiting or communicating, then why don’t we have evidence of our subconscious minds employing these vast powers to protect us from the actual threat of imminent death? That would at least provide a more plausible evolutionary reason for the existence of these vast powers.

Instead of offering any such evidence, these “recent defenders of the Super-ESP hypothesis” simply agree that there is no independent evidence, apart from the cases apparently offering prima facie evidence of survival.  This means that their “argument” is not an argument at all; rather, it is nothing more than the purely dogmatic assertion that cases of evidence for survival must be cases of super-ESP, period.

The fact that they cannot come up with any such independent evidence shows that what they propose is pseudo-science, pure and simple.

Consider the evidence that I present in the form of reports of apparitions of the deceased.  Some of these reports involved witnesses simultaneously seeing the apparition, from perspectives which were correct for each witness.  One “skeptic” Henry Gordon, magician, newspaper columnist, and member of CSICOP, tried to explain this by saying that people sometimes hallucinate in groups. Gordon wrote, “The fact is, once again, that studies have shown that collective hallucinations do take place. And the power of suggestion is the explanation.”

Gordon provided no references. In researching my chapter on apparitions I combed through the entire PsychInfo database, from 1887 to the time of writing, and could find only one article on collective hallucinations. It appeared in the Royal Naval Medical Service Journal in 1942, and it described the experiences of the shipwrecked survivors of a torpedoed ship in Arctic waters. Out of the hundreds of men who managed to make it to rafts and lifeboats, only thirty-six survived, and two of these died shortly after being rescued. The men were without food and water for three days before help arrived.  These men told a horrific story of hunger, thirst exhaustion, and despair, in which at times some of the men did seem to hallucinate ships in the distance, and the hallucination seemed to spread to some, but not all, of the other men in the boats.  It seems preposterous to argue that the hallucinations experienced by these desperate and miserable men – which seemed to spread to some of those around them by the power of suggestion – could throw any light whatsoever on most reports of collectively perceived apparitions.

In other words, Gordon could offer no independent evidence that people hallucinate in groups, apart from cases indicating, prima facie, that apparitions were collectively perceived.

The same is true of many modern conspiracy theories.  Some people today think the moon landings were faked in a film studio, initially during the Nixon administration; that the supporting evidence was fabricated; that hundreds of highly respected scientists, engineers, and other witnesses were bribed, or threatened.  But there is no evidence that such a wide-ranging conspiracy has ever been successful for any period of time, and the evidence that we do have – such as the failure of the Watergate cover-up only a few years later – indicates that even much simpler conspiracies quickly fall apart when examined.

So, to sum up, to argue that “the examples of super-PSI (that is, of forms of PSI of the required extraordinary power and range) are precisely the cases suggestive of survival” is analogous to arguing that “the evidence that the moon landings were faked is precisely the evidence that the moon landings occurred.”

 8-The critics have argued that a hidden assumption of the above objection against super-PSI is the thesis that (in words of Robert Almeder)  it is necessary to have “some evidence of the causes cited in offering an explanation", so in order to appeal to super-PSI as an alternative explanation for cases of survival, we need to have independent evidence of the existence of super-PSI. But the critics say that, on parity of reasoning, if the hidden assumption mentioned is right, then we cannot appeal to discarnate persons to explain observational data suggestive of survival unless we have independent, empirical reasons to suppose that such discarnate entities exist. What do you think of this objection?

Nothing at all.  In my books I present evidence for survival from five different lines of evidence: near-death experiences, death bed visions, children who claim to remember previous lives, apparitions, and communication from the deceased via human mediums.  These five lines of evidence, all gathered independently, and all very different from each other, all point in the same direction.  They most certainly provide “independent, empirical reasons.”

9-Other critics have argued that the survivalist hypothesis is committed to a kind or degree of PSI that is indistinguishable from what is required by the super-PSI hypothesis. So, for example, if  we suppose that a discarnate spirit is levitating a 30-lb table, we must minimally attribute to him PK powers sufficient for bringing about this effect. But we would  have to postulate no more than this to account for a living agent levitating the  same table. Therefore, at least regarding the extension to which PSI is involved, the super-PSI hypothesis is indistinguishable from the PSI required by the survivalist hypothesis. 

With regard to PK, this question is not relevant to my work; as I said earlier, I do not deal with physical mediumship, only mental mediumship.  However, in my book I argue that the question is not so much a problem of degree of ESP required; something different in kind from extra-sensory perception is required to explain the best cases.

10-The defenders of the super-PSI hypothesis also argue that, given that the extension to which PSI is involved in both hypotheses is equivalent and given that the survivalist hypothesis is more complex (because it postulates not only the existence PSI, but the existence of discarnate spirits too), the proper use of Ockam's razor suggests that the super-PSI hypothesis should be preferred because it is simpler. What do you think of this objection?

As I demonstrate in my book, and as many now admit, there is nothing at all simple about the super-ESP theory. As philosopher Carl Becker wrote, “Its ad hoc contortions to fit the data deprive it of all simplicity and elegance.”

I also argue in my book that the line of reasoning above involves a misunderstanding of Occam’s writing. William of Occam famously wrote “Do not multiply entities unnecessarily”—or in other words, do not add unnecessary causal factors to explanations. If inertia and gravity are sufficient to explain the orbits of the planets, do not add invisible angels.  And if your theory of planetary orbits is contradicted by the data, then do not add the actions of invisible angels to “explain” the discrepancy between your theory and the data.  The only sense in which simplicity is of value in scientific explanations is the sense that we refrain from adding untestable ad hoc auxiliary assumptions to our theories in order to immunize them from the data that prove them false, and that is precisely the sense in which super-ESP violates the principle of simplicity.

The “invisible angels” of super-ESP are all the untestable ad hoc auxiliary assumptions that it must make to fit the data that refute the simpler forms of the theory.  In that sense then, it is a gross violation of the principle of parsimony in the use of hypotheses, and so violates the only sense in which simplicity is of value in scientific explanations. 

Any scientist who defended a pet theory by dreaming up ad hoc excuses why he cannot accept falsification of his theory by the data would be rightly condemned for practicing pseudo-science.

11-In your book, you mention another objection to super-PSI. You state that ESP usually operates between people who share some emotional connection, or who are otherwise linked in some way. But in the proxy cases discussed in your book, the link was extremely tenuous; in the drop-in cases, for example, there was apparently no link at all. However, critics say that we don't know that psi usually operates like that all instances (perhaps it is the case in laboratory or in other paradigmatic cases of psi, but there is not evidence that it is always the case), and so it is a weak objection against the super-PSI hypothesis.

All of the anecdotal and laboratory evidence of which I am aware indicates that ESP operates in a much stronger manner between people who are linked in some way.  The anecdotal evidence from history is given in a complete chapter in my first book, Science and Psychic Phenomena.  As for experimental evidence, Dalton (1997) and Broughton and Alexander (1997) found that Ganzfeld telepathy results were much better when tests were done between people who knew each other well.  Sheldrake (2012) in tests of telephone telepathy found that the success rate with unfamiliar callers was near chance level, but with familiar callers it was about twice the chance level.

And by the way, this makes perfect sense if the purpose of ESP is to aid in the struggle of social animals and humans for survival.  Otherwise, it makes no sense.

These considerations led to tests of the idea that ESP between sitters and mediums could explain the data.  The fact that the proxy sittings – sittings with mediums in which the sitter did not know anything about the deceased except their name – were every bit as successful as ordinary sittings falsifies this theory.  Yet the ESP theory was not rejected, merely extended with the complex, ad hoc assumptions of super-ESP, tacked on whenever required, in order to explain survival data in terms of ESP.

Since the evidence indicates that ESP works far better between those who are linked in some way, the burden of evidence is on proponents of super-ESP to show that this is not the case.

12-Another reply by super-PSI advocates against the above objection is that survivalists assumes a fairly rigid border on the set of paradigmatic cases of psi. Suppose we're facing data that would require deviating from what we know about psi, if we were to explain them in terms of psi.  From this viewpoint, one can look at cases that deviate in one of two ways, either as being an entirely different sort of phenomenon (as the survivalist maintains) or as being an instance that demands expanding the scope of paradigmatic cases of living agent psi (as super-PSI defenders mantain). In this case,  it's a lot harder to decide on this matter than the survivalist do, and they seem to be largely unconscious of the problem here.

If this is the “main argument,” it is testimony to the desperation of their case that they must resort to such sophistry dressed up in fancy sounding language.

In the first place, along with Popper, I utterly reject the notion of inductive logic; there is only deduction, and, as Hume showed, induction cannot be rationally justified.  Neither ten nor ten thousand white swans logically imply that the next swan we see will be white (nor do such observations allow the calculation of any probabilities to that effect).  But a single black swan proves deductively that the white swan conjecture is false.  At most, the white swan theory is a conjecture that is accepted tentatively pending possible falsification.  It is not accepted with any sort of probability.

Second, I do not rely on any “epistemic weight of fit with background knowledge for determinations of epistemic probability.”   What I do is ask if a given explanation is consistent with the facts, and also with other things we have good reasons to think are true.  I do not use incoherent expressions such as “epistemic weight of fit” or “epistemic probability,” and frankly, I do not have much respect for philosophers who write like this.  Philosophers who write clearly are not afraid of being understood.

In my work I present the evidence that provides a prima facie case for survival; demonstrate that alternative explanations, to the extent that they are testable, have been proven false; and then argue that to the extent these alternative explanations are not testable (such as elaborate fraud scenarios, or super-ESP) they are pseudo-scientific excuses for refusing to accept an otherwise straightforward inference from the evidence.

13- The information provided by mediums is in many instances contradictory about basic and key aspects of the afterlife or the spiritual world. For example, some mediums have provided information supportive of reincarnation, but many others have denied it or been skeptical about it. So, a contemporary medium like August Goforht, in a interview in Skeptiko commented "I have a huge library of books written by mediums and spiritualists that go back almost a couple hundred years. I noticed not a single one mentioned reincarnation". If reincarnation is a fact and mediums are largely reliable about the conditions of the spiritual world, one would expect a wider agreement about the reality of reincarnation coming from legitimate mediums and reliable afterlife communications. What do you think of the reliability of spiritualism in general and how do you explain the apparent disagreement about reincarnation?"

If at least some of the communications via mediums are what they appear to be, then we should expect some communicators to be more reliable or knowledgeable witnesses than others, just as some people are more reliable or knowledgeable about certain matters here on earth.  And the best communicators do not claim to be infallible.

I have come across several cases of communication in which the idea of reincarnation is discussed.  The fact that some communicators do not remark on this is not evidence that it does not occur – absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Reincarnation is an idea that many people find unpalatable.  I understand this, as many have no desire to be reborn, to go through all the trials of growing up again.  But the communications, or at least the ones I consider most reliable, tell us that we humans do not reincarnate dozens or hundreds of times, but only as long as we need to; in most cases, only three or four times.

The best evidence for reincarnation is not messages to that effect from mediums, but rather children who claim to remember previous lives.  The previous personalities in these cases usually seem to have a sense of unfinished business about their lives.  We need to remember that a high proportion of these previous lives came to a sudden and violent end, often at an early age.

 14-According to Frederic Myers, through repeated incarnations as plants, insects, human beings etc. we are evolving continuously and eventually we will trascend the realm of earthly matter. So, we are "gods in training". Does Myers' view imply a sort of theological polytheism in which we are, at least eventually, gods? 

 No, not really.  I put those three words “gods in training” in italics for a reason.  If some people find the expression blasphemous, then we can easily substitute expressions such as “highly advanced beings.”  Some argue that we are all on a long journey to eventually become what men once called gods.

15-Would you like to add something else to end the interview? 
 

Yes, I would like to stress that the super-ESP hypothesis is simply an elaborate excuse to not accept the most straightforward inference from the data, an inference that has been made since time immemorial.    To the extent that it is testable, it is easily proven false; to the extent that it renders itself untestable with elaborate ad hoc assumptions, it is ideology, anti-empirical dogmatism, pure and simple.

We can compare super-ESP to the theory put forth by the defense lawyers working on the famous OJ Simpson murder trial.  The forensic evidence clearly showed that their client was guilty, so the defense team created an elaborate conspiracy theory involving several police detectives and the Los Angeles police forensic office.  Whenever their “theory” was contradicted by the evidence, they simply dreamed up an even more elaborate conspiracy theory.

Alternative explanations for the survival data fall into two categories: elaborate fraud scenarios, and elaborate theories of super-ESP combined with subconscious fraud.  There is not a shred of supporting evidence for either.  They are nothing more than mere logical possibilities that can never be proven false with 100% certainty.  The burden of providing evidence is not on supporters of the most straightforward inference from the data to show that these logical possibilities are not true, any more than the burden of evidence is on those who think men have walked on the moon to prove beyond all doubt that the moon landings were not faked. 

References

Broughton, RS., and Alexander, CM (1997).  “Autoganzfeld II. An attempted replication of the PRL research.” Journal of Parapsychology, 61, 209-226.

Dalton, K. (1997) “Exploring the Links: creativity and psi in the ganzfeld.” Proceedings of the Parapsychological Association 40^thAnnual Convention, 119-131.

Sheldrake, R. (2012).  The Science Delusion.  London: Coronet.

Schwartz, G. (2003). The Afterlife Experiments.  New York: Atria.