Psychic Powers

There are certain topics which will mark one out as being in some sense beyond the pale, not to be taken seriously, perhaps psychotic, once one broaches them. At some point on this blog I plan to talk about ad hominem, which is the alleged fallacy committed when a person’s reputation is used to dismiss their arguments, but not yet. That said, there is an element of ad hominem here because once I’ve said that I believe in psychic abilities it may mark me for some as an unreliable source of accurate information.

I’ve told this story before on here but it’s worth revisiting. A number of years ago, I gave a talk on philosophical counselling at Leicester Secular Society. In case you don’t know, philosophical counselling is a method of applying philosophical methods and theories to a client’s feelings, behaviour and thoughts to reveal inconsistencies or examine them more closely in a revelatory manner and reach a state of greater well-being as a result. I’m almost accidentally qualified to offer this service although I haven’t explicitly done it very often except as part of a herbal consultation, but it does exist independently of herbalism as a therapy. Unfortunately, the person introducing me mentioned that I was a herbalist, which was fine for most of the audience but one of them was unable to hear my talk without filtering it through that lens and simply became critical and acerbically attacked me verbally. Dunning-Kruger was in full effect, but it’s also an example of ad hominem, since I was from that point on unable to penetrate their K-skepticism.

Many people reading this will already be aware that I’m theist and that this forms an important part of my life, and having learned this they may consider that I am in a sense unreachable to rational argument. If, however, you view my theism in a broader context, it means that I reject metaphysical naturalism, and I have that in common with many people who either reject organised religion or are agnostic or atheist without necessarily focussing that strongly on those labels, but do believe in psychic abilities.

However, I ask myself, is it actually necessary to believe in the supernatural to accept ESP, and what does it even mean to say something is supernatural? Before I go on, I want to mention specific categories into which psionic abilities are usually categorised. I may well miss some, and I want to point out that this is a conceptual classification which is not yet meant to involve commitment as to whether these things are real:

• Telepathy
• Dowsing
• Remote viewing (or other senses)
• Clairvoyance, clairaudience and others.
• Precognition
• Telekinesis and psychokinesis
• Communication with the dead
• Psi missing
• Psychometry
• Levitation
• Teleportation

There may be others, and there are overlaps. At least one of these would in theory require absolutely nothing more than a particular physical ability, and it may be worth reversing some of these to see if they reveal anything extra.

I’ve put telepathy first because I think it’s different from most of the others. We are familiar with signals being transmitted and received via radio waves, and there are animals with magnetic senses such as rays, who hunt by detecting electrical signals within the bodies of their prey. They may of course be aided by the fact that both are immersed in water, although pigeons are able to navigate using Earth’s magnetic field. Whether or not human telepathy exists, there is no need to posit the existence of anything exotic or supernatural to accept its possibility. We detect light with our eyes and there are many organisms with luminescent organs. There seems to be no reason at all why an organ could not exist which transmits or receives radio signals. Whether they actually do exist is another question, and whether this is how telepathy operates, if it exists, is equally mysterious. However, in principle there just could be such abilities, even if all they amount to is the ability to communicate silently in a similar manner to vocalising. On a broader level, there also seems to be no reason why an animal wouldn’t be able to sense brain activity, perhaps by contact with the head in a Spock-like manner. Electroencephalograms exist.

Dowsing is in the same category. There has been a theory that bodies of water influence Earth’s magnetic field. It would clearly be an evolutionary advantage for an animal living in an arid environment to be able to detect subterranean water, and water is a very unusual substance. When I say dowsing, I’m not talking about using a pendulum over a map to find sources of water or something else which is more divorced from the circumstances where one is in close proximity to the body in question. Whereas dowsing may or may not be corroborated by experiment, the fact remains that it makes sense to be able to perceive the proximity of water, and in fact magnetic fields do interact with water: for instance, applying a magnetic field to water increases its melting point. It also makes sense that some native metals would be detectable for similar reasons.

The “gotcha” in these two categories is the question of the actual presence of such organs in the human body, or perhaps a more diffusely distributed function throughout the body manifested on a cellular or systemic level. There does not in fact appear to be any such organ, but there is an issue with post hoc “adjustments” which is the essence of pseudoscience, so if an experiment were to be conducted, it should be rigorously designed enough to postulate exactly what physical basis is sought and how it might operate.

Phenomenology is also an issue. Do we all encode our consciousness uniquely, or do we have a universal language of experience? Is it intelligible to “tune into” another’s brain and find that their red is one’s blue, for example? I think it isn’t, because concepts fit into a network. For instance, of the spectral colours yellow is the brightest and so arguably the closest to white and indigo is the darkest and therefore closest to black. If you disagree with this subjective judgement, you and I may perceive colours differently but we do appear to be having a meaningful disagreement, which can be checked using some other part of our mental systems. When it can’t, it’s possible that one of us is simply wrong. But there’s another level of phenomenology. Would we be experiencing the world of another person from a first person perspective, or would it be more like hearing their voice? What is telepathy actually like? What would it be like for a blind telepath to tap into a seeing person’s mind or vice versa? These questions might not depend on the reality of telepathy, or it could be that if they were pursued far enough they’d reveal that there is something wrong with the idea of telepathy.

Inverted telepathy is in a sense telekinesis, in a rather sinister sense in fact. A telepath detects events in someone else’s mind, but a practitioner of telekinesis is causing events to happen outside their body without using directly motive force. The mental analogue of this is mind control and thought insertion. Thought insertion is said to be a symptom of psychosis, although clearly the likes of gaslighting, brainwashing, propaganda and advertising kind of are thought insertion in a way, and of course mind control. It isn’t clear that psychic mind control would necessarily be any more disturbing or unethical. In fact, given the recent advent of “nudge” psychology, therapeutic use of mind control would be akin to hypnotherapy. In the right setting and with informed consent it could be completely benign.

Telekinesis is the more physically forceful sibling of mind control. Just to clear up a minor point of nomenclature, telekinesis is the ability to move objects with the power of one’s mind, whereas psychokinesis is an instance of telekinesis, or so it seems. Apply this to telepathy, incidentally, and you have psychopathy as a specific instance of telepathy, which in fact does make sense in terms of mind control to some degree! There’s also a bit of a caveat here as regards plausibility. One example of telekinesis might be pyrokinesis, which is the ability to set fire to inflammable objects by touching them, which may in fact be physically possible by influencing nerve impulses in a similar manner to electric organs in fish. From that it may also follow that it’s possible to interfere with electronics or move ferrous metals without this being a particularly paranormal talent, although again the necessary anatomy and physiology in a human body is not known to exist. Psychic surgery would fall into this category if it existed. Belief in the power of prayer is effectively belief in psychokinesis via an intermediary, and I’ve long maintained that if one is to believe such things are possible, accepting that prayer is sometimes granted is a brake on delusions of grandeur. One could believe either that one can directly affect the world or that one’s prayers might lead to God affecting the world, and the second position is humbler, and I would say psychologically healthier. This doesn’t depend on it being true either.

Precognition is something I firmly believe in because I seem to have experienced it pretty unambiguously, and recorded it before the fact in some cases. For instance, this is mixed, but when new clients would contact me by ‘phone for the first time, I would sometimes experience sympathy symptoms a few seconds before and expect to receive a ‘phone call imminently for a complaint associated with those symptoms, which would then happen. This, again, is not hindsight because my preconception of the client’s health preceded their first contact with me. Along with several other incidents, my experience and the way I have recorded it before the fact is enough to convince me that precognition exists. My attitude towards it is that it’s probably a universal ability, not that I’m special, similar to Beverly Jaegers, a C-sceptic who believed psychic abilities were latent in everyone and just needed training and practice to be brought out. This also suggests that K-skeptics are ignoring their own precognitive experiences or attributing them to chance. All that said, it’s entirely unclear how precognition would work given current science, although bafflingly, nothing ever seems to rule out time travel back in time no matter how much physics is discovered. A less personal example is Nostradamus’s apparently successful prediction of 9/11, which was also publicly interpreted as such more than two decades before it happened. With precognition, it’s important to be sure to make a detailed record protected from potential editing before the event predicted.

Remote viewing, which presumably involves other senses too, is the ability to see things at a distance. For instance, in one experiment the island of Kerguelen in the Indian Ocean was described without foreknowledge and in another, details of the Saturnian system were ascertained which were later confirmed by the Voyager probes. However, Immanuel Velikovsky also made a number of predictions about planets in this Solar System which turned out to be correct, but they were based on false premises. It’s possible to be correct by chance or educated guesses, and that mechanism for success could be hidden from consciousness. That said, this presumes to know another’s mind better than they know it themselves, which is dodgy ground. Remote viewing was researched by intelligence services up until the mid-’70s, but it was discontinued owing to the lack of useful results. It isn’t clear that this means they didn’t find it worked. However, police departments have attempted to use remote viewing to find missing persons, Beverly Jaegers again having been involved in this in 1971. The UK government researched it in the ‘noughties. It’s hard to know what to make of government agencies taking the idea seriously, as it could just reflect the non-scientific background of the people running the departments. One gets the impression generally that parapsychology was taken a lot more seriously in the 1960s and 1970s than it was later, and there’s a clear trend in a less accepting direction, which I perceive as a lack of openness to the possibility, but the clear implication is that there have been only negative results, or at least a meta-analysis would show this because statistically there could be some outlying positives which have no significance in a larger setting, that is, they’re just good luck. However, a general trend towards physicalism or mechanism would also show this and the mere fact that it isn’t fashionable needn’t be taken to mean there’s nothing in it.

Psi missing is a phenomenon which could be seen as pareidolia – a tendency to see patterns where none exist. If you take data such as with the Zenner Cards illustrated above and you ask people to guess twenty-five in a row, the null hypothesis is that 20% of the guesses will be correct. However, two other claims could be made looking at such data. One is precognition, where one card ahead is guessed correctly. If this is done twenty-five times, the final result can be discounted because it would be after the end of the experiment, so the probability of being correct is already four percent higher in this situation, making the probability of a positive result for precognition higher. Psi missing is an unusually low result, so it would be a result whose probability is significantly worse than random guessing. However, given the same data set and these three possibilities, the probability of finding something in them becomes much higher even though it may not in fact reflect anything genuine.

Larry Niven called psi missing “Plateau Eyes”. In the Known Space universe, there is a planet circling τ Ceti which is generally Venus-like and uninhabitable but has a high plateau called Mount Lookitthat sticking out of the clouds which humans have settled. On this planet, there is a high proportion of people who tend to be ignored. This enables them to get away with things other people wouldn’t, but it also means they find it very hard to find work or be promoted. I sometimes wonder if I have this! It could also be understood as bad luck, although it isn’t quite that because it can work to one’s advantage. If it exists of course.

Clairvoyance and clairaudience are older terms for a more generic form of ESP. Clairvoyance is the ability to visualise things beyond the “norm”, so for example it could include the past, the future, distant places or spirits, auras and energies. Clairaudience is the auditory equivalent, suggesting that clairvoyance is focussed only on vision but this doesn’t seem to be how it is.

I’m going to have to stop at this point. Part II tomorrow.

Reincarnation

As a Christian, I’m not supposed to believe in reincarnation. That said, there was a time before the emergence of Christian orthodoxy when many Christians did, and more recently the Cathars, for example, did believe it happened. There is also an allegation in the gospels that John The Baptist was a reincarnation of Elijah. Some Jewish mystics also believe in it. However, two things about this. Firstly, I’m not Christian in the sense of having faith in Christ as a living God and Saviour in human form because there seems to be a lot of evidence against the idea that the Holy Spirit exists. Secondly, although one’s knowledge and faith in the doctrines of one’s religion should be a guide, they should never be an excuse for dispassionate observation of the evidence or its lack regarding a possible fact of the matter. Ultimately, our only duty in this respect is to the truth, assuming truth to be absolute and bivalent, and that a correspondence theory of truth is correct rather than a coherence theory, and approaching something in this manner ultimately strengthens any justifiable faith. It’s part of a cycle.

I’m going to start from Christianity. An early argument I made to other Christians regarding reincarnation was that it seems to be more just than having just one shot at life, after which you’re either damned or saved. It gives one longer to commit to Christ or otherwise and enables one to make amends and have as many chances as are needed for salvation. As far as I know, though, no Protestant, Orthodox or Roman Catholic church today accepts the idea of reincarnation as a general process. This has apparently not always been the case. The Cathars were a twelfth century Gnostic Christian sect who believed humans were angels trapped in physical bodies who would not enter heaven until they were purified (hence the name, from the Greek καθαρσις), and until then we would be reincarnated. Cathar Perfects also always travelled as same-sex couples, which led others to attribute homosexual relations to them, although it isn’t clear whether this was defamatory or a fact. It was said to be to avoid sexual temptation. Unsurprisingly, the Cathars were persecuted by the Church. The Albigensian Crusade was conducted against them and they were massacred and executed. In fact their doctrine doesn’t appeal to me because they’re Gnostic, but I hope I don’t need to say that I consider their massacre to be a great evil. They may have been an invention of the Church as an excuse to kill lots of people. I’m not aware of the details here. As a thirteen year old I liked the idea of the Cathars and regarded myself as one because I saw myself as a Christian who believed in reincarnation. A friend of mine saw this as a very bad thing because of their apparent tolerance of homosexuality. They were influenced by the Bogomils and a group I’ve not otherwise heard of called the Paulicians. The Bogomils were also Gnostic and opposed to physical and institutional places of worship as their own bodies were considered to be temples, which makes no sense to me because they were supposed to be Gnostics, who believe matter is evil and see the body as a prison as far as I know.

There’s a widespread belief among both supporters and opponents of reincarnation, that the early Church accepted the belief, and in particular Origen of Alexandria, born 184 CE, is said to have implied that it happened. Origen certainly believed that souls existed before conception. He also believed in a succession of universes in which souls appear to become incarnated in each æon, so that definitely sounds like a form of reincarnation, although not in the sense that someone living in his time might still be around today in a different body so much as that after the end of this æon, a new world will be created and they would live a life then, just as they had before this æon.

The soul has neither beginning nor end. [They] come into this world strengthened by the victories or weakened by the defeats of their previous lives.

Falsely attributed to Origen but widely publicised.

It looks as if Origen’s cosmology has been vaguely passed on to people who later read into it what they wanted to hear, so when they hear the word “reincarnation”, more strictly μετεμψυχωσις, they tend to assume it means a soul living a series of lives in the same universe rather than having one instance per æon in a sequential multiverse. However, the fact that there were still Gnostic Christians around in the fourteenth century who had inherited their own beliefs from other religious groups suggests that there may have been an underground Gnostic movement which survived the early Church and, through all that time, maintained such a belief. In fact I’m wondering if Origen’s belief was in fact modified in the same manner as the popular misconception of it today has been, and that in fact they just plain did believe in reincarnation.

Judaism has a tendency to be quite positive in some places about beliefs which Muslims or Christians tend to clamp down upon. For instance, whereas orthodox Protestant and Roman Catholic churches usually reject divination outright nowadays, including the Kabbalah, Judaism not only embraces it as part of its own tradition but actually seems to prize it and encourage certain people, namely older men, to explore it. Jews do not perceive the Tanakh (Hebrew Bible – what Christians tend to call the Old Testament) to refer to reincarnation and the Talmud never refers to it either. However, the Karaites, a non-Rabbinical sect of Judaism which relies directly on the written Torah, believe in gilgul, “rolling” of the soul between bodies as they live out their lives. One reason for this is that it seems to explain the suffering of small children, because if they sinned in previous lives this can be seen as divine retribution. The Zohar refers to the idea several times, stating that a proud man (sic) might be reincarnated as an insect or worm. It also says Cain’s soul entered the body of Jethro and Abel’s the body of Moses. The Hasidim just plainly and explicitly believe in reincarnation and say that particularly enlightened individuals are able to remember previous lives. Apart from gilgul there is also dybbuk, which is spirit possession, and ʻibbur, which is where a soul enters a person’s mind from heaven to assist them. However, as far as I know observant Jews nowadays don’t usually believe in reincarnation. As usual, the specific beliefs of faithful and observant Judaism do vary considerably on this matter.

In the Christian New Testament, a claim is made that Jesus may be a reincarnation of Elijah.

 “See, I will send the prophet Elijah to you before that great and dreadful day of the Lord comes. ⁶ He will turn the hearts of the parents to their children, and the hearts of the children to their parents; or else I will come and strike the land with total destruction.”

Malachi 4:5-6, New International Version

This is of course the Tanakh, but in the New Testament, the following passage, one of several, appears:

They replied, ‘Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.’

Matthew 16:14, New International Version

This at least suggests that many saw Jesus as an example of what was at some point referred to as ʻibbur, a soul descending from Heaven (which doesn’t seem to be a very Jewish concept incidentally) to help Jesus, or perhaps a plain and simple reincarnation of Elijah. This cannot, as far as I can tell, be reconciled with the later orthodoxy about the nature of Jesus Christ, but interestingly the phenomenon of ʻibbur is remarkably similar to Stapledon’s ideas in ‘Last And First Men’ and ‘Last Men In London’, and of course also somewhat similar to the idea of Bodhisattva.

So in the end, I think I would say that there is definite evidence for the acceptance of the idea of reincarnation in Judaism and heretical Christianity, and early on perhaps even in the embryonic Christian church itself. Of course that doesn’t mean reincarnation is a reality, but it’s just interesting that it isn’t as far from the Abrahamic tradition as is sometimes assumed. The Druze are another example of Abrahamic religionists who believe in it.

The spiritual home of the doctrine of reincarnation is of course generally perceived to be in South Asia, where it’s held to be true by Jains, Hindus, Buddhists and, perhaps surprisingly, Sikhs. Among them, the idea is more formalised and linked more explicitly to karma. Jainism, probably the most physicalist of all religions, sees the soul as weighed down by karma as a kind of subtle contaminating matter which sticks to it when one acts in such a way as to tie oneself to the cycle of life in the world below mokṣa, as with inflicting suffering, lying, theft or committing sexual misdeeds. Buddhism can sometimes analyse the soul completely away and just see things in terms of karma being passed on, and I will return to this as it seems quite significant to me. The idea of reincarnation in Hinduism is so familiar it isn’t worth going into here. It’s worth noting, though, that the link made between the moral quality of one’s life and reincarnation present in both Judaism and the dharmic faiths, and usually inherited in the West from this source, is not present in other parts of the world.

Pythagoras believed in reincarnation and passed the belief to other Ancient Greeks, and at the same time the religion of Orphism, which may have been influenced by Indian thought. Elsewhere in the world beliefs in reincarnation also exist, for instance among Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals. It could be that the religions of South Asia only happen to include belief in reincarnation because they better preserve a more universal ancient human tradition of spirituality than in many other places. In Siberia, children are given the names of dead relatives in the expectation that they receive their personalities. That said, other groups of peoples do believe in an afterlife instead, with no reincarnation, hence ancestor worship.

All that said, this needn’t imply that reincarnation actually happens. There are many near-universal beliefs which have turned out not to be so. Presumably at some point in the remote past, everyone assumed the world was flat, and everyone was wrong. But are we assuming here that those who do believe in reincarnation are in that particular aspect more ignorant than we are? For all we know, they were drawing conclusions on evidence that suggested that hypothesis. In a sense, the scientific method didn’t exist at that time but human beings were still capable of reasoning and used it to improve their quality of life, so why conclude they were wrong or merely superstitious? Why believe in reincarnation or an afterlife, or something else? It does stand to reason that fear or mere incomprehension that such a complex thing as a human personality and consciousness could cease to exist permanently with death, and therefore that the afterlife or reincarnation could be seen as rationalisations, but why choose one over the other? Does it say something about a culture which one they believe in? Are there other beliefs apart from extinction and oblivion?

I also have no idea which belief is more popular or whether they coexist in the same spiritual traditions.

A belief can be thoroughly explained as fulfilling some kind of emotional and social function without turning out to be incorrect. These two approaches are in different realms. In a less culturally integrated situation, belief in reincarnation can still satisfy some kind of need. One example of this is past life therapy. Here, a patient is hypnotised and regressed into time before their birth, at which point they may receive the impression of having lived other lives before this one. Dr Edith Fiore is one such practitioner. She has worked with countless people in this respect, making a connection between their current physical and mental conditions and experiences in their past lives. For instance, someone who suffered headaches might find she had been clubbed to death in a previous life or someone with a phobia of heights might find that they fell to their death previously. Now, I’m not convinced that these are real but I can see that it might help someone make sense of their life today to have these apparent explanations available and even that they might help resolve physical symptoms and illnesses to some extent. Fiore apparently went on to look at cases of spirit possession and alien abduction, which sets off my bogometer, but her work on past life therapy precedes these and I wonder what that’s about. I can still believe that this could be helpful even if it has no basis in reality. Fiore’s view seems to be that the soul has a fixed gender and passes from life to life, which manifests itself as someone mainly experiencing life as cis but without any necessary sense of incongruence or dysphoria when they’re trans. I can actually get on board with this in a limited sense because I think the cis/trans division isn’t primary. Rather, the division is between people for whom their perceived gender is significant and those for whom it isn’t, but of course I have a whole other blog devoted to that. I will just say two things here though. Firstly, I’m aware that there are gender-incongruent people who explain their condition as a soul of one gender in the body of a different sex, and secondly, I think most people who believe in souls also believe that they’re either not gendered at all or that they all have the same gender. I also have an issue with how non-binary and intersex people are supposed to fit into that picture. However, my point is that people in the here and now are using the concept of reincarnation as a therapeutic tool, to explain what they otherwise find inexplicable. However, past life regression often seems not to be historically accurate and may be confabulation. Even if the memories retrieved existed ready-made in the subject’s brain, the same may be true of dreams, and there is at least a lot of extraneous information in those which don’t correspond to waking life or anything in it. For instance, a couple of nights ago I dreamt my carpal bones are being guarded by a pack of dogs. This means nothing literally, though it probably does reflect my felt need to protect my arms from injury when moving my father around.

The notion of karma is another one of these. There is of course a cognitive bias called the “Just World Fallacy”, apparently also known as the “Just World Hypothesis”. This is the belief that life is fair. Consequently, when bad things happen to good people it’s sometimes because of something bad that they’ve done in the past, and doing good brings rewards. Sometimes karma is evoked to explain this, and before I go on I should state that I do in fact believe in karma but not in this way exactly. Sometimes, it seems more that a just and loving deity is acting to balance the scales of justice. A lot of this amounts to victim-blaming and self-aggrandisement, but the position of past lives is clearly evoked as one way to explain how, for example, a child might be born with a life-threatening health problem. I have to say that this particular version of karma is pretty irksome to me and can also come with a general negativity about life as found in, for example, Ayurvedic medicine, where reproduction and development are generally viewed in a negative light and by extension women are seen as inferior since they are thought of as the vessels for new life, i.e. a failure of a spirit to achieve nirvana. That’s a nauseating, disgusting view and I want no truck with it.

Some people do believe past life therapy is “real”, but that it doesn’t involve the patients’ own past lives. Rather, they see it as their minds reaching out into the past to find lives which resonate with their problems. This could explain, for example, the clichéed “I used to be Cleopatra” phenomenon. It is possible that someone felt an affinity with her and made that connection, and therefore that there is a genuine psychic connection which is not, however, the same as reincarnation. Or, much more simply, maybe they just have a strong desire to have lived a glamorous and important life, perhaps like that of Jayne Mansfield, who is of course someone I used to believe I was personally a reincarnation of. And as I’ve said, I do still feel, on seeing her eyes and face, that that’s me looking back at myself. A powerful impression, but not something which has any basis in reality. I’m not that delusional, or at least my beliefs are not delusional in that particular respect. It serves mainly as a reminder of how vivid these impressions can be.

The probability of any random person being a reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe, Cleopatra, Napoleon or any other famous individual is of course very low if identity survives death and the self is incarnated in a single body as a complete entity. I don’t know how many Hollywood stars there were in 1967 but I do know there were more than a million births between Mansfield’s death and my birth, so even if there were a thousand of them the chances are only a thousand to one. It didn’t happen. No matter how strong and eerie my feelings are when I see her in a film or a photo, I know this is an illusion, but it illustrates the power these impressions have over the mind.

There do appear to be genuine memories of past lives. For instance, there’s a case of a mediæval peasant in England who suffered a head injury and is said to have been able to speak only in Ancient Greek when he recovered consciousness, and the religious context of that makes it unlikely that he would have faked that. This is of course also anecdotal. It’s also common for children to spontaneously recall apparent past life memories. These occur whether or not there is a belief in reincarnation in their community or family, and fail to correlate with mental illness, and they also take place where there is no contact with mass media. These memories are usually reported between the ages of two and five and the children concerned often seem to have phobias and likes which don’t seem to result from learned experience since birth. Sometimes these apparent memories correspond to those of another person whose life can be discovered, and there may be birthmarks corresponding to injuries sustained in that person’s life. This sounds outlandish of course, but it’s backed up by studies undertaken by medical scientists and is not in this case just anecdotal or hearsay. There’s a list of peer-reviewed scientific papers here. This is not just a load of superstition.

I think there might be two coëxisting explanations for this which are akin to dreams. It’s probably best to describe dreams first. Daniel Dennett is prominent among the proponents of the idea that dreams are not experiences but false memories. I agree with this to some extent but don’t think they are best explained in this way because of lucid dreaming and the axes which Dennett has to grind. His own explanation of lucid dreaming is pretty poor and violates Ockham’s Razor. You’ll probably gather that I have little respect for Dennett’s thought. Even so, it’s plausible to me that in waking life, dreams are reconstructed memories from the brain state during REM sleep. However, this doesn’t stop dreams from being experiences but may indicate that the relationship between consciousness and time is different with dreaming than it is during wakefulness, and this is also a waking explanation for dreaming and shouldn’t be taken as authoritative because the waking state of consciousness is not the only one and may not be given a higher status than others. Past life memories in small children could be similar. The physical state of the brain in early life is analogous to someone who has just woken from a dream because it may contain various things experienced as impressions and memories which didn’t actually occur in the literal past, but in a projected past created as a result of the physical impossibility of death in the mind of someone living. However, just as dreams are a different relationship between consciousness and reality than waking consciousness, preëxistence could be too.

The reminiscence bump is a peak in strong memories of one’s life. For most people it occurs between fifteen and twenty-five. That is, people tend to remember that decade of their lives more vividly than the rest. Oddly, this doesn’t correspond to the age people go back to when they have dementia, which is often their thirties. Anyway, like most other people I do have this reminiscence bump, which for me corresponds to the years from 1982-92. However, musically I have recently realised I have a previous apparent reminiscence bump I can’t account for. A couple of years ago, I attempted to identify how much of the ’60s I could actually remember, and unsurprisingly a lot of this involved singles which I remembered from when they were popular and first released rather than having heard them since. I wrote these down and found, very surprisingly, that they were almost all from May 1967, which is two to three months before I was born. My current explanation for this is that I heard them in the womb, although that may not make much sense because babies are apparently born with synæsthesia and fail to label their sensory experience as consisting of separate senses. However, it’s also true that transracial children who were exposed to the auditory environments of their birth mothers in utero have been shown to pick up their parental languages significantly faster than those of their adopted communities, which suggests that fetuses can hear. This raises another issue. When does reincarnation occur? If it’s after the second trimester, do premature babies have souls? There are two explanations I can think of for my musical reminiscence bump which are interesting as opposed to probable. One is that I simply remember them from hearing them in utero. This is actually quite problematic as many scientists would reject the possibility that the human brain is sufficiently organised at that time to do that, and also I’m not sure how clearly an ear immersed in amniotic fluid with more such fluid between it and the amnion, uterine wall and abdominal wall can hear music. Our daughter clearly could hear fireworks five months after conception, but loud bangs are not the only part of instrumental and vocal music. Another explanation is that these are the memories of someone who was old enough to recognise music and remember it, possibly my mother or even Jayne Mansfield, or more likely, someone who was adolescent to adult at the time. Perhaps this is part of someone else’s reminiscence bump, born between 1942 and 1952.

There seem to be two major problems with reincarnation. One is that we don’t seem to have memories of future lives or lives of entities elsewhere in the Universe. I should probably explain this. The passage of time as we perceive it seems to be associated with being living, conscious bodies of the kind we are, and in fact we don’t always perceive it at all. If there is a soul existing separately from the body, it would seem to be in a timeless state which doesn’t experience time as flowing. That would mean that incarnations of the soul are like the spines of a sea urchin, puncturing spacetime in various places but converging at a central point which is the soul itself, not subject to spacetime. If this is so, it might be expected that there’s no difference between a life in the nineteenth Christian century and one in the thirty-seventh, or life here on Earth and another in a Bernal sphere in the Andromeda Galaxy back in the Eocene. But we only seem to remember adjacent lives in the relatively recent past. We also don’t seem to recall contemporary lives, which is a bit odd as well. A partial explanation is that we tend to remember spatiotemporally adjacent lives better than ones which are more distant, and our memories of the future tend to be interpreted as precognition, visions, prophecies, whatever.

The other problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a soul in the sense used here. This is problematic in various ways, for instance it doesn’t seem to explain how God can exist or how we can apparently communicate with the dead, because even if that’s faked by Satan or demons they would still be incorporeal beings, in other words souls. However, there seems to be nothing about the human body which suggests it’s “haunted” by a ghost-like entity. There’s no sign of the brain being able to do anything which isn’t amenable to naturalistic explanation. From a religious perspective, the Bible definitely seems to deny that there are such things as souls quite clearly, so a Christian such as I ought to be physicalist, believing only in conscious lumps of matter called people. Therefore, there is a problem. How can reincarnation happen if there are no souls to be reincarnated?

I think a clue to the explanation lies in the possibility of precognition. If we have a convincing impression of life in the future after our own deaths, we usually don’t interpret it as a memory of a future life but as extrasensory perception. We asymmetrically interpret ESP, real or not, according to when and where its source seems to be. An impression of a contemporary distant event or object is generally understood to be remote viewing (assuming it’s visual) or telepathy. The same impression of a future event or object is interpreted as precognition or prophecy. But when we have apparent memories of a time before our conception, we call that reincarnation, or see it as evidence of that. What’s wrong with the idea that we simply receive impressions throughout space and time and just label them as belonging to us when they’re from the past? Alternatively, what’s wrong with the idea of seeing future memories as future reincarnations? Quite a lot in the other case, but if you believe in reincarnation, why wouldn’t you have memories of future lives as well as past ones? And rather chillingly, maybe the reason we don’t have memories of past lives away from this planet is that we’re alone in the Universe. Even so, it seems more likely that we just experience lives which are nearby in time and space.

I mentioned previously that not all Buddhists believe in souls, but they still believe in reincarnation. This is because they don’t conceive of anything which makes up a person continuing to exist after their death for more than a very short period of time, except for their influence on the world. I should point out at this stage that I’m recounting this from memory. It’s true that what one does in one’s life sends out ripples which leave their mark on the world, very obviously through having descendants for example, but in myriad other ways. This doesn’t require a non-naturalistic account, and it means that these ripples, which could be seen as karma, could converge on the as yet unborn. This is closer to how I see apparent reincarnation.

You’ve probably noticed that I’m not remotely sceptical about psychic abilities and the supernatural. This is because they seem to be part of my and other people’s everyday experience and there doesn’t seem to be a naturalistic explanation for them. For instance, on many occasions I’ve experienced the symptoms which clients have had several seconds before they contact me for the first time, and I had a dream on 15th September 1983 of events which appeared to involve people I had yet to meet with recognisable landmarks and buildings in Leicester, a city of which I then knew nothing and had no idea that I’d end up living there. Moreover, this is not confabulation as I wrote a detailed description of the dream in my diary at the time. I think probably most people have these kinds of experience as well as many others which are at first wanting of a boring explanation but eventually get one with some careful thought or analysis. One of these is that the sheer plethora or experiences is bound to turn up the occasional coincidence which will register with one’s pattern-recognition device, the human mind, when it seems to be significant but not with the many more which don’t. But given that I learned to predict when a new client was about to ring me based on these experiences, for example, this doesn’t seem to fall into that category. Nor do I think I’m unusual in that respect. I would expect most people to have these experiences but perhaps dismiss them or ignore them. I do the same with many of mine, but I do acknowledge that they happen.

As I’ve said, Ockham’s Razor needs to be applied to this. We seem to have impressions gathered non-naturalistically, but we sort these into separate categories according to when and where they occur, so we end up thinking that there are different phenomena involved: precognition, telepathy and reincarnation. Reincarnation is particularly problematic because it seems to require belief in a soul. The simplest explanation is that since there is no soul in that sense, our minds simply receive accurate impressions from elsewhere in time and space through means other than our recognised physical senses. It may not even be necessary to abandon metaphysical naturalism here. We can just acknowledge that they exist but that we don’t know how they can.

A Thorn In Their Flesh

One of the remarkable features of the argument between “Christians” and “atheists” is how much they agree on. Perhaps too much. Although I’m theist, I often feel I have more in common with people who are atheist than people who refer to themselves as Christian. The polarised nature of discourse nowadays means this shouldn’t come as a surprise, and before I get going on it I want to specify what seems to be the nature of the opinions which they tend to hold.

It should first of all be noted that in both cases these are in a sense strawmen. Neither of these represent real Christians or real atheists, and part of my point is that these are overlapping categories anyway. There are several distinct ways of being an atheist Christian which I suspect many people would prefer to be ignored. They are actually the images each group tends to have of the other and they’re a subset in each case, if that. Atheism as such is not the point either. Atheism is nothing other than the opinion that no deities exist, and theism is nothing other than the opinion that at least one interventionist deity exists, very often an Abrahamic God. Many would say that the burden of proof is on theism, as our belief is more complex than atheist belief and entities should not be unnecessarily multiplied, but if so, arguably it’s also the case that the burden of proof is on non-solipsism, as believing there are other minds is more complex than believing that there aren’t. Nonetheless, solipsism is generally stated to be false when the subject comes up. The set of beliefs I’m talking about is more restricted than mere atheism. It’s metaphysically naturalistic, scientifically realist, non-religious, anti-theistic atheism which accepts the historical-grammatical approach to sacred texts and also tends to be politically liberal in the American sense of the word. That’s six or seven qualifications, although the political angle is less central than the others. Christopher Hitchens was an example of a non-liberal such atheist and in fact many atheists of this kind do believe it’s important to focus on what they see as the essential belligerent, sexist and homophobic nature of Islam, which takes them away from the left wing mainstream in this respect. They may or may not be secularist. On the side of Christians, again these people are a subset. They’re politically conservative Biblically literalist fundamentalist pre-tribulation post-millennialist historical-grammatical evangelical Protestant Christians who may also believe in the prosperity gospel. Their view of atonement is likely to be penal substitution. Again, there are many qualifications here. I count six or seven again, on the grounds that that description is tautological regarding their view of sacred texts. They are of course also theistic and trinitarian, their view of the Book of Revelation is likely to be historicist or futurist, they may believe in the Rapture and they are also young Earth creationists. A few of them are even flat earthers nowadays. It almost goes without saying that they’re homophobic and sexist, and they’re also likely to be against abortion and transphobic. Again, remember this is a caricature. They’re both caricatures, projected onto the other side of the argument.

Paul the letter-writer once said:

And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. 

1 Corinthians 12:7-9

And in Greek:

καὶ τῇ ὑπερβολῇ τῶν ἀποκαλύψεων. διό, ἵνα µὴ ὑπεραίρωµαι,
ἐδόθη µοι σκόλοψ τῇ σαρκί, ἄγγελος Σατανᾶ, ἵνα µε κολαφίζῃ, ἵνα
µὴ ὑπεραίρωµαι. 8 ὑπὲρ τούτου τρὶς τὸν κύριον παρεκάλεσα ἵνα
ἀποστῇ ἀπí ἐµοῦ· 9 καὶ εἴρηκέν µοι, Ἀρκεῖ σοι ἡ χάρις µου· ἡ γὰρ
δύναµις ἐν ἀσθενείᾳ τελεῖται.

(I’ve finally got round to copy-pasting from an actual copy of the Greek New Testament, hence all the diacritics).

As a Christian, I’ve found this very helpful. Pre-transition, I considered my gender dysphoria to be my “thorn in the flesh”, and it’s non-specific nature is advantageous for many of us who need comfort. If I’d been epileptic, and it’s been suggested that this was in fact Paul’s specific thorn, it might’ve helped, although of course there’s the issue of the social model of disability here. For a less ableist set of circumstances, “these things are sent to try us” is another way Abrahamic religious theists might look at it, since it externalises the issue, and of course a thorn is a foreign body so it could be structural ableism which is the problem rather than the disability itself in a more medicalised way. Nonetheless, there is another way in which we can be a thorn in the flesh of soi-disant Christians with that list of baggage above.

There seems to be a theme in the views of certain Christians of this ilk that they know your own mind better than you know it yourself. This is patronising and doomed to failure, because one of the restricted areas where it is actually possible to know things is in the realm of mental states and dispositions. There are a number of similar claims here: that homosexuality is a choice, that atheists refuse to admit there’s a God and that if you lose your faith, you never had it in the first place. It seems sometimes that the reasons Christians make these claims is more for their own sake, to deal with their own doubts, than to reach out to others, but as I say, it seems – methinks. I can’t make this claim without being a hypocrite, so don’t set too much store in it. The aspect of this I’d like to look at today is the doctrine of the Perseverance of the Saints, and before I go into it, I should probably talk about the word “saint”.

The popular understanding of the word “saint” is more Orthodox and Roman Catholic than Protestant. For a non-reformed church, a saint is a particularly holy person who is better than `οι πολλοι, that is they sin less than average if at all and have performed at least one miracle. They are a different class of people than the rest of us and tend to get prayed to directly. Protestants don’t hold with any of this because, as Paul says in Romans 3:23, “πάντες γὰρ ἥµαρτον καὶ ὑστεροῦνται τῆς δόξης τοῦ θεοῦ” – “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God,” having just said “no-one is righteous, not even one”. There’s Jesus Christ and everyone else. In the Protestant view, a saint is just someone who has repented and committed to Christ as her lord and saviour. Anyone at all. Every single Christian, in other words.

Then there’s the perseverance bit. The doctrine of the perseverance of the saints is that salvation cannot be lost. Due to the confusion brought by the nomenclature, it’s also referred to as “held by God”, “preservation of the saints” or “eternal security”. The website GotQuestions.org, though scarily fundamentalist, is nonetheless an excellent resource regarding what this strand of Christianity is “supposed” to believe, written by faithful Christians and quite authoritative. It’s also, of course, horribly bigoted but that goes with the territory – it doesn’t stop it being useful. Those who are born again will continue to trust in Christ forever, is how it puts it. A slightly different formulation would be that once you are saved, you’re always saved. This means that if you’ve ever been Christian, you never stop being Christian. It’s a permanent change and there’s plenty of Biblical backup for this view, such as Romans 8, and John 5, 6 and 10. And if you want a conversion story from me, here it is: when I was first at university at the age of eighteen, I was theist but not Christian. I became convinced that Jesus was the uniquely fully divine and fully human son of God who died for my sins on the Cross and that by repenting and committing myself to him I would be saved. I therefore prayed sincerely that this happen, and happen it did, according to standard Protestant Christian doctrine. I went to church twice each Sunday and to Bible study groups during the week. I had long conversations about my faith with other Christian friends. I was sincere, and this is an honest account of what happens. Nor is my memory unreliable, as this is what I wrote in my diary at the time. There is no sense in which I was not Christian, outwardly or inwardly. However, after a few months there were problems. I was assured that I shouldn’t stop asking questions because there were answers, and rapidly found that I was supposed to reject anyone who followed a different spiritual path as not saved, required to be homophobic and sexist and that vegetarianism and veganism were not considered priorities. So I thought, sod this for a game of soldiers and left. My fellow Christians were utterly recalcitrant in persisting in being bigoted in a whole load of ways. Nor was there any trade off with anti-materialism. One couple was saving up to buy a Porche! You would think, maybe, that a little bit of bigotry would be somewhat excusable if the Christians concerned were also not interested in material possessions for their own sake and, say, volunteered to help the homeless or donated money to good causes, or at least as they were perceived at the time, such as Live Aid. This did not happen. So to me, these people had no redeeming features and I came to the conclusion that Christianity was the worst thing to happen to this planet since the extinction of the dinosaurs, and that’s a realistic comparison because their attitudes were probably instrumental in causing more damage to the biosphere than the Chicxulub Impactor. I would revise this view today. I’d now say “non-avian dinosaurs”.

The problem was probably more that the Christians around me weren’t doing a particularly good job of witnessing to me or others, because they were stuck in a particular mindset which was unhelpful. And it has to be said that because “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God”, this can to some extent be expected. I’m also aware that I’m being quite judgemental here, and I’m not supposed to do that. However, the point is not so much that these people were persisting in their sin and that made them bad people. It didn’t at all. It did, however, illustrate that they didn’t seem to be getting any help to avoid sin, and if Christianity doesn’t help you make the world a better place, what’s the point of it? I can, incidentally, filter out much of this and assert that the likes of the Porsche people are by practically any standard materialistic, and given that the prosperity gospel was less prevalent back then I would hope that they would consider this a problem for them as Christians. I dunno, maybe it supports the economy. Let’s be Keynesian, shall we?

For whatever reason, my sincere commitment to the Christian faith rapidly decayed in my first year at university. You can say it was Satan, or my own sinfulness. That’s all fine. Maybe it was. What you can’t do, given the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints, is claim correctly that I was never Christian. That doctrine means that the definition of a Christian is, in their terms, something like “A person who has repented of their sin, asked Christ to forgive them and honestly committed their life to Christ, the uniquely sinless fully human and fully divine Son of God who died on the cross for the forgiveness of sins, as lord and saviour”. That’s what a Christian is, you cannot lose your salvation and it’s that simple. Many people describing themselves as ex-Christians have had faithful Christians go over their beliefs and the process in their lives in great detail, perhaps hoping that they would be able to find some feature that allows them to say, “Gotcha! You were never a real Christian anyway!”, thereby preserving their own faith. This is a little legalistic for a Christian attitude. Well, yes I was, absolutely, Christian, by your understanding of what a Christian is, and in fact whereas I have lost my faith, I’m still aware that there is a loving God who responds to prayer. I don’t have all the answers. But in a way, I hardly care that it’s a fact that God exists in comparison with the problem posed by conservative evangelical Christianity, and therefore I believe I have more in common with many atheists than I do with some Christians, and that we are allies in this.

I could, of course, have completely lost my faith and in fact there was a short period during which I was atheist between then and now, but currently I am by no means atheist. Let’s leave that aside though. I don’t wish to alienate atheists, whom I have no interest in converting, particularly left wing politically active ones.

By making the claim that someone was never Christian when it is incontrovertibly the case that they were, people are basically making the claim that they’re telepathic: that there could not possibly be anyone who used to be Christian. They must’ve had their doubts from the start, or they just went along with what others were saying or something. This is in spite of the fact that many generally upright, honest people with a great deal of integrity say otherwise: that they definitely were Christian and no longer believe. One reason they are able to make this claim is that there are many people who see themselves as ex-Christian. Now there is a sense in which I am ex-Christian, in that I don’t currently believe in the power of the Holy Spirit and also have some concerns that Christianity culturally appropriates Judaism. On the other hand, I am definitely someone who made a commitment to Christ, and that’s supposed to be all that matters. If I therefore continue to claim to be Christian, and if atheists with a similar history also do so, it makes it much harder for fundamentalists to claim convincingly that we are not. Because we know better than they do that we were, and therefore by their definition we still are, even if we have no religious faith or belief in God at all nowadays. We can be a thorn in their flesh.

Therefore, if you are atheist and opposed to religious bigotry, and you have a history of having been Christian in that sense (it doesn’t work as well in non-reformed denominations but even so), I implore you, please don’t let them get away with the claim that you never were. Don’t let them have anything their own way. You are still Christian even though you don’t believe.

I could go through the rest of those qualifications (metaphysical naturalism and the like) but right now, I’ll leave it there. I don’t want to widen any of the cracks between us any more than they are already. Progressives need to be united against conservatism and to work together, don’t you agree?