QUANTUM LEAPS IN THE WRONG DIRECTION

Belief perseverance is described by the authors (respectively a chemist and a physicist) as 'unreasonable resistance to change one's beliefs', a state they lament as irrational and based on what they regard as wrong evidence. Part of their update consists of what they call information about reliable websites and educational modules. If one consults these, one finds that they consist entirely of sceptical websites and educational modules all from the James Randi Educational Foundation. In addition, the bibliography consists almost exclusively of sceptical references. In other words, reliable equals sceptical, which itself entails a belief perseverance in the adequacy of naturalism and physicalism. The authors envisage three groups of readers: one unfamiliar with the phenomena where they hope useful insights will be gained, secondly those acquainted with the phenomena and already in agreement with their conclusions, and thirdly, including the present reviewer, 'already acquainted with the phenomena and already in disagreement with our conclusions.' This is the group they feel tend to adhere to their beliefs, even in the face of contradictory evidence and even when explanations are shown to be irrational or based on 'wrong evidence'. Such people, they say, 'disregard evidence inconsistent with or contradictory to their belief' and are subject to potential flaws in their reasoning or observation process.

The assumption or equation here is scientific = naturalistic = rational, hence pseudoscientific = supernatural = irrational where rationality is associated exclusively with a sceptical view. By this logic, a rational scientific explanation has to be naturalistic, as TH Huxley insisted when arguing with Alfred Russel Wallace. Writers like the present authors are very rarely explicit about their own assumptions, while criticising those of others. The first two chapters give a good account of the scientific method and scientific reasoning in action, stating that scientists should not become too attached to their assumptions. The issue here is how to balance openness with rigour, a balance that the Network seeks to maintain. Scientific materialism holds a naturalistic presumption as a point of departure for explanations of phenomena, while also holding to what Sir John Eccles called promissory materialism: if it has not yet been explained naturalistically, it soon will be - including consciousness. The book goes on to consider what the authors call the five biggest ideas of pseudoscience: UFOs and alien abductions; paranormal out of body experiences such as astral projection, near death experience and entities such as spirits and ghosts; astrology; creationism and paranormal powers such as ESP and psychokinesis. In this review I will address their comments on the areas with which I am most familiar, namely the second and fifth.

Before doing so, I would also like to comment on the oft-cited remark of Carl Sagan that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. This statement itself embodies a cultural position about what is or is not extraordinary in terms of what CD Broad called antecedent probability. The antecedent probability of the existence of the phenomenon depends on your assumptions about it: if you regard ESP a priori impossible, then any ostensible instance must be due to fraud or poor experimental design. For the person for whom ESP is an everyday reality, it is no longer extraordinary. The discussion on NDEs is selective, incomplete and in some cases misleading in bringing in the phantom limb example. While the oxygen deprivation hypothesis is correctly set aside, the authors support a neurochemical explanation. No mention is made of the work of Bruce Greyson, Peter Fenwick, Pim van Lommel and many others - especially the work on cardiac arrest and the collections of veridical OBEs. Although these are anecdotal, they still require to be explained and raise intriguing questions about the nature of perception. The authors remark that veridical reports could have been obtained by ordinary means – 'through the senses both before and during the procedure.' This is a typical off-the-shelf sceptical argument dealing only with generalities and completely failing to address the specifics of particular cases. The authors are equally cavalier in their treatment of apparitions and simply state that naturalistic explanations abound for such phenomena. The section on reincarnation and past life memories is equally inadequate, citing only one case and failing even to mention the extensive research of Ian Stevenson and his colleagues. Even Carl Sagan was impressed by this research and regarded it as a question mark for the completeness of scientific naturalism.

Moving on to the chapter on normal sensory perception, ESP and psychokinesis, there is a good description of the mechanics of perception and the authors mention the 20 year CIA research programme on ESP without analysing the evidence it produced. Claims for psychic experiences are regarded as 'merely odd coincidences that command our attention.' Here again we have a general off-the-shelf argument claiming that we often think of people and they don't phone. This totally disregards the uniqueness of, say, deathbed apparitions, where the subject has no idea until after the event that the person concerned has died. This is a one-off rather than everyday occurrence, perhaps only once-in-a-lifetime, so the coincidence theory cuts very little ice. The rest of the chapter continues in a similar vein with 'alleged observations of extrasensory perception', failing to mention, for instance, the studies and meta-analyses reported by Dean Radin covering decades of scientific research. They conclude that if nothing really happened in the first place, there is nothing to explain - and the uninformed reader is supposed to take this on board as if the authors' investigation had been complete and unbiased.

The chapter on alternatives to medicine takes a similar approach, lumping together a very wide range of phenomena but adopting a generalised approach - some areas they deal with are much less established than others, but no mention is made of the multi-million-dollar funding given by the National Institutes of Health is to support research in this area, even if this is a tiny percentage compared with the orthodox field. In their conclusion, this lumping together continues, creating the impression that better researched areas are all equally wacky. The prejudice of the authors shows through in their dismissive and insinuating conclusions about the areas we have treated: 'out of body experiences and entities are observed by people whose imaginations have gotten the best of them, by people in an altered state of consciousness, by people who report the phenomena for ulterior motives, and by people who have been deliberately deceived by con artists.' (p. 142-3) To think these phenomena are real is mere wishful thinking. Then, on ESP and PK, observation of these phenomena 'is tenuous at best' and the 'hypotheses difficult to evaluate because of the questionable nature of the phenomena they purport to explain.' Then part of the rest of the chapter is devoted to hoaxes, including the 'crop circle hoax' where the authors swallow the long discredited 'Doug and Dave did it all' hypothesis as if this all stopped in 1991.

They conclude that their interpretation of these phenomena is the road to reality, contrasting with the road to illusion - giving an accurate view of reality instead of a deluded one. They then give a series of standard sceptical recommendations for further reading, quack busting and debunking. The uninformed reader might be impressed and taken in by the superficial rationality of the arguments presented, but the informed reader without a prior commitment to scepticism and scientific materialism will realise that the treatment of the phenomena is both incomplete and inadequate, demonstrating the confirmation bias of the authors and their own belief perseverance in ignoring evidence that might challenge their own assumptions. I would certainly not disagree with their strictures on some of the more outlandish phenomena they discuss, but their treatment of serious areas of research is nothing short of misleading and intellectually disreputable.