Psychical Miscellanea: Being Papers on Psychical Research, Telepathy, Hypnotism, Christian Science, etc. — John Shaqi
Psychical Miscellanea: Being Papers on Psychical Research, Telepathy, Hypnotism, Christian Science, etc.Hill, J. Arthur (John Arthur)
Religion
Psychical Miscellanea: Being Papers on Psychical Research, Telepathy, Hypnotism, Christian Science, etc.
Hill, J. Arthur (John Arthur)
Parapsychology
This negative dogmatism is as regrettable as the positive variety. It
is not scientific. Science stands for a method, not for a dogma. It
observes, experiments, and infers; but it makes no claim to the
possession of absolute truth. A genuine science, confronted with
allegations of unusual facts, neither believes nor disbelieves. It
investigates. The solution of the problem is simply a question of
evidence. Huxley in his little book _Hume_, and J. S. Mill in his
_Essays on Religion_, made short work of the "impossibility" attitude.
Says the former in _Science and Christian Tradition_, page 197:
"Strictly speaking, I am unaware of anything that has a right to the
title of an impossibility, except a contradiction in terms. There are
impossibilities logical, but none natural. A 'round square', a 'present
past', 'two parallel lines that intersect', are impossibilities, because
the ideas denoted by the predicates round, present, intersect, are
contradictory of the ideas denoted by the subjects square, past,
parallel. But walking on water, or turning water into wine, are plainly
not impossibilities in this sense".
No alleged occurrence can be ruled out as impossible, then, unless the
statement is self-contradictory. Difficulty of belief is no reason. It
was found difficult to believe in Antipodes; if there were people on
the under side of the earth, "they would fall off". But the advance of
knowledge made it not only credible but quite comprehensible. People
stick on, all over the earth, because the earth attracts them more
powerfully than anything else does. Similarly with some miracles. They
may seem much more credible and comprehensible when we have learned
more. Indeed, the wonders of wireless telegraphy, radio-activity, and
aviation are intrinsically as miraculous as many of the stories in the
world's sacred writings.
This is not saying, however, that we are to believe the latter _en
bloc_. They must be taken individually, and believed or disbelieved
according to the evidence and according to the antecedent probability or
improbability. The standing still of the sun (_Joshua_, x) does not seem
credible to the scientific mind which knows that the earth is spinning
at the equator at the rate of one thousand miles an hour and that any
sudden interference with that rotation would send it to smithereens,
with all the creatures on its surface. Of course, a Being who could stop
its rotation could perhaps also prevent it from flying to smithereens;
but we have to extend the miracle in so many entirely hypothetical ways
that the whole thing becomes too dubious for acceptance. It is simpler
to look on the story as a myth.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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