Parapsychology and Muslim apologetics

Definition of parapsychology

Courtesy of Wikipedia:

Parapsychology is a field of study concerned with the investigation of paranormal and psychic phenomena which include telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, near-death experiences, reincarnation, apparitional experiences, and other paranormal claims. It is often identified as pseudoscience.

I've read a couple of parapsychology books in my time- both of them by the analytic philosopher Stephen Braude. The Gold Leaf Lady and Other Parapsychological Investigations is a great gentle (but analytically robust) introduction to the topic, while The Limits of Influence: Psychokinesis and the Philosophy of Science is more rigorous and data-driven.

In this article, I want to make the case that parapsychology is an important avenue that Muslim apologists need to look into. To that end, let me provide a brief sketch of the ways in which parapsychology interacts with apologetics.

Debunking Naturalism

The worldview of naturalism- a commitment to a metaphysics and ontology that only involves things reducible to physical "stuff" i.e. entities and laws postulated by physics- continues to be the dominant strain of thought in academia. I think it's weird that naturalism has been able to persist for so long. Depending on which version of naturalism you adopt, it goes against the most fundamental of human intuitions- teleology in nature, soul/consciousness or agent causation in general, libertarian free will, human exceptionalism, the objectivity of ethical and aesthetic values, probably even the first person perspective. Philosophers have teased out all sorts of hidden consequences of naturalism- Victor Reppert, for example, argues that eliminative materialism entails that beliefs don't exist. Naturalists, of course, are aware of this. For them, the triumph of naturalism implies the defeat of folk, "superstitious" beliefs handed to humans as spandrels of biological evolution. So the fact that it grates against commonly held intuitions is seen as a natural prediction of the worldview.

Philosophers of a certain persuasion have been attempting to rebut naturalism for quite a while. While I think their case, especially when taken cumulatively, is very strong, parapsychology is an interesting player in this game. If paranormal phenomena can be shown to be veridical, then naturalism would be false as a matter of empirical fact. This would be a brutal and decisive rebuttal of naturalism, and would raise the prior probability of Islam in specific and theism in general.

There are two principal ways in which parapsychological phenomena are usually verified. First is via critical analysis of testimonies. If a parapsychological event- levitation or psychokinesis, say- occurs in the presence of a group of experts, and they subject the event to sufficient analytic testing to rule out foul play or natural explanations, and the witnesses pass other criteria of reliable testimony- then that event probably happened. This basically constitutes a commonsense way of thinking about testimonial evidence.

The Gold Leaf Lady is the first book I read on parapsychology. Interestingly, most of the stories in the book are about frauds that got caught, and other such mishaps

This bland, simplistic description of course invites a lot of skepticism. While I'm sympathetic to that feeling, I think a good way- the only way?- for someone to be convinced of the feasibility of such a research project is to either read about the stringent controls investigators often use to verify these phenomena (read either of the two books by Braude that I referenced above), and/or the sophisticated epistemological criteria developed by analytic philosophers of religion to sift out the genuine from the bogus (read Kai-Man Kwan's essay in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology).

As a sample of how rigorous the controls can be in a parapsychology investigation, here's part of a seance report from 1908 (cited in Braude's The Gold Leaf Lady, p. 49-50]:

[Medium’s feet tied to rungs of chairs of controllers on each side of her, length of rope on left being 20 ins., on right 21½ ins. Hands tied to one another—distance apart 22 ins., also left hand tied to B.’s right, distance being 16½ ins.; medium’s right hand tied to C.’s left, distance 18 ins.] 

10.12 p.m. Séance begins.Light I [brightest light]
Tilts begin almost immediately.F. Table tilts on the legs away from her.
10.13 p.m. Complete levitation of the table.C. Her right hand resting on the table touching mine, my wrist being between hers and the edge of the table. Her right foot in contact with my right foot. I saw a clear space of about eight inches between her dress and the leg of the table.
B. Complete levitation of the table for a second time [during dictation of B.’s control. Dec. 14/08].
B. My right hand on both her knees. Her left foot touching my right foot.
10.14 p.m. Complete levitation for a third time.B. Another complete levitation.
F. Both medium’s hands completely on the top of the table touching C.’s and B.’s.
C. I can see a clear space of about 8 inches between her dress and the table leg all the way down.
B. My right hand on her two knees. My right foot against her left foot, and I can see between her left leg and the table leg.
10.16 p.m. Another complete levitation.F. Her right hand off the table altogether, left hand on B.’s, pulling it upward and the table appeared to stick to it.
... 

[The light was sufficient to read small print by with comfort, at the further end of the room, the hands were always plainly visible and always situated so that it was clear that the table was not lifted by them. The extreme rapidity of the levitations made complete descriptions almost impossible, and it was decided to confine the description of the control to the feet, the control of the hands being obvious to all and description rendered unnecessary. . . . F., Dec. 14/08] (Emphases in original)

These reports are detailed and robust enough to count as reliable testimony, and there's no non-ad hoc way of rejecting them. Put differently, and this is the case epistemologists often make in defense of parapsychological phenomena, many of the best examples of these events are attested with a level of rigor equal to, or even more than, our usual standards of evidence.

Arrangement of the 1908 seances- the medium was Eusapia Palladino

Another way these phenomena are verified is by standard anthropology. If reports of a certain class of parapsychological phenomena are consistently associated with some specific details- even when the reports are collected across different cultures and time points, from people who had no contact with each other- then that probably speaks to a veridical core of these phenomena. The strength of this case depends on how widely shared the details are, and how peculiar and specific they are. Braude gives the following example in Limits: across many different cultures and time, poltergeist phenomena are always associated with

...the slow and gentle trajectories of airborne objects, the apparent passage of levitated objects through walls and closed doors, and the poltergeist bombardment with human excrement.

These details are way too specific to be just coincidences, much less resulting from "shared human experiences". Similarly, research on near death experiences suggest their widespread association with a wide range of peculiar details. Perhaps the most dramatic examples of these cases are when you have commonalities between modern and ancient or primitive reports. Andrew Lang in his The Making of Religion (review here) points out that the modern practice of gazing into a crystal ball to predict the future has its analogs in many "primitive" cultures, in the general form of "gazing into a smooth deep"- be it a drop of ink, or blood, or the surface of water. Unless there's a worldwide conspiracy involving millions of individuals spanning thousands of years (there are striking similarities between details of certain parapyschological phenomena reported by the ancient Greeks, and those documented in modern times), the only explanation of these shared features is that people are experiencing and reporting the same, genuine events.

Negative apologetics

Many parapsychological phenomena seem to, ostensibly at least, run counter to Islam's truth claims. Examples include:

a) Curing of possession/healing from diseases when names of other deities are mentioned;

b) Putative evidences for reincarnation in the forms of verifiable past life memories, biological signs corresponding to manner of death in previous life, acquiring proficiency in a different language, and so on;

c) Astrologers accurately and precisely predicting the future, clairvoyance;

d) Other 'miracles' happening associated with other religions or deities, and so on.

Our scholarship, and even some hadith reports, recognized some of this- the explanation is usually given in terms of the activity of the jinn (see the last section of my previous article). In order for that explanation to be a serious contender in parapsychology research, as opposed to just an ad hoc theory-saving attempt in favor of Islam, it needs to be made more precise with both scriptural and "field" data. Specifically, the explanations need to focus on patterns and regularities in jinn activity, association of these activities with specific parapsychological phenomena, and so on. In other words, jinn-based explanations should be of the following form:

P1. Phenomenon X exists.

P2. Jinn are known to cause X.

C1. Jinn are a plausible explanation of X.

The information in P2 would be known from scripture, "field research", and even anthropology (see last post in this blog). To see the importance of this, consider how this argument would have to be run if that information was missing:

P4. Phenomenon X exists.

P5. Possibly, Jinn can cause X.

C2. Jinn are a possible explanation of X.

P5 is almost impossible to dispute, because jinn occupy the realm of the supernatural and its hard to set limits on what they cannot do. However, just because it's possible that jinn caused X, doesn't mean jinn activity constitute a good explanation for X. The second formulation of the argument is too ambiguous to be falsifiable- unlike the first formulation, in which case one could set limits on what jinn are and are not known to cause. So in order to provide good, falsifiable explanations for these parapsychological phenomena with problematic theological content, we'd need to know more about the jinn- hence parapsychology.

Incidentally, I should also mention that there are alternative, epistemologically-based explanations for such "problematic" parapsychological phenomena as well. In attempting to explain near death experiences that have content contrary to Islamic teachings, one hypothesis one could pursue is - perhaps people have a warped access to the "world" where these experiences come from. So while there's a veridical core to near death experiences, other details of these experiences could've been the result of the worldly, cultural experiential filter they pass through. Perhaps similar explanations could be used in the case of other parapsychological experiences as well.

Miscellaneous

Two other ways parapsychology interacts with the case for Islam are:

a) My friend Sharif's research demonstrates that Islam's descriptions of the spiritual realm very often aligns closely with people's experiences of the paranormal. In a recent conversation, for example, he mentioned that people often report the existence of a guardian angel, a constant companion (qareen?), record-keepers responsible for each individual, etc. I don't know what the state of this research is, but it's very interesting that Islam accurately predicts details of the spiritual realm (under the reasonable assumption that there's a veridical core to people's religious experiences). This article also seems to be a good exercise along these lines.

b) Parapsychology also complicates the case for Islam, at least theoretically. The case for Islam is usually presented in the form of a miracle: Islam/Qur'an/the Prophet's life has feature X, feature X is a violation of the laws of nature, hence Islam/Qur'an/the Prophet is from Allah. However, as scripture itself attests (and parapsychology confirms), there are non-divine sources of "miracles" as well. This means one would need to make theoretical distinctions between divine and non-divine miracles. Our scholars have discussed some of these- e.g. it cannot be learned as a skill, it cannot be replicated, it must come with the proper context of a message, and so on. While not a huge problem, I do think some groundbreaking is required here, and these theoretical considerations need to be developed further.

Final musings

As this very, very broad strokes survey attempts to demonstrate, parapsychology is indeed a field where there is a lot of potential and promise for apologetics. And that concern brings us to a sad fact. As I've been recently realizing, to contribute significantly to apologetics, one should ideally make it their career. It's difficult to pursue apologetics as a "side hustle", e.g. become a scientist as a profession and study women's rights at your leisure. You can only contribute so much that way, and "so much" is definitely not enough given the amount of work that's left. Now certain other fields like biology, cosmology, history, and even sociology are more promising in this aspect. Researchers in these fields can make a living while pursuing these apologetics-conducive careers. The same cannot be said for parapsychology. It's highly unlikely that someone can make a respectful living out of a ghostbuster career. That only underscores the amount of funding and such we require if we want to see the success of Muslim apologetics through to the end, inshaAllah.