Reading:
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off my myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

(Walt Whitman)

‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy’. Hamlet
One of the most interesting books I read last year was ‘What We Believe But Cannot Prove’*, which is a series of short essays by dozens of the western world’s leading thinkers, each one putting forward an idea or a proposition which the writer suspects is probably true, but for which there is at present insufficient evidence. Most of the contributors are scientists, and many of their beliefs are concerned with issues which lie beyond my competence to evaluate, but there is sufficient speculation on philosophical and moral questions to maintain the interest of the general reader. For example, the novelist Ian McEwan, in one of the shortest pieces in the book, writes as follows:
What I believe but cannot prove is that no part of my consciousness will survive my death. I exclude the fact that I will linger, fadingly, in the thoughts of others, or that aspects of my consciousness will survive in writing, or in the positioning of a planted tree, or a dent in my old car. I suspect that many contributors (to this book) will take this premise as given: true but not significant. However, it divides the world crucially, and much damage has been done to thought as well as to persons by those who are certain that there is a life – a better, more important life – else where. That this span is brief, that consciousness is an accidental gift of blind processes, makes our existence all the more precious and our responsibilities for it all the more profound. (page 36) A more radical speculation comes a few pages on, from the neuro-scientist Susan Blackmore – one of the few female contributors incidentally – who denies that we have free will because, she says, the notion that there is an inner self who acts, is just an illusion. ‘I long ago set about systematically changing the experience. I now have no feeling of acting with free will, although the feeling took many years to ebb away.......when the feeling is gone, decisions just happen with no sense of anyone making them.....As for giving up the sense of an inner conscious self altogether – this is very much harder. I just keep on seeming to exist. But although I cannot prove it, I think it is true that I don’t. (page 41-2)
This seems to me very strange. In a few lines devoted to explaining that the self does not exist, she uses the word ‘I’ six times. Students of philosophy among you will perhaps recognise that Susan Blackmore is denying the one things that Descartes said we could be sure of: that whatever else we may doubt, we cannot doubt the existence of an experiencing self. I admit to confusion when Susan says, ‘I keep on seeming to exist....even though I think it is true that I don’t’. It reminds me of a little story I heard many years ago about a certain professor of philosophy called Dr. Cohen. One of his classes was engaged in the study of this very question of the existence of the self, and a very earnest student was having sleepless nights over the matter. One morning before class, this heavy-eyed student approached the professor, and said, ‘Tell me professor Cohen. Do I exist or not?’ To which the professor replied, ‘Why? Who wants to know?’
Now I don’t want to appear to be ridiculing Susan Blackmore, who is a very intelligent woman, a student of Buddhism, and a recognised authority on the physiology of the brain, but I do think it is legitimate to ask her to define exactly what it is she is appealing to when she suggests that I –or you, or anybody – should try to dispense with the idea that I have free will. Who or what is doing the dispensing if ‘I’ don’t exist?
So, you can see that there is enough in this little book to exercise the intellectual and philosophical muscles, and it certainly entertained me for a few evenings. But it also prompted me to ask myself the question which lies at the heart of the book: What do I believe but cannot prove? There are dozens of things, but for the purposes of this address I have chosen just one, and before I tell you what it is I would like to say two things. First, like Ian McEwan and Susan Blackmore, I have chosen something that actually influences the way I live, even though I have no conclusive proof of its truth. So, it’s not something like, ‘I believe that the Americans really did send men to the moon in the sixties and seventies’, because whether they did or not does not really impinge on my life in any significant way. And second, I feel I have to warn you that I seem to have been wrong in so many of my speculations in the past that you should be prepared to take what I am going to say in the conjectural spirit in which it is offered. (My first failed prognostication occurred when I was about eight years old and Sir Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tensing were attempting to climb Mount Everest. My class at school was divided evenly between those who thought the attempt would be successful and those I didn’t. I was in the latter camp – out of perversity, perhaps, because perversity has always been a strong element in my make up – and many of my subsequent conjectures seem to have fared no better.)
Bearing this in mind, what do I believe but cannot prove? Well, to put it simply: I believe but cannot prove that those phenomena which are called ‘paranormal’ or ‘psychic’ really do exist, and that unless we factor them in to our overall assessment of experience, our judgements about the nature of reality will be flawed and partial. Why do I believe this, in spite of the fact that the vast majority of those thinkers who contributed to the book would challenge it, and the prevailing consensus of our materialistic culture is to deny it? I believe it because I think I have enough evidence from my own experience and from the experiences of those people whom I know and trust, to verify, tentatively, its reality. I am not a particularly ‘psychic’ person, but there have been a few occasions in my life when things have occurred which, according to many rationalist thinkers, ought not to have occurred. Once, in my brother’s house many years ago, I witnessed a playful kind of poltergeist phenomenon which left me frightened but intrigued and which defies, in my mind at least, a naturalistic explanation. Even stranger, when I was nine years old, I had a moment of precognition in which I knew I would be the winner of a raffle, an experience so powerful that it has stayed with me ever since, forcing me to take seriously the idea that our consciousness extends – in both time and space – beyond its supposed location in our skulls.
My wife Morag has undoubted psychic abilities which have manifested sporadically over the years I have known her. We met thirty-one years ago when she enrolled in a night school class I was teaching, and we were perhaps in each other’s company on that occasion for about two minutes. When she went on the night shift at the hospital later that night she felt compelled to remark to a colleague, ‘It’s strange, but I feel that I’ve just met the man I’m going to marry!’ And in early 2002, just before I was diagnosed with cancer, she telephoned me and asked if my health was okay, because she was feeling that there might be something wrong. And this was before even I knew, or even suspected, that there was anything wrong.
I am not a fool and I am not easily duped. I know that conjurers can convincingly fake many ‘psychical’ phenomena; I know that fraudulent mediums abound – I was even present myself at a so-called séance in 1983 which was so obviously and so cruelly fraudulent that it left me angry and put me permanently on my guard; I know, too, that there is a great deal of wishful thinking involved in these matters. But, despite all these caveats, I am still inclined to think there is something real here, and something with enormous implications for our understanding of who we are. As Doctor Johnson remarked, in another context, ‘All theory is against it, but all experience for it’. Sometimes our scientific theories are every bit as imprisoning as religious dogmas.
Last Saturday I watched part of the soccer match between Luton and Liverpool. I’m not a great sport fan, but I had no sermon to write last week so I stuck with the game. I’m glad I did. Liverpool came back from being 3-1 down to win 5-3, and their final goal was spectacular. The Liverpool player Xabi Alonso kicked the ball from within his own half to score from a distance of 70 yards. What has this to do with our topic? Well, here’s an account of the incident which appeared in the Guardian editorial column (no less!) on Wednesday last.
Dreaming has a special place in the national psyche. It is free, often hugely enjoyable, enigmatic, unsullied (so far) by any New Labour policy social initiatives: and we do an awful lot of it. It has a long literary pedigree going back to the vision of Piers Ploughman and John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (“So I awoke, and behold it was a dream”). One person who awoke recently and found it was not just a dream is Adrian Hayward, a 42 year-old father of two who last July dreamed that Liverpool mid-fielder Xabi Alonso would score a goal from his own half. Which last Saturday he duly did. Fortunately for Mr. Hayward, his dream was so vivid that it stayed in his mind long enough to get to the betting-shop where he put 200 pounds on at 125-1 that Mr. Alonso would make his dream come true during the season. When he was watching the game against Luton Town on Saturday with his family and he saw the Luton goalkeeper – who had raced up to the other end in the hope of getting an equalising goal in the final seconds of the match – was way off his line, he started shouting ‘Shoot’: which Mr. Alonso duly did, scoring a goal that netted Mr. Hayward winnings of 25,000 pounds. Whether Mr. Hayward had a unique premonition of the way the game would go, or whether his dream actually caused the goal to happen in the way it did or whether it was just luck, is above our pay grade. Such pontification is best left to the likes of Richard Dawkins. The important point is that a goal was scored, and a dream came true. (Guardian, 11/1/06)
If explaining this remarkable incident is above the anonymous leader writer’s pay grade, it is certainly above mine. In the words of the celebrated psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, ‘I am not clever enough to explain such things, but nor am I stupid enough to deny them’. The world is a very strange place, and we are very strange beings, and despite the undoubted scientific advances of the last 200 years or so, our understanding of reality is still in its infancy. Science has explained many things, but sometimes, still, like Walt Whitman in our second reading today, we have to leave our charts and tables and test-tubes and computers and ‘in the mystical moist night-air, look up in perfect silence at the stars’. Isaac Newton, arguably the greatest scientist of all time (and who was, by the way, an early Unitarian) summed up his own magnificent intellectual achievements like this:
I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary.
Newton’s humility is a lesson to us all. The cultivation of a similar attitude among the leaders of intellectual opinion would help protect the world from the destructive effects of arrogant bigotry and dogmatism, both scientific and religious.

15th January 2006 Bill Darlison