A Fang friend of mine once insisted that he had seena gifted shaman
perform an extraordinary feat. The old man had stuck a finger in the
ground in his village and had made it reemerge in another village sev-
eral miles away, just by telling his finger to go there! When chal-
lenged by derisive skeptics in the village ("How can you claim you saw
it all, if it happened in two different places?"), the narrator conceded
that he had witnessed only the first part of this dramatic event; but
the reemergence of the finger had been reported by very reliable
sources.As this last comment only added fuel to the skeptics' scorn,
my friend walked off in a sulk.
[76] Such notions crop up in conversations the world over. So does, to
some extent, the skeptical reaction. Only in the West have such beliefs
become a kind of institution, the very earnest activity of dedicated
individuals who compile records of such events, classify them and even
perform experiments to try and validate these extraordinary paranor-
mal claims. Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey has documented this
dogged pursuit of the paranormal and the miraculous. Heroically
stubborn researchers explore all the possible evidence, exchange
masses of information on documented cases, design ever more clever
techniques to discover supernatural causation. The sad fact that exper-
iments never demonstrate the intended effects—or do so only when
they are not properly controlled—does not in any way dash their
hopes. They lose every battle but expect to win the war. The main rea-
son for this unbridled optimism is that there is a strong motivation
here, that people really wantsuch claims to be true. Why is that so? As
Humphrey points out, the cultural impact of science on modern
Western societies is certainly a relevant factor. In a cultural context
where this hugely successful way of understanding the world has
debunked one supernatural claim after another, there is a strong
impulse to find at least onedomain where it would be possible to
trump the scientists. Life used to be one such domain, as scientists
could not properly explain in a purely physical way the difference
between living and nonliving things or the evolution of exquisitely
designed organisms. Life had to be special, perhaps the effect of some
nonphysical vital elan or energy. But evolution and microbiology
crushed all this and showed that life is indeed a physical phenomenon.
All that is left, for some people, is the soul,and the idea that mental
events, thoughts and memories and emotions, are not just physical
events in brains. Hence the hope to find that thought can travel in
physically impossible ways and have direct effects on matter.^7
RELIGION EXPLAINED