A Walk with William James, Part 10: White Crows and The Empirical Trace (Part 2 of 2)

On March 31, 1848 Kate Fox heard a spirit knocking in her house in Hydesville, New York. And thus began an interesting, if little known, alliance between faith and science.

The Fox sisters are often credited with starting a surge of interest in spiritualism in America and Europe during the last half of the 1800s and into the early 1900s. In the wake of the Fox sisters scores of mediums and mesmerists rose up to meet the raging demand for fortune-telling, seances, and spirit communication.

Interestingly, many preachers were very supportive of the spiritualism movement. The movement seemed to provide evidence for the soul and life after death. And in a similar way, many famous scientists saw in spiritualism a means to test and probe the supernatural realm. Thus was born a very odd campaign: The quest to scientifically prove the existence of life after death. It's an odd and quirky tale that continues to this day.

William James was a part of this effort. He was an early and influential member of the Society for Psychical Research, a group of famous scientists who systematically investigated evidence of the supernatural and paranormal. The thesis of the group was simple: If supernatural phenomena is occurring in ways we can sense and experience it must leave some empirical trace. The SPR set out to detect that empirical trace.

Mainly, they debunked a lot cranks and hucksters. Even the famous Fox sisters were found to be frauds (although their story is a very tragic one).

After years of debunking, James himself grew weary of the work. But one case kept him coming back. Miss Leonora Piper.

In their own words, the scientists of the SPR were looking for "the white crow." This was a popular metaphor to illustrate one of the problems with inductive reasoning. In inductive reasoning we gather particular observations and then, based on these isolated observations, draw a general conclusion. Thus, day after day we see crows. And all of them are black. We also pool the experiences of our friends and historians and conclude that all the crows ever seen (that we know of) were also black. So we feel very confident to make the general conclusion: All crows are black.

Then we wake up one day and a white crow lands in our backyard.

The point? A billion observations can lead to an induction. But it only takes ONE contrary observation to invalidate the whole chain of reasoning. With induction you can never be sure that your white crow isn't waiting for you around the corner. (BTW, an interesting recent book on the "white crow" phenomenon in the marketplace is Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.)

The hope of the "white crow" for the SPR researchers was that a billion hucksters did not prove the non-existence of paranormal phenomena. All they needed was just ONE legitimate medium. Just one. And William James strongly suspected that Leonora Piper was the "white crow."

Just why James (and others) came to believe this about Miss Piper is a fascinating story. For more, pick up Deborah Blum's excellent book Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death. Blum's book is an excellent historical account of the spiritualism movement and how the scientific establishment responded to it. But for a quirky modern tour through the paranormal, from a bemused but curious skeptic, check out Mary Roach's Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife. Roach is an amazing writer and her curiosity and humor make for great reading. In fact, before reading Spook, I'd start with Roach's bestselling book Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers. (As you can tell, Roach has a quirky sense of humor. Stiff came first, followed by Spook.)

Okay, why go into all this stuff?

Well, any walk with William James should confront his interests in the paranormal. In the end, despite his study of Miss Piper, James retained his skepticism of the supernatural and in the prospect of life after death. He was hopeful, but skeptical.

But the issues raised by James' brush with the supernatural are still with us today. Specifically, the question remains:

Does the supernatural leave an empirical trace?

For example, is intercessory prayer effective? Much more specifically, are praying Christians more likely to recover from physical illness due to the power of prayer?

If so, this would result in an empirical trace. In fact, this is the reasoning behind many of the medical studies that have examined the effectiveness of distant intercessory prayer in clinical trials. The outcome to date? Despite some intriguing findings to the contrary, the overall trends tend to average out to zero. Prayer does not seem effective in any consistent fashion.

No empirical trace.

In another example, I've written a lot about free will and the soul. That is, if the soul is the apparatus of free will there should be an empirical trace in the neural firing of the brain. If supernatural causation is occurring in the brain we should see some causal loose ends: Neurons firing for no (observable) reason. This would be the empirical trace of free will. But to date, no one has observed such a thing.

Miracles should also leave an empirical trace. But as isolated, unrepeatable events they are hard to verify.

So, in the end, James' experiences with the SPR are very relevant to us, on theological grounds. James' work forces us to ask these questions:

Does the supernatural (however you conceive of it) leave an empirical trace?

If so, science should be able to detect it (unless it's a miracle).

But if not, what are the theological implications of THAT? And should it matter?