Gospel & Universe 🔬 Science & Mystery

Man's Best Friend

From an agnostic point of view, extrasensory powers are tricky to categorize. On the surface, they seem mysterious, as if operating beyond the laws of physics. Or, they operate according to laws of physics we haven’t yet examined or codified. Or, they don’t operate at all, but are merely fabrications. If they’re intentional fabrications, they’re deceptions. If they’re unintentional fabrications, they’re delusions.

Several years ago I had something that may or may not have been an extrasensory experience. I still have no idea what to make of it.

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One afternoon I felt a very deep compassion for a good friend, even though I didn't have a clue where the depth of feeling came from. Later I found out that his dog, who he loved very much, had died that afternoon. I have to admit that I'm pretty oblivious to dogs. I wasn't aware that the dog was sick or even old enough to make death likely. The friend lived across town and I had no communication with him at all for several weeks. Yet still I felt this deep feeling of sorrow, all connected very specifically to him. That afternoon I explained it away, thinking that it was just some flood-plain of memories, some complex overloaded loop of chemicals and neurons in my brain.

Thinking back on this experience now, the lack of any clear explanation makes me wonder about three things. 

First, while this experience hasn't led me to believe in a spiritual world, it does make me wonder if what others claim to be spiritual or metaphysical might have more to it than I supposed. The soft agnostic in me accepts that others may experience spiritual or metaphysical things that I haven't experienced. Yet the hard agnostic in me says that people may think they had a mystical experience yet they’re probably mistaking coincidence or intuition for metaphysical connection. Yet even if I take the soft agnostic stance, and even if their experiences were verified (let’s say, by demonstrating that they knew something yet the transmission of that knowledge was impossible to trace), I would still be very skeptical of any larger claim they might make about a metaphysical or spiritual belief system that explains their experience.

The reason I would be skeptical is that this larger claim lies beyond their experience. Agnostics keep in mind the distinction between 1) apparent metaphysical phenomenon which people say they experienced personally, and 2) metaphysical phenomenon which people have not experienced personally yet which they take on faith. The first is less easy to contest because it involves ontology, that is, the state of our being which is by nature personal and subjective. The latter, on the other hand, is easier to contest because it involves epistemology, that is, the system of knowledge or meaning that we derive from the combination of the following: 1) our subjective experiences, 2) our interpretation of these experiences, and 3) the larger system we use to contextualize or universalize our experiences. Agnostics can’t really deny that a person had a certain experience, but they can contest that person’s interpretation and contextualization.

We can claim that a metaphysical experience is true if we actually experienced it. Yet we can't expect others to believe that our experience is true in terms of their personal experience. After exploring the circumstances, others may conclude that our experience was a product of chance or delusion. Even less can we expect others to believe that the things we conclude from our experience are also true, especially if we tie these conclusions to a bigger metaphysical system of meaning. 

I suspect that many agnostics implicitly agree with the idea that ontology precedes epistemology. By this I mean that the ontological state of our experience and awareness is something we experience and can't explain away; what lies beyond, in the realm of our interpretations and in the epistemological systems we use to explain our experiences, is more doubtful. I would go further and say that epistemological systems are riddled by doubt. Perhaps even riddled to death by doubt.

Second, my inexplicable experience may be more common than I thought. For instance, my older brother, a hard-core atheist, can't explain why he knew the precise moment one of our grandmothers died. Such personal claims or anecdotes don't prove anything, yet let's say for the sake of argument that this type of experience could be verified. Let's say that something intangible, an emotion felt on one side of a city, caused a repeated and verifiable effect on the other side of a city. If this was verified by the scientific method, through close observation and repetition, scientists would accept that emotion can travel in some mysterious way, perhaps even in a way that transcended time and space (if one could verify that the cause occurred at exactly the same time as the effect, with no lag between). Atheists, on the other hand, would insist that the experiment is flawed or the cause and effect can be explained in physical terms. Yet in this (very hypothetical) case, the atheist's belief in material causation would be a belief, not a fact. The fact would derive from the verified experiment, not from the belief that the experiment's observation and verification must be explained in physical terms. 

Third, I wonder what might follow if such experiences could be verified. Would such verification unite the deep divide between spirit and matter, essence and existence? In his essay, The Metaphysical Poets (1921), T.S. Eliot writes about the unification of thought and feeling, in what he calls unified sensibility. Could one experience a unified sensibility that included thought and feeling within the fabric of a physical world that slipped beyond its own form, then merged back into physicality? Once one had gone back and forth enough times, would the metaphysical energy or essence, or whatever it might be, become part of our habitual experience? Atheists would resist this speculation, but scientists and agnostics would be eager to put it to the test.  

It's not unscientific to acknowledge the limits of science. Agnostics respect this. They've no interest in turning science into a dogma by cloaking it in the pseudo-religious doctrines of infallibility or omniscience. They certainly don't want to pretend that this imaginary omniscience extends into the future or the afterlife, as if science were some sort of crystal ball. Rather, it’s a golden ball, reflecting the world from one particular viewpoint in one particular point in time. The ball is attached by strings we see or don’t see, and has connections, which we can see or not, with all the other lines and branches stretching above it and beyond.

The epistemological aspect of science is referred to as the scientific method. It isn't called the scientific belief. It's a way or method of verification, not a way of verifying a pre-established doctrine, a positivist gospel — what Huxley calls the bosh of heterodoxy.

Part of this bosh is the notion that we know the inexplicable doesn’t exist.

7 weeks old hovawart puppy, 26 December 2006. Source: Bodlina (Wikimedia Commons)