The Scrooge Paradox: Ruickbie excerpt #1

“You don’t believe in me,” observed the Ghost.
“I don’t,” said Scrooge.
“What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?” “I don’t know,” said Scrooge.
“Why do you doubt your senses?”

“Because,” said Scrooge, “a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You might be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There’s more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!”

– Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (1843)

Leo Ruickbie

That is the problem. Not just Scrooge, many people have seen ghosts, but modern science does not believe them because the human senses are fallible. The paradox is that all the sciences are founded on the human faculties – either the physical senses or mental reasoning – and all are fallible, yet still we have split the atom, sent men to the moon, and eradicated smallpox. We have more than two thousand years of recorded testimony (excluding religious teachings) that death is not the end of the human personality or consciousness, so the question is not where is the evidence for ‘life’ after death, but why science will not accept it. At the heart of this is, not that we lack the evidence for consciousness being independent of the physical body (not just as apparitions, but also as out-of- body and near-death experiences, among other things), but that we doubt the experience – a case of seeing not being believing – what I will call the ‘Scrooge Paradox.’

Over a hundred and fifty years on from Dickens, polls regularly find large numbers of people believing in ghosts. In the UK, 34% believe in ghosts. In the US, between 31 and 33% of adults believe in ghosts. What this means is that of the nine or so people you call friends, three of them believe in ghosts. Interestingly, more people in the UK believe in life after death: between 45 and 47%. More than a quarter (27%) of those in the UK thought it possible to communicate with the deceased, compared to 21% in the US and 24% in Canada. Polling in the UK went further and asked people whether they believed that they had communicated with the deceased: 9% said yes. These are large proportions of the population and may be greater in other parts of the world.

Unexpectedly, the statistics doubled when people were asked whether they had seen a ghost. A 2018 survey of 2,000 people in the US found that 60% said that they believed that they had seen a ghost.. Although these were different studies, what this pattern seems to indicate is that more people believe that they have seen a ghost based on their own experience, but fewer are prepared to commit to saying that they believe in ghosts as a fact. In a sense, then, people do not even believe themselves – just like Scrooge.

I confess that I am like Scrooge, too. As someone involved in research in this field, scientifically investigating alleged hauntings and mediums, amongst other things, the experiences I have had that could be interpreted as encounters with spirits, I have explained away as random coincidence, even trickery, or due to psychological factors. Our identification with the body is so strong as to make existence without it seem ludicrous. So this essay is not just about the ‘best’ evidence – the best evidence has already been published – but about whether I could convince Scrooge, or myself, that there is sufficiently compelling evidence.

Some of the greatest names in parapsychology have also doubted the evidence for life after death. In 1972, the famous reincarnation researcher Dr. Ian Stevenson chaired a symposium with the subject “What evidence, if you had it, would convince you of survival?” Karlis Osis from the American Society for Psychical Research was there, as was Germany’s foremost parapsychologist at the time, Prof. Hans Bender of the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie (Institute for the Border Areas of Psychology), also Dr. John Palmer of the University of Virginia, and Dr. W.G. Roll of the Psychical Research Foundation. Bender was forthright: “I actually see no way for cogent proof.” Roll argued that “Since the dead cannot be directly observed and since we do not know whether the entities which speak through mediums are who they claim to be, we are unable to tell whether consciousness continues after death.” Finally, Stevenson reported that the prevailing theory among parapsychologists (at least in 1972) was that extrasensory perception (ESP) of the living accounted for what had previously been regarded as evidence of life after death (what came to be known as the ‘super-psi’ or, better, the living-agent psi hypothesis). Many parapsychologists are like Scrooge, too.

Dickens did not make Scrooge have a near-death experience, an out-of-body experience, a religious revelation or a scientific discovery, he had him see a ghost because ghosts are the common currency of any discussion about the afterlife. Everyone knows what a ghost is, it needs no further explanation (at least superficially). When considering what the best evidence for the continuation of the human personality after permanent physical death is or could be, the question of ‘ghosts’ must be the first one to examine because it is the most common and well-known experience across both human history and culture. As far as the extent of our current knowledge allows, we may state that there was never a time when ‘ghosts’ were not talked of and never a people who did not talk of them. This means that it must provide the most documented evidence from the greatest range of people, including the most credible and reliable witnesses.

 

Leo Ruickbie, “The Ghost in the Time Machine,” 2021 prize winning essay in the Bigelow Institute for Consciousness Studies. Ruickbie teaches psychology at Kings College and the University of Northamptom in the United Kingdom. Footnotes have been deleted from these online excerpts from his essay. The entire essay may be downloaded at the Bigelow site, https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php.