Beyond a reasonable doubt: Beischel excerpt #20

When I asked the Windbridge mediums, “Do you believe in an afterlife?” as part of the ‘secret media project’ they knew nothing about, Traci Bray, who worked in and around law enforcement prior to focusing on her mediumship full time, chose to respond this way: “Yes. Were I presented this question in a court room, I would vote along with beyond a reasonable doubt.” But how does scientific evidence fit in a court system? 

 

Although “they evolved independent of each other to serve similar functions,” the decision-making schemes in both law and science share extensive similarities. For example, the threshold level of probability used by scientists to determine whether or not to reject a null hypothesis can be equated to the ‘standard of proof’ threshold used in a court system to determine whether or not proof beyond a reasonable doubt has been established. Furthermore,  

 

The structure of the decision situation is the same. Each reflects a true state of reality, which can never be known directly, but must be inferred (that a defendant is innocent or guilty; that a null hypothesis is true or false). 

 

When scientific findings are used as evidence in court, their “falsifiability,” the extent to which they can be contradicted by observation, is considered “the supreme criterion of authenticity”. 

 

There are also important differences between law and science. The philosophy stating that ‘law seeks justice and science seeks truth’ has been “announced by many legal authors and applied by several courts” and is based on the fact that courts will exclude evidence (such as that which has been illegally obtained) and science will not (as long as ethical and methodological standards are adhered to). In addition, 

 

Law relies primarily on what scientists would consider unreliable anecdotal evidence in the form of oral testimony. Science finds its truths by making generalizations from a mass of events. Thus, its focus is often at a population level. In contrast, law seeks to resolve disputes between certain named parties. 

 

As stated above, this is a significant advantage of mediumship research in establishing evidence for survival: we can assess the phenomenon as demonstrated by multiple skilled participants, using peer-reviewed methods and controlled laboratory conditions, which result in generalizable conclusions; we do not need to rely solely on anecdotal testimony about individual reported experiences. 

 

Using these comparisons to law, it is clear that the statistically significant scientific evidence described above, collected under randomized, controlled conditions in order to address falsifiable hypotheses, meets if not surpasses what could be considered proof beyond a reasonable doubt in a court system. 

 

I will leave you with the rest of Traci’s response to my afterlife question: “In my personal life, I am very calm and assured about where at least parts of our soul travel to after the death of the physical body and I have no fear of death itself.” 

 

 

Dr. Julie Beischel is the Director of Research at the Windbridge Research Center. She received her PhD in Pharmacology and Toxicology with a minor in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of Arizona and uses her interdisciplinary training to apply the scientific method to controversial topics.  For over 15 years, Dr. Beischel has worked full-time studying mediums: individuals who report experiencing communication with the deceased and who regularly, reliably, and on-demand report the specific resulting messages to the living. References cited in her paper are deleted from these excerpts but a full paper with references is available at the Bigelow website (https://bigelowinstitute.org/contest_winners3.php).