And that's just Laura Miller's writing. The SPR's particular brand of excrement deserves its own scatalogical label.

Please stop publishing intelligent interviews with people such as Michael Shermer if all you're going to do a few days later is "balance" fact with this pathetic fiction.

Excellent review. I love reading about the realtionship between science and spirituality/religion as it developed in the Western world. I was especially heartened by the sincerity and careful quest for truth by these early members of the SPR, even though they knew they would be ridiculed in scientific circles. Even to this day, scientists who don't take a strict materialist view of reality are looked upon suspiciously or dismissed as superstitious.

But with today's physics research into the utter strangeness of the universe (quantum theory, nonlocal events, chaos theory, fuzzy logic, etc.), and as we move away from a strictly mechanistic view of reality, such extraordinary psychic phenonema seem not out of the realm of possiblity.

I am reminded of the words of that great poet Rainer Maria Rilke:

"We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, every unheard-of, must be possible in it. This is at bottom the only courage that is demenaded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable."

For those interested in further readings about the extraordinary capacity of human beings for transformative, cognitive, and paranormal capacities, I recommend Michael Murphy's exhaustively researched and sober (yet fascinating) book "The Future of the Body: Explorations Into the Further Evolution of Human Nature". Murphy is the co-Founder of the Esalen Institute in California

I'd like to know Henry James' response to brother William's involvement. The ghosts in "The Turn of the Screw" are more often than not read as hallucinations of a repressed governness. While one can point out that we see everything from her position, and no other adult ever sees the ghosts, the underlying feeling I often get from people's arguments is that they consider Henry James "too intellectual" to have believed in ghosts, so the ones in his novella must be a psychological delusion. Putting aside that a writer can create a work of fiction in which ghosts exist whether the writer in real life believes in them or not, it would be interesting to know if Henry James believed in the possibility of supernatural phenomena, and what impact this had on the (several) ghost stories he wrote.

it's good when people occasionally branch out and question established principles.

I don't believe in psychic powers, but a seance would be fun.

I didn't find Shermer's science sermon fun. It doesn't feel proper to make a religion out of science. Science is supposed to be cold and objective, and if it isn't, then it isn't science.

And Shermer's science sermon also felt weird because it's all about relating to material objects.

Even if there are no psychic powers, still, it's a lot more normal to want to talk to your dead husband than to get all close and personal with an atom or or a strand of DNA.

What would be "the point" of supernatural powers?

If we assume life after death -- what exactly would that mundane daily existence be like? Would we be conscious all the time? Would we learn new things? Would we WANT to talk to the living? If so, what would we say?

The point I'm trying to make is that the evidence of life after death seems to rely almost exclusively on these so-called "communications" from beyond -- and yet the information provided by "spirits from beyond" seems to being on the whole worthless.

No infromation provided by a spirit has ever a) cured cancer or any disease b) solved world hunger c) given a detailed account of life after death that is universal across all cultures, etc.

So even if science proved beyond all doubt that spirits exist and we can communicate with them -- um, absolutely nothing would change here on planet earth. The spirits, apparently, aren't any smarter or more enlightend in death than they were in life.

From an evolutionary point of view exactly what good comes from being able to "tell" the name of someones father who happens to be sitting in front of you, yet is wearing a hood?

From a spiritual/metaphysical point of view what good is it to be able to "tell" someone's name by holding a lock of their hair? How is this metaphysically useful to either the living or the dead? I'm not seeing the value.

I mean, whoo-hoo, that's awesome. Really. Honestly. But what exactly is the point of these powers? Does "God" allow these powers? Do they exist independent of God?

People seems to point to these "powers" as proof of something -- but when looked at in a practical sense these "powers" (while interesting) are almost wholly worthless to mankind and even worthless to the spirits on the other side.

Aren't they?

I was trying to leave this comment a couple of minutes ago when my page mysteriously scrolled down. I know you are going to think this is foofaraw, but I suspect spectral nuns...

Personally, I do hope there's an afterlife, although it occurs to me that the universality of grief suggests that our shared longing for this is precisely why we should be skeptical. But it would give me a chance to catch up on my reading.

This article and much of the work of the SPR unfortunately perpetuates a false dichotomy between science and "the supernatural", a term used to describe those things which are perceived as being outside the boundaries of science. I would argue that there is, in fact, no such thing as the supernatural, except in our imaginations.

There are two, and only two, possibilities for existence: things can be conceptual or imaginary, existing only in our minds, or they can exist in the real, physical world. If such things as gods, angels, ghosts, spirits or demons are anything but imaginary, then they must be considered as natural, existing in the natural world, amenable (at least in principle) to scientific inquiry, and subject to the same inviolable natural laws as all other things. Any appearance by such entities (assuming that they did, in fact, have a physical existence) of transcending these laws would be simply that-appearance. A ghost which passed through a solid wall or a god who could transform matter with the wave of a hand would not be exhibiting "supernatural" powers in violation of natural laws, but would rather be indicating to us that there are aspects of natural law which we simply have not yet discovered.

Scott Stoeffler