I used to laugh at ghosts, God and people who buy healing crystals.

I still despise religion and healing crystals BUT…in my kooky old age, I’ve decided that maybe materialism isn’t necessarily where it’s at. By materialism, I mean not buying more handbags but the idea that everything in our universe can be analysed and explained in terms of purely material forces – gravity, electro-magnetism, the strong and weak nuclear forces, etc.

My basic premise is this. What you can perceive is limited by the tools you use to perceive it. We used to think lightning was God having a tantrum, because we didn’t know about electricity. We used to believe in ‘evil humours’ because we couldn’t see germs. Ask a computer the meaning of life and it’ll say 42.

So if you use the scientific method to analyse our world, and you begin with the assumption that everything is material (no ghosts, thanks) you WILL get scientific answers. Which work. As far as it goes. But if it happens to be the case that the universe also comprises non-material substances or forces, don’t be surprised if the scientific method gives us no indication of this. Wrong tools.

So the obvious riposte is – why should we think that there are any non-material substances or forces at work in the universe, given that we have zero evidence so far that such substances or forces exist?

It’s a good point. But is there really zero evidence?

I mean, what usually happens when we’re presented with ‘evidence’ that non-material stuff exists? We label it delusional. We dismiss it, because – we say – it can’t be verified (or falsified for that matter) through the scientific method. We say, ‘If any of this stuff was real, wouldn’t the Skeptics Society have handed out that million bucks by now?’ (To be fair, nobody’s yet been able to prove that anybody else is actually even self-aware. Yet. NB, maybe we should set up a prize…) It doesn’t fit in with our dominant paradigm – which is, these days at least, that the universe comprises ONLY material stuff.

Case in point – I read a study once ON a study of a dozen northern UK housewives who had experienced, in some form, the presence of a dead family member. The meta-study showed that the original researchers went in with an (understandably) sceptical, rather than neutral, attitude. As a result the housewives (in deference to the attitude of the academics) also qualified their experiences with little asides like ‘but I guess I could have just imagined it…’ and ‘at least that’s how it felt at the time…’. Basically, no one was allowed to take any of it seriously.

Anyway, what kind of ‘evidence’ am I talking about here? People seeing ghosts. Near death experiences. Coincidences. Deja vu. Religious experience. Foreknowledge. Remote mental communication. Moving to (slightly) less controversial examples, how about consciousness itself, which has yet to be explained as an emergent mechanism of matter. Or the experience of a universal consciousness reported by people trained in serious meditation?

“But that’s not evidence!!!” the committed materialist bursts out. “That’s delusion! Or chicanery!”

Well yeah, maybe (magazine psychics, Jesus walking on water…). But it’s also possible that we just have no framework in which to place that kind of information. We’ve got our materialist framework (yep, that’s definitely a split proton). We’ve got our emotional framework (yep, that’s love!). But we don’t really have a framework for ideas about the nature of the universe that go beyond our everyday physical and social context. I mean, look how we struggle with quantum physics and the concept of infinity. What, it goes on for…ever? And ever???? And…you’re saying an electron can be here, and not here, at the same time??

Three things make me wonder if we need to be a bit more cautious about our assumption that what can’t be analysed scientifically can’t, therefore, exist. One, the huge paradigm shifts we’ve experienced so far even just scientifically. We’ve gone from the idea that the world’s made of earth, water, air and fire and God made Adam and Eve six thousand years ago out of dirt to knowing about DNA and multiverses. And we think we’re well on the way to having it all sorted??? Two, the very commonness and frequency of non-material experiences or intuitions. Mass delusions exist for sure but when enough people spot an anomaly there’s a point when it ceases to be an anomaly and you have to consider expanding the basic theory. Newtonian physics to Einstein and all that.

And three, how very limited we are, as humans. We are bounded by our sense of self. We don’t even know what it’s like to be a bat, an ant or an eagle, let alone what it’s like (if anything) to be a tree or a star. We don’t even know how it is that we want to survive (or want anything, for that matter – more on that another time). We’re like the blind guy declaring the elephant is all trunk.

Then again, like, chem trails.

Probably I wouldn’t be putting the case for any of this stuff if I hadn’t myself had a few ‘numinous’ experiences. Which I could easily put into the ‘delusion’ basket. But I’m finding it interesting to explore the ‘what if not’ side of the argument. So I think I’ll just keep doing that for a while on this blog…sorry.