Deaf to argument

John Roberts’s letter describing his encounter with “Showman Randi” [ FT409:76], brought to mind what CS Lewis said in the introduction to his book Miracles. What matters in any investigation is the underlying philosophy that a person brings to their experiences. Lewis said that the only person he knew who claimed to have seen a ghost was an unbeliever who didn’t believe the evidence of her own senses. She decided that she must have been hallucinating.

No amount of evidence was ever going to convince someone like Randi, who long ago made up his mind about the paranormal. If ‘miracles’ don’t exist, then you can’t have witnessed one. End of debate. There will always be a logical explanation for those who want to find it: hallucinations produced by infrasound, psychological self-deception or whatever. They may claim to be scientific in their approach, but it is a very close-minded type of science, admitting no speck of doubt into their purely materialistic cosmos.

Mike Sherlock

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