Richard Dawkins: Psychics, Seers and A Blind Spot

Richard Dawkins is a man we badly need to have around. If anyone is capable of taking on bogus thinking and silly superstition, that man is 'Darwin's rottweiler'. Dawkins has an unerring eye for fraudulent thinking and he brings that talent into play in "The Enemies of Reason" - a TV documentary to be aired on Channel 4 this month.

In the two-part series Dawkin's takes on 'new age' healers, mediums, diviners and others of that ilk. He claims that the UK is in the grip of "an epidemic of superstitious thinking" that sees Britons spending 1.6 billion pounds a year on alternative remedies.

He also takes a shot at homeopathy which is used by roughly 500 million people worldwide. Dawkins asserts that there is absolutely no concrete evidence that it works. He isn't alone in his skepticism. Even Peter Fisher, the clinical director of the Royal London Homeopathic Hospital is on record saying "I don't claim that it's much more than a hypothesis". A House of Lords committee that investigated homeopathy was highly skeptical about the clinical claims made by homeopaths and concluded that much of the 'evidence' in homeopathy's favor was anecdotal.

The series isn't without its moments of light relief. Dawkins goes to consult a medium who charges around $100 for 'instant phone readings'. She told him that she could sense his father "on the other side" and proceeded to offer insights about his 'deceased' dad. The only trouble being that the professor's father is still very much alive. When Dawkins pointed this out, she attempted to minimize her obvious gaff.

While it is true that a percentage of alternative cures and revelations are bogus, driven by deluded thinking and the prospect of a fast buck, it's a mistake to dismiss the non-rational aspects of existence out-of-hand - something Dawkins has a tendency to do. The human mind - the mind Dawkins celebrates - isn't simply a unit capable of logic and analytical processes. It has another side to it.

The imaginative faculty is poorly understood and often dismissed as a sort of vague process for dreaming up creative ideas. This may be true when the imagination is untrained. However in the case of shamans who work with 'controlled imagination', the content of mind functions in a non-rational manner, along ritual lines and for express purposes. In "Primitive Mythology", Joseph Campbell identifies paleolithic cave paintings with the 'magic of the hunt'. By rendering the prey in a ritualistic fashion on cave walls, the hunters or those acting on their behalf, believed they could create 'a link' with the quarry that increased the odds of success.

We are connected to others and to nature by means of 'inclusive' consciousness. It is possible to influence others by means of non-rational processes. The mind also has a pre-cognitive faculty that enables people at times to apprehend an event before it has actually occurred. In 1985, my daughter, who was age five at the time, awoke my wife and I in the middle of the night and announced "gran is dead". We thought she was having a bad dream and put her back to bed. A few hours later we received a call from a family member who announced that my partner's mother had passed away during the night. We hadn't spoken to our daughter about the possibility of her grandmother dying and yet she announced the death with absolute conviction, as though she hadn't a doubt in the world.

It is too easy to dismiss this type of phenomena as coincidence or a fluke. There are non-rational connections and channels of influence that we can't easily explain. As an agnostic I don't view this as proof for the existence of god or as justification for a theological explanation of the world. I simply believe that there is an esoteric aspect to mind function that at this stage of our scientific development is poorly understand.

The argument for this type of phenomena from a quantum physics perspective is always dicey. Theoretical arguments aren't proof. Theories offered by Fritjoff Capra in the "Tao of Physics" and by Deepak Chopra are certainly interesting and have merit, but counter arguments by skeptics such as Heinz Pagels also carry weight.

If, as some atheists believe, we are nothing more than atomic and sub-atomic particles - our consciousness nothing more than neural patterning as a result of bio-electrical and chemical processes - how is it possible to explain the awareness of 'self' that exists apart from function? What gives rise to this awareness and how does this awareness modify our connection with nature and with others? This awareness of self can be modified through meditation and psychological techniques. There is a transcendent aspect to consciousness that is written into the fabric of our existence. We can of course ignore it, minimize it or even suppress it, but this faculty is nonetheless a doorway to 'possibilities' - a mode of knowing that is inherently non-rational.

Some have offered 'negative proof' as an argument for belief in the supernatural. Something along the lines of "the supernatural must exist, because there is no proof that it does not exist". This is of course a logical fallacy since the claim hinges upon the fact that the proposition hasn't been proven to be false. It does carry some epistemological weight but hardly enough to appease those who demand more substantial burdens of proof.

While I rate the work of Richard Dawkins very highly, I think his views are at times too rigorously pragmatic when it comes to defining the full nature and scope of the mind. He's absolutely right in bringing sharp skepticism to bear on the claims being pedaled by self-declared new age seers and mystics. However, I for one am not prepared to entirely close the door on the more esoteric potentials of the human mind.