“The problem with real ghosts, as opposed to the elegant fictional creations of the likes of MR James and Susan Hill, is that their behaviour is so erratic and irritating,” write the Telegraph‘s reviewer of a new book called A Natural History of Ghosts. The book includes
a very long chapter about Hinton Ampner, an Elizabethan house where a tall dark female figure roamed around to the accompaniment of bangings, crashes, groans and shrieks. Was she the spirit of the illegitimate child fathered by the lord of the house and throttled by his manservant? Who knows or cares? She certainly made life unpleasant for those living there.
I’ve thought that myself, when reading stories about ghosts, who act like very very bored and very ill-mannered children, of the sort who find bothering people for no reason amusing. Sometimes they’re reported to do things worthy of a ghost, but not very often. But that childish malevolence may be an argument for their existence, since it’s not the natural form a myth would take or a conman invent.
The reviewer asks what are they? The author of the book, Richard Clarke,
quotes, without comment, one ghost-hunter’s belief that they are “the electrical residue of emotions that became entangled with the living”. Lord knows what that is supposed to mean. Another “seminal figure”, Hans Holzer, defined them as “a surviving emotional memory”, unaware of their own death and therefore in need of help.
Not very helpful. But whether or not the ghosts people think they see or claim to see are real, the book looks interesting as a cultural history.
I am myself agnostic about the existence of ghosts, being restrained from my preferred disbelief by the weight of evidence. There’s the testimony you read and hear about and the occasional story from people you know. Two people who were about the last people who would see strange ethereal presences told me privately about their experiences, and were rather eager that I not repeat the story because they knew other people would think they were nuts. One told a story I can’t find a way of discounting.
In any case, the review reminded me of an enjoyable passage from G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. It’s not entirely fair to the skeptic’s case — it is easier to be fooled by the appearance of a ghost than of a murder — but he makes a good point about the way many skeptic’s weigh testimony.
The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both.
Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story.
That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism — the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence — it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.
But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But mediaevals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say “a peasant saw a ghost,” I am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is — that they see ghosts.
December 27th, 2012 | 9:21 am
I’m, like David Mills, agnostic concerning the existence of ghosts. I don’t accept the blind faith of dogmatic materialists, that ghosts cannot possibly existor are unlikely to exist. But let’s assume that ghosts are essentially immaterial. If this is true, one has to account for the way these immaterial beings manifest themselves to us. Obviously, as Aquinas argued, we humans derive our knowledge of the world via our senses, so if ghosts exist, naturally they would have to convey evidence of their existence through sensory means. This would seem to mean that ghosts, not unlike angels that, according to the Catholic Church are essentially immaterial, must “borrow” or “use” particular forms of matter to manifest themselves to us. An interesting possibility.
December 27th, 2012 | 9:56 am
I have always believed the idea put forth by Gerard J.M. van den Aardweg in his book “Hungry Souls: Supernatural Visits, Messages and Warnings from Purgatory” that these are either REAL people in some sort of purgatorial state (as attested to by St. Padre Pio, St. Fasutina, and other saints) who are seeking our prayers OR demons.
The book has a whole chapter about the Purgatory Museum in Rome, which houses objects touched by these souls and sworn testimonies of encounters.
These experiences do happen to normal, “rational” people. And they happen too often to be discounted. Call me medieval, but I believe in the supernatural. As a Catholic, I must.
December 27th, 2012 | 10:31 am
Just playing with the idea for afew moments, dogmatic materialism needn’t be in conflict with ghosts. While the author pretends he doesn’t know what the ghost hunters are talking about, their theories about ghosts seem quite materialistic to me. They seem to be saying that ghosts are like an echo of an emotion from a person that somehow gets trapped and amplified in some place.
This would explain two things. First why people find ghosts so scarey, because there’s something familiar about them…they seem to be some type of entity rather than just some random clicking like what your fridge does late at night. Second why ghosts seem so irrational. They don’t communicate, they seem to lack any coherent agenda, they may simply not be intelligence but an echo left behind by other intelligences.
Keep in mind mind reading and physic powers are a staple in very materialistic science fiction. Star Trek, Starship Troopers and other genres assumed they were just an extension of materialistic science and would be taken as commonplace in the future.
I think you’re right about Chesterton. Would the peasent woman testifying about a murder be taken at face value if no body was found? No evidence that the events she described could be found at the scene? No missing person?
December 28th, 2012 | 7:41 am
Bret,
Two problems with the existence of ghosts as real people:
1. People with severe brain damage or in a coma aren’t able to communicate via ‘immaterial means’ like closing doors, making noises late at night in places their body isn’t, showing up in photographs as white blurs of light etc. This lends support to the idea that one needs a brain to do things like communicate and brains are pretty material things locked inside the body.
2. Aquinas, correct me if I’m wrong, also accepted the link between our material bodies and our material senses. For example, we have eyes to see with so if we are disconnected from our eyes then we can’t see.
* There’s probably some doctrinal problems as don’t some Christians believe you are dead until the day of ressurection as opposed to the idea of as soon as you die you ‘float’ up to heaven or downwards? If that’s the case then ghosts should exist….at least in the sense that they are people who died recently and are ‘hanging around’ for reasons unclear.
This wouldn’t be dogmatic materialism IMo but what I call ‘soft materialism’ which means simply that ‘matter matters’. Or as Christopher Hitchens once said in a debate “Shoot me in the head and I can’t go on like this…..and I won’t be coming back to bother you!”
You are correct IMO that this is not sufficient to prove ghosts don’t exist as immaterial beigns but I think it is sufficient to say they are unlikely. It was once thought unlikely that black holes existed, though, so unless some better evidence comes along the possibility is still there.
If you’re willing to relax the definition of a ghost as an intelligent entity then you open up some other interesting possibilities. Perhaps some areas just keep a ‘record’ of intense emotions that some people pick up when they visit or when they are tired and sleepy causing them to perceive this as lights or sounds or movement.
December 29th, 2012 | 2:46 am
Hi Boonton,
You bring up good points. Thanks for for your insight. I think that, with respect to Aquinas’s position, you’re correct. He did endorse the notion that, human beings, (as well as animals), derive knowledge of reality through the senses. (Humans are unique, among animal creatures, in that only we humans, take the information, derived from sensation, and, form an understanding of universals; in this capacity for knowledge of universals, we’re like angels, and God). Aquinas argued that angels are immaterial beings, and therefore derive their knowledge not from sensation, which requires a material body, but from other means. Humans who have died, in his view, would be immaterial, and still have the capacity to know reality, but could not communicate with us, unless they used some material as a tool to do so, similar to how angels would do so. if ghosts exist, under this system, (obviously, if the Catholic Church is true, humans exist after death, as immaterial beings. Some people might call them “ghosts”, but I’m using the term “ghosts” to refer to those beings who supposedly communicate with humans in some fashion) they must have the capacity to use their immaterial minds to “control” material things, such as banging doors, etc. Whether they would need to use human brains as an intermediary communicative system (immaterial minds controlling brains that control material objects) I don’t know, but we might then be getting into the realm of possession! But perhaps not, if the spirits communicating had a good purpose, endorsed by God. Angels, in the Catholic Church, can do this: use human or animal bodies to communicate with us. (Aquinas, incidently, didn’t believe that dead humans, as immaterial souls, were fully human, they needed their bodies for this. Hence one of the great things about the resurrection! I’m not Catholic, at least not yet, so perhaps someone in theChurch can correct any errors I may have made in my statements here).
Some Christians, called by many “Christian Materialists” don’t believe that we have immaterial souls.(Ther great philosopher Peter van Inwagen is an example, I think) They argue that the latter notion is not biblically based, but derived from platonic philosophy, and is also not congruent with the findings of modern neuroscience. They don’t, I think it’s fair to say, represent the majority of traditional Christians.
With respect to humans with brain damage on this earth, that affects their capacity to form knowledge, or communicate, this wouldn’t affect their immaterial minds or souls, to communicate with us after they died, I wouldn’t think, since they could use material that adequetely conveyed whatever message they wished to convey to us.
December 30th, 2012 | 2:18 pm
Humans who have died, in his view, would be immaterial, and still have the capacity to know reality, but could not communicate with us, unless they used some material as a tool to do so, similar to how angels would do so.
This would imply, then, that humans who aren’t dead have some type of ability to communicate via ‘immaterial’ means. Perhaps we don’t notice it becuase the body provides such an efficient way to communicate and manipulate matter that we are blind to this ability until we loose our bodies….but still with billions of people and lots of people eager to find a Star Wars ‘force’-like way to act in an immaterial way, one would figure the odds are someone would have found a system to do so by now. Another possibility might be that we lack this ability but are given it after we die. Hence no amount of trial-and-error playing by living people will ever produce such ability for us to examine.
With respect to humans with brain damage on this earth, that affects their capacity to form knowledge, or communicate, this wouldn’t affect their immaterial minds or souls, to communicate with us after they died,
But then why not before death? why can’t the man in a coma cause the doors to bang if he wants to communicate that he doesn’t like something? Why does he have to wait until his death?
Which leads to the question of what evidence is there that ghosts are connected to humans in any way? You have some old house that has mysterious banging in it, say. Or mysterious ‘cold spots’ that appear sometimes. What is the evidence that that is somehow an ‘immaterial’ human soul either trying to communicate or do something? Why not the soul of a dead dog? Why anything linked to a living entity of any intelligence at all? While there’s little good evidence that ghosts exist, I think there’s even less evidence to establish any real communication with ghosts.
December 30th, 2012 | 8:10 pm
Hi Boonton,
I’m highly skeptical that ghosts communicate with us, and vice versa. The evidence just doesn’t seem very strong. But I’m open to it. Without strong empirical evidence of “ghosts”, one is left to speculate. Are ghosts spirits or souls of dead humans? Are they of other animals? Could they be angels, or demons? Could be all of the above, or perhaps none of the above, and some other type of beings we are unaware of.
The debate of whether ghosts exist, is clearly related to what constitutes personal identity. If materialism is true, obviously our brains (or something capable of information processing, such as a computer, or some biological objects different from brains, yet to be discovered, such as beings on other planets) are who we are ( J.C.Smart’s “identity theory”, we’re identical to our brains), and when we die, the party’s over. And if this is so, and no one continues living after death, perhaps what we call “ghosts” aside from the very rich imaginations of many people, are maybe, extraterrestrials.
But I think that there’s good evidence both empirical (e.g., near death experiences), and deductive (Aquinas and Lewis’s arguments for the immaterial aspect of knowledge), to justify a belief in an afterlife. Obviously this doesn’t solve many mysteries, such as why humans, if we have immaterial minds or souls, would need brains to exist in the physical world, or if ghosts exist, and are immaterial, what material they’re using to communicate with us, if all immaterial minds need to have a material “tool” to communicate with us.
There’s of course the obvious conundrum of how material such as brains, or parts of brains, “connect” or communicate with immaterial minds. Such objections were raised in response to Descartes MEDITATIONS ON FIRST PHILOSOPHY, where he argues for substance dualism. How would ghosts use their immaterial minds to “connect” with physical objects, to cause banging, etc.? unfortunately, the issue of “ghosts”, who they are, what they are, wether they’re merely products of human brains imaginative abilities, or wether they’re something that exists “extramentally”, only is exacerbated the more one examines it!
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