Ross Douthat: evaluation

Transcript context

…Just whatever it would take. The editors of Science and Nature, whoever they may be — I suspect they don’t believe in what you believe in. Whatever it would take to convince them. We have no tools that will bring them along. It’s at some odd margin of being quite non-legible. It’s that way on purpose to test us? Or it just turned out that way? It seems like a weird — I think it has to be that way on purpose in order for the basic coherence of physical existence to obtain. . . I think, actually, the scientist’s point originally that you can’t do science if you can always assert that an angel is responsible for moving a planet around — I think that is a decent enough explanation of why you wouldn’t expect constant predictable operation of supernatural forces in the world. I think that there are also reasons to think, for instance, with psychic phenomena . . . Thanks in part to the CIA’s interest in it, this has been subject to a lot of quasi-scientific scrutiny over long periods of time. You can find people who have done studies that technically stand up to the rigors of scientific expectations that seem to prove the existence of some kind of psi, some kind of paranormal ability. But then you enter into the replication crisis [laughs] and you have competing studies and recreations of those studies. I don’t want to rule out, in fact, the possibility that, if more scientists set aside their materialist presumptions, you wouldn’t be able to get better data. But I think it would have to be data about characteristics of human beings rather than characteristics of angels and demons. I think the latter is inherently inaccessible to the tools that we use for modern science. Whereas I do think it’s reasonable to say if people are psychic, maybe we should be able to design a set of experiments that offers clearer indications in that direction. I quote Freeman Dyson in the book as a maverick polymath, scientific genius, and he was a believer in psychic phenomena. His argument was basically that if you read about the cases where people have these kinds of experiences, they’re similar to cases of bursts of artistic creativity or things, again, that are very hard to predict and measure scientifically. They happen under periods of great physical or personal duress. They happen around the death of a loved one. They happen in inherently eccentric circumstances that seem to — again, if these capacities existed — be the things that generated those capacities, which again, creates some problems for laboratory measurement, I would say. But this gets back to my interaction set of worries. People report seeing and hearing angels and demons, right? But there’s not an MP3 file or a photo where you would [say], “Oh, here we go.” That’s very odd to me. It’s not logically impossible. It just seems highly unlikely. None of them seem to have held up.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.