Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
Volume 6, Issue 2 , Pages 57-63, March 2010

The Possibility of the Impossible: Miracles, Wonder, and Thomas Jefferson's Razor

Article Outline

 

“Miracles do not happen in contradiction to nature, but only in contradiction to that which is known to us in nature.”

—St. Augustine1

Fourth century AD

Many people throughout history have protested religious beliefs through speeches, pamphlets, books, and public demonstrations, but seldom have they dissented with the tool President Thomas Jefferson used: his razor. Most men take their razor to their beards; Jefferson applied his to his Bible. Among the passages he slashed were those dealing with miracles.

Jefferson was raised an Anglican, and over the years he maintained some degree of affiliation with the Anglican Church. During his student years at the College of William and Mary, he read the works of the Scottish moral philosophers such as David Hume, who paved the way for his critical views of religious institutions and beliefs. But the most decisive influence on his religious outlook was Joseph Priestly, the English scientist who is usually credited with the discovery of oxygen in 1774.

Priestly was a learned man of wide interests; he published 150 works in theology, natural philosophy, education, and political theory. His 1782 book An History of the Corruptions of Christianity had a profound impact on Jefferson.2 According to Priestly, the human character and teachings of Jesus had been distorted and obscured in the centuries following his death. Doctrines had been invented that were wholly foreign to Jesus' teachings. Jefferson, following Priestly, believed it possible to purge his teachings of what he considered to be doctrinal absurdities. Jefferson was witheringly scornful of what he called “priestcraft,” whose practitioners, he believed, had perpetrated rank superstitions on the faithful for centuries to maintain their status and power. Jefferson was convinced that Jesus' moral teachings were totally compatible with natural law as revealed by the sciences, and that they had been diluted by contrived doctrines such as the Trinity and by fabrications such as miracles.

Jefferson was a true son of the Enlightenment, the European movement of the late 17th and 18th centuries that emphasized reason and individualism rather than tradition. He believed that morality flows not from revelation, as maintained by many religions, but from an innate moral sense. Thus he was inclined to reject any authority that could not be justified by reason.

Jefferson regarded Jesus' ethical teachings as impeccable. In an 1803 letter to Benjamin Rush, a member of the Universalist movement and America's most famous physician, he wrote, “I am a Christian, in the only sense in which he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence, and believing he never claimed any other.”3

So, out came the razor. “Of immense appeal is the image of President Jefferson, up late at night in his study at the White House, using a razor to cut out large segments of the four Gospels and pasting the parts he decided to keep onto the pages of a blank book, purchased to receive them,” says theologian Thom Belote.3

Jefferson's initial effort took place in 1804. He excised all accounts of miracles, the virgin birth, all claims to Jesus' divinity and the resurrection, as well as all references to angels, genealogy, and prophecy. He mingled selected verses from the four Gospels in chronological order to create a single narrative. He called the result The Philosophy of Jesus. Some scholars believe he intended this bowdlerized version of the Gospels only for his personal devotional use. But in later years he greatly revised and expanded this project. The final product, finished in 1820, he called Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, now commonly referred to as the Jefferson Bible.4

Jefferson wanted to restore clarity to what he considered the impossibly muddled story of Jesus that has come down to us. The errors had crept in, he believed, because the early Christians, overly eager to make their religion appealing to pagans, had inserted the philosophy of the ancient Greeks and the teachings of Plato, obscuring Jesus' original message. But Jesus' real words were still there. Jefferson's goal, as he explained in an 1813 letter to John Adams, was one of “abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its luster from the dross of his biographers, and as separate from that as the diamond from the dung hill.”5 If this task were done correctly, Jefferson predicted that, “There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man…of pure and unsophisticated doctrines.”6

Those who believed in the inerrancy of the Bible were horrified by Jefferson's actions and considered them sacrilegious. Jefferson was unmoved by these objections. He considered his revisions an act of devotion and love toward a man he believed to be the greatest moral teacher who ever lived.

In her account of Jefferson and his Bible, filmmaker Marilyn Mellowes says, “Jefferson discovered a Jesus who was a great Teacher of Common Sense. His message was the morality of absolute love and service. Its authenticity was not dependent upon the dogma of the Trinity or even the claim that Jesus was uniquely inspired by god…. In short, Mr. Jefferson's Jesus, modeled on the ideals of the Enlightenment thinkers of his day, bore a striking resemblance to Jefferson himself.”5

Although he completed the Life and Morals project in 1820 and shared it with a number of friends, he never permitted it to be published during his lifetime. Thomas Jefferson Randolph, his grandson, inherited the book following Jefferson's death in 1826. The National Museum in Washington published it in 1895. It was later published as a lithographic reproduction by an act of Congress, and for many years copies were presented to new members of Congress.7 The Jefferson Bible is now in the public domain and is freely available on many Internet sites, as well as through several commercial publishers.

Currently, religious fundamentalists often view Jefferson through a dirty lens. As Belote says, “Today religious conservatives portray Jefferson as a sympathetic figure, unaware of his religious beliefs, his understanding of religious freedom or his criticisms of evangelical religiosity.”3 In Jefferson's day, however, Protestant fundamentalists were well aware of his “deistical” beliefs and tried to make them a factor in elections. Jefferson never responded publicly to any of these attacks, nor did he make any public statement concerning his faith.3, 8

Why did Jefferson find miracles so vexing? He was born in 1743, when the Enlightenment was in full force. Newtonian science was considered the criterion by which true knowledge was to be measured. Even in human affairs, scholars sought to find natural laws similar to those scientists had discovered that governed the physical universe. The goal of inquiring minds was to understand the natural world and humankind's place in it solely through reason, without turning to religion. And everyone agreed that Jefferson possessed one of the most inquiring minds of his day.

He was not alone, of course. Scholars have argued that many of the signatories of America's Declaration of Independence, of which Jefferson was the primary author, were motivated by Enlightenment principles. This led to a critical questioning of traditional institutions, customs, and morals—including, in Jefferson's case, traditional religious structures and beliefs. For centuries, the major religions had seemingly defied reason by proclaiming the centrality of revelation and faith. For someone as reason prone as Jefferson, this was intolerable. Enter the razor.

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If Jefferson Were Alive 

What would Jefferson think about miracles if he were alive today, when Newton's causal, objective science has transitioned to a quantum-relativistic worldview? When reason has been dethroned as a reliable guide to how the world works in the domains of the very large and the very small? When consciousness and the role of an observer have been accorded a key role in how the world unfolds? When, as the eminent quantum theorist Henry Stapp of the University of California, Berkeley, has said, “The new physics presents prima facie evidence that our human thoughts are linked to nature by nonlocal connections: what a person chooses to do in one region seems immediately to affect what is true elsewhere in the universe…[O]ur thoughts…DO something” [his emphasis]?9 When hundreds of controlled laboratory and clinical experiments show that the healing intentions of one individual correlate with measurable changes in a distant person, and that these changes occur even when animals, plants, and inanimate objects are used as subjects?10, 11(pp216-223) Would these experimental findings appear as intolerable miracles to Jefferson? Would they prompt him to go for his razor?

I think not. Jefferson's mind was big enough to embrace the wondrous. He did not suffer from IDS—imagination deficiency syndrome. For instance, when he sent Lewis and Clark on their epic journey to the Pacific Northwest, he half expected they would return with reports of woolly mammoths roaming the West. When the explorers returned with mastodon fossils, he proudly displayed them in the entry hall at Monticello, his home, which at the time contained the country's greatest library, and which later served as the backbone of the Library of Congress. No, Jefferson would not be offended by the astonishments of today's science. He would likely be delighted by them, and his razor would remain in the drawer.

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Hume's Syndrome 

The hero of miracle deniers has long been David Hume, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian. Hume arbitrarily defined a miracle as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition or Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.”12 This is a radical extension beyond the literal meaning of the word. Miracle comes from the Latin mirari, “to wonder.” Hume's extension of “miracle” into the transcendent domain suggested at once that miracles are beyond science, whose focus is on earthly matters. This transcendental interference violated the principles of science, Hume said, and was not acceptable to rational people.

Hume attributed his definition of a miracle to Christianity, although many Christians do not share it. The prime example is St. Augustine, the fourth-century church father who was one of the most important figures in the development of Christianity in the West. Unlike Hume, he insisted that miracles are lawful events, the causes of which we are ignorant. Miracles, in other words, only appear to violate natural law. In the 17th century, Baruch Spinoza, Einstein's favorite philosopher, sided with St. Augustine. So did Einstein, who remarked, “There are two ways to live one's life—as if nothing is a miracle, or as if everything is. I believe in the latter.”13

Hume does not actually say miracles don't happen, but he offers several reasons not to believe in them. Miracles, he says, serve as a foundation of the major religions—in Christianity the parting of the Red Sea, the virgin birth, Jesus turning water into wine and raising Lazarus from the dead, and so on. Believers, Hume said, are inclined to stretch the truth to cast a favorable light on their religion.

Moreover, Hume said, people often lie. Thus, whenever we hear a report of a miracle, it is more probable that the reporter is deceived or deceitful than that his or her report is true. Because lies are infinitely more frequent than miracles, we're always on safer grounds to reject miracles than to believe them.

Hume also claimed that miracles occur mostly in “ignorant” and “barbarous” nations and times, compared to “civilized” societies in which people are not as likely to be awed by what they know to be natural events.14 But even in civilized societies, people are gullible. As he put it, “The gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition and promotes wonder.”14

Hume's arguments remain the manifesto for many scientists who reject the idea of miracles. Among them is the British biologist Richard Dawkins. In The God Delusion, he agrees with Hume, saying, “I suspect that alleged miracles provide the strongest reason many believers have for their faith: and miracles, by definition, violate the principles of science.”15

Are religions really founded on miracles? Philosopher Hugh McLachlan, of Glasgow Caledonian University, thinks not. In a stinging rebuttal of Dawkins's view, he says, “This looks at things the wrong way round. People do not believe in religion because they accept occurrences such as miracles. Surely it is because people believe in particular religions that some interpret some particular occurrences as miracles.”16 The connection between religion and miracles is not axiomatic. As McLachlan says, “As for the link between believing in God and believing in miracles, people may believe in God without believing in miracles in any sense of the term.”

Philosopher Michael Grosso notes that Hume, in his famous essay condemning miracles, actually lays out a good case for some inexplicable healings that were considered by the religious to be miraculous. Even so, Grosso reports, Hume rejected “the overwhelming testimony he reviews, [and] naively reveals what motivates him to deny [the evidence]: namely, his fear of validating religion.” Grosso calls this irrational resistance Hume's syndrome.17

Science cannot easily eradicate the wonder and mystery associated with an alleged miracle, even if the event is later explained by natural causes. Consider the parting of the Red Sea—described in Exodus—that enabled the Israelites to make their escape from Egypt, uniformly considered by Jews and Christians to be a miraculous happening. Oceanographer Doron Nof of Florida State University and atmospheric scientist Nathan Paldor of Hebrew University in Jerusalem reported in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society what they consider a plausible explanation for this event. These experts theorized that strong winds of up to 40 knots, blowing along the narrow, shallow Gulf of Suez, a northern extension of the Red Sea that is considered the likely site for the crossing, could have pushed enough water to the south to cause a 10-foot drop in the sea level, exposing a large swath of sea floor over which the Israelites could have walked to safety. When the wind subsided, the parted waters could have rushed back into place in only four minutes, according to their calculations, drowning the pursuing Egyptian army. Other naturalistic explanations have been offered for this event, such as an underwater earthquake and tsunami that may have temporarily turned the seabed into dry land.18

Case solved? Miracle abolished? Not necessarily, according to these scientists. “Whether this theory explains the crossing or not,” Dr Paldor said, “Nof and I believe it should not affect the religious aspects of the Exodus. Believers can find the presence and existence of God in the very creation of the wind with its particular properties, just as they find it in the establishment of a miracle. Some may even find our proposed mechanism to be a supportive argument for the original biblical description of this event.”19

Professor Nof's research also suggests a physical explanation for the alleged miracle of Jesus walking on water. His analysis found that during one of two protracted cold periods between 2,500 and 1,500 years ago, temperatures plummeted to 25°F (−4°C) for at least two days in the area of the Sea of Galilee, where the biblical account took place. Under these frigid conditions, patches of floating ice would likely have appeared on the sea's surface. Jesus may have walked on one of these, Nof suggests. It may have appeared to onlookers that he was walking on water, when he was actually supported by an ice floe.20

Skeptics of miracles are often gleeful about naturalistic hypotheses such as these, because they believe they demolish the possibility of miracles. But even if the naturalistic hypotheses are true, the wonder and mystery only deepen. If a rare wind phenomenon parted the Red Sea, or if an earthquake and tsunami pushed the waters around, what is the likelihood that the winds or the earthquake would have arisen at the precise moment the Israelites needed passage on dry land? How likely is it that a cold period coincided with Jesus' walk, providing a convenient ice floe at the precise moment he stepped onto the water?

Skeptics of miracles sometimes speak as if they know the mind of the Supreme Being—what the Almighty could or could not, and would or would not, do. A typical example of speaking for God is the late Catholic priest Father James Keller, who said, “The claim that God has worked a miracle implies that God has singled out certain persons for some benefit which many others do not receive implies that God is unfair. An example would be, If God intervenes to save your life in a car crash, then what was He doing in Auschwitz?”21 An example of this tactic in medical science is critiques of the controlled clinical trials of intercessory prayer and healing intentions.11, 22, 23 Critics emphatically maintain that a supreme being would never intervene in only the prayed-for group of subjects and neglect the control subjects in a clinical trial, because this would be capricious and unfair.24 This is the only area in scientific discourse I am aware of in which theological arguments pass for critical thinking. The fact that these theologically laced arguments pass peer review and are published in mainstream journals is remarkable. Can we stop speaking for the Almighty? Can we merely address whether the alleged miracle occurred, and how it may have happened, and resist the urge to psychoanalyze God?

I marvel at the audacity of skeptics in putting God on the couch and dissecting divine motives, thoughts, and actions. These analyses are performed in total seriousness. In fact, it is a rare miracle denier who has a sense of humor. An exception is author/journalist Christopher Hitchens, who is no friend of Christianity and miracles. Even so, he is not as grim and mirthless as most of his fellow critics. Asked about his favorite Bible story, he singles out “the first of the miracles. Jesus changes water into wine. You can't object to that.”25

Hume's arguments never go out of style. They are recycled, generation after generation. They are like the notorious perpetual pills containing metallic antimony that were sold by apothecaries during the 16th century. When swallowed, they irritated the mucous membranes as they passed through the gastrointestinal tract and acted as a purgative, a therapy that was highly regarded at the time. They could be recovered from the chamber pot, washed, and used repeatedly. They had an indefinite lifetime. “After the first capital outlay, there was no further need for spending money on cathartics,” writes novelist Aldous Huxley. “Perpetual Pills were treated as heirlooms and after passing through one generation were passed on to the next.”26

So with Hume's arguments. They keep coming back. They last indefinitely. Like the infamous perpetual pills, they don't do much good and can even be toxic, but they make the user feel better.

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The Danger of Denial 

The problem with miracle denial is that it can become a thoughtless obsession. When this impulse kicks in, any alleged event that seems excessively strange is reflexively condemned as impossible, nonexistent, or fraudulent. This habit is widespread within science and medicine. When the mind rebels against strangeness, one can fall into extremist positions, such as one eminent scientist who said, referring to experimental findings suggesting the reality of distant, nonlocal actions of human consciousness, “This is the sort of thing I would not believe, even if it were true.”27

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A Very Cold Miracle 

Perhaps no case in recent history illustrates the importance of remaining open to wonder and the possibility of the impossible than that of Anna Bågenholm, a 29-year-old Swedish woman fresh out of medical school.

On a warm spring afternoon in 1999, she and two other young doctors went skiing on the spectacular slopes near the Norwegian city of Narvik. An expert skier, Anna and her two colleagues ventured off the trail. She suddenly lost control, slid down an icy gulley, and crashed head first onto a layer of ice on a frozen stream near a waterfall. A hole opened up and, as the icy water filled her clothes, her head and torso were pulled further below the ice. When her friends soon reached her, only her skis and boots protruded. She struggled helplessly to free herself, which suggested that she had found an air pocket under the ice. Her young physician companions began rescue efforts, but they were unable to make progress because of the torrent of icy snowmelt pouring over them into the hole that held Anna.

They called for help on a mobile phone, setting in motion a heroic rescue effort. When additional rescuers arrived, they fastened a rope around her feet and tried unsuccessfully to pull her free from the ice. Eventually they dug another hole in the ice a little downstream and pulled her up through the opening. By this time she had been submerged under the ice for around 80 minutes and unconscious for at least half that time. After dragging her out, Anna's two medical colleagues began CPR on what appeared to be a lifeless, stiff, frozen corpse.

A rescue helicopter arrived and Anna was winched up to the hovering craft. On the one-hour flight to the University Hospital of North Norway in Tromsø, CPR was continued. Dr Mads Gilbert, head of emergency medicine at University Hospital, met her on the helipad. “She had completely dilated pupils,” he recounted. “She is ashen, flaxen white. She's wet. She's ice cold when I touch her skin, and she looks absolutely dead. On the ECG [electrocardiogram]…there is a completely flat line. Like you could have drawn it with a ruler. No signs of life whatsoever. And the decision was made. We will not declare her dead until she is warm and dead.”

Anna was rushed to Operating Room 11, where a team of more than a hundred doctors and nurses worked in shifts for nine hours to save her life. Surgeons channeled her blood through a heart-lung machine that gradually warmed it, then reinfused it into her body. Three hours after her heart stopped, her physicians stood watching it on a video screen. “It was completely still,” Gilbert reported. “No movement. I just saw some little shivering. No fibrillation. And suddenly it contracted.” There was a pause, and then another contraction.

Anna regained consciousness 10 days after the event, but was paralyzed from the neck down because of extensive nerve damage. She remained on a ventilator for 35 days and spent 60 days in the intensive care unit. Her recovery and rehabilitation took almost a year. Eventually she was able to return to skiing and other sports. Today she is a radiologist at the hospital where she was saved. She has no memory of the events.28, 29, 30

One of her ski companions, who is an anesthesiologist at the same hospital, says there's a lesson from Bågenholm's case. “It's the three important things about emergency medicine, which is never give up, never give up, never give up. Because there's always hope.”31

A miracle? It's easy to think so. No one had ever been that cold for that long—80 minutes, and without pulse or respiration for much of that time—and survived. Hers was the lowest survived body temperature—56.70°F—ever recorded in a human with accidental hypothermia. (The previous lowest temperature in someone who survived was 57.90°F, in a child).32

For most observers, however, there was no miracle. They maintained that Anna's recovery, although unusual, is completely understandable in purely physical terms. She found an air pocket under the ice that permitted her body to remain oxygenated during the early phase of her rescue. Her sudden decrease in body temperature lowered her metabolism and reduced her brain's need for oxygen. Her metabolism slowed so greatly that she was plunged into a kind of suspended animation, making possible her ultimate survival. She was lucky to have two young doctors along as her ski companions; they knew CPR, summoned help, and did all the right things to keep her alive. She was met at the hospital by a superb team of professionals.

But headlines around the world pronounced Anna a miracle—someone who came back to life after her heart flatlined and stopped beating, and when her respirations vanished for an extended period of time.

Dilated pupils, the absence of respirations and pulse, and a flatline electrocardiogram over a protracted period would qualify almost any unconscious individual in a modern hospital for a trip to the morgue. As her main doctor put it, “She look[ed] absolutely dead.” But skeptics maintained that Anna could not have been dead, because dead people don't recover. Death is a one-way street; no one comes back. So there's no need to sentimentalize Anna's case with loose talk of a miracle.

Anna Bågenholm is clearly a miracle, however, if we recall that miracle literally means something that inspires wonder. Or we may adopt St. Augustine's view that a miracle never violates the laws of nature but simply illustrates our lack of understanding of nature. But the miracle wars never end. Thus Anna Bågenholm has come to rest in that contested middle ground where cases like hers so often end up.

Survivors of near-death experiences are often amused by the ferocity of the arguments over whether their case is really a miracle. They often experience their near-fatal event as a life-changing epiphany, and they emerge from it psychologically and spiritually transformed. They could care less what people think, for they have learned something important—that life is about more than labels.

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The Unnecessary War 

The miracle war is being fought for the wrong reasons. Like most wars, it is based on misunderstandings and is therefore unnecessary—unnecessary because the very idea that the world can be separated into two parts, the miraculous and the mundane, is one of the enduring fictions of our age. As St. Augustine, Einstein, and any first-grader knows, it's all a miracle—that is, a cause for wonder and awe.

The excesses in the miracle war from the religious side, as Jefferson and many others have maintained, can be egregious, jejune, and never ending—as in northern New Mexico where I live, where believers periodically discover an image of Jesus, Mary, or the Virgin of Guadalupe in a tortilla, and interpret this as the divine injection of a miracle into daily life. But there is more than enough blame to go around in the spat over miracles. From the science side of the argument, the hypocrisy in this war can be breathtaking.

The following unanswered questions in science occur to every wide-eyed child: Why does anything exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? Scientists come closest to this query when they ask, what existed before the Big Bang, the primordial explosion that signaled the beginning of the universe? The answer generally given: nothing. By any stretch of the imagination, this is the greatest miracle ever conceived. If scientists are willing to believe that something as stupendous as the entire universe came from nothing, it's difficult to imagine what they would not believe. If skeptics can swallow the tenets of modern cosmology about the origins of the universe, why should they go ballistic when a cancer up and disappears when splashed with a little holy water and bathed with healing intentions?

Modern scientists are swimming in a veritable soup of miracles, which most of them seem not to realize. Scientists have their gods—matter, energy, space-time—and they ascribe to them qualities that are as miraculous as anything that religionists impute to the Divine. For example, scientists speak of the eternality and immutability of natural laws, the indestructibility of matter and energy, and the space-time invariance or omnipresence of the physical laws. In a religious context, these would be considered attributes of the Absolute. So, strictly speaking, it is not true that scientists don't believe in gods and miracles; rather, they seem to be saying, “Our gods and miracles are OK; yours are not.”

The mere mention of miracles continues to rub a blister in the minds of a certain sort of scientist, and religion-and-miracle bashing has become a blood sport of late. Taken at face value, these arguments imply that the best science is godless and that the best scientists are atheists. Some very great scientists have considered this position as foolish and puerile. Among them was Max Born, who in 1954 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to quantum mechanics. Born said, “Those who say that the study of science makes a man an atheist must be rather silly people.”33

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The Biggest Miracle 

The biggest miracle of all is human consciousness. Its existence surpasses all scientific understanding. As theoretical biologist and complex-systems theorist Stuart Kauffman says, “Nobody has the faintest idea what consciousness is…. I don't have any idea. Nor does anybody else, including the philosophers of mind.”34

Coleridge wrote, “If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream, and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there, and if he found that flower in his hand when he awoke—Aye! and what then?”35

If we awoke with Coleridge's flower in our hand, should we deny its presence on the basis of Hume's contention that doing otherwise would insult human reason and validate religion? But the flower is not hypothetical; we have awakened and it is indeed in our hand. That flower is consciousness, the most impossible of all the impossibilities. Aye! and what now?

Do not think that the debate about miracles is some historical footnote buried in our medieval past. This debate remains a ferocious conflict, and it is being waged over the nature and the very existence of consciousness. The sheer biological unlikelihood of consciousness has driven some authorities to adopt Hume's view that the reports of its existence must be erroneous or outright lies. For those of this persuasion, consciousness does not exist. Thus Daniel Dennett, the Tufts University cognitive scientist, says, “We're all zombies. Nobody is conscious….”36 Dennett includes himself in this extraordinary claim and he seems proud of it. Others insist that there are no mental states at all, such as love, courage, or patriotism, but only electrochemical brain fluxes that should not be described with such inflated terms as “consciousness.” They dismiss thoughts and beliefs for the same reason. This led Nobel neurophysiologist Sir John Eccles satirically to remark that “professional philosophers and psychologists think up the notion that there are no thoughts, come to believe that there are no beliefs, and feel strongly that there are no feelings.”37

Eccles was emphasizing the absurdities that have crept into the debate about consciousness. How could serious scientists and psychologists take such stands? Hume rejected miracles, in spite of compelling evidence that he acknowledged, because of his belief that doing otherwise would offend reason and sanction religion. Those scientists who deny consciousness or define it out of existence appear to have fallen into Hume's syndrome. This is obvious in the condemnations that have recently surfaced toward healing experiments in which individuals employ conscious intentions to increase the healthy function of humans or other biological systems such as animals, plants, microbes, or even biochemical reactions. Like Hume, these critics seem to believe that acknowledging the existence of this research will unleash a tide of unreason that will swamp science and prove inimical to human welfare. Thus they claim that studies in distant healing and prayer are “irrational and foolish”38 and “nonsense,”39 and that there is “little if any biological plausibility or scientific evidence.”40

No scientific evidence? As a single example among many, a 2003 survey by Jonas and Crawford10 found 122 laboratory studies and 80 randomized controlled trials in this field, the majority of which are positive. Overall, these studies merited a laudable “B” grade according to Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) criteria, an accepted method of judging the quality of clinical studies.10 Most of the systematic and meta-analyses of this field that have been published in the peer-reviewed literature have resulted in positive conclusions.11(pp216-223)

Little if any biological plausibility? Certain areas of science are seething with hypotheses that are cordial to distant, nonlocal interactions between biological systems, as well as actual evidence for such. A Google search for “biological nonlocality” yields 124,000 sites; a search for “macroscopic nonlocality” yields 129,000 sites. Distant, nonlocal correlations between healers and their subjects may well be examples of entanglement phenomena currently demonstrated in the quantum domain; further research will clarify this possibility.41, 42 Even though our current understanding of the mechanism of remote healing is incomplete, dismissing the abundant evidence of these events and the hypotheses that are supportive of them as irrational, foolish, nonsense, or nonexistent constitutes willful blindness.

These extreme comments of critics suggest fear that science will be suffocated by malevolent, dark forces. This dread is tellingly demonstrated by the title of the late Carl Sagan's book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark.43 All sorts of sinister qualities are being projected onto healing research—Sagan's demons and hauntings—but the origin of the demons is not in the feared science but in the unconscious depths of the critics themselves.

Jefferson's razor has not disappeared. It is resurrected every time a critic denies the existence of the abundant data and numerous hypotheses supporting the nonlocal, distant, remote effects of healing intentions.11(pp216-223) Hume's syndrome is as virulent as ever, a perpetual pill being recycled not in the GI tracts but in the minds of today's self-proclaimed arbiters of reality.

In one sense, these critics are correct. As many of them maintain, we live in perilous times in which our future existence as a species is uncertain. Humans are now on the endangered species list, whether we realize it or not. But the primary danger is not that we will be paralytically dazzled by a runaway imagination and the wondrous, but that we will be cowed into timidity by the failure of our imagination and by a tepid view of our innate ability to shape our world for the better. Rejecting the evidence for our nonlocal mental powers is as if our ancestors had repudiated the discovery of fire and the wheel.

The idea of a nonlocal aspect of human consciousness leads to the recognition of the oneness and unity of all sentient life. Why? If consciousness is nonlocal, as suggested in healing experiments, it is not merely widespread but is infinite in space and time, because a limited nonlocality is a contradiction in terms. And if individual consciousness is nonlocal, it is in some sense unbounded, therefore one with all other consciousnesses. This leads to the concept of a unified, universal mind. This is no yahoo, new-age contention; some of the greatest intellects of the 20th century have come to this conclusion, including physicists Erwin Schrödinger, David Bohm, and Henry Margenau, mathematician/logician Kurt Gödel, and many other eminent scientists in various fields.44, 45 In Schrödinger's unambiguous words, “In truth there is only one mind.”46 The ethical implications are profound. What we do to others we do to ourselves, because in some sense we are others. If genuinely engaged, this realization has the power to transform our beliefs and behaviors and usher in a responsible earth ethic, now largely missing. As Einstein put it, “I feel such a sense of solidarity with all living things that it does not matter to me where the individual begins and ends.”47

The deniers of the wonders of consciousness should wake up and smell the data. They should examine closely the conclusions about nonlocal consciousness to which many towering figures of modern science have been led. They should kick the habit of those Humean perpetual pills, whose expiration date has long been exceeded. And they should keep their razors in the drawer—or they may discover that what they have excised is not fatuous science, but our astonishing capabilities that constitute our best hope for survival.

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References 

  1. St. Augustine . Quoted in: About miracles. Religioustolerance.org http://www.religioustolerance.org/miracles1.htmAccessed February 3, 2010
  2. Priestley J. An History of the Corruptions of Christianity. Vols 1 and 2 Birmingham, England: Piercy and Jones; 1782;
  3. Quoted in: Belote T. Thomas Jefferson Jefferson T. Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography. http://www25-temp.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/thomasjefferson.htmlAccessed November 22, 2009
  4. Jefferson T. The Jefferson Bible: The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Bel Air, Calif: Wilder Publications; 2009;
  5. Mellowes M. Thomas Jefferson and his bible. PBS.org http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/jesus/jefferson.htmlAccessed November 22, 2009
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PII: S1550-8307(09)00408-X

doi:10.1016/j.explore.2009.12.003

Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing
Volume 6, Issue 2 , Pages 57-63, March 2010

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