I just wanted to take this time to introduce an article on miracles I read and see what you thought of it. From this website
In the last issue of the New York Review of Books, Freeman Dyson reviewed a book entitled simply "Debunked!" by Georges Charpak and Henri Broch (Johns Hopkins University, 136 pages, $25), in which he ends by saying he concludes that despite over a century of failed experiments and lack of empirical evidence, there are valid reasons to believe in the paranormal. This, despite his cogent summary of Littlewood's Law of Miracles--defined as: "In the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month." Dyson explains:
"During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month."
Jim Holt, in the New York Times ("Throw Away That Astrological Chart April 29, 2004; Page D10) offered another calculation on miracles:
"Have you ever had a premonition? Did you once have, say, a passing thought about an uncle, only to receive a phone call five minutes later informing you that the beloved relative had suddenly dropped dead? If so, this probably struck you as eerie. You might have vaguely believed it was ESP.
Was it? Let's see. Suppose you know of 10 people who die each year. Furthermore, suppose you think of each of them once annually. There are 105,120 five-minute intervals in a year. A simple probability calculation shows that there is a 10 in 105,120 likelihood that you will, as a matter of chance, have a thought about one of these people in the five minutes before you hear of his death. Multiply this likelihood by the population of the U.S. (about a quarter of a billion people) and you find that roughly 25,000 people each year--about 70 a day -- will have a "psychic" experience of this sort. In fact, it's pure coincidence."
Despite this cogent explanation of miracles, Dyson concludes his review:
"The question of the proper limits of science has a strong connection with the possible existence of paranormal phenomena. Charpak and Broch and I agree that attempts to study extrasensory perception and telepathy using the methods of science have failed. Charpak and Broch say that since extrasensory perception and telepathy cannot be studied scientifically, they do not exist. Their conclusion is clear and logical, but I do not accept it because I am not a reductionist. I claim that paranormal phenomena may really exist but may not be accessible to scientific investigation. This is a hypothesis. I am not saying that it is true, only that it is tenable, and to my mind plausible.
The hypothesis that paranormal phenomena are real but lie outside the limits of science is supported by a great mass of evidence. The evidence has been collected by the Society for Psychical Research in Britain and by similar organizations in other countries. The journal of the London society is full of stories of remarkable events in which ordinary people appear to possess paranormal abilities. The evidence is entirely anecdotal. It has nothing to do with science, since it cannot be reproduced under controlled conditions. But the evidence is there. The members of the society took great trouble to interview first-hand witnesses as soon as possible after the events, and to document the stories carefully. One fact that emerges clearly from the stories is that paranormal events occur, if they occur at all, only when people are under stress and experiencing strong emotion. This fact would immediately explain why paranormal phenomena are not observable under the conditions of a well-controlled scientific experiment. Strong emotion and stress are inherently incompatible with controlled scientific procedures. In a typical card-guessing experiment, the participants may begin the session in a high state of excitement and record a few high scores, but as the hours pass, and boredom replaces excitement, the scores decline to the 20 percent expected from random chance.
I am suggesting that paranormal mental abilities and scientific method may be complementary. The word "complementary" is a technical term introduced into physics by Niels Bohr. It means that two descriptions of nature may both be valid but cannot be observed simultaneously. The classic example of complementarity is the dual nature of light. In one experiment light is seen to behave as a continuous wave, in another experiment it behaves as a swarm of particles, but we cannot see the wave and the particles in the same experiment. Complementarity in physics is an established fact. The extension of the idea of complementarity to mental phenomena is pure speculation. But I find it plausible that a world of mental phenomena should exist, too fluid and evanescent to be grasped with the cumbersome tools of science.
I should here declare my personal interest in the matter. One of my grandmothers was a notorious and successful faith healer. One of my cousins was for many years the editor of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. Both these ladies were well educated, highly intelligent, and fervent believers in paranormal phenomena. They may have been deluded, but neither of them was a fool. Their beliefs were based on personal experience and careful scrutiny of evidence. Nothing that they believed was incompatible with science."
Here is the letter I sent to the New York Review of Books in response to Dyson:
To the editor:
In his otherwise well-crafted review of Georges Charpak and Henri Broch's Debunked! ESP, Telekinesis, Other Pseudoscience ("One in a Million," Volume 51, Number 5), after reviewing the century-long history of failed attempts to build a scientific case for the paranormal, Freeman Dyson ends with a risibly ridiculous plea for openness to the paranormal because he is not a reductionist, because his grandmother was a faith healer and his cousin edits the Journal of Psychical Review, and because anecdotal evidence gathered by the Society for Psychical Research and other such organizations convinces him that under certain conditions (e.g., stress), some people sometimes exhibit some paranormal powers, unless they are placed in controlled scientific conditions, in which case the powers mysteriously disappear. I expected more from a scientist of Dyson's caliber. He should know that anecdotes do not make a science, and that ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten. Anecdotes may lead us to a research program, but the only way to find out if the anecdotes represent a real phenomenon or not is controlled experimental tests. Psi phenomena have now been subjected to rigorous scientific experiments for over a century (as Dyson notes), and the results are unequivocal: psychic power is a chimera.
So whence does Dyson's plea come? I suspect it is the same place that leads him to make statements like this, from his 1979 book Disturbing the Universe: "As we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked to our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming." His quasi-scientific attempts to reconcile science and religion, and to bring a form of nonmaterialistic transcendency into science, in fact, even earned him in 1997 a $964,000 Templeton Prize. Mind you, lots of people hold conflicting and often contradictory beliefs in their logic-tight compartments, primarily, I think, because they have not thought long and hard about the incompatibility problem. Dyson, however, does recognize the problem, but he wiggles around it by invoking Bohr's principle of complementarity where, for example, light can be both wave and particle. I'm sorry, but the principle does not apply to the paranormal (or to politics either, where Bohr tried to apply it). Either people can read other people's minds (or the backs of ESP cards), or they can't. Science has more than adequately demonstrated that they can't. That's the end of the story. And being a holist instead of a reductionist, being related to psychics, or reading about weird things that happen to people, does not change this simple scientific fact.
Michael Shermer Publisher, Skeptic magazine, columnist, Scientific American
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