Do not all charms fly at the mere touch of cold philosophy?
Occam’s razor implies that naturalistic explanations are invariably to be preferred over supernatural ones. However convoluted the method by which the murderer escaped from the locked room may be, there is never a sufficiently good reason to say “Perhaps he beamed up to his spaceship” or “Perhaps he cast his Apparition spell.”
Philip K Dick’s late novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer asks how much evidence you would need before you abandoned Occam and postulated the miraculous. Your late wife’s photo falls off the wall on her birthday? Mere coincidence. The same thing happens next year? Still coincidence. But if the same picture falls off the same wall on the same date every year for twenty years, do you start to believe that someone in the spirit realm is trying to tell you something?
Sherlock Holmes said that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. But perhaps there is a point when the probable becomes sufficiently improbable that the impossible becomes plausible? Conspiracy theorists and apologists want us, in the face of the even moderately improbable, to automatically assume the impossible.
It is highly improbable that a small girl could take a trick photograph so sophisticated as to fool adults and photography experts for decades: therefore we should believe in the literal existence of fairies.
It is highly improbable that a pious and honest girl would suddenly start telling far-fetched lies (while her dishonest brother sticks to the truth): therefore we should believe that there is a fairy-tale kingdom in the old professor’s cupboard.
It is highly improbable that a group of simple men would invent a story about their dead teacher being a deity, and stick to it in the face of death: therefore you should buy whatever theology I am currently trying to sell.
Granted, we don’t definitely know what is and what is not impossible. Plenty of things which would have seemed magical to our grandparents are now easily downloadable onto my smart-phone. For all we know, there might be portals between dimensions; and for all we know, time might flow at different rates in different universes. And if the point under discussion is “Do alternate universes exist?” then the Professor is correct: you can’t take “Alternate universes do not exist” as a premise.
For all we know, there might be fairies, or magic, or flying saucers, or ghosts. For all we know, dead bodies might occasionally come back to life. But what kind of evidence do we need before we undergo such a dramatic paradigm shift?
Conspiracy theorists very often claim that the relative weakness of their evidence is the strongest indication that it is true. If you were trying to create a fake UFO photograph by hanging a hub-cap from a wire, you’d have the sense to cover your tracks: the fact that the wire is plainly visible in the photo is a strong indication that the photograph is genuine. A forger would have not made so obvious a mistake. For all we know, the human eye would find it hard to focus on otherworldly creatures, so the fact that the little girls are looking through the fairies rather than at them is a point in favour of the Cottingley pictures.
People who argue in this direction are, I think, trying to invoke something along the lines of lectio difficilior potior: “the hard reading is to be preferred”. A scribe copying a document would be more likely to simplify it than to make it more difficult, so faced with two versions of the same text, the obscure one is more likely to be accurate. Scholars of the historical Jesus talk about the “criterion of embarrassment”: passages which are theologically awkward are more likely to be authentic than ones which are theologically convenient. The Church probably wouldn’t have invented a story about the sinless saviour being baptised by John, but it might very well have made up a story in which Jesus delegated the power of forgiving and not-forgiving sins to the Bishop of Rome.
But this kind of thinking leaves you wide open to “heads I win, tails you lose” arguments in which every contradiction and improbability is proof of authenticity. You only get to say “This must be true, because it is so silly no-one would have made it up” if you are also prepared to say “This seems sensible and believable, and is therefore probably a forgery.”
What if a genuinely open-minded sceptic was persuaded to investigate the claim that the Old Inn was haunted? He would certainly have lots of questions. How far back do the ghost stories go? How consistent are they? Are there concrete accounts, or is it just a bit of free-floating folklore? Were the ghosts first mentioned in a story by a writer of spooky fiction, or by ordinary witnesses? Were the people who saw the haunting sceptics, or did they already believe in ghosts? Apparitions tend to be dispersed in the face of that kind of scrutiny.
But perhaps the sceptic finds that this is an unusually well-attested haunting. A guest in the hotel in 1920 found a distressed child crying in one of the corridors, but by the time the proper authorities could be sent for, the kid was nowhere to be found. Another guest in 1978, oblivious to the first incident, described precisely the same event: a scared little boy who was gone by the time the police arrived. And then in 2003, excavations in the hotel uncovered a child’s remains, presumably a murder victim, evidently concealed since the seventeenth century.
Whereupon, of course, every ghost-hunter in England books into the offending room and claims to have seen a small figure or heard crying or just felt that something was not quite right.
I think the sceptic might very well come to the conclusion that there was something to the first two sightings. He might very well conclude that there was a real phenomenon to be investigated. Would it necessarily follow that he “believed in ghosts”? And even if he did, would the verified haunting commit him to a particular version of the afterlife?
He might think that some barely understood naturalistic phenomenon caused two people to have the same hallucination. He might think that the house was infested by toxic mould. He might think that both witnesses had, in fact, read an ancient newspaper report of the murder, but repressed the memory. He might even think that violent events can leave some sort of psychic residue.
But would he be likely to say “I think, on balance, the dead child really did appear to the two visitors: therefore Father O’Murphy is correct when he talks about people who have been denied Christian burial being stuck in purgatory?”
Or would he say “I am convinced that this room is haunted, and therefore, that everything Madam Acati and the Spiritualists say about ectoplasm and the Other Side is the literal truth.”
I don’t think he would. “Some people honestly did see, or think they saw, a ghost” is the beginning of the investigation: not the end point.
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