(3089/898) Humphrey: Leaps of Faith

1995) Scientific materialism is regarded by many, even by some of its own prophets, as deeply unsatisfying: scary, bewildering, insulting, demeaning, dispiriting, confining. [...] Science, with is chain-saws and bulldozers of reason, has felled the tropical rain forest of spirituality. It has wreaked ecological destruction on fairyland. It has extinguished the leprechauns, the elves and goblins. It has caused a global change in the weather of the imagination. It has made a dustbowl of our own Eden, and created an inner drought. And all this, not to bring greater peace or happiness, but to satisfy people's hunger for the Big Macs of technology.

Nicholas Humphrey
Leaps of Faith (1996)

1996) No more things should be presumed to exist than are absolutely necessary.

"Occam's Razor"

[Note: Named after and attributed to William of Occam, the 14th century English logician and philosopher, although it has not been found specifically in his writings. The principle is sometimes paraphrased as All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best. [WP]]

1997) Man must at last wake up out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realize that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings and his crimes.

Jacques Monod
Chance and Necessity (1972)
quoted by Nicholas Humphrey in
Leaps of Faith (1996)

1998) That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collisions of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system [...] Only within the scaffolding of these truths, only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be built.

Bertrand Russell
quoted by E.A. Burtt in
The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern
Physical Science (1924)
quoted by Nicholas Humphrey in
Leaps of Faith (1996)

1999) [S]cience is an extension of a natural faculty that was long ago firmly implanted in human heads because it works in practice to deliver knowledge of the kind the people have always needed in order to survive in daily life. Even if minor natural scientists is not all that people are - they do of course also sometimes employ other less reliable (and less effective) ways to gaining knowledge - it is what they all are.

Nicholas Humphrey
Leaps of Faith (1996)

2000) The most important thing to realize about systems of animal communication is that they are not expected to be systems for the dissemination of truth. Instead, they are expected to be systems by which individual organism attempt to maximize their fitness by communicating to others things that may be true or false.

Robert Trivers
"Sociobiology and politics" in
Sociobiology and Human Politics (1981)
Elliott White, ed.
quoted by Nicholas Humphrey in
Leaps of Faith (1996)

2001) An understanding of the psychology of human perception, cognition and behaviour suggests that, even in psi phenomenona were not to exist, the kinds of experiences that people report under the rubric of "psychic" should be expected to occur from time to time.

James E. Alcock
"Parapsychology as a "spiritual" science" in
A Skeptic's Handbook of Parapsychology (1985)
Paul Kurtz, ed.
quoted by Nicholas Humphrey in
Leaps of Faith (1996)

2002) Psychics and other "credulists" are typically engaged seriously (but misguidedly) in that most characteristic of human enterprises: the attempt to capture our chaotic and fragmentary experiences in a network of meanings and to discover the hidden connectedness that (we hope) underlies all the disorderly and recalcitrant happenings in the world.

William Grey
"Philosophy and the paranormal"
Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 1994)
quoted by Nicholas Humphrey in
Leaps of Faith (1996)

2003) [P]sychic experiences [...] are an inevitable consequence of the way we think [...] like visual illusions, they are the price we pay for a generally very effective relationship with a massively complex world.

Susan Blakemore
"Psychic experiences: Psychic illusions"
Skeptical Inquirer (Summer 1992)
quoted by Nicholas Humphrey in
Leaps of Faith (1996)

2004) [B]eliefs in paranormal powers - or echoes of them - remain central to our own cultural institutions at every level. They are there as an elite opinion, there en masses. They continue to run right through our art and entertainment, our music, painting, literature, architecture, theatre and cinema. They are invoked in all our rites of passage - at weddings, births and funerals. They follow us to school, on to the sports field, on to the battle ground, in and out of love and sex. They creep into our beds and keep us wide eyed in the night.

Many, probably the majority, of the public figures who we look up to - the princes, presidents, popes, pop stars, parliamentarians, press barons, prime-time presenters, prima donnas, premiere league players, etc. who act as society's opinions formers - acknowledge by words or actions their own acceptance of the paranormal ethos. ...

What is rare indeed is to find any public figure disavowing paranormality entirely. And if they do privately have doubts about it, they are probably well advised to keep them to themselves and play along: for, as every public relations consultant would tell you, no one ever did his image any good by openly declaring his preference for common sense.

Nicholas Humphrey
Leaps of Faith (1996)