Book reviews tend to be predictable. A newspaper, a magazine or a journal has an agenda, sometimes more obvious for some than for others. Part of the enjoyment of reading a review is to see if it is possible to guess beforehand what its tone is, given the reviewer and the particular publication in which the review appears. In the Wall Street Journal, for example, it is easy to predict what will be said about works by what it deems "so-called" environmentalists such as Nader and Greenpeace.

Though the Journal of Scientific Exploration specifically eschews any pre-determined position, nevertheless it also takes a fairly predictable stance regarding phenomena and the people who write about phenomena. So it wouldn't surprise me if among the readership of the Journal of Scientific Exploration, I may be the only one to enjoy Nicholas Humphrey's Leaps of Faith. This is an entirely normal prediction on my part and unrelated to clairvoyance of any form. Humphrey has the standard Skeptical Inquirer position regarding PK and ESP and therefore won't impress the JSE readership with his standard answers concerning Uri Geller, UFOs, alien abduction and miracle cures. What is decidedly different about his book is the long treatment of Jesus Christ's putative paranormal abilities:

Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Jesus really had no more paranormal powers than any other human being, and that this means in effect that he had no paranormal powers at all. Why might he have been deluded into thinking that he did have them?

Humphrey goes on to speculate how Jesus could have deceived himself and others concerning his family connections and his power to perform miracles via a "virtuous circle." "Success in bringing about a cure feeds back to the healer, boosting both his image in the eyes of the world and his image of himself." Equating Jesus with a run-of-the-mill magician is startling enough:

In their [Jewish and pagan commentators at the time] view, while Jesus might have been an especially classy conjurer, he was certainly not in an altogether separate class.

but Humphrey even suggests that Christ is the paradigm, the very exemplar, of Western paranormal charlatans:

The miracles recorded in the Bible, especially those attributed to Jesus, have done more to set the stage for all subsequent paranormal phenomena in Western culture, outside as well as inside a specifically religious text.

While ridiculing the views of anomalists is commonplace, doubting the miracles of Jesus is, to mix a few metaphors, beyond the pale of the American canon. So much so, that I can only speculate that Humphrey, counting on the outcry engendered by his blasphemy, did this deliberately in order to increase sales. He also cleverly covered his tracks by publishing it first as a trial balloon in England, a country far less prone to miracles, secular or sacred.

And perhaps all of this, my review included, has been predicted in the Bible just as Humphrey shows on page 78 that Psalm 46 forecasts the birth of Shakespeare. Further, according to Humphrey, "People have been known to tell lies even in books." The same applies to book reviews, particularly and predictably, those written by others.

Paul Alper
QMCS Department
University of St. Thomas
St. Paul, MN 55105

Editorial Addendum from Henry Bauer:

The book's title in its British publication is Soul Searching (Chatto & Windus, 1995).

My own disappointment with this book stems less from its debunking stance than from its focus on a priori argument. Humphrey held the Perrott-Warwick Fellowship in Psychical Research at Cambridge, and one might have expected that to give him the time and means to examine the evidence for and against actual claims. However, the book says little about actual or claimed phenomena or events. It argues largely from first principles and therefore offers little if anything for serious anomalists: they rarely insist that their claims are highly probable, only that they happen to be true. My own delight in the actual existence of the Loch Ness monsters is precisely because that existence is so unlikely.

That would be understandable to religious believers who delight in the occurrence of miracles, and perhaps that connection does somehow support Humphrey's lumping together of religion and parapsychology. But why does he (and why do so many other CSICOP-type "skeptics") so disdain religious belief, when (p. 15) studies show that religious believers "show many fewer symptoms of psychological disturbance" than non-believers?

The late Gordon Stein reviewed this book in Skeptical Inquirer (September/October 1996, pp. 52-53) as one "that both skeptics and believers in the paranormal would do well to read," while also finding, as I do, that it poses too sharp a division between possible beliefs on these matters.

Henry H. Bauer
Professor of Chemistry & Science Studies
Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University
Blacksburg, VA 24061-0247

Leaps of Faith: Science, Miracles and the Search for Supernatural Causes

by Nicholas Humphrey.
New York: Basic Books, 1996, 244 pp. $23.00, (c) ISBN 0-465-08044-8.

The subtitle of this book describes it well: Science, Miracles, and the Search for Supernatural Consolation. Humphrey attributes the belief in paranormal phenomena to an ineradicable need of humans for some meaning to their life beyond mere physical existence and the death that terminates it. This craving lowers or even suppresses our critical faculties when we confront testimony that suggests a less bleak eschatology.

Humphrey tries to show that the miracles attributed to Jesus and the entire edifice of the Christian religion, which he is convinced largely derives from belief in these miracles, illustrate nothing more than gullibility. He suggests that Jesus was initially just an unexceptional itinerant conjurer who happened to attract a following of believers. His skill in magic impressed early observers; his healings could have occurred as described, through the power of faith. Witnesses of his phenomena began to believe that he had paranormal powers. The first believers influenced others to believe. In the end, Jesus came to believe he really possessed the powers he claimed to have. The throng adoring him troubled the religious and governmental authorities for whom he appeared to be a potentially dangerous agitator.

Humphrey's preoccupation with the miracles of Jesus and other miracles continues through nearly the entire first half of his book. In the remainder he addresses the question of whether an intelligent person should take seriously modern claims of paranormal phenomena. The titles of some chapters, such as "PK" and "ESP" exemplify Humphrey's light-hearted approach to his task. He raises the well-known complaint that parapsychologists offer no coherent explanation of how the purported paranormal phenomena occur. He objects to the patchiness of the phenomena and its unpredictability. He also thinks that paranormal phenomena make no sense. There is, he contends, "no rhyme or reason for what gets through [in claimed extrasensory perception] and what does not." With one exception, Humphrey speaks in generalities only and never confronts the details of particular experiments. (Spontaneous cases of apparent paranormal experiences are seemingly not even worthy of his dismissal.) In the exception, which, he writes, "breaks with the convention of this book," he describes (with what he calls "a certain amount of experimental detail") the Ganzfeld experiments in telepathy by Charles Honorton and his colleagues. He then devotes slightly more than one page to a summary of several years of research. (In fact, Honorton's research with the Ganzfeld method extended over nearly two decades.) Although Honorton's experiments are widely regarded as among the best controlled as well as most successful of modern experiments, Humphrey discounts them because one of Honorton's former colleagues found that possible sensory leakage might have accounted for the positive results.

Humphrey has read widely in the history of science, which makes it surprising that he reifies science and tells us what science does and does not allow. In his view, paranormal forces can have no place "in a world of normal laws." Yet surely no one should speak in the name of science; one can only say what scientists believe. The "laws" declared by scientists are just as perishable as the physical bodies of the persons promulgating them. For example, physicists of the latter part of the l9th century believed firmly in the existence of a pervasive ether filling the spaces between material objects, but by the end of the fourth decade of this century new physicists had relegated the concept of ether to the history of their field.

Although this book contains much of value about the psychology and sociology of credulity, I cannot recommend it to anyone beginning a study of research on paranormal phenomena. Humphrey does provide excellent references to his numerous quotations and citations; the only inaccuracy I noticed was the anachronistic misplacement of Sir Thomas Browne as an Elizabethan. These references and the index, however, offer no guide to the serious literature that would help a reader to make an independent appraisal of the phenomena the importance of which Humphrey denies. An informed reader cannot tell from his references whether he is as well acquainted with that literature as the author of a book like this should be. My doubts about this do not derive only from Humphrey's incorrect spelling of the first name of Frederic Myers, one of the best known figures in the history of psychical research. They derive much more from his assertion that paranormal phenomena show no "rhyme or reason." Despite its many limitations, research on some paranormal phenomena has certainly shown recurrent features and circumstances of their occurrence.

I do nevertheless recommend this book to scientists or students already acquainted with the field. They should know how a highly intelligent outsider -- himself a qualified scientist and one who can write well -- regards claims of paranormal phenomena. Most scientists in conventional lines of inquiry ignore research on these phenomena. Humphrey at least takes the subject seriously enough to think it worth the trouble of writing a book deploring it.

Because Humphrey spends so much of his effort in an endeavor to undermine belief in the miracles attributed to Jesus, I think it appropriate for me to draw the attention of readers to two recently published and more balanced appraisals of the life of Jesus and its value for us today (Wilson, 1993; Polkinghorne, 1994).

Ian Stevenson
Division of Personality Studies
Box 152, Health Sciences Center
University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, VA 22908

References

Wilson, A. N. (1993). Jesus. London: Harper Collins.

Polkinghorne, J. (1994). The Faith of a Physicist -- Reflections of a Bottom-Up Thinker. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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