Superstition and electricity

Why is proving God more arduous than proving guilt?

I have written as follows:

The word superstition is dismissal of a belief held by others to be true but for which they cannot produce evidence, even if they can bear witness to its truth; and that defies logic.

A court of law will hear, and accept as evidence at trial, testimony to any perception through any of the five senses: to what was heard, seen, tasted, touched or felt, or smelt by the witness. But it will decline testimony of any spiritual perception. In a deposition, it is labelled as “irrelevant to the cause”. But, to the witness, it is of the greatest relevance to the cause. And to the spiritually imbued, it is supremely relevant to his or her spiritual connection. Yet, the law passes it over, in the name of Justice, thus defying logic.

Why does it do this? As a lawyer myself, I can answer my own question. As a spiritualist, I cannot.

The lawyer in me points to the fact that the rules of evidence require what is called corroboration. Corroboration is a rule that requires two independent witnesses to a event before the court will endow it with its label of a finding in fact. Courts of law will frequently come up against corroborated findings in fact, however, that directly contradict one another. When this happens, they must evaluate the credibility of the witnesses and the likelihood of the one or the other fact being truth. Legally, a finding in fact is not necessarily truth: for a court of law cannot rule on truth, if truth is not available to it in order to be ruled upon. It must instead rule on the findings in fact that it holds to be true and that therefore are of significance in bending its judgment one way or another.

The rule of corroboration demands, therefore, two witnesses, or two pieces of evidence which speak to the same conclusion. This is essentially nothing more than a numbers game. Courts of law take the view that parole evidence can be all too easily fabricated. Now, the fact is, that there has been many a cause célèbre in which scientific (or forensic) evidence has also been fabricated. Or withheld. Such cases have inevitably led to miscarriages of justice. If one’s spiritual senses were to be admitted as evidence before a court of law, this could all too easily constitute fabricated evidence, owing to the lack of corroboration. What courts reason is that, when evidence comes from two sources that speak to the same fact, there is a far greater likelihood that both speak truth. If they contradict one another, then less cogency is attached to them, even if one of them could in fact be truth. Hence, the numbers game. Corroboration doesn’t make the fact spoken to truth, but it does render it more liable to be understood as the truth.

Let us suppose that a court case is filed in which the court of law requires to adjudicate on whether or not there truly exists a thing equating to what many call God, or Allah, or some other manifestation of deific or spiritual presence: in short, does God exist?

There is a great deal of documentary evidence of the existence of God, in the body of texts known as the Bible and as the Koran. Other holy scripts exist across humankind to attest to supernatural phenomena for which man then, at the time, had and also now, in the modern age, has no absolute explanation. Stonehenge, the Egyptian pyramids and the great Sphynx. There have been theories propounded that such structures are the work of alien beings but, given the vast distances that some of the stones used in the construction of these things had to travel, we are left at something of a loss to know how the raw materials were transported and why they were transported over such distances, when other materials were more conveniently available. Then comes the question of how they were even erected as the monuments we know with the tools we assume we know those who did such tasks had at their disposal. Lacking certainty on such things, scientists and archaeologists are given to theorising and postulating and conjecturing. What leads them to do so are the undeniable facts of the existence of the monuments under consideration. The scepticism surrounding their theories stems from purely practical analysis of the feasibility of the theory being right or wrong.

When it comes to considering the existence of God, and despite the many manifestations of God’s presence within the holy scriptures, one is nonetheless faced with the undeniable conclusion that there is no actual monument one can point to in order to speculate on how it was erected. God is non-material, even if it be accepted that He manifests Himself in our very material world. And that is a problem. For both the believer and the sceptic.

The apostolic succession of the popes is a factor pointed to by Christian believers as showing a direct, albeit non-sanguine succession of church fathers back to the disciple Simon Peter. The mere existence of the church is pointed to as evidence of God’s mission. And yet, the sceptic says, these are matters that could just as easily form a construct, of man’s making, for manipulation by man of his fellow man, and there is ample evidence that man has abused his spiritual leadership position for wealth, gain, influence and ignominy.

One might retort that the nefarious practices of some popes do not invalidate the acts of all popes. For that would be tantamount to saying that, if one witness in a court case lies, then all witnesses in court cases lie. According to the law’s “numbers game”, the likelihood of all witnesses in all court cases lying is ruled out by the corroboration rule. But sceptics who accept corroboration as a valid evidence base for judging a court case will nonetheless dismiss individual testimony of God’s existence and, where such testimony is in fact attested to by multiple persons, dismiss it as mass hysteria or something akin to madness.

I cannot judge whether they are right or wrong to do that; but I can say that the evidence of God is not considered with the same eyes as are prepared to consider evidence at trial in a court case.

Aside from the case of God, there are other phenomena which induce scepticism, namely ghosts and spectres. Ghosts are regarded as supernatural and some believe in them and some don’t believe in them. Some will say they have felt them or seen them or been spoken to by them. On the other hand, sceptics dismiss these reports as unlikely, unverified, poppycock or nonsense. The existence of ghosts is nowadays likened to what is called a conspiracy theory: that is a theory that is so outlandish in its likelihood that it gets dismissed as fantastical, as not possibly having any basis in fact; it is an aggressive dismissal, calculated to consign the theory to the category products of the wild imagination. The impartial, non-partisan observer is left to wonder, often with no actual basis on which to rest his judgment, whether the theory itself is fantastical, or rather its dismissal is the more fantastical. In effect, to wonder whether the tendency to label theories as conspiracy theories is in fact itself a conspiracy theory.

The flames of conspiracy theories, it is accepted, get wafted into wildfires by the ease of Internet communication and this is often taken to portend abuse of the web as a means of disinformation. But, if we take, say, the introduction of a means by which a criminal offence may be reported, such as the #MeToo movement, critics may say that it is only the channels for reporting that have led to an increase in incidence. However, what cannot be denied, unless such channels are wittingly used to mislead the public (through mendacity), is that, increase or no, the level of reporting is generally reflective of the level of offending in any momentary snapshot. The reporting channel, it may be argued, does not distort the level of incidence; rather it was its absence in the past that did precisely that.

What our court case on the existence of God comes down to is that all the evidence cited by testimony present and past gets dismissed as pure fabrication, imagination, coincidence or wishful thinking; and that evidence on oath — a promise to the very non-existent God whose proof is so elusive — can be taken as gospel truth (if that’s not an oxymoron).

In a recent article on this blog, I told of a set of circumstances that, for me, constituted concrete evidence of the afterlife. For all anyone reading this knows, and for all any court of law hearing my tale as evidence might presume, I could be fabricating the entire episode. There were two human witnesses to it, but perhaps they too could be fabricating their evidence or they may refuse to testify, even under subpoena. But I have another tale to tell that beggars belief.

A few years back I invited into my home a young man who, I discerned, was needful of guidance. He stole from me on three occasions and on each occasion I told him to return to his own home.

He took up with another character and I learned in due course that they were homeless and living on the streets. I took pity on them and invited them to stay overnight at my home, where I fed them, washed their clothes and gave them a roof for the night. Before that, I had been warned by two mediums, independent of each other, who did not know each other, and did not have any knowledge of each other, to abandon my hopes to be able to reform the young man. I had challenged this prohibition by insisting that no harm can surely come from attempting to help somebody. The reply was as good as a commandment: to desist all action at his address. One of them said, “A year from now, death will be visited on him.”

In the year 2020 I travelled away from home to visit friends in France and, upon my arrival in the foothills of the Pyrenees, I received a WhatsApp message by which these two characters asked if they could once again come to visit to me. I explained that I wasn’t at home and wouldn’t be back for three weeks and, if they still wanted to come at that time, I would gladly welcome them.

Time passed and I duly returned home and there was contact: they said they would be glad to pass by if I would have them, and I agreed. They were dishevelled, in a poor state of health and they were grateful for the benevolence that I extended to them. On the first evening I packed them off to the bathroom for them to have a shower and shave and make themselves clean and presentable. Whilst they were in the bathroom the power went off throughout the house.

I naturally investigated the fuse board to see what the problem was. There was an uncanny series of fallouts from the fuse box. When I re-engaged the full system, another circuit would fall out; if I re-engaged it, another circuit fell out; the circuits fell out one after the other, until the whole system broke down again. Clearly there was a serious problem.

Some time previously, a card had been put through my letterbox announcing that, if I needed an electrician, there was one handy nearby who would gladly come to service my needs. I called him and he agreed to come round the next day. His name was Wim.

Wim had testing equipment with him that was far more sophisticated than I could possibly have availed myself of, and, after some time in the basement conducting tests, he found that the problem lay in a connection between the central heating and a dedicated circuit for just that appliance, which was called circuit C10. He asked if I had another appliance that I knew was working and that he could connect to C10 to verify his theory that C10 was the problem. We connected a fan heater that I knew to be in working order and, lo and behold, it worked. He turned to me and said the problem lies within the central heating itself but that he could not fix that, not being a central heating engineer, and I would need to call my central heating services supplier.

They were duly called the next day and came and investigated and, after some testing, approached me with a somewhat angry look on their face saying there was nothing at all wrong with the central heating: they had connected the central heating via an extension cable to an entirely different circuit, where it was happily working away without any problem at all.

I called Wim again and asked him if he could drop round so that I could have a discussion with him. He looked at the setup by which the central heating was working perfectly on another circuit. He connected it to circuit C10 and the electricity went off. He unplugged it and put the fan heater back into circuit C10, whereupon everything worked as normal. I asked him what conclusion he could draw from these phenomena and he replied, “It is impossible.”

I asked him whether he had attended technical college in order to qualify as an electrician and he said, “Yes. Three hard years of study.” I asked him whether at any point during his studies, his course had touched upon the interplay between electrical house systems and the supernatural. His face fell and he replied, “No.” My parting words to him were that he should perhaps consider writing an article for a professional journal on such phenomena, because I believed that that was what he had just witnessed. He never rendered a bill for his services.

I went upstairs after Wim had left and announced to the boys that they needed to leave. One of them replied, “Yes. I heard the voices too.” They left, and the lad who I had befriended was tearful. He turned to me and said, “But we shall remain friends?” I had to reply, “No, we will never be friends again.” A year later, the boy’s mother, brother and a third party were murdered, not ten kilometres from where I live.

Image: VRT NWS.