Transcript
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Live.
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That lovely music, and I really do love that music, is also the indicator that we're going to have some fun whenever we hear that music. That means we're going to do weird questions with Jimmy Akin. Jimmy Akin, our guest. Jimmy, of course, senior apologist here at Catholic Answers and the proprietor of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World and the Jimmy Akin Podcast, and also keeping a whole bunch of other Catholic podcasters in business, author of many books and willing to take any question quite seriously and do his very best to give you an answer. Thank you for coming back for another hour. Jimmy Akin.
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Yeah, no problem. All right.
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Well, let's go right back to the questions. This one comes from Giuliano. What physical explanation can parapsychology offer? Because one thing is describing phenomena, another one is explaining it in a physical framework.
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Okay, so the answer is I'm interpreting what Juliano says here in terms of is there an overall physical theory that explains parapsychological phenomena? And the because there are other theories, some of which involve physical matters that apply to aspects of parapsychology. Like, for example, there have been studies done of the brain waves of individuals talking to spirits, and they're distinct from the brainwaves that are displayed in in other situations. So, for example, they'll have people who are skilled in talking to spirits, and they'll say, okay, talk to a spirit now and we'll watch your brain waves. But then they'll say, okay with same person. They'll say, okay, have a conversation with with this live in person and see is it is are the brainwaves similar or different? And they're different. They're using different parts of their brains when they're talking to spirits versus when they're talking to a living person. And then they'll say try to be psychic and pick up information psychically. And that again, produces different activation patterns in the brain. And then they'll say, have a conversation with an imaginary person. And that also involves activation of different parts of the brain. So it looks like when they're talking to spirit that they're using different parts of their brain than they are when they're talking to a living person or an imaginary person or when they're picking up information psychically. So it looks like that's a distinct thing. Now, obviously, the brain is a physical organism. And so the theory that talking to spirits involves different parts of the brain and different brain activation patterns than other activities is something that involves physical matters, you know, namely your brain. But that's. I interpret Juliano as asking about parapsychology overall, because talking to spirits is just one little piece of parapsychology. And the answer, if you're asking about an overall theory, is parapsychology doesn't have one. And it may. It may not be possible, depending on what you mean by physical, because one of the things parapsychology studies is the survival of human consciousness beyond bodily death. And if human consciousness survives beyond bodily death, as many, not all, but many, parapsychologists hold, and as the Christian faith teaches, then parapsychology is going to involve matters that are not physical. And so now you could just redefine physical to mean everything that exists, but that's not the way people normally use the word. Nor they. They would consider human consciousness or the human soul or the human spirit to be something that's not physical. So parapsychology may or may not, depending on how you define your terms, be able to provide a physical explanation for all of the phenomena it studies. On the other hand, it may be able to provide physical explanation for some of the phenomena. And I would say that if there is a physical explanation for. I would also add this, that if there is a physical explanation for the phenomena that parapsychology studies, which includes not only survival of bodily death, but also psychic functioning, well, any physical mechanism to explain that is currently undiscovered. We don't know what it is. But there, you know, parapsychology is currently working on that. There are various theories. In fact, I just finished taking a class in theories of parapsychology. They're working towards trying to provide an explanation whether it ends up being physical or not. But the mere fact that. That the explanation for something is undiscovered doesn't challenge a field's validity as part of scientific inquiry. For example, there are lots of things we don't know in other branches of science, like physics, for example, we don't know what causes gravity. We can observe gravity, we can describe gravity. You know, that's one of the things that Juliano mentions. It's one thing to describe phenomena like psychic functioning or whatever. It's another thing to explain it in physical terms. Well, we can describe the effects of gravity really well. You know, Newton's equation did it for us for a long time. And then we got Einstein's refinement of Newton in the early 20th century. But we still don't know what gravity is. Einstein said we could imagine it as if. It's as if massive objects are causing dents in space time, but we don't know that's what it is. There's also discussion of, you know, can we find a quantum explanation for gravity? Like are, are there force carrying particles like gravitons? We, we just don't know. We don't know what causes gravity. We are even more in the dark about what so called dark matter and dark energy are. There are various theories, but it's currently wide open whether dark dark matter even exists and if so, what it is. We can describe the rotation of galaxies and so forth that could be interpreted as caused by dark matter, but. But we don't know for sure if it exists or if, if it does exist, what it actually is. Similarly with dark energy we have some proposals, but we don't with dark energy is different from dark matter. Dark energy is the force that causes the universe to expand faster, and we don't know what it is either. There are some explanations, some of which are simpler than others, but these are currently unknowns in science. And so unfortunately, we don't have a central organizing theory in the field of parapsychology yet. Parapsychology is currently at a stage similar to biology before the 1800s, you know, today and beginning in the 1800s, the idea of either Darwinian or Lamarckian evolution became the central theory. It's more Darwin, but, you know, with today with some contributions from Lamarck. But evolution is the central organizing theory of biology today. And there are actually two central organizing theories in physics. One of them is relativity and the other is quantum mechanics. And together they explain lots of what we see in physics. We also know they're both incomplete because they don't play well together. They conflict with each other and we don't know how to reconcile them. But before the proposal of evolution and before the proposal of relativity and quantum mechanics, there was still lots of good biology being done and lots of good physics being done. You don't have to have a central organizing theory, much less one that's exclusively in physicalist terms. In order to have a scientific field of inquiry that's currently the stage that parapsychology is at.