{"id":110903,"date":"2025-06-28T21:00:24","date_gmt":"2025-06-29T03:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=110903"},"modified":"2025-06-28T21:00:24","modified_gmt":"2025-06-29T03:00:24","slug":"on-hunting-ghosts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2025\/06\/on-hunting-ghosts.html","title":{"rendered":"On hunting ghosts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Chorley's<\/a>
The Preston England Temple in winter. (LDS Media Library)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Our (superb) guide on the recent Interpreter Foundation Church history tour, Peter Fagg \u2014 whom my wife and I have known for years now, and who will also, if all goes according to plan, accompany us on a Christian history-themed tour of England in May of 2026 \u2014 shared these remarks with us while we were there a few weeks ago. \u00a0We liked them so very much that we invited him to share them with the readership of the Interpreter Foundation. \u00a0He generously agreed to do so: \u00a0\u201cEmpty Chairs: Reflections on How Faithful Latter-day Saints Can Handle the Pain Presented by Wayward Loved Ones,\u201d<\/a> written by Peter Fagg<\/p>\n

[Editor\u2019s Note:<\/strong> Peter Fagg gave these remarks at a Sacrament Meeting of the Chorley Second Ward of the Preston England Stake on 30 June 2024. With his kind permission, we share them here, lightly edited, with the hope that they might be helpful and comforting to some of our readers.<\/em>]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"DR<\/a>
From James Jordan during an earlier Interpreter Foundation filming-visit to Africa, a view along the Congo River in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We held our quarterly Interpreter Foundation board meeting today. \u00a0I\u2019m deeply impressed by \u2014 and very grateful for \u2014 all of the time and effort that our uncompensated board<\/a> puts into the Foundation\u2019s work, along with the time and effort given by all of our volunteers. \u00a0Jeff Bradshaw returned only very early this morning from (I think) six weeks in Africa, where he\u2019s been working on the Not by Bread Alone<\/em> project<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"Wm.<\/a>
William James (1842-1910), psychologist, philosopher, illustrious professor at Harvard, and brother of the novelist Henry James (Wikimedia Commons public domain photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I want to share some passages that I recently marked during a reading of Deborah Blum, Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life After Death<\/em> (Penguin, 2007):<\/p>\n

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James and his companions in this scientific ghost hunt were famed for their intellectual brilliance\u2014their intellectual courage gained them less admiration. Yet they possessed both qualities in abundance. James\u2019s fellow ghost hunters included the codiscoverer of the theory of evolution, a physiologist from France who would win the Nobel Prize in Medicine, an Australian who became a founding member of the American Anthropological Society, a female mathematician who became principal of Cambridge University\u2019s first college for women, a pioneer in British utilitarian philosophy, and a trio of respected physicists. All of them had reputations that would suffer as a consequence, and all of them, like William James, would refuse to abandon the search. (15)<\/div>\n
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James wrote to Science<\/em> magazine, a journal devoted to upholding the research ethic, that he loathed the reverential use of the word \u201cscientist \u2026 it suggests to me the priggish, sectarian view of science, as something against religion, against sentiment,\u201d even against real-life experience. (17)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n
In his most famous demonstration\u2014investigated by German philosopher Immanuel Kant\u2014Swedenborg disrupted a garden party by suddenly announcing a firestorm in Stockholm, some three hundred miles away. Staring at a clear evening sky, Swedenborg described the fire\u2019s progress, street by street and building by building, to the disbelieving company. Two days later, a messenger from Stockholm confirmed every detail. Kant concluded that the case showed \u201cbeyond all possibility of doubt\u201d that Swedenborg did indeed possess an extraordinary visionary gift. (23)<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
In the quotation that follows, it seems that the term sensitive<\/em> is being used in a legitimate but perhaps somewhat unfamiliar and even archaic sense, which refers to a person thought to possess occult or psychic powers:<\/div>\n
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\u201cThe ideal of every science is that of a closed and completed system of truth,\u201d James acknowledged. If supernatural events did not match the categories of the scientific system they \u201cmust be held untrue.\u201d James admired the efficiency of the \u201cscientific\u201d approach to the spiritual murkiness. \u201cIt is far better tactics, if you wish to get rid of mystery, to brand the narratives themselves as unworthy of trust,\u201d James wrote. But while he agreed that most so-called supernatural events were suspect, he worried that scientists stayed deliberately blind to the rare credible ones, that researchers might be ignoring \u201ca natural kind of fact of which we do not yet know the full extent.\u201d And he worried too about the larger effect of such prejudice on the way people viewed science itself. \u201cThousands of sensitive organizations in the United States today live as steadily in the light of these experiences, and are as indifferent to modern science, as if they lived in Bohemia in the twelfth century. They are indifferent to science, because science is so callously indifferent to their experiences.\u201d (42)<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\n
If scientists did not afford some respect to the beliefs of the lay public, James warned, there was little reason for the public to respect the pronouncements of science. (42)<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
And, finally, this one. \u00a0It\u2019s a bit off-theme, but it certainly seems a good passage to keep in mind during our own peculiar era:<\/div>\n
\n
Nations, James said simply, are not saved by wars. They are saved, he said, by \u201cacts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties\u2014by people knowing true men when they see them, preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans and empty quacks.\u201d<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n
\"Five<\/a>
Only a few decades ago, a blissfully atheistic utopia appeared to be almost within reach. \u00a0This is the cover of a magazine published in the Soviet Union during the 1920s by the government-sponsored League of the Militant Godless, showing the deities of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam being destroyed by the first Leninist Five Year Plan. \u00a0(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Finally, lest the zealous defenders of humanity against the ravages of theism grow too complacent, I offer several appalling items of evidence, drawn from the venerable Christopher Hitchens Memorial \u201cHow Religion Poisons Everything\u201d File<\/em>\u2122, of how busybody religious believers continue to afflict and torment innocent men, women, and children around the world:<\/p>\n