For some reason the Chronicle of Higher Education, a weekly publication that details doings (and available jobs) in American academia, has shown a penchant for bashing science and promoting anti-materialist views (see here for their piece defending woo-driven evolution). I’m not sure why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with supporting the humanities against the dreaded incursion of science—the bogus disease of “scientism.”

That’s certainly the case with a big new article in the Chronicle, “Visions of the impossible: how ‘fantastic’ stories unlock the nature of consciousness,” by Jeffrey J. Kripal, a professor of religious studies at Rice University in Texas. Given his position, it’s not surprising that Kripal’s piece is an argument about Why There is Something Out There Beyond Science. And although the piece is long, I can summarize its thesis in two sentences (these are my words, not Kripal’s):

“People have had weird experiences, like dreaming in great detail about something happening before it actually does; and because these events can’t be explained by science, the most likely explanation is that they are messages from some non-material realm beyond our ken. If you combine that with science’s complete failure to understand consciousness, we must conclude that naturalism is not sufficient to understand the universe, and that our brains are receiving some sort of ‘transhuman signals.’”

That sounds bizarre, especially for a distinguished periodical, but anti-naturalism seems to be replacing postmodernism as the latest way to bash science in academia. Every opponent of “scientism,” for example, seems to cite Thomas Nagel’s recent book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False as if it were authoritative, never noting that that book has been roundly trounced by academics. (Nagel’s book argues that evolution is driven by some non-Goddy but immaterial and teleological force that science can’t understand.)

Kripal begins his essay by recounting two anecdotes (one from Mark Twain) about how people sensed the deaths of their relatives, complete with accurate details, well before they knew about those deaths. Kripal argues that these cases of precognition are common, suggesting that there’s something out there that science can’t explain. But he doesn’t note the far more frequent instances of “precognition” that don’t come true and aren’t reported, nor the notorious tricks that human memory can play. There are plenty of cases, for example, of humans selectively editing their memories in retrospect to conform to what they—or others—want to believe. This alone makes peculiar anecdotes like Twain’s deeply suspect, or at least in need of scientific confirmation. Such stories are the stock in trade of psychics and aficionados of the paranormal, but have never stood up to critical scrutiny.