The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [59]
Other people might underestimate Sidgwick, mistake his gentleness for passivity. His friends knew that he was relentlessly stubborn. When the evening was done, Sidgwick had worn his colleagues to a compromise. Myers would write the introduction, and Gurney the bulk of the book. “I could tell that M. was annoyed but he handled it admirably.”
Not entirely admirably. Some of Myers’s frustrations and resentments spilled into his writing, which took on a sharp, challenging tone. The provocative question that he chose to confront first was that of proof: In a modern age, Myers asked, could religion endure based on faith alone? Could any God—Christian or otherwise—survive in an age where religion feared science and science denied faith?
It was into that divide that Myers saw psychical research bravely marching. The goal was to bridge research and religion, to show that they were not incompatible, that one could even help explain the other. Yet there was as much peril as promise in such an effort. Orthodox science might contradict religious dogma, as Darwinian theory had appeared to do, but its proponents had in general—aside from a few aggressive hard-liners such as Tyndall—left matters of the spirit to those who professed to understand such things. The faithful could dismiss theological contradictions. They could declare evolution and natural selection irrelevant to the contemplation of God and His powers. Those who didn’t like the conclusions of geologists, biologists, and physicists could ignore, dismiss, even ridicule.
Psychical research, however, explored the very mysteries that other scientists had, thus far, eschewed, and that the faithful reserved as their own. If a fossil were erroneously identified, a rock poorly dated, scientists could be embarrassed, shamed, forced to make corrections. But the error posed no threat to theology. If research failed entirely in its goals, Myers said, if chemistry and physics and astronomy all together stumbled, the faithful would in no way suffer. But if he and his colleagues failed, if they could find no evidence of an afterlife, no proof of otherworldly powers, they might further undermine the church’s promises of immortality. And there, indeed, was the risk: he and his friends might find the evidence for “the independence of man’s spiritual nature and its persistence after death”—or they might confirm the existence of nothing, no promise beyond that of a quiet grave.
If dedicated psychical researchers could detect no flicker of noncorporeal spirit out there in the universe, then the final result, Myers thought, would be to prove Tyndall and his allies right. Perhaps the truth was that religion couldn’t stand up to science. Perhaps all the belief systems—from Christianity to Hinduism—existed only because they had been created in a time before scientific challenge.
The very argument gave Sidgwick the willies. The traditional churches had not rallied to psychical research; clergymen tended to point out disdainfully that the immortality promised in the Bible in no way resembled the spooks and specters of SPR investigations. Sidgwick had hopes that, with time, the churches would alter that stance, accept that miracles needed evidence, that science and faith could stand together in the pulpit. He worried that Myers’s confrontational position might be so alienating as to make such discussions impossible. He feared his colleague’s forthrightness would further isolate their cause.
“M. says roundly to the Theologian, ‘If the results of our investigation are rejected, they must inevitably carry your miracles along with them,’ ” he scrawled anxiously