Despite the best efforts of the New Atheists, the vast majority of the world (85 per cent of the global population) remains firmly religious. No matter what social media might look like, atheism remains a fringe belief.
Even more people believe in spirits. Even in the most ‘atheist’ country, Sweden, nearly half of the population believe in some form of ‘paranormal’ phenomena, especially ghosts: 40 per cent of Swedes believe in ghosts, only slightly less than the Americans they like to feel so superior to. One-fifth of Swedes claim to have personally encountered a ghost, which is more than the percentage of Americans.
Ghosts are one of the most universally believed paranormal phenomena in the world. The oldest recorded story, the Epic of Gilgamesh, features a ghostly encounter. Pliny recorded not just ghost stories, but tales of ghosts haunting houses, also a common motif in ghost beliefs.
Still, widespread belief doesn’t equal objective truth. Are ghosts real – and how could we possibly tell? The hallmark of a paranormal phenomenon, after all, is that it is outside the known laws of nature.
The Spiritualist craze of the 19th and early 20th century claimed all manner of methods for communicating with the spirits of the dead (i.e., ghosts). All were eventually debunked as fraudulent (the founders of spiritualism, the Fox sisters, eventually admitted their fraud), which made no difference whatsoever to most believers. Notably, the invention of apparently objective recording devices, such as photography, were appropriated almost immediately to producing hoax ‘ghost’ images. More recently, TV shows like Ghost Hunters have attempted to use ever-more ‘scientific’ means to find evidence of ghosts (without luck).
There are many contradictions inherent in ideas about ghosts. For example, are ghosts material or not? Either they can move through solid objects without disturbing them, or they can slam doors shut and throw objects across the room. According to logic and the laws of physics, it’s one or the other. If ghosts are human souls, why do they appear clothed and with (presumably soulless) inanimate objects like hats, canes, and dresses – not to mention the many reports of ghost trains, cars and carriages?
If ghosts are the spirits of those whose deaths were unavenged, why are there unsolved murders, since ghosts are said to communicate with psychic mediums, and should be able to identify their killers for the police? The questions go on and on – just about any claim about ghosts raises logical reasons to doubt it.
Nevertheless, ghost hunters have for centuries turned to the latest technology as a means of sensing ghosts. Whether it’s flames that turn blue in the presence of ghosts, or Electromagnetic Field (EMF) detectors, ion detectors, microphones or cameras, ghost hunters keep coming up with blanks.
Undaunted, ghost hunters argue that we simply don’t have the right technology.
But this, too, can’t be correct: Either ghosts exist and appear in our ordinary physical world (and can therefore be detected and recorded in photographs, film, video and audio recordings), or they don’t. If ghosts exist and can be scientifically detected or recorded, then we should find hard evidence of that – yet we don’t. If ghosts exist but cannot be scientifically detected or recorded, then all the photos, videos, audio and other recordings claimed to be evidence of ghosts cannot be ghosts. With so many basic contradictory theories – and so little science brought to bear on the topic – it’s not surprising that despite the efforts of thousands of ghost hunters on television and elsewhere for decades, not a single piece of hard evidence of ghosts has been found.
Then there is the plethora of pseudo-scientific nonsense that relies on the average person’s usually sketchy knowledge of the arcanum of modern physics. As Terry Pratchett noted, in his comic novel Pyramids, just sprinkle the word ‘quantum’ on anything and you can sell it.
For instance, some claim that support for the existence of ghosts can be found in no less a hard science than modern physics. It is widely claimed that Albert Einstein suggested a scientific basis for the reality of ghosts, based on the First Law of Thermodynamics: If energy cannot be created or destroyed but only change form, what happens to our body’s energy when we die? Could that somehow be manifested as a ghost?
It seems like a reasonable assumption – until you dig into the basic physics. The answer is very simple, and not at all mysterious. After a person dies, the energy in his or her body goes where all organisms’ energy goes after death: into the environment. The energy is released in the form of heat, and the body is transferred into the animals that eat us (i.e., wild animals if we are left unburied, or worms and bacteria if we are interred), and the plants that absorb us. There is no bodily “energy” that survives death to be detected with popular ghost-hunting devices.
So why do we persist in believing in ghosts that no one can objectively detect and which logic seems pretty firmly set against?
Most people who believe in ghosts do so because of some personal experience; they grew up in a home where the existence of (friendly) spirits was taken for granted, for example, or they had some unnerving experience on a ghost tour or local haunt.
Belief in a spirit world may also fulfill a deeper psychological need.
“There’s still so much to this universe that we don’t understand, and it’s comforting to fill in the void with explanations. Supernatural explanations are often stated with confidence, even when there’s no actual evidence, and this confidence provides a false sense of actual truth,” [Stephen Hupp, clinical psychologist and professor at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville] said.
Aside from all that, too, it’s just fun. Who doesn’t enjoy the safe shiver of fear from a good ghost story? We pay good money to scare ourselves on amusement park rides and with scary movies. What’s more fun than telling, or hearing, a really good ghost story?
