Spiritualism and ID Today
John Mark Reynolds recounts the rise and fall of spiritualism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He uses the narrative to draw parallels to today's Intelligent Design movement. The parallels seem stretched, and we suspect he does no favors to the ID movement by comparing it to seances and mysterious knocking sounds, but it's an interesting piece. Link. Excerpts:
Spiritualism, and the broader field of psychic research in general, received a huge boost with the formation of the Society for Psychic Research (SPR). This group contained first-rate thinkers like the American psychologist William James. While not all members embraced Spiritualism, and some were even open critics, the Society provided a blue-chip intellectual environment where Spiritualists and psychic claims were taken seriously. (One, of course, could believe in psychic manifestations without accepting the further conclusion that they were the product of life-after-death spirits.)
It is difficult for most of us to realize the seriousness with which groups like the Society for Psychical Research were taken. The present website for the society rightly boasts that its presidents have included: philosophers Henry Sidgwick, C. D. Broad, Henri Bergson and H. H. Price; Prime Minister A. J. Balfour; psychologists William James and F. W. H. Myers; physicists Sir William Crookes, Sir Oliver Lodge and Lord Rayleigh; physiologist and Nobel Laureate Charles Richet; classicist Gilbert Murray; zoologist Sir Alister Hardy; and parapsychologist J. B. Rhine.
The prominent members cited are almost entirely drawn from academics (Sidgwick held a prestigious professorship at Cambridge University, for example) who reached prominence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This was the golden age for spiritualist respectability. . .
I believe, however, that without showing any sympathy for the cause of Spiritualism, one can be quite sympathetic with some of its goals. It was attacked and annihilated by cultural forces just as wicked in their own way. More importantly, in both the concern to oppose naturalism and the relatively high caliber of its initial leadership, the early psychic research movement resembles the Intelligent Design movement, and the similarities are great enough that I believe the failure of Doyle and his companions can serve as a lesson to the Intelligent Design (ID) movement.
First, the ID movement must not allow popular expressions of its position to become divorced from more responsible ones. The Spiritualists left the public leadership of their movement to the cranks and charlatans. With the exception of the fairly responsible Doyle, none of the intellectual leaders of psychic research did much public speaking or writing. The job of “spreading the word” was more and more left to the cranks and charlatans who rushed to fill the void.
In the ID movement up to this point, Phillip Johnson and others have been willing to carry an intense load of more popular level lectures. Though new members of the movement might be designated to fill this role, the “lions” must remain in the public eye. There are too many would-be spokesmen whose arguments and claims could bring the movement into undeserved disrepute.
In most churches I visit, I am asked about Kent Hovind. He is a very prominent defender of “creationism” and “intelligent design” on the speaking circuit and on the Internet. Most members of conservative Evangelical churches are unaware that Hovind has a diploma-mill “doctorate” or that his engaging presentation is riddled with errors and bad reasoning. In charity, and because they are sensitive to the public ridicule they have received as dissidents, most ID supporters have been unwilling to call incompetent speakers to task.
