Desperate measures were taken to cut the sceptic off at the knees. Bertrand Russell and others tried to ‘construct’ material objects out of sense data, and G.E. Moore leapt over the chasm, stunning his audience, by holding up his hands as proof of an external world. As regards the existence of other minds, behaviourists feigned anaesthesia and ignored their own as well as those of others. It may seem odd to those outside the discipline, but scepticism since ancient times has been immensely salutary for the philosophical enterprise of establishing knowledge on secure foundations. It still has formidable representation, though less conspicuous in today’s brash metaphysical scene.

I mention these things to indicate what Martin Bridgstock’s book is not about. It is not substantially about the sceptical disposition or philosophical scepticism, as the introduction makes clear in an arresting passage beginning: ‘Although Harry Houdini and Bertrand Russell did important skeptical work in the early twentieth century, it is not until the 1970s that the modern movement was born.’ Bridgstock’s subject is the ‘grassroots movement’ that grew in response to the ‘onrush of mystical and pseudo-scientific ideas which emerged in the late sixties and seventies’. The movement’s founders, people such as Martin Gardner, Paul Kurtz and James Randi, investigated and debunked paranormalist claims, broadly conceived: claims about flying saucers, creation science, astrology, ESP, beasties like the Loch Ness monster, and other anomalous things. Bridgstock’s ‘working definition’ of the paranormal is ‘beyond the current understanding of science’. This doesn’t really work well, because many non-paranormal matters, such as reconciliation between quantum mechanics and general relativity, are also beyond current scientific understanding. But one can see what he is getting at.

Martin Bridgstock, a senior lecturer in a science department at Griffith University, relates how his own involvement in the sceptical movement began in the 1980s, opposing the infiltration of creation science into Queensland’s education system. His subsequent activity includes some scary surveys. In 2008 in Queensland, 58.6 per cent of people believed in psychic or spiritual healing; 37.7 per cent in creationism; and 35.9 per cent in ghosts or revenants. And it’s not just Queensland. In 1997, sixty-eight per cent of Australians believed in psychic healing; forty per cent in revenants; and twenty-eight per cent in astrology. The United States, of course, cannot be outdone. Having an organised band of sceptics interrogating this ragbag of superstition and muddled thinking is obviously desirable.

But, according to Bridgstock, the ‘modern sceptics’ haven’t carefully thought out their positions on many important issues, and his book is intended as a remedy. Beyond Belief is not aimed at debunking particular paranormal beliefs. It is a kind of guide for sceptics. By the end of it, ‘the reader will know what skepticism is, how to think skeptically, and why this is a good idea’. Accordingly, there are chapters on science and its relation to scepticism, on the nature of the paranormal, the philosophical antecedents of modern scepticism, scepticism’s basic principles and their application, the ethics of scepticism and why it is obligatory, and on the directions in which the author believes modern scepticism should be heading.

Bridgstock rightly contrasts paranormal claims with their meagre evidential grounds to sound science, but wrongly thinks that ‘scientific knowledge [is] radically different from other forms of knowledge’. In fact, reasoned enquiry and respect for evidence in the law courts, in historical researches, in detective work, and so on, are not very different from those in science. Bridgstock aligns scepticism with the ‘larger movement of evidence-based approaches’, but generally, having such a thin sense of rational enquiry, he reaches the obviously false conclusion that evidence-based approaches ‘started in science, with people such as Galileo insisting that evidence must determine scientific theories’.

Indeed, Bridgstock forgets his earlier acknowledgment that ‘modern skepticism is one of the intellectual descendents of a tradition that can be traced back ... to the ancient Greeks’. It might have been better if he had not known this, because his discussion of the philosophers is disastrous. Socrates, he writes, was ‘one of the greatest doubters of all, a man who died for his – thoroughly skeptical – beliefs’. This is wrong; there is no sense in which Socrates was a sceptic. He was a conventionally religious man executed for reasons largely political. More to the point, asking questions to expose ignorance and elicit truth, activities in which Socrates excelled, is not the same as doubting. Socrates believed that knowledge was attainable. Nor was he sceptical about his interlocutors’ claims to knowledge; he knew they were ignorant: that’s what ‘Socratic irony’ was about. Descartes fares even worse: ‘He would attend church, socialize with friends ... Inside though, he would set himself to doubt everything ... Descartes’ plunge into this abyss of doubt was traumatic ...’ The great rationalist and foe of scepticism would be amazed.

According to Bridgstock, the modern sceptic has three main tools: assigning the burden of proof, which is self-explanatory; Occam’s razor, which on Bridgstock’s rendering goes, ‘it is vain to do with more what can be done with fewer’; and ‘[Carl] Sagan’s balance’, which states that ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’. Using these tools, sceptics examine paranormal claims in scientific terms and account for them (generally) as con-sequences of human fallibility and error, or of deception. Bridgstock usefully expatiates on the necessity for reliable evidence, the virtues of controlled trials, the nature of pseudo-science, the placebo effect, the unreliability of witnesses and memory, the tendency to self-deception, and the fact that charla-tans abound.

Developing a theme from W.K. Clifford’s celebrated essay on ‘The Ethics of Belief’ (1877), he goes on to insist that a sceptical attitude is morally obligatory: credulousness and wilful contempt for evidence can be dangerous. It follows that there is a further duty to focus where the gains of sceptical attention can be greatest. And that leads Bridgstock irresistibly to ask whether the application of ‘skeptical criteria’ can be extended to non-paranormal beliefs.

His answer is affirmative, but the argument and examples that lead him there are inept. For instance, Bridgstock argues that Occam’s razor can be applied to preference the Copernican over the clumsier Ptolemaic system; and, together with insistence on the burden of proof, the razor can decide for the Holocaust against the theories of the Holocaust deniers, which ‘are a good deal less economical than those of orthodox history’.

This is absurd. The Copernican replaced the Ptolemaic system because it corresponds better with the facts, not because it is simpler. The claims of the Holocaust deniers must be dismissed because they are untrue, not because they are uneconomical. Bridgstock concludes, as if it were a startling discovery, that ‘the three skeptical principles work quite well in the non-paranormal area ...’ Used with greater acumen, they surely would, but that’s because they were borrowed from the larger domain of rational empirical enquiry in the first place.

Beyond Belief has admirable intentions and should do some good. But its muddled passages, and the incondite prose reduced to be intelligible at the lowest common denominator, embarrass those intentions.