Parapsychology and the interest in spiritualism and various alleged psychic powers did not develop out of thin air. They are all, at least in large part, the product of religious hopes and aspirations ? but more specifically, religious hopes and aspirations which have become disconnected from the anchors of traditional religious dogma and church structures.

Victorian sensibilities were deeply wounded by the development of scientific theories which seemed to contradict many of the fundamental assumptions people generally held about the nature of existence.

Of particular concern to most people was Darwin?s theory of evolution which appeared to put humans on the same level as animals.

As everyone knew, animals did not have souls, whereas humans were specially created by God and endowed with souls. If humans and animals were on the same level, that would suggest that humans did not really have souls after all ? and that cut the heart out of people?s traditional feelings of superiority. It also undermined people?s assurance of an eternal life because, without a soul, there was nothing to survive physical death. R.H. Thouless, for example, wrote in 1979 about how parapsychological research would make belief in God respectable again:

• ?Belief in God or in any spiritual reality has seemed to many people to have become impossible, because these beliefs contradict the expectations raised by the scientific views which have come down to us from the last century. These views regard reality as being bounded by the physical world and necessarily exclude any spiritual world. Parapsychological investigations tend to undermine this ?physicalist? view of the world and, thus, to remove one of the obstacles to religious belief. ...Parapsychological research seems to reveal a world in which it is more reasonable to suppose that God and the supernatural play a part.?

A similar view was expressed by J.L. Randall in 1977:

• ?Despite the contempt with which religion is regarded in some intellectual circles, the vast majority of mankind still seeks relief from the misery of the existential vacuum through ritual, sacrament and prayer. Now at least we are witnessing the extension of scientific procedures into these spiritual areas of human experience: is it too much to hope that the result will be a deepening of understanding which will lead to yet another advance in the liberation of the human spirit??

Spiritualism offered a possible solution to the challenges posed by materialistic sciences. Spiritualists, if genuine, provided proof of an afterlife in which personal identity not only survived, but progressed through ever higher spheres of spiritual existence. Here was a chance to use the tools materialistic science to disprove the principles materialism.

The desire to prove religious beliefs, however, leads to a problem of bias. All scientific research has to be careful that bias does not influence the outcome or analysis of experiments ? this is why experiments must be conducted in such a manner that other scientists who have no bias, less bias, or at least some other bias, can perform the same experiments and see if they get the same results.

Psychic research has been marked by very strong religious premises and desires since the very beginning. This is not necessarily wrong, but religious biases can be much stronger than others and, hence, can be more likely to influence how a person approaches the topic. As an example, J.B. Rhine, who was one of the most prominent parapsychological researchers in the latter half of the 20th century, was never entirely comfortable with accepting naturalist materialism ? a fundamental assumption of science.