a short monograph on mind powers

Are mind powers possible?
Here let the term mean the ability to move a mass through a medium without the application of intervening force save a human will.
I am suggesting that mind powers like these, telekinesis or psychokinesis, as depicted in films such as Carrie or Scanners, do not exist.
Looking on human beings as creatures created by God and subject to his laws, we might agree that God has given us a little help not to commit murder.
This is why we don't have mind powers.
To kill someone takes effort.
We can't do it simply with a thought.
If we could kill simply with a thought, the transgression of the law against murder, would become irresistible.
We are made the way we are made, ie without telekinetic mind powers, so that our actions may be stewarded by our minds.
To transgress the law we must choose to trangress it.
It can't happen by accident, by a momentary irritation by an impulse released in a dream, or on a whim.
Now try a Darwinian or even atheistic perspective.
I consider this perspective to be somehow enabled only by the spiritual perspective which gives us our vocabularies to assess anything.
But never mind that.
Darwinist evolutionary theory as applied to mind powers, how would it work, and what does it tell us?
If one person had mind powers, we might envisage that he could kill at will. That is to say he could affect the physiology of other persons, proximate or non proximate we haven't established, in a harmful way.
This would give him such an evolutionary advantage that ultimately he would dominate all humanity.
More probably as his thoughts ran away with themselves into megalomania, he would kill all humanity.
Briefly in ye wordes of ye olde cliche, he would be king on a field of corpses.
And then he would die.
The first and last of his kind.
Mind powers, I suggest, are therefore also precluded in the human experience when we adopt a Darwinian perspective.
The conception of them as a possibility embodies a logical contradiction as well as a spiritual one.
So they're not there.
We're left with the testimony of some quite respectable figures who have asserted quite forcefully and occasionally credibly, that they believe kinetic motion can be produced by the human mind.
A former leading lawyer in America claims that on one occasion a murderer smiled at him across the courtroom, and motioned him to look at his watch. When he looked at his watch, the hands were spinning.
The lawyer seems to believe the murderer somehow made the hands spin.
Mind powers?
The late Father Benedict Groeschel stated that he had been called to deal with cases of poltergeist activity in supposedly haunted houses and on at least one occasion he had been sure that the activity was caused by the mental telemetries of a resident of the house in question.
A poltergeist is often postulated to be some form of disembodied spirit, moving objects and creating otherwise inexplicable bangs and crashes in a location where it is thought to manifest itself.
As per Father Groeschel, some of the more credible investigators of such things (not the sensationalists who proliferate also in our era) are claiming that poltergeist activity is usually and perhaps always the result of mind powers projected from a pubescent child.
The notion is that pubescent children may temporarily have mind powers which in most cases fade as they leave their teenage years behind.
The more serious and level headed investigators of the phenomena have noted that poltergeist activity often centres around a girl who is resident in the supposedly haunted house.
In this instance I am suggesting that the credible and level headed experts are wrong in their conclusions.
Mind powers are still precluded from human experience for the reasons I have advanced.
This leaves us looking for another explanation for poltergeist activity.
I would revert to the older notion.
Poltergeist activity is caused by poltergeists.
If there are any genuine cases of poltergeist activity, a disembodied spirit will probably be at work.
It may indeed associate itself particularly with a resident of a given house.
It may even be in love with her as depicted in the Old Testament Book Of Tobit.
But it is not her.
And it is not her mind.
I would also postulate the agency of an evil spirit in the aforementioned claimed experience of the lawyer who thought a murderer was able to make the hands of his watch spin from across the courtroom. I doubt the murderer had that power or any other power. But an evil spirit seeking the ruination of the murder's soul might have given him the illusion of such abilities.