'There are definitely some people who want to believe'

Fifteen years ago, the Indian guru did the same thing for Lamont and called it a miracle, but Lamont's recreation of the event comes with a more down-to-earth warning. There is no miracle, he says, just a trick, just a sleight of hand that everyone can learn to do, and as he says this, you can see that he is enjoying the act of debunking, of pulling the curtain back. It's what he does. He loves magic, but he is also anti-magic; he is interested in the paranormal, but he also refuses to believe in it; he almost became a priest, but doesn't believe in God.

Over the years, all of these seeming contradictions have led Lamont to become one of the UK's leading writers on magic, paranormal and the extraordinary. He wrote The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick, which explained how millions of people came to believe in a trick that never really happened. He also wrote a fascinating book about the great Victorian medium, the Scot Daniel Dunglas Home, whose apparent acts of extraordinary powers, such as making tables float, have never been properly explained. And in his new book, Extraordinary Beliefs, he attempts to explain why so many people continue to believe in psychics, mediums and other extraordinary phenomena.

His day job is senior lecturer at the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh, which is where he is showing me the trick with the coin. He's doing it because he wants to illustrate his point that the impossible is possible and the extraordinary is ordinary.

Go down the pub with Lamont and he might do the same thing for you. When he meets people for the first time, he sometimes likes to take out a pack of tarot cards and seemingly reveal everything about someone's life.

"I'd get the cards out and I just make things up," he says. "It's just improvising and saying things that sound as if they might be true. And it's astonishing how easy it is to make connections and say things that people find meaningful."

What interests Lamont about this trick with the tarot cards is the fact that the ability to believe in such things persists and finds new expressions, most recently in the shows of Derren Brown in which the TV hypnotist suggests he is able to perform great psychological feats and read people's body language in new, extraordinary ways. But what he's really doing is performing magic tricks.

"We're all capable of believing if something sounds plausible," says Lamont, "and Derren's psychological explanations sound more plausible than the paranormal and so many people believe it because we can read body language up to a point, so why not a bit further? Where is the actual line? We don't know. What Derren is doing is taking something that is more plausible and stretching it a bit and what's interesting is many people who are sceptical about the paranormal believe Derren does it for real even though, strictly speaking, most of what he does should be described as paranormal."

In the past, Lamont used to do the same thing as Derren Brown, and occasionally still does. In his 20s, he worked as a professional magician to pay his university fees and he still dabbles now and again. In 2011, as part of a festival in Edinburgh celebrating the Victorian magician the Great Lafayette, he staged a mock seance during which he seemingly made an entire audience materialise in the Festival Theatre.

He relished that experience although there was a time when performing was anathema to him. Lamont grew up in Drylaw in Edinburgh in the 1960s and 70s and remembers being horrified when he was asked to sing on stage at his school. In the end, he did, and realised he liked it and later, combined his new taste for performance with his increasing interest in magic.

Before that, however, there was the question of religion. Lamont grew up in a traditional working class Catholic family.

"My dad was a religious person," he says, "and we had a fairly devout upbringing. He was involved with the church, I was an altar boy and my father asked me when I was about 12 or 13, have you ever thought about becoming a priest? However, I think telling a kid who's approaching puberty that they should think about becoming a Catholic priest is one very good step towards atheism. By 14, I didn't believe any more."

Before that, however, the boy who would grow up into the great sceptic believed everything he was told. "I took religion seriously and used to wonder: would I die for Jesus? I was the sort of kid who could have become a priest in that I believed my teachers and parents, who I think were sincere, but I thought something wasn't quite right and so I started to ask some questions about trans-substantiation, for example, and the resurrection and increasingly it seemed implausible."

That questioning continued for Lamont, although his atheism did not prevent him training as an RE teacher when he was a young man. "My atheism was not an issue," he says, "unless I wanted to work in a Catholic school, which I didn't. A surprising number of people who train to be RE teachers are agnostic or atheist."

For a time, Lamont also worked in the complaints department at Waverley Station ("I learned more psychology doing that than I did since I joined this department") before quitting to travel abroad, including to India. It was while there that he saw some of the magic tricks, or miracles, that fuelled his interest in the subject including the so-called miracle performed by the guru. Although Lamont could see that a trick was being performed, he could also see that the guru was performing it with sincerity.

This is an important point for Lamont and one he stresses in his work looking at the paranormal, mediumship, psychic belief and the rest - even if the phenomena do not exist, he says, we cannot simply dismiss it all as the work of fraudsters. "Some psychics are deliberately fake, I'm quite sure of that," he says, "but lots of others are quite sincere and genuinely think they are doing this through the spirits or psychic ability."

The point, says Lamont, is to approach such phenomena critically and to question what you think and why you think it.

"There are certain patterns in how people talk about these things," he says. "Believers will say 'well, I was a sceptic but then something happened, now I believe'. That is very typical and what it does of course is make your position sound more convincing.

"There are also definitely some people who want to believe, but every generation also asks: why do we still believe in this stuff? It's being going on for centuries. Fear of death might have something to do with belief in the afterlife but why would that have anything to do with belief in ESP for example? Who doesn't want to believe in more? I'd like to believe in more."

Lamont explores all of these beliefs in depth in his new book, and his conclusion is definitive: ghosts, psychics, the afterlife, mediums, rope tricks, levitations and the rest of it belong to the same category of fantasy and illusion.

But how can he be so definitive? How can the man who could have become a priest, the man who was a religious education teacher, the man who spends every day thinking about the paranormal, say, beyond doubt, that none of it is true?

"Part of my confidence comes from having read a lot," he says. "The same goes for the paranormal, I've read more than most people."

And then he adds an interesting caveat - one that some people might say is a chink in his confident argument. "Even if you don't believe in the paranormal," he says, "it's important to realise that you might be wrong."

Extraordinary Beliefs by Peter Lamont is published by Cambridge University Press