Given that you seem to be able to get it working if you are touching some wires then the problem is almost certainly a wiring issue. Are you connecting everything together on a solderless breadboard? They are notoriously finicky. I have personally had issues using solderless breadboards to connect NRF24L01 radios to my Arduino.
To give us all a better idea of what is going on, can you post a schematic of how you have wired up your radios, and also post the code that you are using along with any error messages you are getting?