Tales of the Unexplained, Continued

Down below, A Philosopher confidently remarked "I know that there are no ghosts." He then listed off a laundry list of things like unicorns, vampires, zombies, alien abductions and leprechauns and said, in essence, that because these do not exist, ghosts don't either.

I replied, in part, "It does no good classifying spiritual phenomena with non-existent physical phenomena like unicorns. The way to show there are no unicorns or leprechauns is to examine the physical world and see if they are there. They're not. But how does this disprove the existence of a spiritual world or show that other "natures" besides our own do not exist and never interact with this one?"

I then repeated the question. How could anybody possibly "know" with certitude that ghosts do not exist? Philosopher replied: "I didn't say I knew for sure. I said I knew."

I have absolutely no idea how to parse that.

He continued, "I don't see why the physical/supernatural divide is particularly relevant; as far as I can tell my reasons for thinking that there are no vampires carry over entirely into my reasons for thinking that there are no ghosts. And the putative cataract of testimony actually seems to me to make the case the stronger, given that no actual useful evidence seems to emerge out of this abundance of cases."

I think the physical supernatural divide matters immensely. If somebody says "There are unicorns in England" you can go to England and search for them. But if somebody says, "Spirits of people in Purgatory, or damned devils pretending to be such, or glorious saints heaven periodically are permitted, for whatever reason, to bridge the gulf between this spatio-temporal realm and whatever new created order they now inhabit, how is somebody supposed to prove that claim false beyond the shadow of a doubt? Largely what we have to go on is human testimony. And when the testimony to haunting or an apparition is given, I apply the normal tests anybody would. Is the person making the claim given to delusion, or after a buck, or a fool, etc. Lots of candidates are eliminated this way. But I don't see the point of embracing a dogmatic materialism that simply refuses, a priori, to credit the testimony of, say, 70,000 eyewitnesses to the Miracle of the Sun at Fatima, or Rod Dreher's account of preternatural activity during an exorcism to which he was eyewitness. I think the open-minded thing to do is admit the possibility that there are other natures--other created orders--besides the universe we are familiar with and that sometimes these nature are allowed to come in contact by the Creator.

The funny thing is, this very hypothesis is put forward (minus that pesky annoying God Person) in the Many Worlds Hypothesis. It's a hypothesis specifically designed to try to figure out a way out of the Anthropic Principle. We live in a universe that is spectacularly (and suspiciously) fine tuned. So fine tuned, in fact, that atheist Anthony Flew had to finally--grudgingly--concede a limited, modifed hangout form of... grumble, grumble theism (dammit!) after struggling with the various points raised by Roy Abraham Varghese's fine book The Wonder of the World.

The human mind though, is infinitely creative in its search for escape hatches. So we get the Many Worlds Hypothesis, which tells us that this incredibly fine-tuned universe is just one of an infinite number of universes, all with varying laws of physics, universal constants and so forth. No Creator involved. Nothingness just hatched an infinite number of universes with an infinite combination of basic physical laws. We got lucky and wound up in one that works. Doubtless there are trillions of other universes with completely different sets of physical laws that also work, as well as trillions more that didn't work.

So what's the difference between positing created orders beyond ours in which, for instance, intelligences called "angels" may be found and the Many Worlds Hypothesis? Only this: the notion of a multi-tiered creation with room for angels, purgatory, and saints is ruthlessly dismissed as "mythology" or "superstition" because it has room for God. But a Many Worlds Hypothesis is warmly received as a rebuke to the provincial narrow-mindedness of the Anthropic Principle because it shuts out the need of a Creator and the highly suspicious fine-tuning of the universe (or so many of its proponents think).

In the same thread, another readers remarked, "When my little girl asked, worriedly, if there were such things as ghosts and witches, I told her confidently and truthfully that there are not. They are make-believe."

My question is, "Why?" Witches,unlike unicorns, can quickly be documented by a simple Google search. There are plenty of people who identify themselves as witches. So what is the point of saying they don't exist?

Of course, what the reader doubtless meant was, "There are no people who fly on broomsticks." True. But there are people who, quite consciously and with malice aforethought, seek to enter into covenant with fallen angelic powers. That too is quickly established by Googling "satanism". Whether those fallen angelic powers exist is a separate matter. But whether people seek such powers is not open to question. They do.

Now the existence of such powers is a fact testified to by the entire Catholic Tradition, beginning with our Lord himself. Science is utterly powerless to disprove this facet of revelation, so I don't understand why a believer would regard it as a fairy tale given that the only means we have to determine its reality--namely supernatural revelation--is loud and clear: the devil is real.

Similarly, I see no reason why--given such stories as Saul calling up the ghost of Samuel at the end of 1 Samuel, of the appearance of Moses and Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration, and the various well-attested apparitions of Our Lady--we as Catholics should be committed to the notion that appearances of the dead from time to time should all be rejected without trial as "fairy tales". This sort of dogmatism seems to me to spring from an unexamined philosophical prejudice, not from an impartial examination of the evidence.

As usual, I think Chesterton said it best:

Any one who likes... may call my belief in God merely mystical; the phrase is not worth fighting about. But my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant's word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant's word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant's story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism -- the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence -- it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, "Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles," they answer, "But mediaevals were superstitious"; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say "a peasant saw a ghost," I am told, "But peasants are so credulous." If I ask, "Why credulous?" the only answer is -- that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland. - G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy