Supernatural and the Mundane
May 26, 2020 | By Tommy Schacht, PC ‘21. Tommy is majoring in History.
The first point of this essay is merely to lament that most of the world has been wrenched into the realm of the familiar.
Humans have a remarkable capacity for boredom. I remember the first time I stepped foot on Yale’s campus, I was blown away. It was like walking onto the set of a movie, a set starring people much cooler than I ever would be. Sterling Memorial Library particularly struck me. It was not just the massive mosaic on the back wall, or the gorgeous stonework on the facade, but also the sheer amount of human knowledge housed within its walls (it is not for nothing that it is described as a cathedral to knowledge). And we should be struck! We walk around the halls that have nurtured the best and brightest minds for over three centuries. Hundreds of millions of dollars and some of the finest minds ever created have sculpted Yale’s campus. Our art galleries, which are a stone’s throw from our bedrooms, house astonishing works from across time and space. We should exist in a perpetual state of astonishment at our daily lives. If ten-year-old me saw my life now, he would probably have an aneurysm. And yet, this splendor hardly elicits a response from me now. The spectacular has become mundane simply by exposure.
We seem to do this with everything. Think about how absolutely nuts the combustion engine is. We use the compressed bodies of long-dead dinosaurs to create thousands of explosions every minute, all to push a car along a road. And yet, despite this mind-blowing technology, no one is excited by their morning commute. That’s because over time, we place any given thing into our expectations[1] . As soon as something maps onto our expectation of the world, it ceases to elicit an emotional response. At best, there is a sort of satisfaction that our expectations map onto reality. When we visit the Pyramids, we are pleased when they are what we expected, or are agitated when they fail to live up to the hype, to what we built them up to be.[1] In that sense, only that which is different is noteworthy.
The first point of this essay is merely to lament that this is the case, especially given that most of the world has been wrenched into the realm of the familiar. There are very few places left on Earth that are truly untouched by expectation. Even if I were to travel to India, a country I have never been to, I would have a myriad of expectations, and my trip would largely be judged by how much the Taj Mahal was just like all the pictures. No matter where I go, I will be oppressed by the tyranny of past tourists, whose cultural transmissions have forever tainted my own experience. I weep, for I have no worlds left to conquer. [2]
Our lives follow these patterns and preset expectations. We judge things with reference to past experience. When I see shadows in my room at night, I know they are not in reality a scary man come to murder me, because that has held true every night of the past. It requires a lot more contrary information for my brain to process something as “actually a scary axe murderer.” The problem is, different people have different thresholds of unexpectedness required to overcome the inertia of expectation. For some, the merest background noise will make them certain someone is following them. For others, no amount of contrary information will convince them they were wrong. This threshold of belief is true for the miraculous as well as the ordinary. Miracles, after all, are definitionally not an everyday occurrence. For some, miracles will be insufficient to convince them they were wrong. Let’s imagine we are in Egypt during the time of Moses. We see the plague of locusts. Now, we as Christians know that these plagues were acts of divine punishment. However, it is conceivable that one who was there at the time and did not have Scripture as a guide would interpret it as mere natural phenomenon. After all, locusts are not unheard of. The matter of whether the plagues qualify as a “miracle” largely depends on one’s priors and assumptions upon witnessing the event.
Let’s take another, more modern example. The Miracle of the Sun at Fatima saw the sun zig-zag in the sky, cast multi-colored light, along with other miraculous occurrences. However, there is disagreement about what caused these occurrences. The Catholic faithful point to this as supernatural proof of the Fatima prophecies coming true; skeptics provide various explanations, including mass delusion or weather phenomena, to try to explain it away. Here we have the last method of humans beating the extraordinary into the merely ordinary. If something does not fit into our normal patterns, we make it fit. We all know that there are those who suffer from false visions and delusions; mental illness is a well known condition to us. Anything that does not fit neatly into a naturalist paradigm can be explained away by unreliability of the human mind.
Those who claim that they would abandon their unbelief only in the face of the miraculous may be operating in good faith, but they are not operating in good sense. No matter their claims to the contrary, they would sooner believe any explanation other than the miraculous: illusions, mirages, someone playing a trick on them. We humans are remarkably good at fitting new things into existing frameworks and experiences. I am reminded of a trick my cousin used to play on the rest of us when I was a small child. He would pretend that he was possessed by the ghost of a Ouija board. He would maintain the persona for hours. When I was a child, I wasn’t sure what was really going on; as an adult, I know he was playing like any child might. The framework of how children behave does more to convince me than the actual event ever would. Ouija ghosts don’t actually possess people, so he must not have been possessed. The trouble is, this same logic can be applied to faith in general. People don’t rise from the dead, so Christ must not have risen from the dead, no matter what the early faithful professed unto death.[2] If one’s heart is hardened to faith, then no counter-evidence has such weight that it would cure them of their unbelief. This is not a defense of why they should believe; it is merely to say that one’s priors are the essential element which form beliefs, not the evidence itself. If one has sufficiently strong priors, then evidence, no matter how miraculous, will never be convincing. After all, the world is full of miracles each and every day; we just see them too often to recognize them as such.
[1] I am cribbing from an excellent essay which uses the Grand Canyon as a similar example
[2] See this video starting at 1:39 for how this thought process may go.