We Have Much To Learn

I would not have known anything about snow rollers before I saw them if I had not logged into Facebook to wish people happy birthday the morning of January 27^th, 2014. A local television station posted photographs and an explanation of how they formed. I tried to imagine how I would have explained them to my eight-year-old son if I had seen them without this knowledge.

I can understand the temptation of giving children mythological explanations for natural phenomena, such as telling them thunder is the sound of angels bowling. This makes me wonder if some of the things that we think of as supernatural phenomena have scientific explanations that none of us have figured out yet. People have long reported seeing strange lights before and during earthquakes. It turns out that they were not lying or hallucinating. We now have a scientific explanation for the phenomenon. I wonder if animals already knew this.  People have reported animals acting strangely in the days before an earthquake.

If we are just now finding the cause of lights associated with earthquakes, perhaps there are scientific explanations for things people have reported through history that we now regard as superstition or tall tales. Scientists investigating cosmology and quantum physics are learning that the more we learn, the more we find out how little we know. They are starting to see a need to investigate the nature of reality. While they are at it, I would like to see scientists investigate such things as miracles, ghost stories, UFO sightings or fairies. We have some understanding of how giving a sick person a placebo sometimes ends up as a form of faith healing, but applying this knowledge would involve lying to a patient.

The scientists who investigated the lights associated with earthquakes began by searching for things that reports about such lights had in common. It would be interesting if we could apply the same method to descriptions of supernatural events found in the Bible, other ancient texts and folklore. St. Joan of Arc made a case to leave some fairies alone to her parish priest as a young girl. Psychiatry may be able to explain some of these phenomena, but others may turn out to have explanations we do not yet understand, such as the earthquake lights until recently.

Metaphor can probably explain some of the descriptions of visitations by angels mentioned in the Bible. We do not need a scientific explanation of The Angel of the Lord telling Abraham not to kill Isaac to understand that human sacrifice is not necessary to please God.