If you have not yet gotten a chance to sit down and read Marilyn Prever's entertaining and thought-provoking article "Behind the Veil: The Truth We Don’t Know About Fairies, Leprechauns, UFOs, ETs & Other Entities," maybe it's time to do so. From the July/August 2011 issue of Touchstone:
One reason for modern disbelief in fairies and their cousins is that people have a vague idea that all those folklore creatures have been explained away psychologically. The only trouble with that theory is, you can use the same arguments against the scientifically respectable creatures just as easily. “Wishful thinking” pretty much sums up all the arguments, and it’s a notoriously two-edged sword. There are probably just as many twenty-first-century people hoping to see a UFO as there used to be nineteenth-century people hoping to see a fairy, and we do often “get” what we hope for.
Or your explanation may go a little further—beyond Freud and into the wilds of Jung. Maybe these creatures are archetypes rising up like marsh gas from the collective unconscious (whatever that may be). Fine, but isn’t a starship full of creatures from the heavens also an archetype?
This article also has a sidebar by Touchstone senior editor S. M. Hutchens about a different kind of paranormal belief: ghosts.
And speaking of the paranormal, I recently came across this from the Touchstone archives by Peter Leithart (March 2004). It's a review of the book The Sense of Being Stared At: And Other Aspects of the Extended Mind by Rupert Sheldrake. The opening paragraph really sets the tone for the article:
Rupert Sheldrake’s latest book is full of amusing and entertaining oddities, as Sheldrake continues his assault on reductionistic modern science. At the outset of a treatment of “para-normal” phenomena, he points out that such things as telepathy are “para-normal” only if we have already defined “normal” in terms that are compatible with modern science. If our minds are more complex and extended than modern science suggests, then there is no “para” about it—it’s just normal, though some people might have better-developed “sixth” and “seventh” senses than others, just as some people can naturally see better than others. Sheldrake thinks that these “paranormal” senses are in theory as susceptible to scientific investigation (i.e., rigorous testing) as anything, but points out that science excludes such phenomena from scientific investigation by the sheer tyranny of definition.
I don't believe I've ever seen a ghost. I did, however, hear one....
Posted by: Deacon Michael D. Harmon | July 26, 2011 at 01:00 PM