I've always wondered why ghosts are supposed to be scary. Most other legendary monsters are "predators" or "parasites" of some kind -- if you encounter them, they want to harm you, no matter who you are.
But ghosts, in the sense of restless spirits of the dead, always seem to be agents of vengeance or justice. You get haunted because you did something, or because someone else did something that made the soul of a dead person so unhappy it haunts the living. If you think about it, ghosts are really a reassuring legend rather than a source of horror. Ghosts prove the universe is moral. That evil cannot be hidden, even by death.
Which is why it's such a shame that ghosts don't exist. For nearly two centuries, scientifically-minded sorts have been looking into ghost sightings, wondering if there's any truth to them. And they've found precisely nothing. Outfits like the Ghost Club, the Society for Psychical Research, the Ghost Research Society, and dozens of free-lance individuals have poked around haunted sites, and what have they found? Some patently faked photos, some patently faked audiotapes, and some patently bogus chatter about "cold spots" and "presences."
There's a paradox here, as in most paranormal investigation. Tales of the supernatural describe vivid, terrifying, physical events -- a ghost appearing to someone, fairies doing mischief, flying saucer aliens manifesting themselves, whatever. Inspired by these amazing reports, "paranormal investigators" look into the situation. What do they find? They don't find showy ghosts, flying saucers, fairies, or werewolves. What they find are vague, barely-measurable, now-you-see-it-now-you-don't traces. They announce these as proof -- but the "proof" isn't anything like the phenomena as originally described!
This has a perfect parallel in Creationism. For Creationists, the big paranormal event is God making the world in seven days, approximately 6,000 years ago. But when supporters of "intelligent design" try to demonstrate it scientifically, all they can produce are minor inconsistencies in the fossil record, blatant misunderstandings of how natural selection works, and undisprovable "alternate theories." In most cases they've retreated completely out of the Biblical account and are reduced to looking for God hiding in the cracks of geology and cosmology.
And ultimately, God and ghosts have a common origin: people want to believe in a moral universe. They want to believe their lives have meaning that will endure past death. The creationist and the ghost hunter are both struggling to find scientific proof for something which is entirely outside science's realm. But because science has done such an amazing job of describing and recording the universe we live in, anything it can't describe no longer seems real, even to believers.
This suggests that the true solution for conflicts of faith vs. science is for the believers to have more faith rather than less! A sufficiently faithful Christian (or whatever religion you prefer) can believe in God even if the Bible is proved wrong word for word. Perhaps the ones who attack science or try to twist it aren't real fanatics, but instead are tormented by doubts.
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