We Want to Believe

On a break point, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet. Over a century ago, long before people believed that sharks were swimming in the subways of New York during Hurricane Sandy, or before Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois joined the immigration debate on the Senate floor, using an AI-altered photo that included an ICE agent without a head, Dr. Merrick Burrow, the curator of an exhibit that commemorated the strange incident, told the BBC article, and I quote, I do not think anybody really believed it, but they couldn't explain how it had been done either. And the fairy pictures look so real, in fact, they even convince none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the famously logical Sherlock Holmes stories. Initially skeptical Conan Doyle became a believer and worked to promote the images as evidence of the supernatural It wasn until decades later that one of the girls confessed that they had used paper cutouts from a 1915 children book I never thought of it being a fraud, Francis Griffiths told the BBC in 1983. It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun. Even so, the bit of fun was enough to convince some really smart people that these girls had discovered a window between our world and the world of spirits and fairies. Now, how do otherwise intelligent people fall for these things? Conan Doyle certainly wasn't a fool, but he also wasn't a disinterested party either. He was someone very curious about spiritualism. Perhaps most importantly, he'd lost a son during the First World War. The prank gave him hope that perhaps there was something beyond this world, and if so, it could mean he might see his boy again. This also helps explain the emergence of new spiritualism, something that seems to happen every few years or so, despite the predictions that more science and more technology will certainly make us less spiritual. Even as formal religious life has receded in popularity over the past few decades, people remain curious about things they wish to be true and end up being drawn to a hodgepodge of spiritual practices And even if they don really make sense they can really be proven wrong As it turns out people are simply spiritually vulnerable creatures. Now, it's easy to roll our eyes and cast aspersion whenever postmodern skeptics buy crystals and incense or sharp thinkers like Conan Doyle are punked. Sometimes it is simply about indulging in fantasy or wishful thinking, but more often than not, it's about looking for a window to another world. After all, humans are made with eternity in our hearts. What Romans describes is things that are eternal, but we inherently know about. Even after the fall, there's a sense that there's more to this world that we can see. For Conan Doyle, there was the longing to be reunited with his child, a sense that something is terribly wrong with death. And of course, that sense is illegitimate. Death's nothing more than a mere inconvenience if this world is all there is. It's not really wrong that someone we love dies if there's nothing eternal about us or the world or them. It's just kind of bad luck. Our longing points to something beyond ourselves that we know to be true We want to believe that there more to this world We want to know that reality is not limited to just what we can see But we're also fallen, so our senses are not clear. Without the clarifying light of God's truth, we'll stumble around in the darkness. And yet, even as we stumble, the longing persists. And even that points to the higher reality. As C.S. Lewis put it in Mere Christianity, if we find in ourselves a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy. The most probable explanation is that we're made for another world. Our spiritually minded and tempted neighbors are a lot like the Athenians that Luke described in Acts 17. They have all kinds of altars, even one to an unknown God, yet they somehow know that there's more. They don't know where to look. So like St. Paul, we have the opportunity, and yes, the calling, to show them what is true. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stonestreet with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Timothy Padgett. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, leave us a review where you download your podcast. And for more resources or a version of this commentary to download and share with others, go to breakpoint.org.