Smart People Don't Believe Stuff Like That
A Brief Reflection Inspired by Two Recent Books and Lots of Conversations
“We’ve been trained to take a mechanical image of nature as the truth about nature itself. The universe, we reflexively assume, is an unfeeling contraption built by no one. Any departure from this imagined truth feels like a return to the days of witchcraft and unreason.”
“‘[E]very era is credulous, but they are credulous in different ways,’ which is why modern-day unbelief is, in fact, a form of belief, and why phenomena such as levitation end up being dismissed as impossible in modern and postmodern materialistic culture. Every age has its own unquestionable beliefs, and our own tends to prize the rationality and superiority of unbelief as one of its core beliefs, especially in regard to denying the existence of a supernatural dimension.”
The first of the quotes above is from Spencer Klavan’s Light of the Mind, Light of the World; the second is from They Flew by Carlos Eire (pages 174 and 362, respectively). Both quotes—and both books—deal with one of the most important and underdiscussed issues in the contemporary western world: a widely shared and very deeply held conviction that what’s really real is physical stuff, and if we can ever come to understand physical stuff completely, we will thereby have come to understand everything at all.
This conviction runs rampant in the twenty-first-century mind. I remember a comment an undergraduate student made to me in the fall of 2018. He had come by my office to ask me about some philosophical question or other, and in the course of our conversation it came up that I am a Christian. He was taken aback. “You don’t really believe in God, do you? Smart people don’t believe stuff like that.”
About a decade earlier, as I was completing my doctoral studies in philosophy at Ohio State, a professor there had said something similar. We were chatting at a social event, and—knowing he was an atheist—I asked him whether he’d been born into a religious home and abandoned faith, or if he’d been raised without religious faith. It was the latter, he said. “By the time I got to high school, I found myself gravitating more and more to the intellectuals among my peers. I was aware of religious questions, and I knew of serious religious believers at my school, but it seemed like the smart kids just didn’t talk about stuff like that.”
I’m paraphrasing, of course, but that was the gist. Smart people aren’t into stuff like that. It’s a refrain I’ve heard over and over again through the years. There’s an extraordinarily widely held and deeply ingrained belief that part of what it is to be an intelligent person is to adopt a skeptical stance toward any claims about the supernatural. The contrary is not true: skepticism concerning philosophical materialism does not make a person seem smart or help to score points at a cocktail party. If you don’t believe me, go hang out with a crowd of educated Americans or Europeans and let it slip that you believe in the devil, or bilocation, or other spooky phenomena, and see how long it takes respectable people to stop making eye contact and hunt for a new conversation partner.
Most people have not really thought through their views on metaphysics, of course. They don’t have carefully worked-out theories about what exists and what depends on what else for its existence or where minds come from or whether Being and Existence are different or anything like that. Most people haven’t developed a coherent epistemology, either: what distinguishes knowledge from mere true belief, for instance, or what kinds of entities are possible objects of knowledge — these are questions that many of us are willing to set aside.
Whether such an attitude toward the perennial questions of philosophy is lamentable or inevitable is not my interest here. What strikes me, in the present context, is that most people—college-educated people, I mean; people whom you’d at least kinda sorta expect to have well-formed beliefs on the Big Questions—know approximately nothing about philosophical debates over the nature of reality and the capabilities of the human mind, and if you ask them about such things they will acknowledge that they know nothing about such things, and yet at the same time they will speak and act as though it is an uncontestable fact of the matter that nothing beyond the material world exists and if it did we’d never be able to know anything about it anyway.
Cousin Eric, I’m looking at you.
The two books quoted at the beginning of this post address this dynamic head-on, and in fascinating ways. Carlos Eire, author of They Flew, is a professor of history and religious studies at Yale University. He is, I think, an agnostic with respect to religion, which makes the book all the more interesting. Eire dives deeply into accounts of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft, primarily in Europe around the time of the Protestant Reformation. It’s a hefty tome: not difficult to read, but really long. It felt to me like it could have been just as good at half the length, but I’m not a historian and I suspect that Eire would be correct to say that he needed all that text in order to make his case. The book is beautifully illustrated, too, though only in black and white.
Light of the World, Light of the Mind is a much faster read. The first two-thirds or so can be described as an overview of western intellectual history. Klavan goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, but his principal interest is in the Enlightenment, the development of modern science, and the influence of that development on cultural attitudes. This may sound dull when summarized in the abstract, but Klavan is an excellent writer and a true humanist: he earned a doctorate in ancient Greek literature from Oxford University. The story he tells is a gripping one. I had a difficult time putting the book down. Where it gets really good is in part three, where Klavan moves into the twentieth century and the debate over general relativity and quantum mechanics. I thought it was fantastic, though of course your mileage may vary.
Both books push us to ask—or should push us to ask—what’s possible, what’s really real and why we think we know what we think we know about what’s possible and what’s really real.
To wit: Eire devotes seventy pages to recounting and analyzing records of the life of Saint Joseph of Cupertino. Eire is very careful here, noting that much of the information we have that purports to be about Saint Joseph is hagiographic, written by people already convinced of his sanctity and remarkable supernatural gifts and keen to persuade others of the same. These sources are not, however, without value to the historian. We can say with confidence that Joseph was born in 1603, faced serious obstacles to fulfilling his perceived calling as a Franciscan friar, was investigated by the Inquisition and brought before Pope Urban VIII, and was sent to Assisi in April 1639 in an attempt to diminish his celebrity. Oh, and he flew. Like, a lot.
I don’t want to misrepresent Eire here. He is not quite willing to pull the trigger and declare that the Flying Friar’s levitations are indisputable facts of history. But he notes that “Several factors make it difficult to dismiss testimonies about [Joseph’s] levitations as lies, sheer nonsense, or mass hysteria” (137). I won’t attempt to unpack those factors here, as the evidence for such phenomena isn’t what I’m interested in at the moment. What I’m interested in here is our reaction to (purported) evidence of the supernatural. It really seems that people saw Saint Joseph fly. He’s far from the only one, and levitation is far from the only extraordinary phenomenon for which impressive evidence exists. In subsequent chapters of the book, we learn that it really seems that Sister Maria de Agreda was in both Spain and the Americas [checks notes] at the same time on multiple occasions in the 1620s.
Impossible, right?
But why? Near the very end of his book, Eire writes,
We live in an era in which disbelief is so powerful it seems almighty, principally because “reality” is conceived of as one-dimensional, not as some two-dimensional coin or multidimensional universe. Suspending disbelief has become difficult, even impossible. But that might be a misperception, a mirage of sorts, caused by our constant immersion in our own zeitgeist or dominant worldview (377-78).
Readers of C. S. Lewis will recognize in Eire’s words here something like the former’s notion of “chronological snobbery,” which is
the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realisation that our own age is also a ‘period’, and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions. They are likeliest to lurk in those widespread assumptions which are so ingrained in the age that no one dares to attack or feels it necessary to defend them (Surprised by Joy, 254).
Smart people don’t believe in stuff like levitation.
The thing is, our deeply-ingrained sense of what it means to be a smart person is a function of a particular zeitgeist, a particular “spirit of the age.” And if one is open to the possibility that our own zeitgeist ought to be questioned—that it’s not uncontroversial or obvious that material stuff is the ultimate stuff—well, then you really ought to take a look at the other book mentioned above: Light of the Mind, Light of the World by Spencer Klavan.
I’ll say even less about Klavan than I did about Eire. Let it suffice for me to go ahead and summarize his thesis, which is twofold. The first big claim Klavan makes, which is pretty mind-boggling in its own right, and which actually seems to be increasingly accepted as an undeniable implication of our most sophisticated empirical science, is that the role of observers—the role of minds—is ineliminable from physics at the most fundamental level. Among other things, this means that the “commonsense materialism” assumed by so many educated people in the contemporary world is… well, it’s just plain wrong. It’s simply and straightforwardly false as a description of what reality is like.
[At this point, someone, somewhere, is going to say “BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN THAT SAINT JOSEPH OF CUPERTINO ACTUALLY LEVITATED!!!” Relax. I know.]
The second part of Klavan’s thesis is that our best contemporary science—all the absolutely bonkers, hard-to-understand stuff about wave mechanics and quantum indeterminacy and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and all that—dovetails elegantly with the depictions of creation found in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures: Genesis 1-2, of course, but also Proverbs 8, John 1, and Colossians 1. He makes a compelling case, and summarizes it as follows:
[C]utting-edge science and inherited wisdom alike are revealing … a picture of a world that cannot be what it is without us, that is endowed with all its meaning and structure by our presence in it. A world spoken into being by the eternal Word and made complete by the words of his creatures, who bear his image on Earth (209).
It’s heady stuff, in multiple senses of the phrase. And it’s utterly fascinating. Anyone interested in religion, science, or philosophy will enjoy Klavan’s book. And to any reader who casually and comfortably shrugs off claims about the supernatural on the grounds that smart people don’t believe stuff like that: it’s time to reconsider.