We Want to Believe

Over a century ago, long before people believed that sharks were swimming in the subways of New York during Hurricane Sandy or Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) joined the immigration debate on the Senate floor using an AI-altered photo that included an ICE agent without a head, young Francis Griffiths and her cousin took pictures of fairies dancing in the forest. What began as the imagination of little girls turned into an international sensation known as the Cottingley Fairies incident of 1920. Dr. Merrick Burrow, the curator of an exhibit that commemorated the strange incident told the BBC article, “I do not think anybody really believed it . . . But they couldn’t explain how it had been done either.”

The fairy pictures looked so real that they even convinced 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’t until decades later that one of the girls confessed that they had used paper cut-outs from a 1915 children’s book. "I never even thought of it being a fraud,” Frances Griffiths told the BBC in 1983, “It was just Elsie and I having a bit of fun.” Even so, their “bit of fun” was enough to convince some very smart people that these girls had discovered a window between our world and the world of spirits and fairies.

How do otherwise intelligent people fall for such things? Conan Doyle wasn’t a fool, but he also wasn’t disinterested. He was someone who was very curious about spiritualism, and he’d lost a son during the First World War. The prank gave him hope that there was something beyond this world, and that if so, it may mean he would see his boy again.

This helps explain the emergence of new spiritualism, something that seems to happen every few years or so, despite the predictions that more science and technology will certainly make us less spiritual. Even as formal religious life recedes in popularity, people remain curious about things they wish to be true and end up being drawn to a hodge-podge of “spiritual” practices. Even if they don’t make sense, they cannot really be proven wrong. As it turns out, people are spiritually vulnerable creatures.

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’s about indulging in fantasy or simple wishful thinking, but more often it’s about looking for a window to another world. Humans are made with eternity in our hearts, what Romans describes as things that are eternal that we inherently know about. Even after the Fall, there is a sense that there’s more to this world than what we can see. For Conan Doyle, there was a longing to be reunited with his child and a sense there is something terribly wrong with death.

Of course, that sense is 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 is nothing eternal about us or the world; it’s merely bad luck. Our longings point to what we somehow know to be true.

We want to believe that there’s more to this world. We want to know that reality is not limited to only what we can see. But we are also fallen. Our senses are not clear. Without the clarifying light of God’s truth, we stumble in the darkness. And yet, even as we stumble, the longing persists and points to a higher reality. As C.S.Lewis put it in Mere Christianity, “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.”

Our spiritually minded and tempted neighbors are like the Athenians Luke described in Acts 17. They have all kinds of altars, even one to “an unknown god.” They somehow know there’s more, but they don’t know where to look. Like St. Paul, we have the opportunity to show them the way.