Last week, Bob Somerby noted an interview with physicist Michio Kaku on C-SPAN. Talking on the many themes of his new book, Kaku discussed the whole issue of extra-terrestrial life and the many claims that beings from other worlds have been and continue to visit our little neck of the Universe. Summing up Kaku, Somerby writes:
By our culture’s conventional standards of evidence, it is clear that we have been visited.I love those four words, "conventional standards of evidence". For oh so many people, venturing off the reservation - expressing the belief that contact with other intelligent life is at least probable; expressing belief in one or another or several deities and abiding by the canons of belief in that deity; accepting the widespread occurrence of events that defy easy categorization by the limited methods of science - is too often met with a rhetorical violence that can be breathtaking. I am not suggesting here that I accept Kaku's argument. As a matter of fact, Im not sure I do.
Back in the mid-1990's, I remember reading a story in the Richmond Times-Dispatch. It concerned a young man dying of a brain tumor. He had gone to his neurologist for a scan to check the progress of the tumor. That was all that was left now. Therapies, surgeries - all off the table. Yet, the young man had passed through the headaches and seizures and other symptoms, which seemed to have stopped.
The tumor was gone.
In the few short weeks between the two scans, the tumor had not simply shrunk in size. It was gone.
They did another scan, and the results were the same.
Now, I am no doctor, but I do know that tumors, for the most part, just grow. That's why they are so deadly. They can be reduced in size by pretty radical chemo-therapy, but it is always a struggle against the hyper-growth of the tumor.
Outside the grotto of Lourdes in France, there is a pile of crutches, canes, and wheelchairs. These have been left by those healed of their afflictions by . . . whatever . . . happens in there. Not everyone who goes there is healed. Yet, there are enough, the pile of no-longer-needed crutches mute testimony to that fundamental reality.
I mention these last two items, in connection with all the others, because what unites them is they exist outside our usual understanding of the way the world is supposed to work. UFOs, miracle cures, even the ideologically-induced mass murder of religious believers - these things defy our neatly-wrapped notions of how things are supposed to be. Yet, they are real. Denying them, any of them, out of hand exposes the denier as someone far more committed to some boxed-up notion of Truth than to the possibility the Universe includes all sorts of things that cannot be explained by our current ways of understanding. They might not even be amenable to the limited but very useful methods of science.
I am not suggesting that I think God cured some but not all the folks who visited Lourdes grotto. I am not suggesting the earth has been visited over the course of its long history by beings from other planets or dimensions. I am saying, however, that devotion to any ideology - be it science, or religion, or the denial of religion, or what have you - is a dangerous thing. Accepting our current ways of understanding the way the Universe works includes accepting that such understanding is limited. Science, religion, political and social ideology - they are committed to Truth. When facts intrude that disrupt our cozy notions of Truth, we human beings react violently. People, sometimes large numbers of people, who don't fit our ways of understanding, get hurt and even die because who they are doesn't fit with our Truth. Being False, therefore, eliminating them isn't so much a crime as it is a necessity.
