I must confess feeling a soothing sense of comfort in seeing the flimsiness of the arguments on which John Guillaumier often bases his beliefs or, perhaps more appropriately, disbeliefs. In his latest contribution (March 13), he explains away the Lourdes phenomena as “the subjective imaginings of a lonely, depressed teenager” and ascribes the “occasional healing that takes place at the sites of popular pilgrimage” to “psychic and biological forces”.
Mr Guilaumier does not say if such “occasional healings” occur with similar frequency in Madras, or Timbuktu, or Seattle, or Wellington, or anywhere else for that matter. Nor does he provide any statistical or other reliable scientific evidence to show that what happens in these “sites of popular pilgrimage” is par for the course anywhere else on earth and that there is nothing out of the ordinary happening in these particular places. Not that any such evidence would in any way undermine the basis of the Catholic faith, which has nothing to do with these “occasional healings”, but it would certainly serve to prop Mr Guillaumier’s disbelief in them.
His attempt at explaining away these phenomena by recourse to “psychic and biological forces” reminds me of Yuri Geller who used to hop around between television shows claiming he could bend cutlery by his psychic powers. When Scotland were given a penalty kick against England in the Euro ’96, he even claimed to have used his psychic powers to move the ball from the penalty spot... and Scotland missed the chance to equalise while England went on to win. Presumably, then, to Maradona’s “hand of God” England replied with the “mind of Geller”!
Mr Guillaumier’s approach to things even remotely connected with faith is typical of a preconceived belief (or should I say disbelief) on which he then tailors his assertions to suit. For very long centuries, this type of attitude had a conspicuous role in obstructing progress in the scientific world. Thus, for example, up to about half a century after the Fatima apparitions, scientists still hung on to the preconception that space was filled with a “luminiferous aether” that permitted light to travel in space. When Max Planck came out with his quantum theory, the luminiferous aether was shown to be what it always was – a mere preconception.
It’s not that we have made much headway, though. Nowadays scientists speak of “dark energy” permeating space. It is supposed to account for almost three quarters of the energy in the universe... and no one knows where it comes from! One cannot help wonder if this “dark energy” is not just another preconceived notion.
How restrictive preconceptions can be is perhaps best illustrated by what must definitely be considered one of the biggest faux pas in the history of science. It is attributed to none other than Albert Einstein (which also goes to show how weak even the greatest minds are).
When Einstein was working on his theory of general relativity in 1919 scientists still believed that the universe was fixed and eternal. Yet, his calculations were showing an expanding universe, so he dropped in a “cosmological constant” to correct the discrepancy. Now we know, of course, that the universe is neither eternal nor fixed, but instead of questioning his preconception Einstein let it influence his reasoning and committed what he was later to call “the biggest blunder of my life”. When Hubble found that the universe was expanding, Einstein kicked out the infamous “cosmological constant” from his theory. (Ironically, one current theory assigns “dark energy” to none other than the “cosmological constant”. So here we go again!)
In fairness I must add, however, that preconceptions are not restricted to one camp or the other. My mother was a very devout Catholic but I could never convince her that spilling oil on the kictchen counter was not an omen of bad luck. I was even less successful in trying to convince her that superstition is not a belief befitting a Catholic. Nothing was stored more securely in her kitchen than the oil phials and she clung on to her preconceived notion till the day she died.