Materialism is False

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

Act 1 Scene 5, Hamlet

They Flew:  A History of The Impossible, by Professor Carlos M. N. Eirie, Cuban refugee, as a child, and Professor of Religious Studies and History at Yale.  It was published on September 26, 2023.  His thesis is quite simple:  what if accounts of levitating saints and others are accurate?  His chapter on the Flying Friar, Saint Joseph of Cupertino,  notes the massive nature of the contemporary accounts of his levitating and flying.  The Church reacted to these feats of the supernatural by moving him from monastery to monastery to hide him from the World.  That Saint Joseph of Cupertino flew is better documented than almost all other facts from his century, the seventeenth century.  These accounts are rejected as untrue by many  because of an a priori assumption that miracles do not occur.  That a priori assumption is clearly wrong and this fact will eventually lead to a shift in how the miraculous is viewed.  I hazard to say that ultimately the view of miracles will be rather akin to that of the Church:  miracles can occur, but they need not be accepted on faith without looking at the surrounding facts and weighing the evidence, without prejudice either for or against the alleged miracle.

For myself, long before the post death activities of my late son, Larry, I believed that the supernatural was real:  first on faith, as a child, and then as a matter of historical research.  Larry brings to my own life an awareness of a fact that is going to be one of the great intellectual conflicts in the coming decades:  the reality of the supernatural.