Refuting the Mystical In Favor of the Empirical: One Avenue of Escape From The Twilight Zone

“[The Twilight Zone] is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.”

–Rod Serling

Rod Serling’s crowning achievement, The Twilight Zone, a Kafkaesque anthology show that frequently traversed through the realms of the supernatural, paranormal, and science fiction, is widely regarded as one of the greatest television shows of all time. Having premiered in the late 1950s, when filmic technology and special effects were nowhere near where they are today, the show relied on the brilliance of storytelling, dialogue, and thematic structure to captivate audiences. These are indeed timeless, transcendent, and permanent cinematic qualities, demonstrated by the fact that more than 50 years later The Twilight Zone has still not lost its charm. When in my early 30s I finally came around to exploring The Twilight Zone, I was immediately gripped by Serling’s penetrating opening voiceover and by the conclusion of the pilot episode, Where Is Everybody?, I realized that this show, in no short measure, wore its philosophical heart on its sleeve. The opening narration alone, alluding to matters of reality, truth, knowledge, and perception, bears profound philosophical implications. Beyond serving as merely a riveting introduction to the nature of The Twilight Zone, it is an effective metaphorical device to reason more critically. And in this post I will relate the essence of this device to the challenges the ancient philosopher’s faced when attempting to resolve the demarcation problem.

In antiquity there was no distinction between science and non-science and this began leading to wildly divergent claims regarding the causation of various observable phenomena. On the one hand, the spiritually and mystically-oriented thinkers of the time, in the tradition of their predecessors, were attributing supernatural causes to the outcomes of the various experiments conducted and healings accomplished by the early Greek natural philosophers. Members of the prophet and priesthood classes undoubtedly attributed divine intervention to the curing of illnesses. The natural philosophers, on the other hand, began rejecting such mystical claims of their contemporaries and instead proposed empirical causes for the outcomes they generated. They asserted that the results they were accomplishing were due to systematic methods and practices that they were constantly refining based on their experimentation and observation. To them it was misleading for their contemporaries to suggest that they, through their practice of medicine, were channeling divine or cosmic forces to effectuate healing. To me, it can be due only to the merit of the claims of the natural philosophers that their theories eventually prevailed.[1]

I do not imagine modern medical textbooks intertwine religion into them; however I am aware that the most fervently religious among us do frequently construe most all medical healings as miracles attributable to the healing hand of God. The problem, as I see it, with this extreme mystical view is that it ignores scientific apodicticity in favor of legitimating one's own predilections. A more sober version of this view, one that I am not completely unsympathetic toward, is that the healing hand of God accomplishes the medical healing, not directly but indirectly, by enabling humanity to advance the relevant and necessary scientific knowledge and then divinely directing the medical practitioner to perform their duties (i.e., to do God’s work). I am less inclined to challenge this view because, apart from allowing persons in a free society to have their reasonable subjective beliefs, it does not diminish the importance of carefully-directed and determined scientific advancement in the same manner and to the same degree as does the more extreme mystical view.

In the face of underdetermination in any field of inquiry, it is tempting to commit the reasoning fallacy of invoking the inexplicable to explain the unexplained. Insufficient evidence (i.e., the middle ground between light and shadow) can land one, as it did our forebears, in the figurative Twilight Zone wherein one attempts to bridge the gap between the available evidence and the observation at-hand by invoking superstitious, metaphysical, or mythological claims.[2] The Twilight Zone was obviously not an advocate for logical positivism. Nonetheless, an important application of Serling’s immortal opener is that despite the current extent and quality of available evidence (i.e., the summit of man’s knowledge) one must resist bad reasoning (i.e., fear and superstition) and instead continue to expand his knowledge and understanding to the point that he may eventually identify and gather the necessary evidence to derive the appropriately apodictic conclusions that may lead him out of The Twilight Zone.

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[1] I do not subscribe to the troublingly not uncommon conspiratorial view that academia has been hijacked by atheistic or Jewish intellectuals in an effort to undermine religious values.

[2] This is, of course, not to mean that the religious are exclusively responsible of such thinking.