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How Logical Spock Gives Us a Surprising Example of Spirituality

How Logical Spock Gives Us a Surprising Example of Spirituality

Last updated on: September 7, 2016 at 1:03 pm by Paul Asay

How Logical Spock Gives Us a Surprising Example of Spirituality 2016-09-07T13:03:48-06:00 Paul Asay

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Improbable Truth

Spock has, in some ways, a kindred spirit in one of the characters in The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis’ much-beloved children’s book. And ironically, the guy’s name is Kirk. Or rather, Kirke.

“Logic!” exclaims Professor Digory Kirke in the book. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?”

Professor Kirke is quite old and incredibly smart, much like Spock himself. And when Peter and Susan Pevensie need help figuring out how to help their younger sister, Lucy—a girl who has been blathering about some strange, snowy world called Narnia locked behind a wardrobe door—they turn to the white-haired prof for help. How should they handle these incredible lies? they ask. Or, worse, what if Lucy doesn’t realize she’s lying? What if she’s losing her mind?

After pondering the situation for a while and clearing his throat, Professor Kirke asked a deceptively simple question in return.

“How do you know that your sister’s story is not true?”

Peter and Susan are flabbergasted, but Professor Kirke swiftly—logically—brings them to a point where if they’re not convinced of Narnia itself (and they’re not), at least they’re willing to wait for more information before carting Lucy off to the nearest asylum.

“There are only three possibilities,” the Professor says. “Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume she is telling the truth.”

If there’s anything we’ve learned from our 50 years aboard the Enterprise, the Star Trek universe makes Narnia look about as improbable and exotic as central Nebraska. Spock fought Wyatt Earp at the O.K. Corral, mind-melded with a humpback whale and actually assisted Dr. McCoy in hooking up his own brain. Compared to that and a hundred other adventures, meeting a pair of conversational beavers seems about as unusual as Taco Bell messing up a drive-thru order.

Pictured: Just another day at the office (from the episode “Plato’s Stepchildren”)

In 2009’s Star Trek movie, a young Mr. Spock—a Spock before the whales and Wyatt and all his other adventures—contemplates a seriously pressing problem: How did a Romulan mining ship come to possess a previously unknown doomsday weapon that, just minutes before, destroyed Spock’s home planet of Vulcan? Could such a weapon be hidden? The product of an unknown alien race? Spock quickly discards the most obvious (but apparently impossible) hypotheses for one that’s merely outlandish: The Romulan craft, somehow and for some unknown reason, must’ve come from the future. And in explaining himself to the crew, the Vulcan does a remarkably cogent impression of Professor Kirke.

“If you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains—however improbable—must be the truth,” Spock says.

The atheists of our day tell us that faith in some supernatural power or entity is illogical, unreasonable. But if you look at the facts fairly, it’s no more illogical or unreasonable than the concept of you or me or the universe itself. We’re all highly improbable creations.

G.K. Chesterton, when he talked about the phenomenon of miracles in his book Orthodoxy, brings up an interesting point: Those who believe in miracles generally believe in them because they feel they’ve experienced them. Those who deny them do so because, in Chesterton’s words, “they have a doctrine against them.” Writes Chesterton:

“If I say, ‘Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, ‘But mediaevals were superstitious’; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles.”

Spock wearing a symbol representing the Vulcan philosophy of IDIC, or “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations.”

Spock cannot and will not deny miracles out of hand simply because they don’t jibe with what he, to this point, knows about the universe. He’s seen too many strange things and dealt with too many improbable creatures to shut that door. He is, after all, a scientist—a man of reason. Only the dogmatist would reject a thing simply because it does not fit within a given hypothesis: A scientist reshapes his hypothesis to fit the facts, however improbable those facts might prove to be. As he himself says in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, “Logic is not the end of wisdom, but the beginning.”

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