Ballad of a Slender Man

A few years back someone started an internet "hoax" about a mythical creature known as The Slender Man.  I hesitate to use the word "hoax", and I rope it off behind quotation marks, because even at the time of its origin, the creature was never presented as anything other than fake.  I'll say that again, as it bears repeating, The Slender Man was openly and clearly created as a made-up story.  It even appeared for the first time on a forum thread specifically designated for posting fake, photoshopped, paranormal images.  From there it grew on improvised details of child abductions and a catalog of manipulated images that amounted to the creepiest game of Where's Waldo? ever.  And yet, there are apparently people who believe that The Slender Man is real, and they report their own sightings without a touch of irony.

Which brings us to the point.  In the comments below the last post, Mr. Doug Cheese and I had a little tea party where we discussed spaghetti monsters and which one of us has the bigger crush on Justin Bieber (Doug, of course.)  I said that Richard Dawkins and the spaghetti folks base their entire case on the argument that people shouldn't believe something just because the possibility exists that it might be true.  The problem with this argument is that no one, to my knowledge, has ever believed something strictly because it was a possibility.  The poor bastard would be at the mercy of anything you told them.  You could tell them there was a giant pumpkin buried under the Statue of Liberty and they would start shifting anxiously in their seat, eager to get their hands on a shovel.

In fact, the Flying Spaghetti Monster is a completely unfair model of belief, precisely because it's deliberately designed to be something that no one would ever seriously believe in.  It's a calculated absurdity.  It really tells us nothing about why someone would believe in something in the absence of solid evidence.  All it does is hold such people up to mockery, and try to make them look like buffoons.  It may be amusing, but it isn't enlightening.

On the other hand, we have The Slender Man here.  This is something that some people apparently do believe in, not merely in the absence of evidence, but with all available evidence actively pointing to the whole thing being an outright fabrication.  So, why?  The skeptical heathen in me would say that once you've removed evidence and reasonable argument, you're left with little more than wishful thinking.  But this comes off as more derogatory and cynical than I intend for it too.  "Wishful Thinking" isn't just the refuge of delusional fools.  It's a significant part of all our lives.  It fuels our dreams and, as the insistence on The Slender Man shows, even our nightmares.  It is a necessary ingredient of any leap of faith, and some leaps are greater than others.  It can lead us astray, but it doesn't necessarily always lead us into error, and this is where our more prudent sides look for proof.  Sometimes we rely on evidence not just as a map of reality, but also as a way of tracking landmarks in our flights of fancy, something to tell us that we might not just be kidding ourselves.  And we all do this.  We all get out ahead of our more sober judgment at times, pursuing the intriguing possibilities.  It may even be an indispensable part of human existence, something we couldn't function without.  It may drive us to make fools of ourselves at times, but before people get too smug in their mockery, they should remember that we all chase our own spaghetti monsters in one form or another.

The cautious, incremental steps of the scientific method are an invaluable aid for keeping us grounded, and keeping us from getting too carried away by these impulses.  But people like Richard Dawkins sometimes come to think of the scientific method as a lens through which you view the world, instead of a tool with which you check your work.  There's always something to be said for dreaming, for speculating, for following a crazy idea just to see where it leads.  It might even lead you to a open clearing of breath-taking truth that you wouldn't have found otherwise.  

Now, Doug, that's a stickman with angst ;)