Every now and then, just when you think things cannot get too silly, they do. Case in point: the fact that the news media is actually giving some attention to a woman’s claim that her goldfish cracket is a “sign from God”…
It’s a fishy story, but the woman telling it believes it’s pure gold. The Florida resident says the markings she found on a Goldfish cracker are a direct message affirming her Christian faith.
“I believe that it’s a sign, a sign from God,” Patti Burke told Florida Today. “He is still in our life every day, and he wants to show that to his people.”
It’s not quite manna, but in Burke’s eyes it’s a manifestation of her faith.
The cracker in question has two markings, or imperfections, on its surface. Burke says the first marking is of a cross with a circle around it. The second marking, near the head of the fish, represents a golden crown.
“When I picked this one up, I knew he was special,” she said. “Something I’ve never seen before out of all the Goldfish I’ve eaten.”
Burke admittedly has been working from a large sample size, consuming between two and three pounds of the crackers per week. She says she eats the small crackers individually, examining each one for the optimal amount of savory coating. … [emphasis added]
Umm… yeah. Pardon me, but… IT’S A CRACKER!!! Sorry, I just had to get that out of my system. Come on folks, is it really any surprise that the person making this “miraculous discovery” (which has all the markings of a modern-day “religious relic” such as the infamous Virgin Mary Grill Cheese Sandwich) is a devout Christian? That is the classic marker of pareidolia – our evolution-wired brains are developed for pattern recognition, and one of the most recognized patterns for a Christian is the cross. Throw into the mix a bit of religious fervor (i.e. in this case, devout Christianity) and viola! you have a “miracle” appearance of the cross on a cracker.
Here’s another interesting bit of pareidolia to get you thinking. Years ago a man cut into a melon, and he saw this…
So what, if anything, do you see? If you’re like me, you see some wavy lines which are essentially meaningless. But if you are a devout Muslim who can read Arabic, you will likely see “Allah” (God) written out in Arabic. And, before you roll your eyes, there are people who treat this as seriously as our lady does her cross-marked cracker. So, what this shows you is that the interpretation of these “miracles” is strongly context and culturally specific.
In conclusion, what this all really teaches us about these kinds of “miraculous events” is this: it’s all in your head, folks, and people who believe strongly enough can find amazing ways to validate those beliefs – even if to the rest of us it’s utter gibberish.
It also seems to teach us something about God’s powers, namely that as time goes on the kind of “miracles” that God apparently performs become increasingly mundane, as this graph displays 🙂
I’ve been meaning to post this for awhile, but I keep forgetting to do so. During my summer vacation to the Adirondacks in New York, my wife and I took a break from hiking to get some dinner. As we were getting ready to chow down, lo and behold, I observed the following “miraculous” appearance in my wife’s soup!…
Laugh if you will, unbeliever, but you should tremble in awe at the miraculous appearance of…
Of course it isn’t Mr. Bill in my soup, folks. It’s just another classic case of pareidolia, the same phenomenon by which people think they see dogs or cars in the clouds, the so-called Face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast, or visions of Jesus in a window. Essentially, our brains work as pattern-recognition machines, and one of the most familiar patterns which we are evolutionarily programmed to recognize is other human faces. So we tend to see human (or human-like) faces in bits of random data even when there really is no face there to begin with!
I really like how skeptical magicians Penn & Teller put it during their Bullshit! episode on supposed “miracles”, so I’ll let them have the last word 🙂
The APOD text displays why this is a nice, timely lesson in skepticism:
Explanation: What surrounds the florid Rosette nebula? To better picture this area of the sky, the famous floweryemission nebula on the far right has been captured recently in a deep and dramatic wide field image that features several other sky highlights. Designated NGC 2237, the center of the Rosette nebula is populated by the bright blue stars of open cluster NGC 2244, whose winds and energetic light are evacuating the nebula’s center. Below the famous flower, a symbol of Valentine’s Day, is a column of dust and gas that appears like a rose’s stem but extends hundreds of light years. Across the above image, the bright blue star just left and below the center is called S Monocerotis. The star is part of the open cluster of stars labelled NGC 2264 and known as the Snowflake cluster. To the right of S Mon is a dark pointy featured called the Cone nebula, a nebula likely shaped by winds flowing out a massive star obscured by dust. To the left of S Mon is the Fox Fur nebula, a tumultuous region created by the rapidly evolving Snowflake cluster. The Rosette region, at about 5,000 light years distant, is about twice as far away as the region surrounding S Mon. The entire field can be seen with a small telescope toward the constellation of the Unicorn (Monoceros).
Of course, there isn’t really a great big rose 5,000 light-years away in the sky – this is just another classic example of pareidolia, the phenomenon by which the pattern recognition programming in our brains makes familiar pictures out of otherwise random visual data (or audio data, as in the case with “electronic voice phenomenon”). The whole point is that while our brains might dumbly fill in the gaps and give us the illusion of seeing a rose, we can think at a higher level and see past the illusion to the beautiful reality that lies beneath.
Earlier this week, a news story made the rounds making the somewhat tongue-in-cheek claim that the Hubble Space Telescope had imaged a “cosmic Christmas ornament” in the sky. Here’s the image…
The Hubble Space Telescope has captured a festive view of the cosmos in time for the holiday season, with some saying the picture of a star nursery looks like a wreath, maybe a Christmas tree, or even Santa.
The spacecraft observed a group of young stars called R136, which is only a few million years old and inhabits the 30 Doradus Nebula, part of a relatively nearby satellite galaxy of our Milky Way called the Large Magellanic Cloud.
In the photograph, hundreds of brilliant blue stars are surrounded by a ring of warm, glowing orange clouds of dust. The colorful portrait evokes a giant wreath of pine boughs studded with glowing jewels — sort of. And in the hollow center, the dark shadow has the distinct silhouette of a Christmas tree. Really!
Finally, if flipped 90 degrees clockwise, the image even resembles the face and beard of Santa Claus himself. Somewhat.
Well, whether or not this heavenly view actually has anything to do with the season on Earth, it does teach scientists about what’s happening up above.
This humorous story does a good job of hitting upon the point I wanted to make: what you see in such images, whether they are of “Santa” in a cosmic nebulae in the sky or “Jesus” in a rusty clothing-iron, is the result of a well-known phenomenon called pareidolia. We see familiar patterns because we are trained, by both evolution & our upbringing, to see familiar images even when there’s nothing more than random noise present.
In short, pareidolia is in your head, and different people “see” different things. More than anything, pareidolia tells us a lot about ourselves and what we’re thinking rather than what we believe we’re looking at.
A Massachusetts woman who recently separated from her husband and had her hours cut at work says an image of Jesus Christ she sees on her iron has reassured her that “life is going to be good.”
Mary Jo Coady first noticed the image Sunday when she walked into her daughter’s room.
The brownish residue on the bottom of the iron looks like the face of a man with long hair.
The 44-year-old Coady was raised Catholic. She and her two college-age daughters agree that the image looks like Jesus and is proof that “he’s listening.”
Coady tells The Eagle-Tribune she hopes her story will inspire others during the holidays. She says she plans to keep the iron in a closet and buy a new one.
Umm… yeah. Pardon me, but… IT’S A STAIN!!! Sorry, I just had to get that out of my system. Come on folks, is it really any surprise that the person making this “miraculous discovery” (which has all the markings of a modern-day “religious relic” such as the infamous Virgin Mary Grill Cheese Sandwich) is a devout Catholic? That is the classic marker of pareidolia – our evolution-wired brains are developed for pattern recognition, and one of the most recognized patterns for humans is another human’s face. Throw into the mix a bit of religious fervor (i.e. in this case, devout Catholicism) and viola! you have a “miracle” appearance of Jesus on an iron.
Here’s another interesting bit of pareidolia to get you thinking. Years ago a man cut into a melon, and he saw this…
So what, if anything, do you see? If you’re like me, you see some wavy lines which are essentially meaningless. But if you are a devout Muslim who can read Arabic, you will likely see “Allah” (God) written out in Arabic. And, before you roll your eyes, there are people who treat this as seriously as our Catholic lady does her Jesus-stained iron.
In conclusion, what this all really teaches us about these kinds of “miraculous events” is this: it’s all in your head, folks, and people who believe strongly enough can find amazing ways to validate those beliefs – even if to the rest of us it’s utter gibberish.
Mmmm-kay… I’m not seeing it. But then, I was never a big fan of MJ in the first place. And, of course, if you had never even heard of or seen a picture of MJ, then the blob in the clouds above would likely look to you like… well, like a blob.
The Skeptical Teacher 
