The real meaning of the Blessed Virgin's apparitions on the wall of a Chicago underpass, on a California griddle, and in an Arizona pancake

TASHA YAR: Humans often imagine pictures in clouds, Data. Like the ship in that one over there.

DATA: That behavior seems quite irrational. And besides- that particular cloud is clearly a bunny rabbit.

--Star Trek: The Next Generation

The Blessed Virgin- last seen on a  griddle in a Mexican restaurant in California after a holdover appearance at the Fullerton Avenue underpass in Chicago- has made yet another appearance: on a pancake in Arizona.

She certainly is well-traveled.

Meanwhile, Galle Crater in Agyre Planitia on Mars wants you to have a happy day. But beware of dead Communists inhabiting your shower curtain!

I've blogged on Mary's travels before.  The inappropriate places where her image is thought to appear are often quite humorous, and a little gentle fun probably should be poked at those who take such "miracles" too seriously. But what is, in fact, going on here is a phenomenon called pareidolia, from two Greek words translatable roughly as "false" and "image." 

Pareidolia are generally dismissed as people's imaginations getting the better of them or as purely subjective and utterly psychological phenomena. Obviously, this is often the case, and I am not suggesting that there is necessarily much if any, significance to the exceptions. While one person I showed it to thinks that the Virgin of the Underpass actually looks more like Edvard Munch's The Scream than like the Mother of God (and I have to admit that it's easier for me to see the former in it than the latter), the fact is that it takes quite a bit of imagination to see either one in that particular salt stain on the wall of an underpass where salt stains are far more common than either impressionist paintings or miraculous apparitions.

Hey, guys. It's a salt stain- and although it has a vaguely anthropomorphic shape, it really doesn't look like anything else.

However, I would suggest that the Galle Crater on Mars really falls into a completely different category. No imagination is required here. In fact, it's hard not to see the joke:

Or consider another actual feature on the surface of the Red Planet. Is it even remotely possible not to see something here other than your average, run-of-the-mill graben in this?

The above is not your imagination. That doesn't mean that they are necessarily significant in any way other than being coincidences of form. But they are real. They are physical phenomena, not psychological ones, and the resemblance they bear to, respectively, a smiley face and a valentine heart exist is perfectly objective.

You might even say the same thing about an interesting feature of the asteroid Eros (of all the asteroids in the Solar System!), discovered (the feature, that is) by NASA's NEAR Shoemaker probe three days before Valentine's Day in 2000: The arrow points to the feature in question. And no, before anybody even suggests it, none of these pictures are faked or altered in any way. They are just as they came from NASA.

If you have either a sense of wonder or humor, such phenomena are apt to bring a smile to your face. Coincidences? Fine. They need to be nothing more. In fact, the very incongruity of the coincidence is what makes them funny. If they were merely subjective, psychological phenomena, we wouldn't be nearly so amused. But such coincidences are funny because they combine incongruity with the very objectivity of their resemblance to other- and wholly unrelated- things. They're sort of like optical puns.

There is a nebula that seems rather clearly to resemble a naked man with a somewhat elongated waist. His back turned to us, making an... er, defiant gesture with his very oversized right hand lifted high above his head. It is actually known among astronomers as the "Rude Gesture Nebula." 

I always dreaded having my junior high students from the astronomy course I used to teach for the Des Moines Public Schools Talented and Gifted Program find a picture of it while we were working online. It obviously has no cosmic meaning. But when so many people see the same incongruous thing in such an unlikely place, how can it be dismissed as a purely subjective, psychological phenomenon? Random, yes. But the resemblance itself is objective.

Not everybody smiles, however. There are people who, not so much because they are of a materialistic bent because they lack both a sense of humor and a sense of wonder, cannot bear for the incongruity to be real. Some years ago, the European Space Agency (ESA) undertook a determined assault on the Smiley Face aspect of the Galle crater, determined to prove that, like the better-known "Face on Mars" in Cydonia, it is nothing more than a trick of lighting or perspective.

So great was their determination to prove their point (in a manner just about diametrically opposed to anything that could reasonably be called scientific) that- perhaps without intending or even realizing it- they cooked the evidence. I did a lengthy post on the subject here. To summarize my point, this picture of the Galle crater- from so close and so shallow an angle that its features cannot be made out- proves that the "Smiley Face" isn't really about as much as taking a closeup of a man's nose and then pointing out that no mouth is seen proves that what was photographed was not part of a human face!

Lighten up, ESA. Coincidences can be both amusing and delightful. And whether you are comfortable with the idea or not, sometimes pareidolia are coincidences of objective resemblance rather than mere subjective perceptions or figments of the imagination. In fact, the more incongruously objective the resemblance- the more incongruously anything, really- the more amusing a pareidolion is.

So you can be an absolute materialist- a convinced atheist, even- and still both perceive and enjoy the incongruity of an objective resemblance between a natural phenomenon and something which is obviously unrelated to it. Moreover, the greater the incongruity, the more fun even a mere coincidence ends up being. Not only is such a thing possible for a materialist and skeptic, but  I would guess that when this increasingly lengthy post started, you may well have thought that I myself was treading on the border of disrespect for those who look for revelations of the divine in the created order.

But in fact, I am more than respectful of such people. I am one myself. I am- in case you don't realize it or have lost sight of the fact in the course of reading this entry- a conservative Christian clergyman. But I don't look for Jesus on the walls of underpasses, or on griddles, or in pancakes. I recognize that some of the pictures in the slide show linked to early in this post really do look like Jesus, or Mary, or Michael Jackson, or Lenin, and I enjoy the incongruity.

I see plenty of support for my religious beliefs in the phenomenal world. In fact, the very presence of life on this planet requires such an amazing number of happy coincidences that I find atheism implausible and even agnosticism eccentric. The presence of a planet the mass of Jupiter at a distance from Earth sufficient to allow it to so efficiently "play goalie" for us when comets come whizzing in from the Oort Cloud, for example, and the presence of a moon exactly the size of ours at the exact distance necessary to stabilize Earth's precession on its axis and keep us from temperature extremes which would make life impossible here, and our presence in the Solar System between Venus and Mars, exactly at a distance from the sun necessary for life, all speak to me of a Mind behind the universe. That it should all be an accident seems to me to be pretty much a matter of the classic monkey banging away on a typewriter and just happening to produce Shakespeare's Hamlet by accident. Except it seems to me to be a tad less likely.

I concede that, from a strictly scientific point of view, given the vastness of the universe, it is not quite as implausible as one might think at first to suggest that some monkey somewhere might produce a fair copy of the play about the melancholy Dane- and why not here? I don't find this counter-argument especially convincing, but as an old debater, I know the difference between something seeming unlikely and something actually disproven. While it proves absolutely nothing, I see the Smiley Face on Mars as suggesting (not proving) the possibility (not the scientific certainty) that there is not only a Creator but that He has a sense of humor.

No, pareidolia are not always a matter of mere, subjective imagination. But sometimes they are. Subjectively, they may, to a greater or lesser extent, be highly suggestive of many things. But they are not proof of anything. On the other hand, so powerful is the human imagination that people of faith, no less than people of science, need to insist on that distinction.

As a Christian, I base my faith on the teachings of Jesus and His apostles, whom I take for reliable guides regarding the nature of God and of my relationship to Him. And being a Christian, I look for-and, I believe, find- God in His definitive revelation in the person of Jesus Christ. But my imagination is both too active and too seductive for me to waste time reading meaning into incongruous resemblances between physical phenomena and my Lord and Savior- or any of His relations. If the resemblance is striking enough, I'll smile. But I won't regard it as proving very much, whatever it may suggest. Nor will I describe it as a miracle without considerable corroborating evidence; God's sense of humor is too acute, pareidolia are too common, my imagination is too active, and the stakes are too high.

 I do not look for the divine in subjective feelings, subjective "signs" that are susceptible to interpretation and manipulation, the vagaries of my own imagination- or on the walls of underpasses, on grills, or in pancakes.

In bread and wine, yes. But not in pancakes.