The Spiritual World

JULES I just been sittin‘ here thinkin‘.

VINCENT About what?

JULES The miracle we witnessed.

VINCENT The miracle you witnessed. I witnessed a freak occurrence.

JULES Do you know that a miracle is?

VINCENT An act of God.

JULES What’s an act of God?

VINCENT I guess it’s when God makes the impossible possible. And I’m sorry Jules, but I don’t think what happened this morning qualifies.

JULES Don’t you see, Vince, that shit don’t matter. You’re judging this thing the wrong way. It’s not about what. It could be God stopped the bullets, he changed Coke into Pepsi, he found my fuckin‘ car keys. You don’t judge shit like this based on merit. Whether or not what we experienced was an according-to-Hoyle miracle is insignificant. What is significant is I felt God’s touch, God got involved.

― Dialogue between Jules (right) and Vincent (left) in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction

Modern science appears to have given us an incredibly detailed map of the world, but closer inspection reveals surprising blind spots and gaps. Questions like why subjective consciousness arises at all or if all miracles can be accounted for seem to lie outside mechanistic descriptions of nature. These questions inherently cannot be reduced to current physical laws and our empirical experience with them often undermine our neat mechanical narratives about the world .

The Hard Problem of Consciousness

One famous blind spot for mechanical descriptions of the world is subjective experience. We can describe how neurons fire and how an animal behaves, but why these physical processes are accompanied by “what it is like” to feel, see red, or taste sweetness remains mysterious. Philosophers call this the “hard problem of consciousness”. Even if we fully explain all functional and structural brain processes, we “can still meaningfully ask…why is it conscious?”, suggesting that an explanation of consciousness may need something beyond standard science.

In other words, there appears to be an unbridgeable gap: a complete physical account of the brain could leave unanswered whether the creature is conscious at all. We can even coherently imagine a creature physically identical to us that lacks any subjective feelings. This indicates that purely structural explanations omit the “what it’s like” of experience, the qualia, creating an irreducible divide between description and experience.

Treating thought as symbol manipulation makes sense for behavioral functions but it does not, on its face, explain why those functions should carry a first-person feel. Neural imaging and brain scans reveal correlations (patterns of voltage, activation, and circuitry), but they never capture the inner, qualitative character. For example, a brain scan might detect the color “red” in the visual cortex, but it cannot render the redness itself; it only shows voltages, not the phenomenal quality of red. In this sense, consciousness behaves like evidence of something beyond the physical realm. Explaining syntax (brain processes) does not exhaust semantics (the meaning or feeling of experience).

Conciousness can only be described through phenomenology or first-person experience. This conclusion may feel uncomfortable to modern ears, but it simply reflects that science, powerful as it is, might not capture every aspect of reality. Treating consciousness as describable through science is a lie.

Miracles and Epistemic Blind Spots

A second area of puzzlement lies in miracles and one-off events. David Hume famously defined a miracle as an event that violates natural law. He reasoned that our uniform experience establishes those natural laws so firmly that any single contrary event is a harder story to swallow than to doubt the eyewitness. He argued that because we have never observed, say, a dead person returning to life, “firm and unalterable experience” provides what he calls a full proof against any miracle occurring. Hume concluded, in effect, that no testimony should be believed unless the lie in the testimony would itself be even more miraculous than the event claimed.

This witty calculus treats highly improbable events as virtually impossible: if someone claims a violation of nature, we weigh the miracle against the fallibility of the witness, and always assume the more straightforward explanation (error, hoax, delusion).

But singular events or divine interventions, which occur only once by nature, lie outside the scope of standard experiments, making them effectively invisible to science. In practice, this means any unique occurrence is excluded a-priori: if an event can’t be reproduced or systematically observed, it does not count as data. Thus, science can be “blind by design” to genuine novelties not fitting inductive reasoning.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s famous “Turkey Problem” illustrates the danger of this inductive certainty. In the problem each day a turkey observes benevolent treatment and its confidence in “farmers love turkeys” grows stronger. Yet on Thanksgiving the farmer kills the flock: an unforeseen, high-impact event (Taleb calls this a ‘Black Swan Event’). This parable highlights how scientific overconfidence can be fatally misled by relying only on past patterns.

For the turkey, Thanksgiving was paranormal event (a miracle). A genuine surprise beyond prior expectation and beyond the realm of prediction. If we close our minds to miracles or exceptional events simply because they violate current laws then they become invisible. They don’t become invisible because they never happen, but because our scientific ruleship won’t record them.

Conclusion.

The map of science is not the territory of reality. Science maps parts of the cosmos, but beyond its edges lie phenomena that demand other lenses and methods. Recognizing these limits is not a betrayal of science but a commitment to honesty about what we know and have the capacity to describe.