Do fantasy creatures really exist?

No

5 of 12

by Paul Chalmers

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This is an epistemological issue, and its crux is the idea that we make judgments about whether to believe based not only on the merits of the isolated case, but on that belief's coherence with other beliefs, which we already hold and want to continue holding. In a sense it is the idea that the merits of believing in a case cannot be isolated; they are composed of the truth of the case in point's relationship with other things believed to be true.

So why do I say this has a bearing on the existence of fantasy creatures? Because if we were to believe in a fantasy creature we would either have to discard many other beliefs, which would be epistemologically unwise, or incorporate our understanding of the nature of that creature into our prevailing and 'naturalistic' world view. So, we might be held to explain the unicorn's place in evolutionary history, for example. The distinction between 'fantasy creature' and 'rare creature' would thereby collapse; it is up to you whether you think it can survive this collapse, but it seems that to do so it would need to become a lot more mundane, and not really carry the same sense.

A similar logic applies to belief in miracles; in taking their occurrence to be physically true, we must either say that they are an aberration from physical law, in which case the logic is to disregard them as a mistake as with any strange data, or that they are explained by a yet undiscovered physical law. The latter option would render them mundane (and not miracles, perhaps). The similarity between miracles and fantasy creatures seems to be that they both require a 'specialness' that separates them from the normal scientific world, yet to properly believe in them we need to incorporate them into this scientific world.

An interesting manifestation of this need is in modern children's fantasy books. Cases in point; Harry Potter, Northern Lights (et al). Both of these seem to use pseudo-scientific explanations to weave the magical sub world of the main characters into the real world which surrounds them, and of course which the reader is a part of. Examples might be the universal of 'dust' or the making of the Amber Spyglass in the Dark Materials trilogy, the endangered status of griffons in Harry Potter, or the methodological way in which magic is practiced; importantly with actions and objects not available to the reader in his life for comparative experimentation. The fact that these explanations are not truly scientific is not a problem; the truly believing reader does not have the background knowledge to perceive the incongruity. Both make use not only of explanations of how their magic fits into our world (with pseudo science) but also of separation to explain difference.

So Harry Potter manages to convince us of how it is that we have never seen magic; firstly we are incapable by birth, and secondly magic is more or less forbidden in anywhere can actually locate. Northern Lights manages to do it by actually having very little magic in the world we are located in; that mainly goes on in one of the parallel worlds. The strange differences, which would be magical and hard to understand as a part of our world, are presented as part of the 'science' that applies to the whole of one of the parallel worlds. So everyone in Lyra's world has a daemon. This works with the current consensus that different, although necessarily self-coherent, scientific laws could rule a different universe. We see sense in this, because it is a separate system. So our consensus on normality here does not threaten belief in magical occurrences elsewhere, and the occurrences elsewhere do not force us into confusion over our own, quite different experience.

So, do fantasy creatures exist? The answer is a rather difficult 'not here'. They do not exist in our system; they cannot, because belief in such creatures would either be illogical, or render them mundane. You have to consider for yourself whether a phoenix that is an evolutionary branch from the pigeon would really count as a fantasy creature. The 'not here' clause, exemplified by the success of young adult fantasy novels to convince us of magical reality interacting with normal reality, is interesting. But we have to consider that this relies on the creation of a different system in which the magic is possible, one which we can have no evidence of. If we have evidence of it, it is thereby a part of our system; it falls under our epistemological rules.

The plausibility of both Harry Potter and Dark Materials started to fall apart towards the end, because the plot required channels between the systems; they were the magical and the normal were in fact weakly presented as the same system. In Harry Potter, the threat from Voldemort affected normal people towards the end; which we should have seen, but didn't, and in Dark Materials, the threat from to all
universes was supposed to mean our scientists would be starting to research 'Dust'. The plausibility remains only as a threat about the future, because the future is out of our grasp. So it is interesting to note that while many readers of HP might have been imagining the exploits going on currently, when the mentions of evil interaction (explained as 'terrorist incidents') with the normal world started to creep in, they would be likely to mentally move the location of the story into the future. We can obviously explain why we have not perceived things that happened in the future. It is either this or rely on genuine lack of knowledge again, which is actually quite plausible considering the average 9 year-old's nebulous understanding of world affairs (terrorists are evil wizards). But not the average 14 year-old's. This makes what seems like a mundane point, but is actually quite profound. We do not actually believe these fantasies, or do not forever. Often actual belief is a very good indicator of what is rational to believe. But this article was not just about rationality, it was about the necessary inextricability of belief and mundanity, about the fact that fantasy creatures cannot exist because existence is the antithesis of the fantastical.

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