I grew up with a love for reading. Learning to read came early in my life, starting with Dr. Seuss and progressing on to more sophisticated books. When I was in third and fourth grades, I read the novelizations of my favorite movies at least twice: Gremlins and The Goonies. When I was in fifth grade, though, I discovered chain reading. Like chain smoking, I went from one book to the next in a seemingly never-ending progression through the story lines of my favorite fictional characters: Frank and Joe Hardy. The Hardy Boys had a penchant for mysteries. Sons of the world-famous detective Fenton Hardy, the boys always found themselves at the center of some mysterious goings on: a house where the floor disappears but all the furniture stays aloft; a phantom freighter that eludes any and all attempted capture; a dead pilot broadcasts an enigmatic radio message. With their friends and girlfriends, the Hardy Boys eventually solved each mystery by the twentieth chapter, walking through the evidence and how they pieced it all together. I was lucky. My mother fully supported my reading habit and as my love for Hardy mysteries deepened, she funded my eventual whole collection of their first one hundred thirteen books and thirty of their young adult series, Hardy Boys Casefiles. The Hardy Boys presented me with my first adventures in skepticism, as it were. A lot of their mysteries began with supernatural happenings: ghosts, hauntings, mysterious strangers, extraordinary creatures and general mysterious goings on. However, in the end, the young detectives always figured out the prosaic, unsupernatural explanation for the mystery. While I certainly loved Hardy Boys mysteries, the best part was the end where you finally figured out the answer(s). Among other things, when you pick up a mystery novel, you expect to find: 1) an interesting story and characters; 2) a mystery that is not easily/apparently solvable; 3) clues/happenings that lead to certain conclusions; 4) red herrings; and finally, 5) a believable, satisfying solution that fits all the clues/evidence presented in the story and does not cheat. Two of the most lucrative fictional genres today are romance and mystery. Even a mediocre author who can put together an interesting plot can sell a book in these genres easier than they can sell the next great American novel. But why? While romance fulfills that part of us that longs for interpersonal passion, mystery novels appeal to something quite different: wonder. Everyone likes a good mystery, right? Mysteries make us think and can easily draw us in to the drama of the story. We are interested in the characters, yes, but we also pay attention to the clues. We piece them together and come to certain conclusions: Mrs. Peacock in the Library with the Revolver, for instance. But I've been talking about mysteries of a novel sort. What about other types of mysteries? All around us are natural mysteries. We wonder at them. Why is the sky blue? How do birds fly? Why do stars only come out at night? Questions like these tug at our wonder strings. We humans like to figure things out, and we're pretty good at it. We know now why the sky is blue, how birds fly and why the stars only come out at night, but we didn't come to know for certain until recently in our history. However, there are other natural mysteries that we don't have answers to. Is there life on other planets? How did life start here? How does the brain work? And then there are other types of mysteries, supernatural/metaphysical mysteries: Does God exist? Is morality universal or relative? Is there life after death? These mysteries are different from natural ones because the answers cannot be found by empirical means. Here, answers come in deeper shades of gray than we may find of natural mysteries. For instance, all logical proofs for the existence of God fail or have a fatal flaw; however, arguments against the existence of God also fall flat. These supernatural/metaphysical mysteries present both an intellectual and spiritual struggle for us to come to some final answer. But because of the very nature of the questions, one can never truly know. The wonder of mysteries captivates us and we cannot help but try to find the answers. Or at least some of us. As puzzling as it may seem, some are so fascinated by mysteries that they do not wish to find any answers at all. For them, a mystery is something to revere and any attempt to answer it, they say, destroys the beauty of the mystery. Does it? The job of a magician is to fool an audience. Magicians are masters of deception, performing tricks without letting the audience know how they are done: pulling a rabbit out of an empty hat, sawing a person in half and putting them back together, causing someone to float in midair. The mystery, of course, is in how the trick is done. Most, if not all, people do not put any stock into the idea that magicians perform any “real” magic. The magician and the audience conspire with each other to suspend disbelief in magic for the purposes of entertainment. However, every person in an audience cannot help but think “How did he do that?” Magicians have a code of not revealing their secrets. The reason they do not, they say, is because to tell the secret destroys the magic. In some sense, this is true: once you know the answer, there’s no more mystery (which is the fun part). Often enough, I’ve seen magicians doing their tricks and someone sitting nearby laughs cynically, saying, “I know how he did that – that’s easy.” For me, though, the experience of magic is quite different. When I see a trick, I wonder how it is done and may even try to find out. But solving the mystery does not destroy its magic. In fact, it illuminates it. Finding out how a trick is done makes me appreciate it that much more. The more clever or subtle the trick, the better. Knowing the answer to the mystery of the trick gives one a new perspective and admiration for the magician. Similarly for natural mysteries, finding the answer can illuminate the mystery, not destroy it. Take a flower, for instance. Some may see a flower and marvel at its beauty and decry attempts to understand it scientifically. However, another may see its beauty, yes, but also understand its delicate, complex structure: how it converts carbon dioxide to oxygen, how it reproduces, how it gathers water from the ground, etc. For me, knowing these things about a flower makes me see more than its physical beauty; its beauty encompasses all its intricate dimensions, not just its appearance. Answering natural mysteries also causes something else to happen: more mysteries. As soon as you answer one, another pops up, like an insatiable child constantly asking “Why?” You may know how a bird can fly, but how did it develop that ability? If you know how it developed that ability, how did the bird come into being? If you know how it came into being, what caused it to exist? And so on. Each new answer brings a new question, sometimes even more than one. So, the mystery deepens even as you solve it. While we can appreciate a mystery at face value, doing nothing to discover its answer is not just boring, its an appeal to ignorance. We can sit and wonder at a flower’s outer beauty, or discover its inner beauty as well. There are no limits to where mysteries can lead and even if you find one hard to solve, that in itself broadens its mystery. It’s not the mystery of mystery that is mysterious; the answers they produce are what’s mysterious. Typically: smugglers, gangs of thieves, extortionists, and (frequently enough) the mysterious antagonist turns out to be the person who hired them (to throw off police suspicions). While it is true that one cannot prove a negative (which is why defendants are innocent until proven guilty), arguments can still be made about the nature of the idea of God. For instance, the “problem of evil” argument attempts to show that the existence of evil in the world does not mesh with an omnibenevolent God. While I do find this to be a pretty good argument in general, I find its conclusions as unsatisfying as some of the proofs for God. Many attest that they are 100% certain they know the answers (e.g., because of divine revelation); however, humans are often mistaken for good and bad reasons both. To be absolutely sure, one would have to be omniscient. “Real” magic being what you may find in a fantasy novel. Credit must be given here to the late physicist Richard Feynman who used this example. Likewise, finding out how a magician’s trick is done forces magicians to come up with new, better tricks to fool us with (which adds to the fun).