Why the Dog Howled in the Night

Bear with me a minute:

Four travelers find themselves at a strange house.  They are greeted by a man who tells them he has a sick uncle upstairs who is near death, but not under immediate threat of death because the Black Dog, which comes around and howls when people are going to die, has not yet appeared.  Later in the evening, the men are startled to hear howling, and on looking out the window, they see a black dog is the source of the noise.  Thinking to frighten off the black dog, they begin to throw things at the dog. Some beef tea is thrown, whereupon the dog starts lapping up the tea.  It turns out it is a real dog, a stray which was wandering by.  Not a phantom after all.  Relieved, the men turn away from the widow.  The sick uncle is dead.

That’s the plot of Stephen Crane’s “The Black Dog.”  So, was the legend of the Black Dog who howls at the approach of death confirmed or not?

The modern mind has no trouble with this question.  There is no mystical black dog.  The fact that a real black dog happened to show up and howl right at the moment of death is one of those silly contrivances which happen in short stories, and is not worthy of serious contemplation.  But, pause for a second:  suppose the events just described did happen in that order—there is nothing impossible about that series of events.  But, even still, the modern mind has no trouble with the events:  sometimes strange coincidences happen.  After all, with 6 billion people and who knows how many black dogs (where would one go to look up the number of black dogs in the world? I suppose it could be pieced together from Google—I did find a guess that there over 500 million dogs, but I didn’t take the time to discover relative percentages of hair color), it would be highly improbable that at least some deaths do not coincide with the howls of black dogs even if there is no causal relationship between the two.

Suppose we did find a case of Actual Black Dog howling immediately prior at Actual Death.  Why would this not be evidence for the legend of a black dog which howls at the moment of death?  Why, for example, did the fact that the dog was real cause the reader of the story described above to decide this wasn’t a ghost story after all?

We have a curious bias toward physicality in the modern age.  Yet the evidence that all things can be explained by physical causes is shockingly weak.  One need look no farther than the human brain.  Does anyone really believe that an exact copy of your physical body and brain would literally be you—not a copy of you, but actually you?   If it is a copy of you, if it is somehow distinct from you, then there is something about you which transcends the physical structure of you.  As someone once put it: The only known way of reducing Biology to Chemistry is murder. 

So, is it possible for the Black Dog to be both just a normal old stray dog and an incarnation of a legendary being?  Why, if we have a hypothesis that a black dog will howl at death and then we have the existence of a black dog howling at death, do we not think that we have evidence for our hypothesis?  Why am I not now scouring the evidence for black dogs and death?

Truth be told, none of this really puzzles me at all.  It’s just a contrived short story.  (Is that redundant?)  But, why am I so convinced, and really I am convinced, that physical occurrences on Earth have physical explanations?  Why do I discount the mystical?  After all, I do believe in non-physical things; I believe in a non-corporeal soul and a non-corporeal God and non-corporeal angels and demons.  Yet, when looking for explanations of physical things, I immediately assume that the non-corporeal world is not the source of explanation.  I have no problem with a dual explanation—that there is a physical cause and a spiritual cause seems thoroughly plausible.  Consubstantiation in the Eucharist may well have a counterpart in human affairs.  But I have a hard time thinking of events other than the Incarnation (and probably the Resurrection) which I do not assusme can be explained by physical causes.  There is no evidence that this bias is merited.  So, why do I believe it?  There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.  Hamlet was right.  But why don’t I suspect that a causal relationship between the spiritual realm and the physical realm one of those things?

The obvious song.