An atheist in “The Twilight Zone”?

In the early 2010s, the fiancée of a prominent American writer moved from her native Germany to California. Among the heirlooms she brought with her was a broken 1978 Philips transistor radio, a gift from her deceased grandfather, Walter. She had been raised by a single mother, and Walter, a music lover, had played the paternal role in her life until his death when she was sixteen. The radio had been dead since then as well, and the woman’s American fiancé, understanding its significance, tried to get it working—new batteries, new connections, even what he jokingly called the “percussive maintenance” of smacking it hard from different angles. Nothing worked, and the couple placed it in the back of a bedroom drawer and forgot about it. Flash-forward to their wedding day: an exchange of signatures in a Beverly Hills courthouse, an exchange of rings at home with a crowd of family and friends. But most of the crowd was there for the American groom, and his bride, feeling isolated and homesick and wishing that her grandfather had been there to give her away, asked the groom to take her away from the crowd, into the back of the house, where they could hear music playing. Mysterious music, since nothing was turned on—not computers or stereos or iPhones or any other system—and yet the music was a love song, the kind you would play for the first dance at a wedding. Finally they found the source: the grandfather’s broken radio, in the back of the desk drawer, working again for the first time in decades, spilling romantic music into their Californian home. A relative told them that she had heard it begin playing just as the wedding ceremony started. It played all that night, switching from love songs to classical music; the next morning it was dead once more, and it never worked again. In his famous case for presumptively disbelieving in all miracles, the Scottish philosopher David Hume argued that with any supposed witness to the supernatural, however credible they might otherwise appear, it’s always more likely that they are either credulous or lying than that a supernatural event has actually occurred. The Hume rule is set up to be universally discrediting, but if you were looking for someone who would come closest to passing its exacting test, someone with every incentive not to lie or be deceived, the source for this touching not-quite-ghost story is an unusually good candidate. The bridegroom in the story, the American writer, happens to be Michael Shermer, proud atheist, editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and a man who has spent his entire professional career trying to debunk the supernatural. (66-67)