Prairiefire52, a new OS blogger, recently posed a question:
If you don't believe in the supernatural, what exactly is it you don't believe in?
Coming up with an answer turned out to be more challenging (and interesting) than I'd expected. Here goes.
We're all familiar with the natural world, the world we interact with every day. What would count as supernatural? Is it things that we don't understand about the world? Not quite. The ancients might have believed that lightning was a supernatural force, but now we have a relatively good way of explaining how it comes about. Simply because we don't understand something doesn't make it supernatural--we might gain an understanding of it tomorrow, bringing it under the umbrella of nature.
What about events or situations that violate our current understanding of nature? We could say that these are supernatural, but again that's not really satisfying. We might revise our scientific theories or even the way we look at the everyday world. I'll pick on the ancients again: Aristotle asserted that a vacuum could not exist, but of course he turned out to be wrong. Our understanding of the world has changed, moving the impossible into the possible.
What about stuff that can't be explained by science, or even logic? This is a plausible candidate for the supernatural. For example, we might imagine an omnipotent being--but omnipotence itself is a problem, if we remember the story about the wizard who claims to be able to do anything at all. When asked to create a rock so heavy even he can't lift it, he gives up in the face of the logical contradiction. That's enough for me: I don't believe in this kind of supernatural.
There's one subtlety we might think about here. Some statements about the supernatural aren't open to observation. For example, it might be that human consciousness continues after the death of the body, perhaps by some supernatural mechanism, so that we don't have any real evidence for it. I also don't believe in this sort of supernatural. Now, I could be wrong about this. We might find evidence for survival of consciousness after death, in which case I'd have to adjust my beliefs. That's okay, though; I'm good with contingent disbelief in things that don't seem plausible.
The upshot is that if the supernatural is something that is in principle beyond our ability to understand and explain, no matter how smart or knowledgeable we might be, then that's what I don't believe in. I do think we'll always have mysteries in the world, and some of these mysteries are awe-inspiring. But we should never stop trying to figure it all out.
I'll end this rambling post with something vaguely related that I once heard Daniel Dennett say: We've all seen magicians perform their acts, and of course we know that they're not doing real magic. Real magic doesn't exist. But isn't that an odd way of putting things? The real thing is the thing that doesn't exist.
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Over a year ago, I wrote this on my blog the following:
"A wonderful Argentinian writer, Mr. Ernesto Sábato, talks about the matter of time and space using with a story which goes something like this :Suppose a person is walking along a winding road on a mountain. Further ahead, after a certain curve, a “puma” (kind of tiger) is walking towards our person in the story. Now imagine that there is another man standing at a viewpoint higher on that mountain, so from his position he can see both, the person walking, and the puma towards him as well. For our walking person, his encounter with the puma is his future. However, for the observer higher on the mountain, that encounter is present, it already exists as a reality. Interesting, isn´t it?"
Sorry for the lengthy answer, Rob!.
Rated,
Marcela
(It's a strange story but that monograph was published in Mythlore, a journal of mythopoeia without my knowledge—I found out through a vanity Google search in a German researcher's vitae bibliography.)
I'm more of a benign agnostic now than I was, with sprinkles of skepticism.
Are you a Catch-22 fan, Robin? I'm thinking of Yossarian, the supraman, of course.
I liked that line, too, Plain Grit. Dennett has a way with words, even if I've only given a paraphrase.
Bart, that's a good question, the nature of religion. There's supernatural and supernatural. I think of religion as being a lot more comprehensive than a belief system, since it's tied up so closely with people's morals, social interactions, behaviors, and so forth. So I'll have to pass. :-)
But if by supernatural one means of otherworldly cause -- not so much. And as far as I'm concerned the onus is on the claimant to offer some sort of rationale for such claim. Saying "I believe" is not an offer of proof, in fact, it doesn't even qualify as a hypothesis, it is merely a weak tautology.
which measured the weight of consciousness as 21 grams. People who were dying were weighed on scales built into hospital beds before they died and then after they died. The difference was always 21 grams. Something to think about.
That's assuming that there's a need to convince the listener of what usually amounts to a personal truth :). There are things I believe due to proof that satisfies my requirements for such - but they're my truths. Each of us have to find our own truths, not expect others to bring us their proof ;).
I'll agree with Marcela here, supernatural is as yet only a mystery waiting to be understood - if not in this lifetime then perhaps the next ;).
McGarrett, you ask an interesting question. Is mathematics natural? It's not supernatural, of course, but my understanding is that philosophers have thought hard about the nature of math, whether it's part of the universe or something we've imposed on the universe. (WVO Quine wrote a great piece called "On what there is", in which he discusses the existence of universals, which I think is related. Unfortunately, I don't understand everything he wrote, but here's one aspect of it: Let's agree that there exist red houses in the world. They're real. If there exist many red houses throughout the world, does that mean that the universal category of red houses exists in reality in the same way as the individual houses? People can disagree about this. It's interesting because it raises questions about the nature of numbers.)
Cindy, I share your distaste for some beliefs. I sometimes wonder when someone says, "Please respect my beliefs," whether that's a reasonable thing. I mean, we can respect human beings, but should we respect the abstract things floating around in their heads? Maybe they're not the kinds of things that it's reasonable to respect, any more than we'd think it reasonable to say, "Please respect this chair."
On why we have to believe things, though: There's a view that says, in essence, that knowledge is true and justified belief. That is, you can't know something without believing it. An example I like is someone who's just won the lottery and says, "I knew I would win!" If that person hasn't cheated, then they actually didn't know it. They believed it, and it turned out to be true, but it wasn't a justified belief.
Hi, Denise! I'm still catching up here...
On the general idea of assertion without evidence or proof, yup, that's mainly what I object to.
Hi, Deven, I'm glad to see you here. (That is, now that I'm here too.) Are you writing a book of movie reviews? I hope so. In case not enough other people have been encouraging you to do this...
Julie, astrology is something, I'm sorry to say, that I actively dislike. The prediction and explanation parts. But as a way of interpreting and structuring one's experiences, the way that writers and poets have relied on mythology throughout history to give insight into the human condition--that I'm okay with.
Hey, Cap'n, my best to you. You and Seer raise an interesting point: One reason I'm skeptical about an afterlife, for example, is that it's hard to think of anything better if you wanted to give people hope about the troubles they might have in their lives. Hope and optimism are great, of course, but I like them to be justified. Of course, this is my belief, and as you say, Seer, we all have our own personal truths; if these truths are the sort of thing that aren't open to observation or explanation, and we belive in different truths, we have to leave them unsettled.
Hi, Poppi. I appreciated your apology for recent events in northern Europe; it was big of you. Consciousness is a tough nut, and we've haven't cracked it yet. So I keep an open mind. On the issue of whether we lose weight when we die, I think that people have studied this phenomenon and not been able to reproduce it. But this is from memory, so I could be wrong.
good post, Rob
if by nature we mean the whole of the observable universe, then supernatural is an oxymoron
This is a very good summary of my difficulty in getting a handle on what supernatural means. Thanks.
I have actually come to the conclusion that this is pretty much what is supposed to be. It basically comes down to this critter called 'faith', and I don't mean that in a religious sense as much as simply a spirit sense - if we are going to have something that we believe in that is outside of our 'self'. Some of us are inclined to do this, some of us aren't, and I don't think either way is 'right' or 'wrong' - we're all on a learning curve here ;).
I've learned to not trust most religions because there's too much 'man' in them, and I don't trust a lot of science because they've had to reorder themselves and their convictions often enough - as further learning occurred - to tell me that nothing is really 'concrete', life is really just a huge conglomerate of 'abstracts'. 'We' have learned a lot over the centuries, but it's a proverbial drop in a bucket compared to what we don't yet know - and may never figure out, we don't even know all of the questions that can be asked :).
I think that's the way it's supposed to be, this not knowing.
Seriously, what comes *after* all of the questions are answered? What happens then? I don't remember if it was Tor or Dr Spud (or someone else ;) that said it wasn't the answers that were important, it was asking the questions, sort of 'it's not the end of the journey that's important, but how we get there'.
Is there a design to all of this? Personally I believe so, for me personally, to think it's all an 'accident' just doesn't make sense - but that's *me*. Do I have a clue of what that design might be? Or who the designer is? Not a bit of it :D. But I've decided I don't care, that doesn't matter. I don't have to have those particular answers to carry on. I'm here, wherever 'here' is and whatever 'I' am, all I'm interested in is seeing what happens next ;).
As the newbie OS blogger who originally posed the question, “If you don't believe in the supernatural, what exactly is it you don't believe in,” I’m sitting here in my kitchen trying to be an emotional grown-up about the fact that when Rob asked, he started a discussion of 33 responses on his blog not including this one, while I got exactly and precisely one (his) on mine.
Oh, well. It’s Friday night and I’ve got some Piesporter in me, so I’ll accept my newbie status and be glad that my question started an interesting conversation somewhere.
First: Congratulations on the book contract! Oxford! My first husband went there as an undergraduate. He turned out to be a jerk. (Ooops. Damn that wine.) Good publishing house.
Second: I am with those commenters who expressed awareness that it’s a mistake actively to disbelieve everything we do not yet understand. The arrogant, pseudo-scientific attitude that something cannot be ‘real’ until science has at least acknowledged it as something that can be studied is the irritant that prompted me to pose that question in the first place.
Firestorm, I very much appreciate “Supernatural: That which does not have any physical interaction with the known or unknown components of our physical existence.” I’m going to mull that one a while. As attractive as that definition is, it might be useless. If something has no interaction with our physical world, why would any material being care about it? People are motivated to debate the ‘supernatural’ only to the extent that they claim or deny its effects on our material world.
Other than that, I’ll say that I’m in agreement with Seer’s and Rob’s last posts on this topic.
And about belief: I like something Carl Sagan wrote in 1995 about belief in (I recall) The Demon-haunted World.: He pointed out that you can say ‘I believe Pluto is the ninth planet from the sun’ (Remember, 1995) and you can say ‘I believe Pluto governs creation, destruction, and regeneration,’ but unless you can say whyyou believe that, there is no difference in the nature of those beliefs.
Sagan was making a point in support of science education; I take a different lesson. I perceive that we operate on the basis of belief a thousand times every day--so frequently that if we had to justify--even to ourselves--every belief before we act on it, we would be unable to function. Belief (faith, if you will) has an important functional role to play in humans' daily lives. We just have to figure out how to tell when we're using it wisely, and when we're using it foolishly.
I'm sorry for having left you out of this conversation (I hope my personal message [PM] gives enough of an explanation why--poor judgment and a lack of communication skill on my part).
I should say that there are some parts of your post that I do agree with: that sometimes when people make assertions about what can and cannot be the case on scientific grounds, they're sliding over into philosophical territory.
Last night, I had the privilege to chat with Steve Paulson, host of NPR's "To the Best of Our Knowledge" and author of "Atoms and Eden." (http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/ReligionTheology/Theory/?view=usa&ci=9780199743162)
He used the word "supernatural" several times, so I asked him what he meant by it.
Paulson suggested a solution that can enable conversation and thought about phenomenon we don't yet understand, without forcing us either to close-mindedly dismiss it or mindlessly accept unproven nonsense.
When Paulson wants to refer to an event or phenomenon that cannot yet be explained with anything we have learned through scientific methods, he uses the term "paranormal." A simple, descriptive label: "outside normal." No judgment, no presumption about whether it happened or, if it did, what caused it.
He uses the term "supernatural" to refer not to the paranormal phenomena themselves, but to unscientific or anti-scientific explanations of their causes or nature.
Paulson gave an example. His father had, years ago, glanced up from his desk at a photograph of Paulson's grandfather (his own father.) As Paulson's father looked at the photograph, he saw the grandfather walking away from him through a door. Paulson said his father, whose profession involved careful objective observation (I forget what Steve said it was), noted the time of the odd occurrence, and went back to his work. An hour or so later, the telephone rang and--you guessed it--the grandfather had died at the same time Poulson's father, half a world away, looked at a portrait and perceived a moving image in a still photograph.
Paulson told me that his father had related this event to him with a legitimately scientific attitude: He described an experience, provided relevant information (time, place, etc.) and said that it surprised and puzzled him. Plain-vanilla paranormal.
Had Paulson's father told him "Your grandfather's spirit sent a message to me through his photograph," Paulson would have considered that to be a story of the "supernatural," that is, a non-scientific explanation or interpretation.
With that definition, a person can say "I do not believe in the supernatural" while maintaining a legitimately scientific open-mindedness.