Besides your belief that there is no higher power, what are your thoughts on supernatural phenomena?
Besides your belief that there is no higher power, what are your thoughts on supernatural phenomena?
Lets take a little break from politics and have us a real atheist conversation.
Personally, I'm open to the idea of the existence of supernatural phenomena, and I believe mainstream religions are actually complicated incomplete stories full of misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and half-truths.
Basically, I think that these stories are not as simple and straightforward as they seem to be to religious people. I feel like there is a lot more to them. Concluding that all these stories are just made up or came out of nowhere is kind of hard for me.
Sorry but I'm going to call out what I see as some pretty blatant motte-and-bailey argumentation by the OP and their offense taken to people trying to nail down the definition of supernatural is illustrative.
They have their bailey, belief in things like the occult, ghosts, demons, etc, that are almost certainly bullshit. To the extent that they can be falsified, they have been. This is the typical definition of what people think when you say "supernatural" and people are right to answer "no" when asked if they believe in it.
But then you have OP falling back on their motte when this happens, taking a nebulous definition of supernatural and asking rhetorical philosophical questions about reality, perception, and the unknown. The fallacy is that these questions do nothing to strengthen or refute the original argument about the supernatural.
Nobody is here to argue that nothing is unknown and even unknowable but that doesn't make the things that people typically call "supernatural" any less bullshit. Demons and ghosts are just not the kinds of things that are waiting around to surprise us. And shifting the conversation from your bailey to your motte to protect your feelings on the former is not a good way to have a friendly debate.
All that aside, if you are interested in expanding your understanding of the universe then I'd really encourage you to divert the effort you're putting into the "supernatural" into learning about the actual natural universe instead. Our universe really is fantastic on its own. There's plenty of interesting, wacky, and unknown things happening all around us that you can learn about without resorting to magic. If anything, magic is the boring answer imo.
Slight nitpick, I don't "believe" there is no higher power. I don't believe in any of the claims people have made that a higher power exists. By default we don't believe in anything.
I do not currently believe in any supernatural anything, for the exact same reasons I do not believe in gods.
- There is no persuasive evidence of anything supernatural
- Many supernatural phenomena were discovered to have naturalistic explanations
- The only evidence provided for supernatural phenomena is anecdotal
It's entirely possible for there to be supernatural stuff, but the time to believe it is when it is demonstrated.
One point that I don't see raised a lot is that otherwise perfectly mentally healthy people can experience hallucinations. They may even find them comforting, and some even then do not believe the visions are real. I have a suspicion that a lot of ghost sightings, etc, might be such hallucinations. But I can't demonstrate that, and I'm honestly not sure how we could, unless we can find a way to trigger such hallucinations on purpose.
I think it's hard to find "true experiences with the supernatural" credible because even if the person believes it happened: humans make for awful sensors. They might feel warm when they're cold or vice versa. They regularly see things that don't exist. More than half of us appear to be some kind of moron.
And why would a ghost be unmeasurable? Why could something be truly ethereal when everything ever measured or recorded is not? Plus, the seemingly random limitations on any sort of fairy, ghost, or deity make it pretty much dead in the water as far as theories go. Imagine this, you're some kind of land-god of wealth and/or stealing and potentially eating babies. But you go years or decades without fulfilling your own theme or being seen by humans? And you can't leave your territory as defined by human maps like you need permission from city councilmen?
All of this on top of the belief I hold that life is a culmination of billions of tiny mechanisms that, upon systemic failure, result in something akin to gears no longer turning in a clock means: either machinery and electronics all have "souls" or humans don't. Where would you draw the line? Do waterfalls have souls? The grand canyon? Dogs?
So pretty unlikely, all things considered.
I don't think it makes sense as a term. If it occurs in the real world, has real impacts on it, but is hard to understand that doesn't mean it is supernatural, just not understood. The double slit experiment is not supernatural, just hard to understand. Things can happen in coincidental ways, but something had to happen so even if very coincidental it can be natural. What would it mean to be supernatural? I mean, really, some small part of the universe behaving badly for a moment for a reason we don't understand is not magic, it is just ignorance on our part. So I am open to phenomena, they happen, but a supernatural explanation could never be justified in my view. Just because I can't think of why something happens doesn't make it magic, it could far more easily be something we have seen time and again, my own ignorance.
Our Brains are a meat pudding that runs on less electricity than a light bulb. I don't think it's unreasonable to get some hallucinations and signal interference. Especially when the pudding is stressed or poisoned . Plus we straight up know there are senses and ranges of senses we do not perceive. Reality is another thing all together through the eyes of a mantis shrimp. Our perception is incredibly biased and limited, so miracles (magic) are an easy explanation when our senses fail us.
You know how various fantasy and sci-fi settings will say something like, "____ uses both science and magic," when describing how the world works? That ususally makes no sense. If magic has laws consistent enough to be used in machinery, it is just another branch of science. But with that out of the way, is that the only thing magic can be?
If magic was not just another type of science, it would have to supercede the natural world. Imagine a fantasy world that has gods who bestow power to their acolytes. Rather than using a natural process that could be recreated by mortals, the gods could actually break physical laws or even write new ones on a whim. In this world, magic isn't bound by a naturalistic worldview since it can change based on what a free-thinking entity chooses at any given moment.
That was a roundabout way of saying, "I don't think it matters." If the supernatural (magic) is knowable, we do not currently know it. If it turned out to be real, we may not even have a way of meaningfully interacting with it.
I think it's highly unlikely and the universe is amazing and bizarre enough without us imagining outside forces acting on it.
"Natural" simply means "real". Any phenomena that does exist, known or not, is by definition natural.
“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia
If by natural forces we mean things like gravity, electromagnetism, color (strong force), and flavor (weak force), then absolutely there are phenomena that transcend those.
Those things are logic, causality, time, identity, math, etc. Ontology or metaphysics would be the formal subject. A lot of people in philosophy already study this, and it's considered one of the main branches of philosophy alongside epistemology and ethics/morality.
I've been studying causality lately, and it's fascinating how one of the best theories of it is that we diagnose causal relations based on how regular/reproducible they appear (Regularity Theory of Causation or RTC).
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60% the person experiencing it misunderstood or misinterpreted what they were looking at because they were stupid and gullible, but not maliciously making things up.
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35% completely fabricated and never happened and created to legitimately defraud or troll others.
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5% something scientific that we simply don't understand yet.
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0% actual supernatural occurrences.
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Supernatural phenomena do not actually exist as far as I can tell. There's no actual evidence to my knowledge, and plenty of evidence that humans are not particularly good at perceiving or interpreting the universe around us as it actually is. Our brains are not a reliable narrator, supernatural phenomena are most likely a consequence of this rather than anything genuinely supernatural.
“Supernatural” is just unexplained, or misunderstood, natural phenomena.
I’ve spent years working in supposedly haunted buildings (as security.)
the guy who loves sharing his ghost story really didn’t appreciate being told that the “fleeting man” he saw apparitions of, were his own reflection (specifically in a corner window of a conference room, or in certain circumstances, in double-paned windows.)
Nor did he appreciate being told the ghost “walking” down the stairwell was really just the fire sprinkler standpipe clunking against the stairs as the building cooled off. (And the reason it happened around the same time every night was the building’s hvac being set to a lower temp to save energy.)
He most certainly didn’t enjoy being told that the doors closing in his face were caused by shorts in the magnetic door holders and that he really should have put that in his report (he was written up for not reporting a maintenance issue.)
He also got written up when we found out that he was leaving windows cracked in the space above him, but he wrote them off as ghosts screaming instead of the wind whistling through a slightly cracked window.
Our understanding of the universe is imperfect- and it probably always will be. The point of science is to improve that understanding using evidence and experimentation.
I’ll take science any day of the week.
Evidence?
Supernatural phenomena is possible but not probable.
The only "supernatural" thing I believe in is reincarnation, and that's just a game of numbers. I believe we're on the verge of discovering that black holes birth new universes. Then your existence and rebirth just becomes a statistical eventuality. From your POV you would die and then immediately be aware of your next life; since death is a state of non-being, an infinite amount of time could pass between those two moments but you wouldn't experience any of it. So, it isn't really even supernatural since I don't believe anything like karma or whatever mediates the process.
If something has observable properties, then it is part of nature, as we could observe it, model it, and include it into our scientific theories. If something has no observable properties, then it is not distinguishable from something that does not exist. Supernatural phenomena thus, tautologically, are not distinguishable from something that does not exist. Indeed, I would go as far as even saying the definition of nonexistence is to lack observable properties. That is why i se supernatural phenomena as a no-go. It either lacks observable properties, so it does not exist as a matter of definition, or it has observable properties, meaning it is just natural and not supernatural.
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/718/
Basically, it's not that hard to believe there are so many stories.
It’s entirely possible that supernatural phenomena exist. It’s also possible that what we call “supernatural” is merely science we don’t understand yet. After all, things like lightning and disease used to be attributed to gods, evil spirits, witchcraft, etc. I guess I’d call myself an open-minded skeptic, if that makes any sense.
I'm basically at a point where I don't think any actual magic or phenomena exists, but the disciplines of metaphysical practice themselves are worthwhile for introspection and working on your mindset. Also I don't like to give voice to my own skepticism that much - I don't defend it or argue because I can't be talked out of it and it's not very fun to be that guy. It's more fun to entertain the fanciful things and hold ideas lightly among people who are inclined to talk about phenomena.
I don't believe in "supernatural phenomena" either. If they'd exist, we'd actually have prove of their existence. There's about 8 billion people on this planet and for some reason all the "recorded" phenomena date back to before everyone had an easy to record device in their pockets. They've all gone down to 0 for some odd reason, even though it is as easy as ever to actually provide literal proof - if they existed in the first place.
People who experience supernatural phenomena are experiencing either natural phenomena they are too stupid to understand, are fooled by man made things, or are hallucinating for whatever reason.
I'd recommend Manly P Halls book on "secret teachings". I think alot of "religion" is just philosophy + myth.
We are overzealous pattern recognition machines.
The proto-hominids who saw a tiger in the bush when there wasn't one had a higher chance of passing on their genes than the ones who didn't see a tiger when there was one.
And now their descendants see tigers in the stars.
If LLMs have taught us anything about pattern recognition machines it's that when they don't find a pattern to match they don't say they have no matches... they just pull a somewhat fitting match off their arse, or an outright random one. They hallucinate.
And that's even before we get to our actual minds. We've got pattern recognition machinery in our retinas. What reaches our brain is already highly processed (to make tigers easier to spot), and then it gets into the visual processing part of the brain, which uses sophisticated autocompletion using previously stored patterns to fill in the blanks and highlight anything remotely interesting... often including things that aren't there (see optical illusions, for instance). That's what we "see", and then we get to make up stuff based on that (and the same probably applies to our other senses, too).
Add to that that we're notoriously bad at recognising randomness (or lack thereof). A coin falls heads up four times in a row and we suspect shenanigans, as if it wasn't as likely or unlikely as any other pattern.
We see some craters that look like a smiley face (pattern recognition strikes again) on Mars and we think it's a fake picture (it's 2024, after all), or a Watchmen reference. And when we learn it's actually real our hair stands up. We get goosebumps. It can't be natural. Must be super natural. Aliens. Gods. Ancient civilizations. All while we ignore the thousands of craters that don't look like a smiley face.
But, hey, at least we're not getting eaten by hidden tigers, so win some lose some, I guess.
Asking if the supernatural exists is not a scientific question whose answer can be derived empirically. Which to me means the question isn't even worth asking until a bunch of other questions can be asked / answered enough that this question becomes a scientific one, belief really has nothing to do with it (not sure I'm even capable of belief like that).
Concluding that all these stories are made up IS the simplest and most logical explanation. But, they almost certainly do not come from nothing. We as a species are kinda hardwired to understand things, and when we encounter something we don't, we have a tendency to either make shit up or seek things that satisfy that understanding (even if its not really understanding). The result is that we have all these fantastic stories and myths that are only distantly related to reality.
Seconding custard_swallower. Strict naturalism. I see no reason to believe in any supernatural claim of any kind.
Relatively recently I had a new hypothesis for some of the feelings people attribute to hauntings; bad vibes. I know someone who smokes indoors in their home. Before I had purged supernatural beliefs of all kinds from my worldview I thought there was some kind of curse or haunting wrong with the place. No, it's the ill effects of third-hand smoke.
Belief in non-theistic supernatural phenomena appears to be a crutch for theistic supernatural belief; it gives a convenient explanation for something so that you don't exercise your rational faculties to find the real reason and then have the kind of experience that can contribute to unraveling god-beliefs.
I think there may be some scientific explanation for a variety of things that are attributed to the supernatural; and not necessarily just mundane things like knocks and creaks in your house, paradolia causing images of faces in image noise and shit like that. For example, with how places that have unusual geomagnetic activity tend to also have higher than average ghost sightings, I think some people may just be extra sensitive to magnetic fields which causes them to hallucinate.
So many myths and monsters are basically caused by misunderstandings, not seeing something clearly enough to identify it, or even exaggerating a story that's been passed down verbally over a long time. Not to mention things caused by mental illness in times before advanced medicine and psychology. Many alien abduction stories and succubus sightings are almost certainly the result of hallucinations induced by sleep paralysis.
Idk about "supernatural" but there definitely seems like there's a lot of undiscovered psychological phenomenon we haven't figured out. It's hard to research and quantify subjective experiences.
I try to keep my thinking in line with scientific materialism. That also means things I believe need to be falsifiable, which means, I don't entirely believe them. There there always needs to be a bit of a hole or escape hatch in any truth to prevent it from becoming dogma.
I don't "believe" what I'm about to say, but it's something that has come up for me many times under psychedelics, which is the concept of a 'consciousness first' manifestation of reality. It's the closest thing I have to a spiritual or supernatural belief, and it's not really a belief because I don't believe it, but I do entertain the idea from time to time. The basic argument is that we've got the order of operations backwards, that the universe doesn't manifest consciousness through emergent properties, but rather that consciousness manifests universe concepts and scenarios that end up being plausible. This concepts extends the concept of consciousness to all matter and energy as well, because it all ends up being one and the same. I think of it as an extension of some Taoist thinking around wei wu wei where, because one is aught to find what they are looking for, if we can step back and stop dictating what we think/demand reality to be, reality may actually be much more fluid if we aren't so dogmatic in our thinking about it.
Anyways, I don't really believe any of that. But I think it would make for good science fiction, although it's already been done extremely well by Le Guin in her novella The Lathe of Heaven.
I have experienced weird things and I think it is something that is an explainable natural phenomena that humans attribute to the supernatural in their ignorance.
Like the "ominous feeling" of a basement being stuff like radon or unshielded wiring, things that are explainable without the supernatural.
I don't have anything to add to this conversation as I'm in agreement that the "supernatural" is simply how humans have historically described natural phenomena that is not yet understood.
Now... what I do find interesting is the shared art. I've seen similar styles, but not this piece. I looked it up and thought I would share because I find it to be pretty rad.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flammarion_engraving
The Flammarion engraving is a wood engraving by an unknown artist. Its first documented appearance is in the book L'atmosphère : météorologie populaire ("The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology"), published in 1888 by the French astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion.
The illustration depicts a man, dressed as a pilgrim in a long robe and carrying a walking stick, who has reached a point where the flat Earth meets the firmament. The pilgrim kneels down and passes his head, shoulders, right arm, and the top of the walking stick through an opening in the firmament, which is depicted as covered on the inside by the stars, Sun, and Moon. Behind the sky, the pilgrim finds a marvelous realm of circling clouds, fires and suns. One of the elements of the cosmic machinery resembles traditional pictorial representations of the "wheel in the middle of a wheel" described in the visions of the Hebrew prophet Ezekiel.
I first want to call out all of the responses with "philosophical insurance".
By that I mean things like "If it IS real, it's not supernatural, so even if I rolled my eyes at it, and you prove me wrong, I'm still right"
We're just hanging out and casually talking about stuff here. No enforcers are going to come back and read these and hunt you down if someone ends up proving that ghosts or something is real. Also, you can still keep your Atheist card, if you think there might still be some weird stuff out there that science cannot yet explain.
As for me, I've had a few "Supernatural experiences" myself, and they've convinced me that there is another "force" out there that we don't understand.
OP if you're feeling lost and without purpose there's more fulfilling things than getting trapped in the search for God. There's natural humanism. Read Carl Sagan. Read some Marcus Aurelius. There's a whole universe of interesting philosophy and science worth learning about rather than trying to find meaning in thy mystical and empty 'supernatural' hoping to stumble upon a sign that says made by god. The universe is majestic and endless and we are specks of atoms here for a short short time. Make the most of it while you can.
There’s nothing that humans couldn’t understand.
Just based on the premise of this question I think you should look into the work of Robert Anton Wilson if you haven’t already.