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.
While James Randi was alive, he offered $1,000,000 for proof of the supernatural. He never got that proof. I think that’s pretty telling.
Let me preface this by saying I tend to go with the Null hypothesis until proven otherwise, and as such don’t believe in the unproven supernatural.
Regardless, there are two ways to interpret James Randi never getting proof.
- There are no provable supernatural claims.
- Those who could prove a supernatural claim have no use for a $1,000,000 prize.
Re number. 2, they must also either be ignorant of the existence of charities or can’t think of a single one that could use that $1,000,000 they would have no use for. So I don’t accept that.
Perhaps. Though it’s entirely conceivable that the cost of revealing said supernatural proof would be detrimental to their life in such a way that no use of a $1,000,000 would justify it. Or, ala Mr. Manhattan, they have lost their empathy and/or worldly concern. Or they could just be massive dicks who could make $1,000,000 easier if their secret is kept, like Hayden Christensen in Jumper.
So I stand by my point that only looking at James Randi’s $1,000,000 prize as proof that “there is no supernatural claims that can be proven” is an example of sampling bias. Even if you can not conceive of a person who would have no reason to, nor a reason not to, seek out the specific prize money.
Assuming the correctness of a hypothesis without sufficiently disproving potentially valid alternatives is how we wound up with the acceptance of the supernatural. It’s just bad epistemology.
Regardless, I believe that James Randi’s offer, combined with the lack of any other provable and sufficiently documented supernatural occurrences means it’s more than reasonable to not hold any belief in the supernatural. I certainly don’t myself.
ETA: 3. I suppose a third possibility is they were unable/unwilling to travel or were entirely unaware of said prize. Something like a “hermetic monk” for exame.
Bro, what is a hermetic monk 💀.
Definition taken from Merriam Webster
hermetic adjective
1 a: Of or relating to the mystical and alchemical writings or teachings arising in the first three centuries a.d. and attributed to Hermes Trismegistus
b: Relating to or characterized by subjects that are mysterious and difficult to understand: Relating to or characterized by occultism or abstruseness
a hermetic discussion
2 b: impervious to external influence
trapped inside the hermetic military machine
c: recluse, solitary
leads a hermetic life
So in this context, I guess I’m using both meanings. As in they are isolated monks with knowledge of the occult and esoteric.
There is no such thing as a hermetic monk. Hermeticism is a philosophy.
If I had legit supernatural powers, $1,000,000 would be chump change to reveal those powers. No way.
There’s stuff I’ve experienced that I can’t understand or explain. Certainly, I trust other’s witnesses of their own experiences, even if they seem supernatural to me. But, I don’t consider that good enough evidence to believe in the supernatural.
There are all kinds of things in my life I have experienced that I cannot explain. For one thing, I am not an expert on everything. For another, I am a prisoner inside a skull that has to rely on not especially precise equipment in terms of sensory input. In other words, the meat sacks in our heads cannot be trusted. In fact, going back to Randi, if they could be trusted, Randi and other magicians would never have a job.
None of that is evidence for the supernatural.
Unexplained does not mean unexplainable nor supernatural.
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.
Most ghost sightings happen in low lighting when our brains are trying to fill the gaps of limited information. Evolution taught meat to think and it doesn’t do the best job at times.
Well it is better (for survival) to imagine a predator than to imagine an ice cream truck.
Don’t forget carbon monoxide poisoning most likely contributed significantly to ghost stories before the risks of indoor fires for heat were known.
I’m fully atheist, but I have seen ghosts in front of me, clear as day, while completely sober, during the daylight.
I have too, in company no less and we both saw the same thing. It’s disheartening to see such ready dismissal of what I saw by others though lol
I have also seen some wild, completely unexplainable things. There’s too much out there.
You probably need to check the mushrooms you were eating.
You are one of the reasons why people don’t report such things. You just went straight to ridiculing him without even knowing the context.
There hasn’t been any proof in all of history that any supernatural phenomenon was real.
Until there is, my thoughts on it are: not real, never happened.There also hasn’t been any proof that supernatural phenomena doesn’t exist. It’s why I choose to keep an open mind about it. It’s a subject that suffers a lot of stigma in the science-centric world we live in, and thus few people talk about it.
There also hasn’t been any proof that supernatural phenomena doesn’t exist.
You can play that game all day with anything. It’s not a valid argument.
Exactly. There’s no definitive proof that winged monkeys won’t fly out of my asshole five minutes from now, but I’m not making plans that assume they will.
Well, you sold me. I definitely believe in your five minute asshole monkeys!
I don’t.
But I want to.
Why is it not a valid argument?
That’s already been explained to you by others here.
I want to hear your opinion. That’s the point of this post. It’s how we have healthy debates.
I’ve already started my opinion.
All you’re doing is telling people no. That’s not a debate.You haven’t really said anything. You just said that my argument isn’t valid, refused to elaborate why, and when asked to do so, you said that others have told me why, when I’m getting completely different opinions from multiple people. Also, disagreeing with people is literally what makes a debate a debate. What do you want me to do? Agree with everyone even if I don’t? That’s not how a genuine conversation works.
It rightly suffers stigma because it does not follow the scientific method, but claims to have scientific merit.
Supernatural phenomena does not claim to have scientific merit. You are also assuming that science will eventually explain everything about everything. That it is the only existing truth. This is called scientism, and it oversteps science’s proper boundaries.
Um… no? Not what I said and not what I believe.
To quote professor Farnsworth: “The pursuit of knowledge is hopeless and eternal. HOORAY!”
We’re always going to have things we don’t know. The point is to build on the knowledge we do have and to slowly get better. What the belief in the supernatural does is actually the shortcut to “being able to explain everything about everything”, because you’re presupposing the answer without any proof or testing done. Sure, those things might be possible, but so might be waking up in the Pokemon universe tomorrow.
Until there’s proof, I have no reason to act like there is. It’s a fun game to think about, but it shouldn’t hold any weight in how you see the universe we actually live in.
Also, the natural universe is weird enough already. Have you heard of the fine structure constant? Basically, we found this one constant number within all of these different fundamental formulas for how the universe behaves, but it doesn’t have a unit associated. So, we know that it exists and can calculate it, but no one knows WHY it exists. We think it’s a constant, but it might have changed over time, so we’re trying to find ways to test that. We might never know, but those questions are far more interesting to me than “maybe aliens”.
Yes, there’s going to be stuff we don’t know about. That’s why I’m advocating for open-mindedness to supernatural phenomena. That’s my goal.
There also hasn’t been any proof that supernatural phenomena doesn’t exist
You can’t prove a negative. Which is why in the scientific method, the onus is on the person making the claim to provide the proof, not the other way around. That’s why we rarely engage in debates with people who don’t grasp that concept, because for the most part they’re argument comes down to “You can’t prove it doesn’t exist, so therefore I’m right.”
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.
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.
This argument is a very common one. It’s only valid at a scientific standpoint, since you can’t really scientifically prove something that transcends the laws of nature. However, at a historical standpoint, the existence of supernatural phenomena can be considered. There is also no evidence that supernatural phenomena does not exist.
I’m not sure what you mean about a historical standpoint. I don’t think there’s anything in the historical record that could be considered actual evidence of supernatural phenomena. History as an academic discipline is a kind of science and generally approaches the subject matter with the scientific method.
What? Supernatural stuff has been talked about throughout history.
Any non-falsifiable theory is only worth so much.
And can still be considered.
Not really, because every non-falsifiable theory is true at the same time. I mean, I can’t forbid anyone from considering.
And that’s what I’m advocating. For people to sit on the fence, instead of leaning hard-science, or hard-supernatural.
You may have misunderstood me - supernatural theories are worthless because they are non-falsifiable.
That doesn’t make them worthless. Have you ever listened to stories that may involve potential supernatural forces?
what’s the difference between higher power and supernatural phenomena?
sounds more like agnosticism to me…
Supernatural phenomina could mean that psychics aren’t shysters, that some magicians are defying physics, or ghosts are real. Doesn’t necessarily have to mean there’s a god somewhere. I don’t believe in any of those things but that’s how I read this question.
Yes, that’s what I meant.
Higher power = some kind of god or creator. Supernatural phenomena = anything that transcends/defies the laws of nature.
SUPERnatural means “above” nature
TRANScend means to cross the threshold to a new plane
Those both imply higher powers in their name. You might not consider the higher power to be sentient or good or whatever, but you’re literally arguing for a higher power, just under a different name.
I felt that in the context of the post, OP used Supernatural to mean “weird shit”. Nit picking on the definition of the word is just being argumentative, and not participating in the spirit of the conversation.
…nit-picking is what science IS. There is no way to independently verify the claims if OP can’t define what they’re even testing for.
There’s a time and a place for science.
Oh, please. You know what I mean when I say supernatural. The extraordinary. Things that defy the laws of nature. Paranormal. Weird shit. You guys are complicating things for unknown reasons.
Exactly. Thank you. Most people in the comments are just trying to sort of erase the word. But if I can’t call the phenomena supernatural, what do I call it? It most certainly needs a name.
But a lot of the time, what they’re saying is “look at this photon, it transcends the law that everything has an electrical charge!” No, it doesn’t transcend anything: your understanding of natural law is defective. Most of the UFO silliness falls into that bucket: they draw stupid conclusions based on their fanciful interpretation of a few perceived data points, then think that half-assed reasoning is enough to invalidate some real science.
Wait, is this a depiction of the flat earth dome cutting someone in half?
You look at it too literally, but yes, that’s what it looks like. It’s actually a symbolic painting supposed to represent the pursuit for mystical knowledge.
It’s a bad Victorian picture of their defective understanding of the medieval mystical world view.
If it can be oberved and explained then it isn’t supernatural. Therefore nothing can be supernatural.
A ton of real things would fit in with all the supernatural stereotypes if we didn’t already accept them due to science.
I disagree. You seem to be unfamiliar with the definition of supernatural. Supernatural is anything that transcends the laws of nature. Not things that can’t be observed or explained. Something that defies the laws of nature is not natural now, is it?
Just because we do not know all the laws dosen’t mean something dosen’t have an explanation. The universe is under no obligation to make sense.
But what do we call the phenomena then, if I can’t call it supernatural?
/shrug, call it what ever you want. Your reality is subjective.
I’m a strict naturalist - I believe that supernatural phenomena do not exist. I do not believe in the unknown.
Why? Supernatural phenomena isn’t really generally unknown.
What do you mean? That people experience supernatural phenomena?
If they didn’t, they would it be a thing?
Ok. I don’t believe they do experience supernatural. I think people are gullible, only selectively critical, and are often influenced by their culture to believe in supernatural explanations. And some people are just frauds. I believe honest people get tricked by their culture to regard unknown as supernatural, and by accepting that explanation, never find the natural behind the unknown.
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.
That also means things I believe need to be falsifiable
It’s possible to have real science without it being falsifiable in the Popperian sense. For example, archeology, paleontology, cosmology, medicine (unless your sense of ethics would even shame a Nazi).
Popper’s goal was to discredit soft sciences like sociology because he was an extreme conservative who didn’t like the findings that people like Horkheimer and Adorno were coming up with.
As for psychedelics, one part of the mind that’s affected by psychedelics is the part that tells you what’s important and meaningful. What you’re being shown is the subjectivity and emptiness of that sense of awe.
I’m on the page of discrediting soft-sciences. Because they are not rigid and testable, they are filled to the brim with what are essentially witch-doctors who read the tea leaves so-to-speak. Social sciences especially. They are a pseudo-science that has infected the minds of many.
I have to defend archaeology here because that is not true in the modern discipline whether or not you want to call it a true science. Modern archaeologists are (generally) very meticulous with their findings and very reluctant to come up with conclusions that sound like anything near objective truths because they are more aware than anyone that it is fragmentary information about the past which we have to come up with conclusions to and basing them on our own modern biases.
Modern archaeology has also (again, generally) embraced the idea that archaeology is inherently destructive, so studying sites in on-invasive ways with actual scientific tools like magnetometry and ground-penetrating radar is very popular and requires someone with actual grounded training in geophysics to do properly. Even basic GIS mapping requires scientific instruction in order to do it properly and GIS is a primary tool of archaeologists now.
I’m not an archaeologist, just a very keen amateur enthusiast who wishes less of it didn’t go over his head.
I wouldn’t group Archaeology in with humanities or soft-sciences. They are using rigorous methodologies for their findings, and they kind of take from multiple fields in that regard. Radiocarbon dating for example; sure it doesn’t give us exact answers, but it gives a repeatable, testable result.
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.
Paraphrasing I believe — Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic
No nothing is “supernatural “. We may not yet know what we’re seeing or exactly what happened… we simply don’t understand it yet.
Yet is relevant point there IMHO. We will.
But there is also a possibility that what we don’t understand transcends the laws of nature. That’s what supernatural means. A possibility that our universe is also governed by supernatural forces, as much as it is governed by natural forces.
If something can “transcend” the laws of nature, then the ability to do that is part of the laws of nature, and thus it transcends nothing. We just didn’t know all of the rules.
If ghosts are real, then they aren’t breaking the rules of nature because clearly the rules of nature allow for ghosts, we just don’t understand how yet, but then ghosts are natural.
By definition, anything real is natural, and anything supernatural is not.
But we still need the word “supernatural” to describe such things. Otherwise, what do we call the phenomena?
Fictional
That’s just a weak reformulation of the “God of the gaps” fallacy.
The difference is that science is observable and testable, god is not. This key difference, changes it from being a fallacy.
So, in the god of the gaps fallacy it goes like this:
- GotG: Something unknown = GOD!
- Science: Something unknown = “We don’t know!”
- GotG: Ghosts = GOD!!
- Science: Ghosts = “We need a way to reliably test and confirm!”
Science isn’t anti-god either. It’s just pro-knowledge. Observable, testable, verifiable knowledge.
Science isn’t anti-god either. It’s just pro-knowledge. Observable, testable, verifiable knowledge.
This part. If ghosts are observable, testable, and verifiable, then we would have a way of measuring things. Maybe ghosts are 4th dimensional entities. It’s very possible they are real and it’s purely something we haven’t been able to measure thus far.
Science gets stuff wrong all the time. The point of science is to be adapting and learning. And part of that involves verifying credibility of a new source of information.
Unfortunately, almost all of the sources of “proof” of things like ghosts are heavily biased in favor of proving things over disproving, and there are a lot of people throwing clear scams into the mix. Science needs to go in with an open mind. “I want ghosts to be real, and the wind moved this door, therefore it was a ghost” is not valid proof of ghosts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WohbNt18wNs Things like this. A pastor that can walk on air, which is clearly fake. If the pastor believed he could walk on air, why would he fake it. This is not proof that people CAN’T walk on air, but it’s a great example of why when someone claims they can, you should figure out why lying about it benefits them (this guy clearly wants more people to tithe to his church).
GotG benefits from the default being “GOD!” for all things, because it leaves them in power. Science has no benefit from anything except the truth. Sure there will be liars in science as well and a lot of people will optimistically want to believe the lies if they sound nice, but looking at things like LK-99, it winds up disproven when it’s a lie. Capitalism and industry don’t care about your fake superconductor. That doesn’t benefit them, they only care about real superconductors.
Saying that I’m making a god of the gaps argument would also mean that you are making a science of the gaps argument.
Except, when you fill the gaps with science, you have evidence and proof. Not superstition and ancient myth.
But you’re still leading yourself into a fallacious argument. It’s not any better.
It’s only a fallacious argument if you don’t say “we can’t answer that yet” and maybe add, “but here are some theories…”
“I don’t know” does not mean “therefore the supernatural is real.”
Er um— no.
There is nothing that is “supernatural “
There is nothing that is proven and repeated not beholden to the laws of nature.
Yes it is possible, but there isn’t any proof of anything transcending nature. You’re making a “god of the gaps” argument. It is illogical to assume that god or anything supernatural keeps getting smaller and smaller so as to hide in those ever shrinking gaps.
But we need a name to describe such extraordinary events. If you erase it, what do we call such phenomena? There’s a reason why the word exists. Also, saying that I’m making a god of the gaps argument would also mean that you are making a science of the gaps argument, where you assume that science will always have an answer, and that it is the only truth. It’s why I believe that it’s best to sit on the fence on this topic, your mind being open to ideas of supernatural phenomena, as you still consider rational scientific explanations.
This “then why do we have a word for that” is such a a strange argument
We also have a word for elves, doesn’t mean they exist
It’s the same logic I see people applying to Korean, with arguments like “they have no word for depression, therefore they’re happier”, completely ignoring the fact that they have a bridge called “suicide bridge” (guess why)
If you think the word supernatural is so unneeded, you can petition for it to be taken out of dictionaries and Wikipedia.
and not understanding how something functions isnt a reason to assign intent or awareness to the thing.
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.
People do not understand that visual hallucinations can happen to anyone when they are sober. Our brains are not perfect machines.
Overall, 84.8 percent of the volunteers that took part in the study reported having experienced some form of anomalous visual experiences in their life. More than a third of them (37.8 percent) reported that they had experienced an actual visual hallucination similar to what a patient with a psychotic disorder may experience. When the scientists analyzed the additional questions of whether an experience would agree with a clinical definition of visual hallucinations, about 17.4 percent of volunteers had experienced a hallucination that met these criteria.
And I’m guessing the other 15.2 either didn’t remember or didn’t really understand the question.
It’s even more a problem with hearing things that aren’t there or, far more commonly, just hearing something but misidentifying it. The whole EVP thing that “paranormal investigators” are so fond of is all about hearing a sound and just assuming that sound is a voice because of our flawed brains (and flawed ears).
Humans seem to be wired to be like this. That’s why pareidolia is a thing.
Honestly, 15% sounds like it’s right in the range of the number of people who will just lie on surveys - be it purposefully or not – in order to present a superior version of themselves to a piece of paper.
“Natural” simply means “real”. Any phenomena that does exist, known or not, is by definition natural.
