Direct continuation of: The Twelve Reasons I Don’t Believe in Supernatural Claims, Part I

Earlier, I outlined the first six of twelve reasons I don’t believe in supernatural claims. This is the second part, with the last six reasons (reasons #7 – #12). Here is a complete table of contents:

The Twelve Reasons (Table of Contents)

1. Supernatural Claims Have a Track Record of Failure
2. Supernatural Claims Are Typically Guesses, At Best
3. Supernatural Claims Are Frequently Packages, Held for Reasons Other Than Evidence
4. Supernatural Claims Have No Good Evidence
5. Many Current Supernatural Claims Have Been Disproved As Much As Possible
6. Supernatural Claims Have Been Redefined to Be No Longer Falsifiable
7. A Belief in the Supernatural Asks Too Much
8. Among Those Who Generally Believe in the Supernatural, There is Complete Disagreement
9. Humans Have a History of Being Cognitively Biased
10. Supernatural Claims Have a Massive Double Standard
11. Supernatural Claims Rarely Improve
12. Supernatural Claims Are Scientific Dead-Ends

And without further ado, the last six reasons:

#7: A Belief in the Supernatural Asks Too Much

I’d like you to understand exactly what is being expected by those who assert a supernatural claim. Those who assert the objective, real existence of the supernatural want us to believe the impossible. Those who suggest a supernatural claim want us to believe that the laws of physics and nature are not immutable as we’ve always known and come to rely upon, but rather can be suspended to allow for something supernatural. This flies in the face of everything we’ve come to expect about the world.

The supernatural is a big deal. If someone were to prove the objective, real existence of supernatural, it would throw science on its head. It would force us to re-evaluate history. It would completely reverse the trends explained in #1 and #5. With all these indicators pointing away from the supernatural, we should require a lot of proof to put it back on track.

We ideally want proof beyond any reasonable doubt before overthrowing everything we know. Yet what do we get? As seen in #4, we don’t even meet a preponderance of evidence. We don’t meet even the lowest standard of evidence. We can’t overthrow science on such low evidence, and such a belief is simply asking too much.

Those who suggest supernatural claims typically also suggest that supernatural claims can “go around” or “supersede” science. They put science in a domain to explain the natural, but assert a second domain to explain the supernatural. They say there are truths we can find through “spirituality” and “faith”, and that these methods can be used to prove the supernatural domain without need to reference science.

On it’s face, this seems acceptable. However, it really just substitutes one thing that has not been proven, the supernatural, with another thing that has not been proven — namely, that there is a second domain of knowledge. This is problematic because, like there being no indication of the supernatural, there is no indication that faith-based methods provide reliable knowledge.

We already have reliable methods for finding truth — sweeping claims about reality are made through appeals to science and history alone. As far as we know, these two methods have been enough. Adding faith as a third method would again contradict what we have come to expect.

Quite simply, such contradictions need to be met with lots of evidence. But they aren’t. Therefore supernatural claims are simply asking too much.

#8: Among Those Who Generally Believe in the Supernatural, There is Complete Disagreement

Consider the supernatural claims that have been made over the past few thousand years. Is there any agreement on all of these?

Of course not. Supernatural beliefs have been packaged into religions, and there are hundreds of religions to date. A wide variety of religions contradict other religions. Even within these religions, there are dozens of sects and denominations that all disagree with each other. Even within these sects, there are still dozens of different opinions on all sorts of topics.

There is simple proof of this wide disagreement: ask various people what is the way to salvation. You’ll likely get a few dozen different answers.

Now consider God. No one can agree on what God is like, what God wants, what God has done throughout history, or why God does what he does, if he, or she, or it exists at all. Does God exist? How many Gods are there? Is God male, female, or something else? Does God have desires? If so, what does God desire? Which combination of omnipotent, omnipresent, omnibenevolent describes God? Which sacred book best describes God, if any? Which interpretation of that book should we believe?

Consider claims of what God has done within evolution alone — has God created evolution or has he not? Did God create everything within the past 10 thousand years or the past 10 billion years? Did God direct this evolution intentionally or just allow it to happen blindly? No one can agree on this — or anything else. Instead, we’ve had thousands of years of argument with very little progress.

But is this disagreement to be expected? We disagree on everything, including science. However, the disagreement in science is very different. It comes to a conclusion. There has been universal agreement within science on hundreds of different hypotheses. Practically everyone agrees that the world is spherical and orbits the Sun. Practically everyone agrees that the universe is billions of years old and billions of lightyears wide. Among remaining theories, there is very little disagreement about which explanation is right. There are very few prolonged battles between scientific hypotheses, and those that do exist last a decade at most, not thousands of years.

When we see something in the natural world, we can all come to an agreement about what it is like. This is not true for anything in the supernatural world. There are people who agree on the entire natural world, but I don’t think there are any two people who agree on the entire supernatural world.

If the supernatural world was as real as the natural world, we would expect there to be a reliable way to find out about it. If this reliable method existed, we would expect there to be agreement on it. There isn’t. This is unexpected if the supernatural world exists, but is to be expected if the supernatural world doesn’t exist.

#9: Humans Have a History of Being Cognitively Biased

Consider the cartoon series Scooby Doo. In this television series, there are a wide variety of ghosts, Yetis, zombies, witches, etc. that “haunt” various locations. Because of the perceived powers of these alleged paranormal and supernatural beings, the locals are utterly convinced they are in the presence of a real ghost/Yeti/zombie/witch/etc.

However, it always turns out there is a more reasonable explanation. A careful investigation by the Mystery Team reveal that the true reality is a person in a mask who was tricking people. From the beginning, this trickery was far more likely and definitely to have been expected. Yet people disregard the natural conclusion and jump to the unlikely supernatural conclusion just because there is “no other way to describe it”. People assume that “no rational answer” automatically implies “supernatural answer”. (For more on why that conclusion is wrong, see #2.)

People have shown a tendency of doing this supernatural jump, falling for the “Scooby Doo Effect”. People fall for all sorts of scam artists, from D.D. Home, to Uri Geller, to Heaven’s Gate. People quite frequently can be tricked into assuming the supernatural — this happens quite regularly. Consider all the people who used to be utterly convinced of the existence of Zeus, Thor, or Ra, for example. Or all those who hold sincere beliefs in religions that you don’t.

The “Scooby Doo Effect” is an alternative explanation for the origin of supernatural claims, along with those in #3. We know that people can easily be tricked into the supernatural. But now, that leaves the question: how? The answer is that people fall for their cognitive biases — people see patterns where patterns are not really there. People suck at thinking about probability and randomness.

People fall for the clustering illusion, where they assume random events are actually intentional.

People experience pareidolia, or see significant things in random items, such as animals in clouds or a human face in the moon.

People fall for attentional biases, where people jump to correlations or associations without considering all the evidence.

People fall for the availability heurististic, in which an unlikely event is considered to be likely just because the person can easily remember a time when the unlikely event happened.

People create illusory correlations, or assume a relationship based on an expectation rather than an actual review of the evidence.

People fit in with the Dunning-Kruger Effect where ignorant people never think they are ignorant.

People fall for the Forer effect, seeing completely general and vague phenomena as being specific and concrete.

This biases apply to everybody — both me and you. There is no indication that knowing about the biases prevents people from falling for them. This leaves the conclusion that our own experience cannot be trusted. We cannot assert something to be objectively true without objective evidence — our experiences are worthless as objective proof for anything we assert to exist independent of ourselves.

Given that supernatural claims do not have objective evidence (see #4), it seems far more likely that people believe in the supernatural because of one of these biases, effects, illusions, or a reason from #3 than because the supernatural claim is actually real.

#10: Supernatural Claims Have a Massive Double Standard

Greta Christina put it best in her essay “Hey Religious Believers, Where’s Your Evidence?”, opening with the statement “in the marketplace of ideas, only religion gets a free ride in an armored tank.” (Side-note: I also found out that she has a pretty cool blog on atheism.)

I believe her statement to be correct of all supernatural claims, not solely religion. Only supernatural claims can get away with what essentially boils down to “well, we don’t need a good reason to believe in supernatural claim {X}”. This reveals a massive double standard. Those who believe in supernatural claims typically justify themselves on shoddy evidence (see #3, #4, and #9), but require very clear evidence that they are wrong.

Most supernatural claimants are perfectly willing to accept subjective evidence for their beliefs, but won’t accept the subjective evidence that proves the Earth is flat because it looks flat, or proves an Earth-centered universe because it looks like the Sun orbits the Earth.

Most supernatural claimants declare that challenging their beliefs is bad, offensive, and hurts their feelings, yet still freely evangelize their beliefs upon others without feeling like that is bad, offensive, or hurtful.

Supernatural claimants get to challenge others to disprove the claims they believe in, but won’t accept that they have to disprove the claims of others.

Supernatural claims get a free pass from evidence and get to hold double standards. Supernatural claims are for some reason above skepticism and inquiry. For every other claim about objective, physical reality from the spherical Earth to quantum physics, we believe what has been reliably demonstrated and proven to a sufficient degree. Yet, Supernatural claimants give us a bait-and-switch, substituting reliable demonstrations with bad evidence, subjective evidence, or no evidence at all, and then call it sufficient reason to belief.

Until supernatural claims are brought back down to our level and discussed reasonably and objectively, there’s no good reason to believe in them. I can’t accept the claims of those who want to shortchange the process.

#11: Supernatural Claims Rarely Improve

When we look at the history of any supernatural claim, we see problems. We see these claims mired by disagreement (see #8), mired by lack of proof (see #2, #4, #5, #6, and #7), mired by other rational explanations for their origin than truth (see #3 and #9), and mired by a fundamental double standard (see #10).

Yet there is another problem. These problems show no indication of going away. There is no supernatural claim I know of in which disagreement has decreased, in which proof has increased, in which alternative explanations have been addressed, or in which the double standard has gone away. Instead, we only see increasing disagreement and increasing disproof, establishing a general track record of failure (see #1).

When we look at natural claims, everything is a lot better. Unlike supernatural claims, there are tons of natural claims in which disagreement has decreased dramatically, sometimes down to zero. Unlike supernatural claims, there are tons of natural claims in which proof has increased dramatically, sometimes to the point of erasing all reasonable doubt. Unlike supernatural claims, there are tons of natural claims in which biases or alternative explanations have been addressed adequately, to the point where the claim is considered the objective and the only reasonable explanation. Unlike supernatural claims, natural claims do not operate on any double standard of evidence.

This trend of no improvement within the supernatural tells us even more, however. Compare the supernatural claims to natural claims that follow the same trend and we see something startling. The only natural claims where disagreement has increased, where disproof has increased, where proof was never adequately offered, where biases and alternative explanations were never addressed, or where the claim operated on a double standard have turn out to be false.

Even if this reasoning is rejected, it must be asked: why are supernatural claims not improving in quality? Why are they, at best, stagnating and at worst going in a downward spiral of in-fighting and disproof? Would we expect this to be the case even if supernatural claims are true? If so, why?

#12: Supernatural Claims Are Scientific Dead-Ends

Even the other eleven reasons notwithstanding, we’ve never needed to believe in the supernatural to accomplish anything. It could be true that holy books were like the Book of Origin from the sci-fi television series Stargate: SG1, in which a culture learns how to build advanced technology merely from reading divine revelation.

It could be God telling us how to build skyscrapers instead of architects. It could be that appeals to the supernatural were completely valid explanations for a variety of phenomena, and such appeals actually helped us understand the world. There is nothing logically impossible about this.

Yet, this is not the case. It has turned out that methodologically ruling out the supernatural has not only failed to harm our ability to gather knowledge, but actually is required in order to gain knowledge. This is because absolutely anything in science or history could be ruled as due to the supernatural, creating a dead-end.

For example, lightning could really be the result of the supernatural. If it was deemed such, that would be the end. “Oh, well, I guess it really is Zeus. No need to study this further.” Since lightning now has a complete explanation, and since there is no way we can study the how of the supernatural, we are at a dead-end. Supernatural things just happen with no underlying mechanism or cause — that’s what makes them supernatural. If a claim is considered supernatural, there is nothing more to study.

Fortunately, science methodologically rules out the supernatural. Even if the supernatural could or does exist, it is never accepted as a reason because of the dead-end it creates. Yet science ignored this dead-end and continued on anyway, and found out that the supernatural wasn’t necessary (see #1). It turned out there was something more to study, and it wasn’t supernatural.

This is why it is dangerous to accept supernatural guesses for modern problems, such as for consciousness, evolution, and the origin of the universe. It would prevent us from searching for the true answer.

The Closing Argument

I doubt that supernatural claims are really true. When I say this I mean that I am not convinced that there is a good reason to believe that supernatural claims accurately describe what objective, mind-independent reality is like for the given twelve reasons.

Nothing has been provided to be convincing. Accepting a supernatural claim would overthrow everything we know, so we should want a lot of proof (see #7 and #12). Instead, we get something that is a guess, at best (see #2), that no one can agree upon (see #8), and that has no good evidence at all pointing in its direction, let alone solid proof (see #4).

I am convinced that of all supernatural claims currently suggested, they are either unfalsifiable (see #6) or disproven (see #5). I also believe that people believe in the supernatural either via a double standard of evidence (see #10), cognitive bias (see #9), or other non-objective reasons (see #3).

Also, I am not convinced that supernatural claimants have addressed the 100% trend of failure within supernatural claims (see #1) and the trend that supernatural claims never improve in quality (see #11).

Because of this, I argue that all reasonable, rational, objective people should stop believing in supernatural claims until these twelve reasons are properly addressed. Furthermore, no reasonable, rational, objective people should assume they have some sort of basis on which to convince me of the supernatural without addressing these twelve reasons.

If someone were to address these twelve reasons, I promise to look at it eagerly, consider it rationally, and respond to it reasonably. I may even be convinced and change my mind on these twelve reasons. Consider it a challenge to the believers. Until then, I leave my readers with an honest, sincere question — one that is not meant to offend but to be reasonable and provoke thought: If you can’t meet this challenge, why do you still believe in the supernatural?

Followed up in: The Magical Magician: A Naturalist’s Allegory

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