In any form or fashion. If you do believe in a supernatural thing(s) what?
If “supernatural things” were to exist, they would be part of nature and therefore natural by definition.
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Your stupidity is supernatural.
Congratulations, you proved everyone in this thread wrong.
Fuck off
Now that almost everyone on planet earth has a small camera with them at all times, it would have been really cool to have discovered some supernatural stuff, be it ghosts, Big Foot, Nessie, whatever (and someone still might, who knows?), but instead all we get is police brutality. 🙁
we get is police brutality.
The existence of which is just as controversial as UFO sightings in conservative media.
Probably more so these days with all the lame UFO hype periodically coming from the government.
No. I believe all things have a natural explanation.
I do believe we won’t be able to understand every natural explanation that happens in the universe, though.
You can’t teach a dog quantum physics. I don’t think we are so special that we will be able to understand everything. We may hit a limit where our math (a formal language of reasoning that we have developed) can’t model something or our brains simply refuse to accept its conclusion.
We can operate with irrational numbers but it’s not like our brains can truly comprehend them. Nor does quantum physics really make sense; I mean, mathematically we can reason about it but we can’t comprehend it. The speed of light being a constant and warping time is another example of something we can experimentally verify but can’t logically comprehend.
There’s no reason to believe everything will be understandable. So I’m open to something “unexplainable” happening that seems supernatural. I definitely do believe it’s natural at all times.
And while I’m open to “natural things we cannot comprehend” I simply struggle to believe for a second theres something that exists on another “plane”, which we cannot see signs of, that somehow judges us and takes an interest in our individual lives, as anything but fanciful. If such an entity exists, and it seems to us omnipresent, I doubt it takes any more interest in us than we would an ant in a forest on the other side of the planet.
No. Or maybe. Depending on your definition of each particular supernatural thing.
Do I believe that every “UFO” spotted in the sky is a craft from an alien race? No. However, do I believe people genuinely see things that can’t be explained or identified in the sky, that could plausibly be extraterrestrial, inter-dimensional or top secret in ways we generally don’t currently understand? Yes, absolutely.
Do I believe that we all have souls that exist outside our physical form, that persist after death? Absolutely not. But do I believe people who aren’t lying genuinely see people or entities that we would generally refer to as “ghosts”? Yes. But beyond believing people really do “see” these things, I don’t know if they are always hallucinations or if people are witnessing some kind of other phenomena.
I’m a sceptic at heart. There’s nothing I won’t believe for ideological reasons, but evidence is key. Things that there is currently no evidence for could theoretically still exist, but will always require proof for me to actually believe in.
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (a.k.a., the Sagan standard)
If enough people say they’re actually experiencing something is that not proof enough to believe in something? First hand experiences that are all very similar and have been known throughout human history. What else do you need?
That’s proof that many people experienced something. It’s not proof of what that something is.
What if enough people say what it is?
That means that’s what they think/believe it is. Might be what it is, might not be.
Yes, exactly this.
As a personal example, when I was very young, possibly about 5, I saw a “ghost” of my mum, at home one evening when she was out. My mum is very much as alive now as she was then.
I don’t clearly recall the event directly anymore, and we would generally agree a child is a less reliable witness than an adult (although believers would counter that the child’s brain is somehow more open to such things). Although I remember that I wasn’t making this up, and I could describe the clothing and jewellery I saw her wearing.
So does my experience prove ghosts exist? As always it depends on what you mean by that. Scientifically the experience doesn’t carry enough weight to prove anything. It does add credence to the view that people who are being truthful report seeing such things.
But also, most people who believe in “ghosts” think they’re the spirits of the dead - which my experience actually runs completely contrary to. So from one point of view you could say my experience of seeing a ghost disproves ghosts!
What do you mean by supernatural?
It means ‘beyond the natural world’, I think, but what does ‘natural’ mean? That is exists without humans? That it’s good for the planet? That it’s something theoretically knowable by empirical means? That’s it’s something knowable by logical/rational means?
I believe that I as a conscious experience exist. I don’t believe anything else with certainty, although I believe a great many things conditional on the empirical (‘natural’?) world being assumed to be true.
The word supernatural: phenomena or entities are those beyond the laws of the nature
But the “laws of nature” are just provisional rules we’ve deduced through observation. When we see things that violate the rules as we’ve deduced them (and we often have), we figure out new rules—we don’t just assume there are things to which the rules don’t apply.
Were electrons supernatural before we had the laws to describe them? Would something that’s supernatural now still be supernatural if we came up with laws describing its behavior?
I appreciate I made an edit to add more to my comment that you may not have seen; are you equivocating ‘the laws of nature’ with empirical knowledge (ie knowledge which can be gained by evaluating our sensory experience and assuming that it represents a true world)? If not, how are you defining it?
I work in 911 dispatch, and it absolutely feels like on and around a full moon our calls get weirder
We’re not necessarily getting more or more serious calls than average, so it’s kind of hard to point to any measurable statistic that would back up that assertion, and it’s not just people with psych issues calling and ranting at us, so you can’t even just go by mentions of callers “rambling” or “not making sense” in the notes of our calls, a lot of them are just bizarre situations that seem really unlikely or convoluted.
I’m kind of loath to label it as supernatural though. I feel like if there is actually a correlation and not just confirmation bias on my part, it probably has some reasonable scientific explanation.
Tbh, a full moon means a lot of increased predatory activity, I wouldn’t be surprised if we subconsciously become more anxious and rash, and I wouldn’t consider that any more supernatural than the tides (provided there’s actually at some point a link discovered).
I’m not sure which version of my comment you replied to because I kind of waffled a bit on my last paragraph and edited it about 3 or 4 times in rapid succession probably about the same time you were replying because I didn’t like how it sounded, it felt a little rambly trying to cram it all into the comment, so sorry about that.
But yeah, I’m basically on the same page there, one of my versions did touch on that, lots of animals have instincts tied to the moon, more available light gives them different opportunities and risks, and we are, at our core, still animals with some weird instincts driving our decisions, and of course there are things like the tides as well, and who knows what other little effects the moon is having on us and our environment that might make us act a certain way, all with a reasonable, if not immediately apparent scientific explanation.
Sure feels supernatural though.
If answering very simply, no.
But I believe the words, “I don’t know” are arguably the most important words there are. As soon as you step beyond that into claiming to know anything for certain, I doubt your motives/mindset very much. But I appreciate that “I don’t know” also leaves room for so much mystery, pondering, speculation, etc. In that sense, I’m cool with a “maybe,” as long as you don’t start trying to define it as a specific entity you have special knowledge about, etc…
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I think humans are natural storytellers who rely on the construction of narratives for most of our basic thought processes. But the natural world is inimical to narrative, so we employ narrative worlds whose functioning is adapted to the requirements of storytelling. (Even “naturalistic” storytelling relies on subtle tweaks to the laws of causality and probability, if nothing else.)
So I believe that we can’t make sense of the world without relying at least implicitly on the supernatural, but I don’t believe that it corresponds to anything external to our own cognition.
I believe that our understanding of “natural” is imperfect and immature, thus there are an enormous number of things and phenomena that don’t yet fit into our understanding of natural, thus are supernatural. At least until we learn and adapt our understanding of natural.
I mean, I believe in God, but He’s not supernatural but outside of spacetime itself so it doesn’t apply. Things like ghosts, for example, would have to coexist with us for us to notice them. And nothing truly “supernatural” has ever happened to me (I have deja vus often but if it’s just an illusion, so be it, and if they aren’t they’re part of reality just not easy/impossible to reproduce, so where’s the “supernatural” part of it?), so I don’t concern myself with it at all. And I’m not superstitious so that takes away rituals and lucky charms from the equation as well. 🤷
That is supernatural geez.
No. I believe there are unexplained, and probably unexplainable things, but they all exist as part of the natural universe.
And honestly a lot less is left unexplained than most people seem to assume. Or maybe just most believers.
Isaac Newton put it best:
“I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
It’s completely stupid, short sighted and ignorant of us to think that we know everything there is know about the universe and natural world. There is still so much more to learn about and understand and probably far more than we can even comprehend.
But we also have to regulate how much we know and don’t know and how we can understand or not understand … because as Richard Feynman put it …
“Keep an open mind … but not so open that your brain falls out”
Tim Minchin summed it up wonderfully for me.
Because throughout history
Every mystery
Ever solved has turned out to be
Not magicMy favorite of his is:
Do you know what they call alternative medicine that’s been proven to work?
Medicine.
No. But I love them for storytelling purposes.
i like this answer. i like the lore, but i don’t like how people try to change and shape the world in a way that fits it.
Thank you for your direct answer.
What does it really mean to be supernatural? What’s the difference between, say, a ghost and dark matter? We don’t really know what either one is. Is it that we can reliably find evidence of dark matter, even if we don’t know what it is, so it’s not “super” anymore? It seems to me that “supernatural” is just a name for the ones we don’t actually believe in.
