Against the supernatural as a profound idea--Part 4

Plato gave the well-known cave allegory [1]. In this thought experiment, people are chained to the wall in a cave and can only view the world through a screen. They see people walking past the opening of the cave only as shadows on the screen and this is all they know of reality. They think these shadows are the "true" reality while there is really a "true" world beyond the cave, of "real" people and other objects that generate these shadows. It may be tempting to use this as an analogy for the "supernatural" in which the "natural" world is what someone knows inside the cave and the "supernatural" is the world that everyone knows outside the cave. This, however, would be saying nothing profound about the world as it appears to someone in the cave and someone outside. It would merely be saying something about the state of knowledge of someone in the cave. There would be nothing special about the boundary between the two parts of world as seen in either situation. A modern expression of Plato's cave analogy is in the film The Matrix [2].

Some readers may still think of Plato's cave as an allegory for what people call "the supernatural." but we should already realize that we live in this sort of situation in ways that New Agers and theists do not seem to be rushing to describe as supernatural. Here is one example:

We experience the world as solid objects, yet examined closely it ceases to exist. Viewed closely, solid objects are particles connected by field interactions. Viewed closer, these particles themselves become still other particles connected by field interactions, and so on. Properties such as "wet" and "dry" vanish at such levels, as we merely experience them due to the effect of many particles, in the aggregate, on us. Properties such as "colour" also cease to exist once we look closely enough at things, below the sizes of the wavelengths of visible light. Gas pressure vanishes: it is merely due to the behaviour of large numbers of gas molecules, moving around randomly.

There is every reason for thinking of the everyday world we experience as merely a shadow of the true world of chemistry or, looking closer, particle physics, with things like cats and fire engines being merely our limited perception of the interactions of large numbers of particles, but I am not aware of anyone calling particle physics "supernatural." It would be a trivial definition of the boundary between the "natural" and the "supernatural." People cannot have it both ways. If people want to insist that there is "supernatural" world, which is supernatural because it is "beyond our perception" then they should label most of modern physics as "supernatural."

Natural things are inside reality and supernatural things are outside reality

We could argue that reality should mean everything, but even if we accept different semantics, in which "reality" means part of everything, we are left with a definition of the "supernatural" which is effectively the same as saying that natural things are inside nature and supernatural things are outside nature, with which I just dealt. Only the semantics are slightly different: "nature" is changed to "reality" and "outside nature" is changed to "outside reality." The arguments that I just made would also apply to it.

Natural things can be observed directly by humans and supernatural things cannot be observed directly

People advocating the "supernatural" often say that it is beyond human perception. We might ask how they claim to know that the supernatural things exist in the first place if they cannot be perceived by humans. This could only be by making some observations of the outside world which allow the presence of the supernatural thing to be inferred indirectly. For example, someone may say that God is beyond human perception, but that observations of the natural world, or of ancient texts, allow us to infer the existence of God. In other words, when someone is claiming that some "supernatural" entity exists that is "beyond human perception" they must really be saying that it is only beyond direct human perception if they are supposed to know it exists at all. This perception might be very indirect indeed. For example, some people think that a supernatural god beyond human perception exists and that the mere existence of the universe is evidence for this. In this case, however the existence of the god would be supported by human perception -- perception of the existence of the universe: it would just be indirect.

No claim that you are supposed to believe for the existence or something can be for something that is totally beyond human perception. If you are persuaded by someone, for example, making a claim for God, at the very least you have perceived the person making the claim and then subjected this perception to whatever reasoning leads you to believe that the claim is correct. This would mean that, to be persuaded by any claim at all, there must be at least some degree of indirect perception. Nobody can rationally make a claim for something that is supposed to be totally beyond human perception and expect you to believe it when the act of persuading you requires you to perceive something that is supposed to persuade you that the thing exists.

Advocates of the supernatural may say that the important point is that the "supernatural" cannot be perceived directly -- that we can only infer its existence from what limited part of reality we do perceive. The problem with all this is that science routinely involves humans perceiving things very indirectly. Humans make observations and often have to go through a lot of abstract reasoning to infer the underlying theory. For example, in particle experiments like those at CERNE, measurements by sensors are used to infer information about particle collisions, which is used in turn to infer information about the underlying physics. There is no sense in which physicists "directly" perceive microscopic particles or laws of physics. In fact, there is no such thing as direct human perception. Your eyes, for example, do not see "things": your eyes detect light colours and intensities. The information is passed from your eyes to the brain where sophisticated neurological computing processes infer the existence of various objects in front of you. When you "see" a tree you are not directly seeing a tree. Information about the light received by your eyes is sent to your brain where complex processes infer the existence of the tree. You perceive the tree indirectly. It therefore makes no sense to say that the supernatural is profoundly different than everything else on account of being perceivable only indirectly -- and if we cannot perceive it at all then we cannot even infer that it exists.

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