Hypernatural and Origins
Even as a Christian, I grew weary of the term "supernatural." I have lately come to refer to those phenomena that are beyond explanation and sometimes appear to be the result of prayer or providence of a divine being as "hypernatural". "Hyper" meaning above or beyond.
The concept of "spirit" continues to intrigue me as one who is becoming "rational." Is there a spiritual dimension? My study and reflection have led me to conclude that most of what we define as "spiritual" is actually "hypernatural" - that is, it is the natural operation of a material universe, but we have developed the ability to measure it or analyze it or even understand it. Our limited knowledge about the universe seems to support that there are realms of natural/material activity that are simply above and beyond our capacity for experience, understanding, or explanation. Those activities do not imply a divine agent...simply a profoundly complex and layered natural order.
Here is where I keep banging my head...and I hope the "DC" community can help with this: I was reading "The Skeptics Journal" recently and ran across this question - "why this, and not nothing?" It refers to the issue of origins...how does matter and energy exist? Forget how the universe got here, big bang and all. Where did the material that comprised the big bang come from? It seems most of the questions about origins do not go far enough in trying to address the question - "why existence?"
Is the mystery of existence what we ultimately call God - or the Divine? Is it a euphemism for "can't go no further in explaining this...here is where we throw our hands up and shout 'Lord'!"?
These are my musings for the day.
5 comments:
John Loftus mentioned this before in a comment on another post, but I want to weigh in.
First of all, there is no reason to assume that a void is the default state of things. The best answer to "Why is there something rather than nothing" is "Why not?" However, if we rephrase the question as "Why isn't there nothing?" then there is some evidence.
The answer, as Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek put it, is that nothing is unstable. Quantum mechanics predicts that a vacuum will not persist, due to the spontaneous arisal of matter/energy. Similarly, at the quantum level, causality goes out the window as well, as reality seems to cease to be deterministic and becomes probabilistic.
However, there are very real problems with this. Quantum mechanics has been very well tested in our world, and is remarkably predictive. However, we cannot test its predictions in a perfect void, as it is impossible to create a perfect void. So while we have no reason to think that the math wouldn't hold in a perfect void, take the scientific predictions with a grain of salt.
There are obviously questions about the origin of the Universe that we don't know the answers to, and perhaps we will never know the answers. However, throwing up one's hands and shouting "Lord!" has always struck me as inadequate. Firstly, because it doesn't have any explanatory power: it merely replaces a mystery with a further mystery, a magical one which admits of no explanation. Secondly, because history shows us that such appeals to magic are usually sooner or later superceded by science: the thunderbolt-wielding god in the cloud replaced by electrical charges, the vital force in living things replaced by genes evolved over billions of years.
So whether or not we ultimately understand the origin of the Universe, to postulate an unevolved complex eternal superpowerful Being as the source seems a cop-out.
The origin of religion, on the other hand, is all too obvious: our knowledge of our own death, and our natural desire to not perish, creates a niche in the ideosphere too tempting not to be filled: God as Creator and Judge, who rewards those who follow Him. Couple that with some practical advice about building societies, and you've got a pretty fit memeplex.
The first thing I want to mention, is that making a decision on how the universe, or matter, or energy or whatever came about at this point is jumping to a conclusion. There is not enough information to say definitively. There's more work to do.
Sure we want to know the answers but we have to do the work first, see where it leads. We have to read the book to understand the ending. Jumping to the end doesn't tell you everything you want to know anyway.
One step at a time.
People were not made perfect or imperfect, they developed over time through biological trial and error and that includes their reasoning ability. Some are better than others but we all suffer from the built in algorithms in our brain circuitry that give us the tendency to jump to conclusions.
A very brief explanation from wikipedia which doesn't really do it justice
""In psychology, heuristics are simple, efficient rules, hard-coded by evolutionary processes or learned, which have been proposed to explain how people make decisions, come to judgments, and solve problems, typically when facing complex problems or incomplete information. These rules work well under most circumstances, but in certain cases lead to systematic cognitive biases."
In my mind, this explains how gods came about very elegantly and also why people are so quick to settle on an explanation without sufficient information.
For example, just as it happens day to day at work, it happened even more so in the past. The difference is that now we understand that there are modes of 'stinking' thinking and that there are techniques to get over it. The scientific method is one of them. Counting to ten when you are angry is another, etc.
As I keep saying over and over, Marketing and Advertising take advantage of these behaviors and, ironically, business managers fight against them to increase productivity in the workplace.
To say that god did anything is to assume there is a god with no evidence, and to assume that it cared enough to do it in the first place. For all we know it could be that any gods out there were born after the universe as a result of naturally occurring process.
I am waiting for the evidence and to see how it turns out.
What settled this for me was the fact that there is no difference between a distant God and none at all. If there is no difference I might as well affirm atheism. So I describe myself as an agnostic atheist. Agnosticism is the default position, but if I were asked what I think I move in the direction of atheism. There is no God, no supernatural, no supreme being. Matter, however one describes it, is all there is.
John:
You say:"there is no difference between a distant God and none at all." Precisely!
This is why I repeatedly insist on the difference between a 'deistic' and a 'theistic' god, and why I continually challege creationists/IDers to show how, even conceding they are right -- which I don't -- this advances the cause of their god in the slightest.
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