Exploring proofs in a supernatural framework

Previous Chapter: Supernaturalism VI (Chapter 6)

Next Chapter: Supernaturalism VIII (Chapter 8)

You cannot disprove supernaturalism

The only thing left for supernaturalists is playing their big trump card: you cannot disprove that a cause is supernatural. Science is based on falsification; we cannot know what is true due to a lack of a truth criterion¹, but we can rule out what is logically incoherent or does not explain the data or cannot predict future events. Truth can only exist when there is also falsity.

But how can supernaturalists find out if they are mistaken? There is simply no way. Anything is possible, and even any natural cause can be explained by supernatural causes, and both can be intermingled. We cannot know what the case is in any case. Scientists have many methods to find out if they are mistaken; supernaturalists have none. That makes it so attractive, because there is always a way to establish wishful thinking. You can make the world your own without the hard and laborious ways science has to take to draw conclusions. You can always inject some magic, and it appears that this can explain what science can't explain. Your hands don't get dirty. All you have to do is think about it.

Supernaturalism is fabricated to be not falsifiable. Though in principle it should, because it makes factual claims about the world. If you think it doesn't, supernaturalism would be the most useless theory of everything ever invented.

This all leads to:

You cannot disprove that supernaturalism does not exist

If you play the trump card that you cannot disprove supernaturalism, this may sound true. But for every position that cannot be disproven exists the logically opposite claim that you cannot disprove the logical opposite, too. If you cannot disprove the claim (A), it automatically follows that you cannot disprove the logical opposite claim Not-(A). If you believe that (A) is true because it cannot be disproven, you have to accept the logically opposite claim for precisely the same reason. No sane mind can do that.

So if you cannot disprove the existence of a supernatural realm, you cannot disprove the claim that a supernatural realm does not exist. That buys you nothing.

But supernatural explanations cannot predict the future, because everything is possible. It fails on a logical level; it cannot explain to anything, though it seems on the surface that it can explain everything. It fails on a linguistic level, too. In fact, it fails on every level but one: it can be very comforting because it can make the world to appear to be exactly as you wish. Naturalism deals with reality and cannot compete with such a comforting view, except that it can solve real-world problems on a far superior level, which supernaturalism cannot. You might pray to a supernatural agent of your choice to get a missing limb back, and that will do nothing. Science can provide you with a working substitute for your missing limb. You can pray for health if you are ill, and this has been proven to not work. Science can really cure you, not in all cases, but in some, and it is improving. Supernaturalism cannot be improved because it cannot provide any solution to any problem but one—feeling better in a world that is mostly unknown to us and stays unknown regardless of what supernaturalists do in their framework.

Supernaturalism cannot detect something new

Supernaturalism cannot detect something new because everything seems to be known already. But appearances can be deceiving.

Make a list of all things that were unknown 500 years ago, before the age of science began, and write down what science has detected since it was invented. You can fill a large book with that. Create a second list of what supernaturalists have claimed to exist and what was detected since, and the list is empty. It is fairly safe to predict that this will not change in the next 500 years, or even 5,000 years. This is a bit surprising at first glance, because when you guess or speculate, you would expect that some of your hunches came out true. But the number of things that do not exist is uncountably large, and therefore, guessing right has a probability of zero or so close to zero that it hardly makes a difference. This is true for every god you can imagine.

You might think that supernaturalism can solve the problem of why there is anything at all. But it can't, because it can't tell you if there was a supernatural, magical, or unconscious cause or a supernatural agent. And it can't tell you why there is something supernatural at all, pushing the answer one stage back. Even if that is correct, it tells you nothing, explains to nothing, and destroys every possible argument you explore. And how would you know that pushing it one stage back is enough? If nature is not self-sufficient as an explanation, why should we assume that magically the supernatural realm plus the natural realm together are self-sufficient? Perhaps we need another realm, and it's turtles all the way down. An additional super-supernaturalistic realm has all the features a supernatural realm has: it is unknown and unknowable.

Just believe me for no reason at all

This is all hidden behind the fact that we have traditions from authorities. But they could not know what they were talking about as well. The solution is pushed back one stage again onto unknown people with questionable knowledge. Though we know that most of them knew less about the world than any educated person living today.

All claims that supernaturalists hide the fact that you should believe the subjective experiences of other people without asking questions. It is a submission to the authority that has only one source: someone sounded convincing when telling you about things that he claims he knows and nobody else can know. Most believers are not convinced that they do not know; they assume that all others with contradicting experiences don't know. In some respects, they are not even considering their experiences: dreams can sometimes seem more real than reality itself. Most supernatural beliefs have been handed down for generations by charismatic figures who gained power and wealth with their claims. It has been known for centuries that you will gain attention and power and wealth when you serve the wishes of others. Supernaturalists can do that without having a real product to sell; their products are ideas and claims.

By definition, you cannot prove anything in the supernaturalistic framework. This is hidden with logical guessing games and logical tricks and wordplay. If we need a framework where something can be proven, we have to resort to naturalism.