A
PLAIN GUIDE TO ...
The Supernatural
The idea that
a perfect reality lies beyond our imperfect world is as ancient as
humanity. In its Western forms it derives mainly from the Greek philosophy
epitomised by Plato. The Church took his thought up and still preaches a
dual nature. But there are severe problems in thinking this way, often
felt keenly by those who cannot regress to older thought patterns.
Few perhaps realise how central is the concept of the supernatural to
the Christian religion, to Islam and to many other religious systems.
Buddhists
are among the few religious people who don't think in terms of a
supernatural realm underpinning normal perceptions.
Take away the idea of the
supernatural and the entire edifice of traditional
Christianity (though not necessarily of Christianity itself) collapses. In
ages past, people did not think in terms of a split between the natural
and the supernatural at all.
As far as we can tell, what some
now perceive as visible nature enclosed in an invisible super-nature, was
for them a single reality. Spirits, humans, angels, demons and many
other kinds of non-human beings moved around in this reality. Some could
be seen, some not. Spirits and demons sometimes appeared as animals or
humans or as apparitions.
People of those times thought
that a few special people had the capacity to communicate with the
invisible powers who inhabited the world. These were looked to for
guidance about the will of the spirit-dimension - and particularly for
messages and commands from God, the transcendent power "above"
this natural/supernatural world.
Many today, especially in the
West, no longer think of reality in that way. They think of reality in
terms of what can be described and as something for which there is some
sort of evidence. Are there such beings as mermaids? No, unless one can be
found, observed by enough individuals to form a convincing consensus, and
described in the same terms as we describe each other.
One might be forgiven, therefore,
for thinking that in the contemporary Christian world the idea of the
supernatural is a carefully thought-out notion, supported by both argument
and evidence to make a convincing case. As far as I can tell, this is not
so. Instead, it seems to me, the idea of the supernatural as the
all-pervading reality it once was is gradually slipping from human
consciousness.
So in what sense is the
supernatural central to the traditional formulations of Christian faith?
The answer lies with interpretations of the meaning of the person of Jesus
of Nazareth.
The claim for him is that he
lived as an ordinary human being, apparently indistinguishable from any
other man, apart perhaps from what are now called miracles but in his time
were "wonders" or "signs" such as were normally
performed by holy people.
But, as if to belie appearances,
his conception was in fact extraordinary in that it occurred without the
sexual act. In short, the baby Jesus was somehow conceived by God acting
in the body of Jesus' mother from a supernatural reality "above"
or "outside" this physical world.
Jesus died like anyone else. But
his death was somehow reversed and he came alive again. He was met by
those who had known him previously, ate meals with them, and then
disappeared back into the supernatural world. However, he remains in
contact with vast numbers of people from his supernatural dimension. It's
possible, so it is said, for humans to communicate from "within"
the universe to Jesus in the supernatural dimension "outside"
the universe.
Since the person of Jesus is the
foundation of Christianity, and since traditional doctrines assume the
above account (or at least something very close to it), traditional
Christianity would theoretically fall apart without the supernatural.
It is notoriously difficult to
demonstrate the negative of anything. How is it possible to demonstrate
that there are not a hundred, four-winged butterflies somewhere in
the Amazon forest? How is it possible to demonstrate that there isn't
such a thing as the supernatural? In other words, the burden of
demonstrating that the supernatural exists lies with those who affirm its
reality.
Most supernaturalists today
would, I suppose, say that the supernatural is that reality which lies
beyond the natural world or outside the physical universe in what we would
call another "dimension". The supernatural world is
meta-physical - that is, it's higher, larger and greater than the
universe.
A majority today thinks that the
universe is uniformly physical in the sense that everything we know
derives from what we call "matter". Matter is the substrate of
all living things. It is formed of particles which are difficult to
describe and observe. But despite the ambiguities of quantum physics and
the complexity of philosophical argument about "what is real",
we all live our lives on the assumption and in mutual agreement that the
physical is real.
The supernatural is that which is
beyond our physical space/time continuum. In some sense it
"contains" the universe. Traditional theology - and much
philosophy, going back to Plato and the ancient Greek thinkers - asserts
that the supernatural is the natural environment of God, angels and
other good spiritual beings. It is also inhabited by the opposite of these
beings, by Satan and his demons. The one lot are in "heaven" and
the other in "hell", but both inhabit a supernatural realm.
There are many other schemes or
descriptions of the supernatural. Some are sophisticated and detailed.
Others are more "primitive" in the sense that they are thought
to relate more directly to a specific way of life in a particular place
such as an island in the Pacific ocean or a place in the African jungle.
Spiritualists assert that the dead, having gone into a supernatural place,
can communicate with the living in the natural universe.
A question to be asked is,
"How do we get information about the supernatural?" A
traditional answer, used by that great Christian philosopher Thomas
Aquinas, is that we extrapolate from the known world. In other words, the
supernatural is known by analogy, by reasoning from this world into the
other. We can study the qualities of our natural world and from them infer
what supernatural reality is like.
Inference could, I suppose, get
lucky and come up with qualities shared by the two realities. But if
anyone makes an assertion about such a correspondence, how is another
person to verify it? If two people make contrary assertions about the
nature of the supernatural - one may say that in heaven people can fly,
another may say that they walk as we do - how am I to decide who is
correct? In short, there appears to be no evidence for the supernatural.
But what about
"messages" and apparitions from the other world? Don't people
from time-to-time receive information about the supernatural?
History is full of those who have
claimed to have talked to God, seen and talked to angels, heard the voice
of a dead loved one. Are they all wrong or misguided or just plain
mad? Not necessarily so. Enough people claim to have experienced the
supernatural to make it a distinct possibility. But just as many, if not
more, have not. The case is open until some way can be found of testing
the existence of the supernatural. By that I mean, a way of discovering
facts about the supernatural which can be verified to the satisfaction of
those who are presently sceptical about its existence.
Meanwhile, the way we now
perceive the universe makes it unlikely that we can do more than imagine a
supernatural world.
The reason is that the universe
is almost certainly (just as much if not all our knowledge is "almost
certainly") a bounded system. That is, because it began with an event
we call the "Big Bang", it has no "outside". And if there is no outside,
there is no point of talking about "inside" the universe. The
reason it has no outside is that any word which describes space
automatically describes time.
Einstein and others have shown
conclusively that we don't live "in" space and
"through" time but that we are entities occupying space/time.
Change the one and you change the other. This in turn means that when the
universe began some 13.7 billion years ago (approximately) space/time itself also began. The word "before" can't be
used about the universe since our space/time has a beginning. There is no
"before" the space/time continuum we call the universe. No
language or concept that we can imagine applies "before" the
universe. And because the universe is expanding, what is
"outside" must once have been "before." Neither, by
this definition, can be known by humans or by any living being in the
universe.
But there's a more serious
objection, not to the existence of a supernatural "place" (to
use that word we must have a space/time continuum), but to communication
of information between the supernatural and ourselves. Remember, without
such communication we can know nothing about the supernatural except
perhaps by analogy.
New information results in
change. The connection is inevitable. The entire world changes
infinitesimally every time
we formulate a new piece of knowledge. History is a panoramic, generalised
view of how
the world of human perceptions and affairs has changed in the past. In
order to understand the past at least one assumption is necessary. It is
the assumption that, even if we can't put all the pieces together
every time, everything that happens is related in a causative way to what
has gone before. An airliner was deliberately crashed into the World Trade
Centre because ... and we go on to propose the causes of that effect.
Christians claim that theirs is a
way of life originating in historical events, based upon the life and
death of a real person who really lived just as we do. The rub is this: if
we allow that information or intervention comes from the supernatural into
the natural, then the seamless web of historical cause and effect is
sundered each time that happens.
If God caused the conception of
Jesus from "outside" nature, then this was an event not caused
by any other event in the universe. In other words, we can only use the
analytical discipline we call history from that point onwards, since we
cannot be sure that an event after the conception was caused by any event
which came before it.
Similarly, if God communicates
with people "on earth" today, the course of history is
irrevocably changed each time God does so because it is an event not
caused by any other event in the universe. If God communicates with a
billion Christians today, then God is effectively running much of human
history from the supernatural dimension in which God lives.
If this is true, we need to know
the difference between God-events and non-God-events in order to study
history. And we must recall that Christians need the idea of history in
order to be Christian because we have faith in a real, historical person. This in turn requires us also to be able to
describe the difference between a God-event and a non-God-event. To do
this we need criteria on which to base our description.
The World Trade Centre in New
York is destroyed by terrorists. Is this a God-event or not? Did God
communicate with these men? They claim to be doing what God wants
them to do. If they are correct in their claim, what are the
characteristics of the event which distinguish it from a purely
human-motivated one? I don't think it's a satisfactory answer to claim
that God communicates secretly from the supernatural dimension. If this is
the case, we have no way of distinguishing a God event from a
non-God-event since we don't know if God has communicated.
There is no way of telling, then,
if we do receive information from another dimension. It seems we don't
know which is natural cause and which is supernatural cause. Do do so
would require that we describe similarities and differences. I know of
nobody who can so describe God-events and demonstrate them in the
sense that they can present evidence which can be verified by those (like
me) who do not experience the supernatural or, if they do, are unaware of
it.
One of the hidden difficulties
which presents itself is that if the idea of the supernatural is done away
with then we should perhaps entertain the possibility that we're on our
own in the universe. It's an illusion to think that behind all the muddle
and mess of life is a clean, ordered, perfect existence waiting for
us. Don Cupitt says we have to give up
... the idea that some
objective and independent touchstone of reality can be found. There
isn't ... we are on our own. There is no referee. We don't actually
need one. We must, and we can, content ourselves with the world we have. [1]
Of course, none of the above
demonstrates that the supernatural does not exist. Perhaps I'm the
only person in the universe who has no experience of it. In which case, I
presume that the evidence for it (as something I can't or won't
experience) will shortly be in my hands.
_____________________________________
[1] The Great Questions of
Life, Polebridge Press, 2005
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