Adelphiasophism
Science and the Supernatural
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, March 07, 1999
The Immaterial World
Science is knowledge about the matter and energy in the universe—the material world. Since we humans are ourselves material, inhabit a material world, and depend on this material world for our existence, sustenance, and survival, the discipline that allows us to understand and control the material world must be the most important part of human learning, though not the only part.
Science is the only “reliable” method of investigation we have. “Information ”about the material world might come to us through pure speculation, dreams, inspiration, trances, spirits, and so on but experience shows that such “information” is unreliable—we cannot be sure it is true. It is not “knowledge”. When a medium helps to solve a crime everyone is amazed, yet science helps to solve millions of crimes and nobody is amazed. People expect scientific methods to work and other methods not to. When some other method gives a spectacular success, it is astonishing. It is rarely repeated but we hear nothing of that.
Science is less reliable if we examine questions about how the material world relates with the immaterial world of the conscious mind—the world of thoughts and dreams, beliefs and imagination. They are plainly in the natural world but do these abstract concepts exist independently of a conscious mind?
Some would say that the material world would not exist independently of a conscious mind because existence is a property of recognition by a conscious mind. The evidence therefore is doubly against abstract concepts thus existing. There would be no conscious mind to produce them and no conscious mind to recognise them. In a material world, mind cannot exist independently of a brain, so the immaterial world is a product of the material world. Abstractions are properties of the human mind which science has not yet successfully explained.
Supernaturalism
Some people, dualists, despite the evidence, believe mind, an immaterial world of Nature that includes thoughts and dreams, beliefs and imagination, exists independently of the material world. Does yet a third, transcendent world of supernature exist independently of both the material and immaterial natural worlds?
Naturalists, with massive evidence, associate conscious mind with the brain, but supernaturalists, with no evidence at all, identify conscious mind with soul, and imagination and emotion with transcendence. They identify the brain’s sense of self-identity as spirit. The brain’s dreams or psychoses become revelation. The brain’s experience of a parent as an authority figure becomes God. Unexplained natural phenomena are seen as mysteries and become miracles. A forbidden or a wrongful act is regarded as an immoral act and becomes a sin. The immaterial world of the human mind, which obviously exists and is part of Nature, is really the transcendental world of their supernatural beliefs.
So-called supernatural occurrences are sporadic and elusive. They always seem to have delusional qualities about them that demand a material explanation in terms of the mind.
Few people disagree that a natural world exists. Because everyone’s daily experience is natural, we do not doubt it. There is every reason to doubt the existence of a supernatural world, yet few people do doubt it. Yet, belief is insufficient. People used to believe a sacrifice to spill some human blood on to the earth in the spring would refertilise the soil. Christians still follow the same rituals at Easter when they celebrate the sacrifice of their God. Fortunately, even Christians no longer believe in the need for a real human sacrifice.
It is up to believers in the supernatural to prove the supernatural is not fantasy. They have failed. There is no empirical evidence for the supernatural and nothing else compels us to believe it. Parsimony demands that we should not believe it. The same arguments hold true for belief in an absolute God. The world of science and technology has got as far as it has without making a jot of an allowance for the supernatural. In practice, either the supernatural does not exist, or it has no discernible effect on the world and can be ignored. Supernaturalism is superstition.
Some might protest that, though there is no evidence for it and no compelling reason to believe it otherwise, the supernatural might still exist but without our knowledge. Supernaturalists exploit the uncertainty and ignorance of science regarding the world of the immaterial to create and justify their belief in a supernatural world. This explains why they can continue to hold their beliefs without empirical evidence—they think they find evidence but are misinterpreting elements of the world of the immaterial. If a transcendental world existed under these conditions, it evidently has no impact on our world, and so we can never know it exists and can safely ignore it.
The Holy Universal Consciousness (HUC)
William Rees-Mogg, is a smug old hack who, like most hacks, does not like scientists because they know a lot more than he does. That however does not deter him from writing a load of nonsense which he doubtless hopes will impress his readers. If it ever did then they show that they are even more ignorant than he is. He wants to find supernatural explanations for human imagination.
Worried about his own mortality, he is concerned that the duality of materialism and idealism might turn out to favour materialism. He labels the acceptance of scientific explanations as “scientism” in an attempt to disparage it. “Scientism” disregards the idea of survival after bodily death, the unreality of religious and psychic phenomena and regards the brain as a machine and evolution by natural selection as its own justification. Religious people, who we infer include Mogg, believe in the survival of the spirit after death, the growth of the spirit as the purpose of human existence and the brain as merely a transmitter of thoughts from the spirit to the material world.
He theorises that all organs of the body merely transmit. The lungs take in air and transmit oxygen from it to the body. The stomach accepts food and transmits nutrients to the body. The body does not manufacture the air we breathe nor the food we eat, so why should it manufacture the thoughts we think? Mogg is employing an old argument by William James because he is not clever enough to think of one of his own, and he seems not to realise that for all his disregard for science he presents an argument which adopts the trappings of science. The functions of bodily organs are observed and a hypothesis is formed. From the hypothesis he deduces how another, less transparent organ, the brain, works. Because he is an uncomprehending man he thinks he has a good case but any schoolboy can see it is shot full of holes.
The biggest is his idea that the scientist believes that the brain is producing thoughts out of nothing. He argues that neither the lungs nor the stomach produce something out of nothing so neither can the brain. Da da! He thinks someone thinks it does. The brain is fed its raw materials just as the lungs and stomach are. Incidentally, while it might be possible to say that the lungs are merely transmitting oxygen from one place to another, it is hardly possible to say the same about the stomach which actually breaks down its raw materials into useable components. It is not merely transmitting, but who can expect Mogg to understand anything so hard?
Mogg realises he’s on thin ice because he weasels his way around the problem by saying no organ in "any perfect sense produces". What is this perfect sense of production? He obviously means a perfect sense like Yehouah’s creation in Genesis, or producing something out of nothing like perpetual motion. Well. Let us agree with the clever Mr Mogg that on the macro scale of our existence there is no such thing as a perfect sense of production, so it is hardly surprising that the organs of the human body do not do it—including the brain!
To clarify his view of the brain, Mogg moves on to quote Schiller, the philosopher, who said that matter merely contains or limits consciousness and the brain is the mechanism by which consciousness is manifest in the material world. Schiller triumphed that this theory is irrefutable because, whether the brain produces consciousness or simply manifests it, any interference will cause unconsciousness. Fair enough. But Mogg and evidently James and Schiller seem to think that an organ that transmits some mystical concept of immortal consciousness from some transcendental spiritual place to our own world is merely doing what the stomach and lungs are doing. Our schoolboy can see that the stomach and lungs are dealing with what we can observe and measure in the here and now on both the input and the output sides. The brain, Mogg says, is able to take something from the fairytale place and manifest it here on earth—quite a different thing.
To find a true analogy, why doesn’t Mr Mogg look for something on earth that the brain can transmit, like energy, say. That would be far more reasonable, but it would not serve Mogg’s purpose. He’s never heard of the principle of parsimony otherwise known as Occam’s Razor from the Christian monk who proposed it. Under this principle the analogy sought between brain and stomach would not introduce a whole new world of supernatural entities—rather a drastic violation of Occam’s Razor, you might think. Not that Occam’s Razor proves science right and spiritualism wrong. It just restricts the complexity of scientific theories to the simplest level that works.
Mogg, a bit of a name dropper it seems, now turns to Henri Bergson who was happy to accept evolution as long as it had intelligence behind it. Mogg thinks this universal intelligence would explain "the apparently universal instinct for religion". Again, he’s not sure that the human being has a universal instinct for religion so has to introduce another weasel word just in case. If it has, it is not clear why a disembodied consciousness should explain it. After all, if our consciences know they are independent of our material bodies, why should we have any doubt about it?
Mogg thinks any type of universal consciousness would be regarded as sacred. Why should it be regarded as any more sacred than the air we breathe through our lungs or the stuff we put into our bellies. By his own analogy it is the same. Without it we could not think, just as without air we could not breathe. Perhaps that is why Mogg calls this consciousness the Holy Spirit. In Greek and Hebrew the words used meant breath or air. In fact, sacredness is primitive people’s excuse for an explanation, but today we are not primitive, and shouldn’t need excuses.
Mogg now gets really barmy, claiming that schizophrenia is an excess of the Holy universal consciousness because it produces hallucinations of the divine. If that is the case it is clear that the HUC is a bit of a drug addict because it can be induced to invade us by drugs or it can be induce to go away—in cases like schizophrenia—by treatment with certain drugs. The conditions that Mogg quotes as suggestive of the HUC are all abnormal conditions—but there you go!
Seemingly getting increasingly desperate, Mogg next tells us that the HUC can explain telepathy, ghosts, clairvoyance and a huge ragbag of other psychic experiences. Well, Mogg is easily satisfied, but the HUC does not explain any of these to the satisfaction of a scientist. The scientist seeks predictive value. The Mogg theory of the HUC has no predictive value. Or, if it has, Mogg is not saying. Mogg concludes that the transmission theory of the brain solves problems rather than creating them, but nothing in the mish-mash of Forteana he cites is actually solved. It is a pseudo explanation like explaining the death of a loved one in a car accident with, "It is God’s will".
Yet, Mogg thinks that scientists should accept this "theory" because it can explain the "pure randomness" required by orthodox neo-Darwinism, and "reconcile the division of human thought that has done so much harm in the last century and a half". If Mogg thinks the essence of Darwinism is "pure randomness", he betrays his usual ignorance. If he thinks that science has done the harm in the last 150 years and not the pure selfishness of the Christian economic system called free enterprise, then his view of the world is obviously tarnished by his mercenary position in it.
There are those people who like mysteries to solve and there are those people who like mysteries because they are mysteries and don’t like to solve them because it spoils the mystery. Scientists are the first, theologians the second.Richard Dawkins
Religion and Astrologers
Among the Chaldeans, the astrologer stood in the same relation to the King as a chief economic advisor does to the President of the USA, the Chancellor of Germany or the Prime Minister of Britain. Ancient Romans sought advice from augers and astrologers or "mathematicians", as they were called. Arab Sultans consulted them and the sages of the Renaissance believed in them. Kepler, the great astronomer, became an astrologer to earn a comfortable living. Astrologers, until quite late in our history, controlled the destiny of nations. Yet, in the age of the hydrogen bomb, it remains quite frightening that a president should take advice from someone who practised such a discredited art.
For modern astrologers are quite different from the ancient ones. They follow, as well as they can, ancient formulae for interpreting the courses of the planets in relation to people’s dates of birth but their output is modernised, and their horoscopes printed in tabloid newspapers as applying to everyone born in a particular month. It is hard to see how anyone can have faith in such an absurdity.
Do astrologers believe it themselves? Anything marvellous is believed by a gullible proportion of the people, and professional astrologers will be of this type, or are totally cynical about duping their audience of believers. Most professional astrologers, in this day and age, are less convinced of the truth of their doctrines than in the simplicity of their readers.
This severely questions our educational system and indeed our society. In schools and universities, no one is taught to reason, to consider what is evidence for what or to practice skepticism as the proper way to truth, not gullibility. Those who have tried to examine the question of astrological links between the careers of people and the orientation of the planets at their birth have found only the vaguest hints of a connexion, and they are perhaps related to other factors such as the seasons rather than the planets.
People are not taught to reason correctly, because the foundations of society might thereby be questioned rather too vigorously, and the ruling elites of the last few millennia found inadequate. It is important to patriarchs and their hangers on to keep us confused and stupid. In the West, astrology and Christianity are their main instruments—indeed Christianity is their main instrument—for so doing.
Only a Hypothesis
Christians are not noted for their concern with truth. Faced with the truth or their beliefs, they choose their beliefs. So, if truth required them to reject their belief in God to practice science, they would rather abandon science! That is the position of creationists. Science has never unearthed a tittle of evidence in favour of the hypothesis of a supernatural being called God. Quite the opposite, science shows the world works without the intervention of God. God is a hypothesis not needed by science and therefore it is scientifically untrue. That is why creationists do not like science and hope to replace it with the pseudoscience of "scientific creationism". The description of creationism as "scientific" shows that they need the kudos of science.
Truth matters in noesis, and we should understand what it means to claim to know truth. The truth that critical inquiry produces is called knowledge. Scientific knowledge has a high probability of being true because it has been proved by a reliable method that uses empiricism, rationalism, and scepticism. The scientific method is the most reliable method of discovering knowledge in any discipline, not only science and philosophy. It is a truth seeking and problem solving method, developed to examine scientific hypotheses and theories, but equally able to evaluate competing claims of truth in many other disciplines.
Science investigates the natural. It finds that natural explanations are useful explanations. Science does not “assume” that the supernatural does not exist. Scientific hypotheses predict effects given certain causes. A supernatural cause means that some effects do not have natural causes and cannot be explained by the scientific method. If the supernatural is not subject to the laws of Nature, it cannot be investigated by science. But science is rational and, if the supernatural is necessarily outside Nature, it follows that it cannot affect Nature.
It becomes impossible to propose a hypothesis that explains the effect. Any hypotheses proposed would not survive the process of testing. Indeed, if a natural hypothesis for a supposed supernatural event proves to be valid then there is no call for a supernatural explanation. So, if it is found that some phenomenon, thought to have been supernatural, is subject to laws and can be investigated by science, then it becomes part of Nature.
Because they will not try to understand science, Christians fail to appreciate the role of hypotheses in the development of the scientific corpus. They hear the word “hypothesis” and exult. They know a hypothesis is a supposition but don’t want to know more. For them, it is “only” a supposition or “just” a supposition. They hope to enfeeble more what they already consider enfeebled. Thus, they say scientists concede that “the materialistic theory of mind is only a hypothesis.” The most frequent phrases found in creationist literature“ ”must be“ only a hypothesis” and “just a theory.”
Yet, even hypotheses which are found wanting are not necessarily wrong. Newton’s mechanics are not wrong and are of much more practicability in everyday life than Einstein’s. What happens is that their boundaries are defined. Newton’s do not work at speeds near to the speed of light but work at all speeds that anyone is likely to meet on earth.
The materialistic theory of mind “is” only a hypothesis—a highly reliable hypothesis, tested and corroborated so exhaustively that only irrational or perverse people would want to deny it as true. They will not recognise that God’s Creation is also “only a hypothesis”, an ancient one proposed by simple and primitive people and now superseded by better ones. The people who still believe it today must be far simpler than those who proposed it. Those who proposed it were being original. Those who still believe it today have fettered their minds. Creationists are so much in fear of the hell fire of the god they have built in their heads that they defend mankind’s most primitive explanations of the world because they believe they are God’s. If God exists, he must despair at their idiocy.
Naturalism in Practice and in Theory
The power of science lies in the fact that it is not a philosophy of the world, but a method for gaining knowledge. Critics of science, like the creationists, say that science assumes naturalism, that matter is real, that the universe is comprehensible, that natural laws are uniform through space and time, and so forth. Really science has taken these propositions as hypotheses and has shown that they correspond with reality by repeated testing for many decades. The practices from which science was formed might have had many outlandish premises but as the method developed they were sloughed off like the skins of snakes and new practices were born based only on what was shown to work.
Science has no prior commitment to a description of reality, being, or existence. It makes no assumptions or presuppositions about its subject matter or methods. Its fundamental hypotheses have been accepted by testing them against reality. Since they are fundamental, if any of them had proved false, the edifice built upon them would have tumbled. They are therefore true. “Everything” in science stands only as long as it yields predictions that correspond with our observations
The argument is whether the naturalistic hypotheses science has shown to work by testing against reality truly represents reality or whether they are merely pragmatically convenient. Creationists admit they are not questioning “naturalism in practice”, the acceptance of naturalism in scientific practice without accepting it in reality. They cannot because scientists who believe in God have to accept practical naturalism all the time out of necessity—to practice their profession while retaining their faith. Christian Creationists are determined to deny that naturalism is how the world really is“— philosophical naturalism.” They maintain that teaching evolution as a fact of science foists philosophic naturalism on to Christians who reject such a philosophy.
Naturalism as Religion
Christians fear and hate naturalism because there is no room in it for the supernatural. It follows automatically that Christianity is a lie or a delusion. Their fear is that science is so successful that even the members of their own club will be swayed. In the meantime they set their hearts and minds to discredit naturalism, while they can, to try to discredit science. They label the great merit of science as being a fault. Thus evolution is a “fully naturalistic process.” They object to naturalism because it “defines reality only in terms of material causes thereby rejecting a creator at the outset.”
These are the reasons why Christians decry naturalism as a conspiracy of atheistic scientists to influence our schoolchildren. Christians cannot win the polemical battle, despite God being on their side, so they turn to the courtrooms and the political arena hoping that they can defeat Nature by throwing some legal and constitutional mud into teachers’ and scientists’ eyes.
In the USA, the Christian Right claim that scientists are breaking the constitution by teaching evolution. Creationists say scientists are unconstitutionally setting up a religion—Naturalism, and demand that a value-neutral science should be taught which allows supernatural explanations as well as natural ones.
Naturalism in itself is not a religion but a philosophy of Nature. The US First Amendment deals with religions, not philosophies of life. Naturalistic humanism, which promotes naturalism as a philosophy along with other viewpoints such as democracy, humanitarianism, and moral relativism is arguably a religion, but the arguments have been heard in courts and rejected. Though naturalism itself makes no moral statements and advances no social concerns, Adelphiasophism goes further. We draw conclusions based on it and our experience of life and infer the Goddess is under attack.
So, naturalism is not a religion, but it “is” the philosophy of a religion—our religion, the Adelphiasophist religion—the reverence of the Goddess Nature. If the Christians’ legal arguments that because it is the basis of our religion it has to be balanced by the teaching of supernaturalism are successful, then there is something wrong with the US constitution. What we believe can be shown to correspond with reality, so is true. Christian beliefs cannot be shown to correspond with reality, depending as they do on the supernatural, so they are false.
What the totalitarian Christians want is their own beliefs established in the constitution rather than other ways of thinking. To achieve this they claim that Christians are the underdogs when a second’s reflexion is all that is needed to see that they are totally dominant. Belief in the philosophy of naturalism is the minority position in the US population by a huge margin.
Naturalism in practice combined with supernaturalism in theory is the most popular belief system in the US today. Even many educated people do not believe in naturalism unadulterated by supernaturalism. Belief in a supernatural god is the religion of the establishment. All scientists who believe in God are therefore supernaturalists, as well as the forty to fifty percent of the US population who believe in evolution and in God.
Another Forty to fifty percent reject science for creationism. Only the remainder, no more than ten percent of Americans, including most scientists and many philosophers, accept natural science and evolution without believing in any god. Only this minority takes naturalism as a philosophical stance. Yet, Christians pretend they are David faced with the Philistine Goliath of reason. They want to create a McCarthyite hysteria that will cow the intellectual ten percent into silence.
What bothers the Christian Right is that the minority ten percent that rejects supernaturalism includes the most advanced and influential people. That is why Christian bigots spread fears of conspiracy. They see that the tide is running against them, though it is overwhelmingly in their favour at present, with ninety percent of people being supernaturalists—though about half are practical naturalists when it suits them.
