Hood, Bruce - Supersense

We may have no written record from this period of humankind, but evidence for supernatural practices can be found in human activity as far back as we can record it. Some of the earliest burials from at least forty-five thousand years ago show signs of ritual. We do not know exactly what motivated prehistoric humans to paint their caves, bury their dead with symbolic objects, or make female (‘Venus’) figurines with enlarged breasts and stomachs, but these behaviours reflect some of the earliest ceremonial practices in the history of our civilization. Ceremony and ritual have been present from the beginning. There was culture in the caves. Everyday experience must have raised questions in minds sophisticated enough to organize hunts, manufacture jewellery, paint, and communicate. Where do we go when we dream? What happens when we die? They must have thought that there was something more to daily existence. Why else spend so much effort celebrating a culture deep in the recesses of a cave if not in the belief that there was something more to reality? From the beginning, humans already had minds prepared for the supernatural.

MODERN MINDS IN THE CAVE

In modern society, we should no longer have a need for shaman to commune with subterranean spirits. Armed with modern science and technology, we can predict and control our lives without the help of trance-induced priests. We can even blast away an entire mountain at the press of a button. We do not have to pray or make sacrifices to control our future. We can measure, test, and document the world. Prehistoric man may have believed in the supernatural, but, then, he did not have the benefit of modern science to explain what he could not understand. Humankind has emerged out of the darkness into a bright, technological, scientific age. By now, we should have abandoned the mind in the cave.

Clearly this has not happened. Over the last four hundred years, we have witnessed an astonishing explosion in our understanding of the universe, something almost like a ‘big bang’ of scientific understanding. In no other period in human history has humankind made such breathtaking advances in explaining so many facets of the natural world. Wander the corridors of the science departments in any modern large university, and you will find experts in the minuscule details of nature. We have reached out to the farthest galaxies and delved into the subatomic through our science. Science should be the bedrock of our knowledge and wisdom. And yet beliefs in the supernatural – beliefs that are unnatural and unscientific – are still very common.

If science is so successful, why do most people ignore what it has to say about the supernatural? Why doesn’t the general public listen to the scientists who say that such belief is unfounded? At this point, I want to draw your attention to the fact that supernatural beliefs generally come in two forms. There are religious supernatural beliefs (God, angels, demons, reincarnation, heaven, hell, and so on) and secular supernatural beliefs (such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and ESP). All religions are based on supernatural beliefs, but not all supernatural beliefs are based on religion. This is an important distinction, since there are some very powerful lobbies and arguments when it comes to the differences between religion, science, and supernaturalism.

As we saw in the last chapter, many Westerners have some form of supernatural belief. The Gallup poll in 2005 revealed that three out of four American adults have at least one secular supernatural belief. Even this figure is an underestimate, for the simple reason that supernatural belief is at the core of every known religion. In the United States, around 90 per cent of the general public is religious, compared to 10 per cent who are atheists. 3The difference between religious and secular supernatural belief becomes crucial when we consider how we should treat each type. Religious supernatural beliefs are deemed sacrosanct and beyond the realm of scientific analysis. They are miraculous. They transcend the profane and mundane. That’s the whole point. Religions must offer unworldly views of reality, not views based in natural laws. Otherwise, they would not be attractive to those people seeking something more from the natural and the ordinary. Religion has to appeal to the super natural and the extra ordinary. Believers need that spiritual ‘X factor’ from their religion. In contrast, secular supernatural beliefs are thought to be real phenomena that science has arrogantly failed to acknowledge. All manner of secular supernaturalism has been studied experimentally and, as we shall see, generally rejected by conventional science. Yet in both cases believers have dismissed what science has to say. Why is this?

As we noted earlier, the number one reason people believe in the supernatural is because of their own personal experience. No amount of scientific explanation seems to shake the foundations of such belief. Science seems to make no impact on our supersense. One reason for this is the widening gap between scientists and the general public when it comes to understanding. We are happy to accept the technologies that emerge from science, like the Internet, cell phones, medicines, and so on, but we remain generally ignorant about how science goes about its business. Second, science has a poor public relations image. Ever since scientists were deemed to be tinkering with Mother Nature, they have been held responsible for all sorts of humankind’s problems. Today’s newspaper headlines about ‘Frankenfoods’ in reference to genetically modified crops reflect the same deep-seated notion of abomination that was captured so well by Mary Shelley’s monster. And what’s more, scientists never seem to give a straight answer. They can’t agree on the important issues, with experts wheeled in by the media to give opposing opinions that don’t seem to provide answers. One day we are told that something is bad and the next, it’s good. The public simply don’t know what to believe anymore, nor who to trust. 4

As our planet appears to lurch from one self-inflicted Armageddon catastrophe to the next, from the threat of nuclear holocaust to global warming, many hold the relentless progress of science responsible rather than the technology we have used so conspicuously and greedily. We blame the scientists, not our own human nature. In typically beautiful prose, the psychologist Nick Humphrey summarizes our fear of science:

Science with its chain-saws and bulldozers of reason, has felled the tropical rainforests of spirituality. It has wreaked ecological destruction on fairyland. It has extinguished the leprechauns, the elves and goblins. It has caused a global change in the weather of imagination. It has made a dustbowl of our Eden, and created an inner drought. And all of this, not to bring greater peace or happiness, but to satisfy people’s hunger for the Big Macs of technology. 5

The nostalgic amongst us look back with rose-tinted glasses and reminisce about a simpler age that seems more wholesome and less threatening than today’s uncertain future. We look to ancient cultures for prescientific knowledge, simple living, and spiritual enrichment. We want to get back to nature. We conveniently forget or ignore Thomas Hobbes’s callous observation that life in such times was ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ 6

Many of us consider modern science a necessary evil. We are happy to reap the benefits of the technology it produces, but deeply suspicious about how it operates. It can be opaque and detached, speaking in a language that make no sense to the rest of society. Any scientist who has briefly stepped into the spotlight has to learn how to explain his or her work in a way that the rest of society can understand. Even scientists from one discipline can be completely unintelligible to those from another. I once took part in the popular BBC Radio 4 science programme, ‘Material World’ with two astrophysicists. 7I was talking about the origins of supernatural beliefs while they were arguing about the structure of the universe. I must confess that I felt an acute degree of intellectual inferiority. My contribution seemed trivially simplistic as I struggled to understand their disagreement about whether there are eleven or twelve dimensions to the universe. Phrases such as ‘dark matter’, ‘string theory’, and ‘multiverses’ momentarily triggered faint glimpses of recognition, but since I lacked the necessary skill and experience in mathematics, they might as well have been talking Venusian for all I knew. I expect that’s how the public must feel about scientists in general. As he summed up his theory, one of the astrophysicists said that he ‘believed’ that his theory would be proven right. At last, some common ground for me to enter the discussion. Scientists have beliefs too. They don’t always have all the facts. They also have to make leaps of logic in order to put forward a better model to explain the world. The difference between supernatural beliefs and scientific beliefs is that the latter produce testable hypotheses. A good scientist puts forward an idea and, if it fails to stand up to rigorous testing, he or she is obliged to abandon the hypothesis and move on. That’s how science progresses – it is always moving forward. In contrast, supernatural believers either do not question their beliefs or ignore the lack of evidence. They do not move forward. In short, the major difference between scientific and supernatural belief is that scientists and believers approach the problem from two completely opposite directions when it comes to weighing up the evidence. Scientists reject beliefs until they are proven beyond reasonable doubt. In contrast, supernaturalists accept beliefs until they are disproven beyond reasonable doubt. The problem is that it is impossible to disprove anything. Logically, you cannot categorically say that something does not exist and will never exist in the future. So you cannot disprove the supernatural. That’s why most conventional scientists reject supernatural beliefs as unscientific. The other important lesson I learned from that day at the radio station is that science may be specialized, but most of us have some opinion on the supernatural. After the broadcast, we all went for a drink at the pub with the production crew. It was not astrophysics that was discussed, but rather supernatural belief. Maybe my fellow scientists were graciously saving me from the embarrassment of not knowing how to discuss the structure of the universe, but they seemed genuinely interested in the public’s appetite for the supernatural. During our discussion, it occurred to me that most of us are happy to defer to scientists when it comes to areas of knowledge beyond our own ability. My mathematics is hopelessly mediocre, but I am willing to accept that the astrophysicists know what they are talking about when it concerns the dimensions of the universe. The same must be true for all the other specialized disciplines. However, when it comes to the supernatural, we all have something to say and something we believe. Whether it is our religion or personal conviction that there are supernatural events, science does not have a monopoly on explanations. Also, if the public can see that scientists disagree within their own areas of expertise, then it stands to reason that scientists can’t possibly know everything about the supernatural.