What evidence does the paranormal and supernatural provide

What evidence does the paranormal and supernatural provide towards the existance of God? :astonished: :blush: :blush:

I just took a philosophy class and this was one of my final questions, I tought i had understood the question and knew the answer but i must say after taking this philosophy class im still confuse…

Please help me!! :blush:

My opinion is that there may be (and is) much evidence for the paranormal and “supernatural” (actually, supernatural is an oxymoron – if the paranormal or even divinity exists, it is an aspect of nature), but the nature of God is too great and too comprehensive to definitively interpret anything specific as being evidence of God. For example, you could prove that life after death exists, but does that prove God exists? Can’t there by life after death without a god? You can prove a miracle happened, but can you prove God did it? Maybe some more specific consciousness did it? If even a big guy with white hair and a thundering voice (speaking in Old English even) in the sky appeared, can you prove that that’s anything other than a mysterious big guy with white hair speaking in a thundering voice in the sky?

If God can do anything he wants and take any form he wants and encompasses everything that exists, what can you claim is God and what not?

Perhaps some headway can be made if we ask what we are looking for when we are looking for God. What are your parameters, how do you define God? If God is the unity of all things (or all consciousnesses?), and you prove telepathy, isn’t that a kind of unity? Even moreso, what about the Global Consciousness Project? Maybe it’s not a strict proof, but it goes some ways. What if your idea of God is as a Creator and that He lives in all of us? What if you prove, then, that some person has some uncanny ability to perform the impossible? Again, it doesn’t strictly prove God, but it would be a strong parcel of evidence. With even more strict parameters for God, perhaps you could prove, or potentially prove, his existence, but perhaps with diminishing significance of what you’re proving to exist exactly.

I suppose in order to physically [scientifically] prove that God exists, you have to define God in some physical way or in some way that has specific logical implications that are physical.

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There is no “evidence” for paranormal or supernatural so it’s kind of a meaningless question. :slight_smile:

That depends on what you think God is.

If you think God is someone who exists only in a “spiritual” realm that, by religious definition, is a place where there is no material but still coexists with us material beings somehow, then the paranormal and supernatural help support the mind’s wondering about the existence of God.

Indeed, because the paranormal and the supernatural are really all about the “spiritual” supposedly “leaking out” into the material somehow, and such leaks manifesting themselves, sometimes, as if there was some form of “intelligent” “life” behind and within that “leaking”, then one can wishfully carry out the speculative "if"ing that thereby understandably follows … all the way to “that must be where God lives”, along with where all those Biblically referenced angels and demons live too.

But, if your thoughts about what God is aren’t so theistic, and are maybe more pantheistic or panentheistic, then the paranormal and supernatural aren’t really of much help to you with regard to evidencing God’s existence, as then you are aware that the spiritual is simply our psyche’s experience of our self as an organism and its experience of everything at its material-created level of life, and that there really is no such real thing as a before/after life and that God is the material universe’s name, complete with infinite psyche and resultant imminent and transcendent spirituality just like ours … and that there really is no traditionally theistic material-disconnected “spiritual realm” where angels and demons and the undead and such live … and that the paranormal and supernatural are merely misperceptions for easily explained physics or the presentations of brains that aren’t screwed on quite completely.

I thought I agreed with you and that it was very insightful until I came to the part where the paranormal is merely a misperception of easily explained physics. That doesn’t follow frmo any of the other things you said (the way you made them sound, at least), and it seems to contradict it. What’s so hard to believe about the paranormal? If there are different levels of life, such as the ‘material-created’, which include the ‘infinite psyche’ and the ‘transcendent spirituality’, why can’t those levels “leak into” eachother, which is just another way of saying that the reality we experience is multi-facted, and sometimes we see facets other than the physical? What is the physical, anyway? If it is the matrix from which everything existent is born or abstracted, if it is the absolute and all-encompassing blueprint for existence/events, then the paranormal would probably be misperceptions easily explained with physics. But if reality includes more than the material, then the material could easily be an effect, and physical laws could be nothing more than observations of how the material “usually behaves.”, and any event physical, mental, superphysical and/or subphysical could weigh in on the likelihood of some physical-level event.

If the paranormal were normal, it wouldn’t be thought of as odd or called the paranormal, so a rejection of the paranormal is just the denial that anything could happen that’s not normal. :stuck_out_tongue:

I think people depserately want to think they have understanding of, and thus control over, their environments. If ghosts exist, who’s to say something completely mytserious and unpredictable won’t capriciously kill you (or scare the living daylights out of you) at any time? Or maybe it’s just an effect of wanting to know your bearings, ‘where you are’, what kind of universe you’re living in. Maybe that’s a warm and cozy feeling, but what the bleep do we know? And why should all of reality always be easily explaianable?

I don’t think you can prove that physics is comprehensive (and not to mention that assuming it is requires the adoption of a ridiculous notion of ‘absolute randomness’), so I don’t think physics proves anything about the non-existence of the paranormal.

I think another fear of believing in the paranormal has to do with the leakage you were talking about–the immensity of the pain and mundanity of our human existence is something we get used to, but can’t address in its full form, which is why we violently deny anything that points to higher realms, like the paranormal. I’ve always been too interested in the truth for that.

I think people naively assume that there’s no paranormal because, if there were, it would be proven, and the scientific community would go hog wild, and you’d hear about it instantly in the media. There are a few problems with this theory. One, as highly esteemed as scientific thinking is, scientists are ultimately humans, and “skeptical”/physicalist-thinking ones at that, so any funny/fringe/fey stuff like paranormal research will be laughed out of the mainstream before it even even gets a chance to prove itself. It’s like Atlas Shrugged. Two, the meaning of the word paranormal is ‘outside the ordinary’. Science is great at exploring the ordinary—something that is repeatable, always happens the same way under the same conditions, can be controlled on command, can be independently verified, can be predicted. If something unusual or ‘outside of the ordinary’ like a UFO lands in your backyard and there’s nobody around to make a recording, scientifically speaking, it never happened (to say nothing of the myriad of photographs and videos of UFOs that have been proven to not be fraudulent and to not be what the government claimed they were (why would the government do that anyway?)). Of the whole spectrum of Things That Happen, why would we think that all of it is repeatable, predictable, controllable or not infrequent? (Perhaps credible media sources also have reservations about what to report, in order to keep up appearencs of their credibility and their assumed role?)

Whether there is evidence out there of the paranormal depends on whether you listen to the skeptics and take for granted that you (and they) would have heard about it if it happened, or take a look at the other side of the issue and read about case studies by people who don’t disbelieve.

One more think I think about dismissing the paranormal is this: If 10 million things happen in your life that are perfectly normal, and one thing happens that seems to be paranormal, maybe it’s safe to assume it was an illusion, that there’s some, underlynig, “physical” explanation. Because, after all, nothing paranormal has ever happened before (or been proven to happen). So what happens if 10 million things happen in your life, and 5,000 of them seem to be paranormal (or ‘outsode of the normal’)? Well, the first one obviously was an illusion, because all previous experiences fit within a model of normality. The second one? Obivously an illusion, because nothing paranormal has happened before (the first occurrence was an illusion and easily forgettable). The third one? Same thing. So it’s just a blind cycle of dismissal, ever skirting around the bigger picture. Especially when you take into account not only personal experiences, but anecdotal experience.

Assuming there are no ghosts, no ufos, no authentic crop circles, no spirits, no auras, no occurrences of telepathy, etc. is not necessarily “parsimonious”. On one hand, if a paranormal story is true, you have to add into the mix ghosts, or spirits, or unexplained phenomena, or alleged violations of physics, or a spiritual realm, etc. On the other hand, denying a single experience happened as it seemed introduces complexity–usually things are what they seem–to deny something was what it seemed (for no reason than that you don’t understand it even) requires complex explanations/machinations (usually flimsy ones), and it requires these for every single experience, or every anecdotal story, that one denies. If you take into consideration enough stories, it adds up. Sure, out of all things people say, some will be lies, some will be illusions, and those will add up too, but what would the numbers be? And how many of those people seem to be honest and clear-headed, etc.? These are things you have to use your intuition for, and that requires a lack of bias. If ideology denies anything paranormal, you’re biased. Now, how do you compare the complexity added by denying every individual story of the paranormal ever told (and every personal experience) with the complexity added by believing one of them? There is no objective way to do this. You can’t mathematically formalize it, so you can’t make equations for it. It’s all intuition. Occam’s razor is a double-edged sword.

Sorry if I’m being too adversarial. I don’t know how else to prove I’m right. =P

Inhahe, the only issue I’m seeing is the incompatibility of the supernatural interacting with the natural world. For a person to see a ghost, that supernatural object would have to be having some interaction with the natural world, no longer making it supernatural.

It seems the paranormal and supernatural wants to have its cake and eat it to. If something is supernatural, it can’t interact with the natural world in any way without violating it’s definition of supernatural. And if it’s interacting with the natural world, there should be a way to measure it. And if there’s a way to measure it, it’s not supernatural.

What if it’s all one reality, and the natural and supernatural are just aspects, parts, levels of it? You said there is an incompatibility, but how do we know it’s incompatible? It sounds to me like only an artifact of definitions. That’s partly why I don’t use the term supernatural anyway–everything is natural. I think the objection you express arises from the way language tends toward absolutism. Maybe something “supernatural” interacting with the physical is like air interacting with water.

I guess theres a little more to it, having to do with the way physical reality appears, from our perspective, to be comprehensive and therefore a causally closed system, and the fact that we believe we “are” physical, and that physicality is considered not just our constitution but a description of being. I’d have to think about all that some more but suffice to to say any one of those tenets could be wrong…

In panentheism, the spiritual is the part of living beings that thinks, feels, and believes from an ontological foundation.

Can you see, hear, touch, taste and smell your thoughts?

No.

The spiritual, by definition, is not detected by the senses, so when God or any other contained or containing being thinks, feels or believes, no other being senses in the material that thought, feeling or belief – that’s just the way it is.

Whenever someone talks about the paranormal or the supernatural, they say I “saw” something or I “heard” something or it “touched” me and the like.

When someone says that, they’re just experiencing physically or psychologically explanable stuff that they at the moment are clueless about regarding the physics or psychology.

So, because of all the false “spirit world” inculcating that’s been banged into their minds, they jump to “paranormal” conclusions.

Now, that being said, one’s spirituality is capable of moving vast amounts of material. I, with a single motor thought, can move tens of trillions of living being cells across a tennis court at quite a rate of speed.

Imagine how much material a galactic being could move with a single thought.

But all of that still conforms to E=MC^2 and the like – there is no “magical” fantasy supernatural stuff happening there at all.

Nevertheless, one’s relationship with God is spiritual. There are no eyes and ears and all being used (except to perceive the tiny material piece of God to which each of us is uniquely exposed). But we experience the person of God spiritually and communicate thereby via prayer and meditation.

Still, God doesn’t break the physics rules. There’s no “weird” paranormal supernatural stuff going on there.

We cannot see another being’s thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.

Those spiritual activities do not have “woo woo” manifestations in the material.

Again, the paranormal is either a misperception of physics phenomena or the hallucinations of a rather loose psyche.

You can’t really prove things about what we can or can’t experience by logical necessity…

By whose definition is the spiritual not detected by the senses? And why does that have to be absolutely so rather than generally so? Nevertheless, I think the point here is the spiritual isn’t detected by the physical senses, which generally detect physical things, but we could have any “number” of spiritual senses. We have no idea what the mind is or what its capacities are.

And not to mention that if something spiritual affects the physical then the physical senses can physically detect it.

Things usually aren’t “just” this or “just” that. And Not everything is explainable. And if our areas of knowledge expanded to encompass more than psychology (in its reduced form of having no idea what the mind is, only some of the things it does) and physics (which itself may also be incomplete), then our ideas of what constitutes an easy explanation or what something “just” is could be very different. Since we only know X at the moment, everything seems to be explainable by X.

It seems like ‘being able to explain’ something takes precedence over simply trying to apprehend its nature and explanation becomes a game of contriving a theory of reduction and assuming it’s true… what could the motives for this be?

Things don’t usually arise out of vacuums. Those precepts about the paranormal or whatever came from somewhere. Although I concede there are popular systems of thought that are very delusional. Anyway I can easily turn the tables with this one: physicalism and doubt have been banged into the minds of those who insist on one paradigm of explanation for everything.

I hate to step on someone’s form of spirituality, but it seems, at least from my perspective, that your version of spirituality is a makeshift adaptation / adoption into a reduction to exactly what spirituality was intended to complement, leaving your version of spirituality with no actual content and just pretty ways to rephrase physicalist conceptions that appear to say something spiritual – lip service to an idea.

I think it’s a misconception that the laws of physics prove there can’t be anything paranormal or spiritual. Can you show exactly how E=MC^2 precludes paranormal stuff? The laws of physics are just relationships… and E=MC^2 shows that matter is a form of energy. (Since it’s a mathematical equivalence, derived from other mathematical equivalences, it doesn’t mean matter ‘under some circumstances can, by some process, be transformed into energy’, it means matter IS energy, and the fact that it can be ‘transformed’ into energy shows that its particular form of energy can be unraveled) So if anything, E=MC^2 shows that matter is just one possible configuration of energy.

Well I of course disagree that God exists as only something material, and I question the merit of “spiritual” ideas which are forced into a materiaist framework. Square peg, round hole, hammer anyone?

I don’t think supernatural, weird, spiritual or paranomal stuff has to “break” the laws of physics. If a ghost appears, which laws of physics are being broken? The laws of physics do not say there can’t be some other formulation of energy. Physics can’t claim to completely understand the universe metaphysically/all the way down to the bottom turtle. We know WHAT happens and WHAT exists but, ultimately, not why, so we don’t know under what circumstances it’s limited to and what else could happen. We can’t even simulate a mundane, physical reality from physics so we can’t prove known physics is enough to explain it, so things that aren’t mundane aren’t necessarily all that much of a violation.
Physics is just a set of equations, describing relationships between known types of linear measurements. Physics says even less about the possibility of an invisible ghost appearing to us through ethereal senses, having nothing to say about what it has no idea how to measure.

Even if they don’t, they can still exist just as really as the material, and they can affect the material through the actions of conscious beings. We don’t even know what coniscousness is, although we pretend to. Like music, the ego is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual lives.

Perhaps some people can see thoughts, feelings and/or beliefs, sometimes. Perhaps it’s not physical. Perhaps the perception is an adjunct to the physical senses. It’s shown that, when people dream, the visual cortex behaves as it would if the subject were actually seeing it. Perhaps some analogue to dreamtime can coexist with the visual/audial/etc processing to show us auras, thoughts, etc. Perhaps this is a latent human (and animal) ability that we’ve been suppressnig for millennia.

Of course, the fact that we cannot or even generally do not see thoughts, feelings and beliefs doesn’t show that anything paranormal doesn’t exist any more than the fact that we can’t digest tree bark shows that we can’t eat anything.

As for “woo woo” or otherwise characterized manifestations into the material, I don’t know but I’m open-minded about it. Spoon bending, for example, could be real, and if it is it has far-reaching implications about the nature of things but it still follows natural law of some sort.

(or, alternatively, it is what it is.)

It is difficult for us to continue this discussion reasonably, Inhahe, as we appear to have a different base of knowledge upon which to calibrate such a discussion.

You tend to question agnostically with “I’m not so sure, are you sure?”, and I respond panentheistically, “Yes, I once wasn’t but now I am.”

My certainty and your uncertainty on the matter make it difficult to create a necessary discussion nexus.

For instance, I do know what the mind and consciousness are and I am quite aware that the paranormal/supernatural is presented as “miraculous” in nature, meaning that it thereby violates the rules of material physics and other tried and true perspectives of modern 'man. You have your doubts.

But let me clear up what might be a few misunderstandings, and then present another presentation on a related subject you might find interesting.

What you call the “physical senses” is what I call the eyes, ears, touch, taste and smell, as you surmised. These are capable of sensing matter, both mass and energy. As to “spiritual” senses, when we use our bodies to communicate with another, it is our spiritual senses, so to speak, that “sense” what that person means.

If matter was just one possible configuration of energy, couldn’t then energy be just one possible configuration of matter? One’s perspective of choice, to present energy as the “ultimate” or matter as the ultimate, makes an implication about one’s bias. To begin with, matter is not contrasted with energy, mass is. Matter is mass and energy. Also, mass and energy are two very distinct entities from physics’ perspective, which is why they have two different symbols in equations and are treated so differently.

As for your general question “how do you know?”, the best relevant answer is that I took the same doubts you had and explored to find the answer, rationally knowing that two concepts in opposition could not both be true. I learned that our ancient ancestors made mistakes of perception that lead to mistaken constructs.

A good example for us to discuss is your presentation of spoon bending with thoughts. You leave it open as a possiblity. I have closed the door on it, realizing it to be impossible. I challenge you to show how it could happen, cite reputable examples of it having happened, and repeat the process repeatedly on demand.

One can enjoy agnostic doubt because it keeps things open indefinitely. Such a preference of perceiving over judging may give the “pleasurable” illusion that one will live forever, but eventually one begins to realize that good decisions cannot be forestalled forever, and that the reality remains that one will eventually die, and that deferring decisions, as if so doing will defer the passage of time unto death, is futile. Those who “prefer” energy, and the supernatural/paranormal they like to connect it with, over the harder mass of life that more graphically illustrates the reality and permanancy of death, are particularly characteristic of this futility. It’s quite the process addiction.

So hopefully this isn’t you, and you’re just where you are on your way, normally, to making some good decisions.

One can play God and doubt the conclusions we limited human beings make, but we are not supposed to be “God”, we are supposed to be what we are: human beings, quite limited compared to God. We make decisions, we make mistakes, and we eventually, hopefully, correct them and make better decisions. We progress that way, simply by being the ephemeral mortal human beings that we are. Sure, we’ll never know the whole truth like God does, but we’re not supposed to. We’re supposed to be human beings, with limited senses and spirituality, never knowing everything. But that’s okay. It’s better to be a pretty good human being than to masquerade as God’s advocate, doubting every rational, reaonsable, modern conclusion humanity makes.

As for the precepts about the paranormal or whatever coming from somewhere, yes, they do: misperceptions. (http://www.ilovephilosophy.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=1853814&highlight=whered#1853814)

I’m not comfortable with the use of the word “prove”… can we prove anything?
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If there were evidence of anything paranormal or supernatural, it would be quantified, tested, and fill a chapter in your high school science textbook - just as electricity, magnetism, etc. have.

Sure, there are likely many things we haven’t discovered yet - but none of them that have been discovered were things for which there were ‘legends’ about for hundreds or thousands of years before being verified. So, these things have followed a pattern more akin to folklore than a genuine phenomenon that is discoverable. In other words, there has been no real evidence for any of it, despite thousands of years of alleged incidents. There is, on the other hand, quite a bit of evidence for the general silliness, overactive imagination, sensory mistakes, and unreliability of the human mind, which is quite an ordinary and more reasonable explanation.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Perhaps not completely…but some things are more probable than others, based on information we’ve gathered.

I don’t think paranormal or supernatural evidence is evidence at all. If anything, weak evidence. :sunglasses:

Before you can speculate what evidence is provided by the existance of the supernatural, you must first provide evidence for the existance of the supernatural.

I think so. It’s just a good idea to discern between weak proof and strong proof. Science seems to try for the strongest proof (which is why I use it for determining my beliefs).

Paranormal proof is so weak as to be invalid.

Yes

so reality is a strictly limited system known entirely to us and anything new is to be thought of as impossible by default? do we have prove that a black swan is possible before we show any evidence of the existence of black swans? pffft.

Not quite. Where did anybody claim to know everything? Me detects a straw man.