Noumena, Cognita and Dreams

A discussion of epistemology in relation to the paranormal.

c. Timothy V Reeves

December 2020

(Edition 6)

The mind of (wo)man penetrates behind the experiential façade to the logic that controls it. “A man may see how this world goes with no eyes. Look with thine ears!” (Shakespeare).

 

This essay is a response to James Knight’s blog post here to which he drew my attention. James asks if the question of the existence of the supernatural can be answered via the kind of crowd thinking which is behind free market economics. James’ subsequent verdict is that stories of the supernatural are so prevalent that it makes the existence of the supernatural likely. I suppose it’s a bit like one of those experiments where a crowd of people give their estimates as to the number of items in a large jar and though very few get it right the average of the estimates often turns out to be close to the truth.    

I found it difficult, however, to proceed with a judgement on James’ post in the absence of a clear vision of just what the natural vs the supernatural dichotomy really means (….at least in the post in view, although James tells me that he has grappled with this question elsewhere….but see the appendix). But having said that I would certainly agree that the sheer weight of paranormal accounts is a kind of crowd based evidence which leaves me, at least, feeling that there is much more to those “high strangeness” experiences we hear reported from time to time than many would credit. What makes these experiences all the more compelling is that they are not necessarily associated with “supernatural belief”, either before or after the experience; quite often the experiencer isn’t a believer from the outset and after the experience they are left mystified as to what it all means and they do not subsequently engage in an elaborate interpretation of the meaning of their experience in terms of “the supernatural”; for them it remains an experiential anomaly they have to live with.

But let me start with some probing of the concept of the “supernatural”.  How do we distinguish the “supernatural” from the “natural”?  I don’t fully buy the quip that it’s simply a distinction between the known laws of physics being obeyed and them being transgressed. After all on that basis anomalous events leading to revisions of the laws of physics would then classify as “supernatural”, at least until such a time that they became incorporated into “settled science”.

If we hold to a conventional Christian theology (like myself), however, we then do have a clear theological basis for the distinction between the natural and the supernatural: Viz; that God himself classifies as capital “S” Supernatural and everything thing he creates is natural.  From this it follows that angelic beings (which includes Satan), then automatically classify as natural. There is much to be said for this definition theologically since it is (theologically) clear-cut and avoids a spiritual dualism which is inclined to lump God himself into a so-called “spirit world” where, like one of the Greek gods, he is striving with entities and objects that, although lesser than himself, nevertheless all classify as belonging to some supernatural domain of gods, thereby almost putting such entities in the same genus as God himself. This form of dualism may have its roots in the traditional Earth vs the Heavens dualism which contrasts the Earthly world of profane matter over and against the sacred & ethereal god-like spiritual beings that inhabit the sublime reaches of the Heavens. Echoes of this spirit vs matter (sometimes subliminally expressed as mind vs matter) dichotomy remain with us today. I personally am repelled by this kind of dualism, especially in the light of Colossians 1:15-17.  For me the only valid theological dualism is God vs. everything he has created.

But having said that this theological understanding isn’t in fact the folk usage of the term “supernatural”. It is more usual to lump together all those strange entities and events which revolve round miracles, prophecies, angelic beings, ghosts, ghouls and goblins as supernatural (“supernatural” without a capital S in this case).  Well, fair enough provided we keep at the back of our minds the fundamental God vs creation dualism.  But this returns us to the original question, namely, what does the “supernatural” mean in this secondary sense?  This is where our problems begin. 

The whole of this essay can be found here: