Are We Able to Quantify the Supernatural?

The supernatural are not exactly quantifiable because supernaturalism is a baseless ideology about imaginary entities that cannot exist in any reality. Here is my simple yet logical argument for this position.

In The Beginning

What are the possibilities for the origins of supernatural entities? 

They cannot just pop into existence, because there would be nothing for them to pop from, nothing for them to pop out of, or anywhere for them to pop into, and that "magic" stuff would need to be generated from something somewhere before there was anywhere. Could these entities be formed from, evolve or developed from, or even be synthesized from natural entities? No! The ability to contravene the laws of nature would need to come from material that was not subject to these laws, but all material is subject to the laws of nature. This material would need to be immaterial, which is impossible. So, from where could supernatural entities possibly come?

Let me break this down. To begin with, the concept of absolute nothing is false. At no time in the existence of reality could absolute nothing ever exist, because from nothing nothing can come. There would be nothing to generate anything and nothing to generate it from. Therefore, if there were ever absolute nothing, there would be nothing forever. So, something has always existed. And, the strongest evidence of any science tells us that this is energy. Everything is and has always been energy. Quantum energy, packets of energy, systems of interactive quantum particles, are the building blocks of everything. Everything. And, since energy has always existed because, according to the Laws of Thermodynamics, energy can be neither created nor destroyed in a closed system. The universe includes everything in reality, which makes it a closed system. The scientifically determinable parameters regulating natural interactions, otherwise known as the laws of nature have always existed in reality. Since these parameters have always existed as evidenced by the facts that, first, energy has always existed, and second, that these parameters exist because the resulting balance, systemic harmony, and stability, to keep the concept simple, are the reasons anything exists at all. 

So, with this in mind, how might the supernatural come about or exist? Supernatural entities would need to contravene these parameters before they have ever achieved the developmental level of quantum particles, before they actually existed. These simple facts eliminate the unnatural, the supernatural, and the supranatural from the realm of existence. They cannot even be logically imagined, which is why so many scary movies are funny when not insulting the viewer's intelligence. From the perspective of logic, the law of identity describes why supernatural entities cannot be a part of the natural universe in the same way it explains why infinite entities cannot exist. Then from the breakdown of what a supernatural entity would be composed of, so that it could escape the laws of nature, we are left with a noncognative construct, immaterial. The immaterial is exactly nothing. Otherwise it would be subject to the laws of nature. In other words, some thing, anything, and everything is subject to the laws of nature. Just how much a misunderstanding of nothing figures into ideologies, especially anthologies of ideologies like religion is a topic for another blog entry.

In short, supernatural entities cannot possibly exist. This eliminates gods, ghosts, demons, devils, spirits, souls, heavens, hells, an afterlife and magic. And this is exactly what the evidence has consistently exposed. 

How Did We Get Here

Now through ethology, behavioral sciences, we know that the time required for primitive perceptual processes with assimilation and interpretation, memory retrieval, thought strings, and motor neuron activation takes too long, so imaginatively suggestive feedback loops initially give intelligent agency to stimuli of unknown origin. Better safe than sorry. It's an ESS (evolutionarily stable strategy), a safety feature we feel as fear of the unknown so as to activate defensive mechanisms. Dumbfounded by the absence of intelligent entities, the inexplicable grew into wild claims of unnatural beings escaping into unnatural realms after performing some imagined feat. Ephemeral feelings generated a story for which there was no evidence and that no one actually witnessed. This story from those feelings about something inexplicable has reproduced so prodigiously that it has evolved into ideologies like supernaturalism and superstition, story genre like myths and legends, and anthologies of mythology and ideology like religion. What started out as the pretense of knowledge in an atmosphere of ignorance (i.e., belief), became the motivation and excuse for the most heinous atrocities ever committed by humans. But far worse, what could be excused as an ignorance of natural properties and their psychology, when they might have just admitted they didn't know, became a habit of deceit, an institutionalized habit of assuming the conclusion from which to build a back story. Belief is not only an admission of ignorance, it was born in an atmosphere of ignorance where it nursed on deceit. There is nothing good about belief.

Eventually, it became culturally acceptable to suppose that supernatural (remember, they were originally only unnatural) beings were responsible for both fortunate and mis-fortunate happenstance. This led to authority figures claiming expert knowledge, then privileged knowledge, eventually revelation as to the concerns of those supernaturally powerful beings (eg. spirits, gods, demons, etc). This was necessary to claim control over these powers (yes, those biblical powers), and then to manipulate fear and thereby control the population for political purposes. In some popular forms of this manifests as anything from racism and enforced conformity to an ideology to tyranny of a majority or the stampede of stupidity that takes humanity into war or over a cliff into extinction.  And while ignorance runs-a-muck, authorized charlatans collaborated to institutionalize their "explanations" as far as their influence would allow. This led to the authorized justification of regional superstitions (i.e., poly- and monotheistic religions, nationalistic gods, and nationalism; see King Josiah and his High Priest Hilkiah and their Pentateuch). These institutions quickly capitalized on the power of unfalsifiable, unquestionable, unapproachable authority figures, like war gods, that hailed from an (until recently) unreachable sphere. Charlatans learn to use this Orphic Abyss as a most advantageous, be it ever so heinous, value of supernaturalism. This value will be used religiously by both religious and non-religious totalitarians, despots, dictators, sadomasochists, pedophiles, preachers, and Sunday school teachers to convince people that some supernatural something-or-other gave them the authority to profess the intimate thoughts and wishes of their immaterial-nothing-whatsoever. Making them, in effect, demigods, to those who don't see them as metaphysical naturalists, atheists, and freethinkers see them: deluded. Oh yeah, the sociopaths love this demigod status every bit as much as they hate scientists exposing their chicanery. 

Then, as if this were not enough, these powerful charlatans persecuted people of discovery and inquiry, burnt libraries, (eg. schools of philosophy, the Library of Alexandria, early geometers, astronomers, etc.) repressed education, limited the reading of, even possession of, holy writings to the initiated (clergy), while at the same time, they forbade reading or public interpretation of much else for more than a thousand years. In so doing, and knowing full well that in the absence of knowledge their superstitious explanations would reign over great suffering, pursued some of the most horrendous acts ever perpetrated against humans (mostly women and minorities), based on ridiculous supernatural claims of witchcraft, demons, devils, magic potions, daemonic possession, biblical dogma, etc.

This fear and ignorance was often found useful in sustaining bigotry against groups of people mentioned in the myths of their holy books. For example, Jews have been held culpable for the crucifixion of the mythical demigod for centuries. These inquisitions had the effect intended with people turning against each other for fear of retribution from their tyrants of interpretation or some unimaginable supernatural tyrant, even when no one was around. The clergy would terrorize nonconformists for the crimes of knowing too much about nature, anatomy, or for possessing foreign knowledge; they would persecute an intellectual gift as fast as a mental impediment. In this way ignorance was maintained, and supernaturalism retains the power of ideological manipulation.

Then science broke through with discoveries from foreign lands, embarrassingly obvious biases against brilliant thinkers like Galileo, upstanding activists like Bruno, the explanations by Newton and Darwin. Laws related to thermodynamics, quantum physics, astrophysics, and chemistry were built on the discoveries of great thinkers and the reemergence of the ancient Greek philosophers, mathematicians, and algebra via the Renaissance Era. The Schism, Reformation, and Enlightenment Eras freed many thinkers; the printing press allowed public scrutiny of Christianity's earlier versions, foundational flaws, and the King James Bible made it obvious that the Abrahamic religions were not the concoction of gods. Then Spinoza, Voltaire, and Thomas Paine's Age of Reason, works that inspired Thomas Jefferson's realization that dogmatic superstitious totalitarianism imprisoned thinking throughout man's history, the role ignorance played in this, and the function education would play in eliminating it. James Madison's elucidation of Baron de Montesquieu's "Spirit of Laws" kicked the Church to the curb, and boom -- freethinking is the beacon breaking through the black hole of primitive beliefs. A beacon shinning into the foggy blackness of interpretive nonsense, into the depths of the nothing, that is, the supernatural. And there was no there, there.

We learn of our actual origins, thanks to Charles Darwin, genetics, physics, and many other important sciences. Medical and anatomical understanding explodes with the knowledge of these new found relationships. The anthropomorphic gods of the biblical testaments becomes a parlor joke for all but those who pander to the beliefs of the uneducated, while charlatan sophists scramble to find new excuses for the inexplicable absence of these god(s) and their disappearing gaps. And scientific advancements greatly enhance the human experience with advent of modern medicine and technology. We look back at our history with new sight only to see that superstitions, supernaturalism, and those supposed authority figures -- the pundit, the politician, the priestly wannabe demigod who settles for demagogue, and the god-fraud fostering a personality cult of power worshippers -- were not only the wrong people to be followed or even listened to, but also the source of the worst answers to the most important questions. As it turns out, these sociopaths have always been the problem. And don't get me started on business people in government, a member of the exploiter caste in a public service post, really? It is for this reason that pious pundits should not be in government, but I digress.

Of course, there have been religious resurgences since the Enlightenment era. Fear has been exploited time and time again to siphon power from social groups; it's what religion was concocted to do. The single worst thing about a democratic society is that if populism isn't held in check by higher courts, mob mentality turns democracy into fascism. With Christian Supremacy morphing fascism into Nazism (read Mein Kampf), and corporatism into something similar to an Orwellian dystopia, the darkest days of our democracy and the human species are just around the corner. All of this is supported by the vast majority of Christians, including Bishops, the Vatican, and end-times fundamentalists. In the United States, relatively far right organizations, politicians, religious groups and their adherents have partnered with powerful corporations to rewrite history (Texas SBOE recent ruling), revive the Confederacy through the Southern Strategy, and make political footballs of equal rights for women, reproductive rights, gay rights, racial, and immigrant rights. These same far right groups are attempting to redefine political philosophies with some of the lamest sophistry I have ever read (read anything by Murray Rothbard, the oxymorons of Neoliberalism, or the landfills full of religious idiocies). Also they are continually reintroducing fallacious, fictitious evidentiarily unsupported claims as scientific, in an attempt to obfuscate the evidence for evolutionary theory with a rebranding of the same old creationism. Science is expanding our knowledge of the properties and regularities of this natural realm, while our knowledge of the cosmos pushes the boundaries of the old real estate for these supernatural beings beyond known space and its temporal origins.

Then it's realized that in the history of human kind, never has any supernatural claim ever been justified, let alone verified, and poof! The evolution of the supernatural realm has come full circle only to be quantified for what it always has been -- the figment of a primitive mind in search of an explanation for things that go bump in the dark. 

An obvious explanation for multiplicity of claims of supernaturalistic origins would be that all isolated populations imagined supernatural entities in their history and culture, but due to their isolation, these entities developed differently. Their names, likes, dislikes, powers, proclamations, responsibilities, and modes of retribution, even ironically, when it comes to using naturally occurring cataclysms as one of its forms, reflect the era when and area where these entities were imaginatively defined. Even what is considered ethical behavior varies widely between geographically isolated groups. My favorite example of course, is India, but the American Indians are, every bit as much as the Middle East, a study in cultural migration and syncretism through cultural interaction. Also, if one hypothetically travels backwards through time, they will find that the isolation increases with the limitations of travel between these geographically isolated groups. And it is noted by most Cultural Anthropologists that there is a link between language migration and an accompaniment of superstitious beliefs. Talk is cheap and beliefs are cheaper. How is that for a quantification of the supernatural?

I suppose you thought that this would be a blurb on the irrationality of superstition and the supernatural. Well, to quantify the baseless foundation of a baseless ideology that is the cornerstone of so many baseless anthologies of myths and ideologies, I had to expose  its quantifiable value. The only quantifiable value of the supernatural is as a means of emotional manipulation.

Now, I prefer to finish all discussions of problems with my best suggestions for their solution. And anthologies of ideologies based on supernatural claims have caused unfathomable suffering. It qualifies as a major problem. So, here is my best solution. Education. No, not your typical public school education that inculcates compliance, conformity, obedience, and complacency to the point of apathy. You have to possess intellectual integrity and self determination to sift through the fraud and find the facts. 

My next blog will take us deeper.