Waiting for the Supernatural bus

When something seriously weird happens, or allegedly happens, something that seems to just not be part of the natural world as we know it, what do we do with these events (sorry, alleged events)?

Well, that depends on who you are and how you think.

Religious people of a certain hue will be quick to claim credit on behalf of their god, if the event was good (a ‘miracle’) or if it was bad (‘punishment’ for sins, usually other people’s sins, of course – the delightful Fred Phelps springs to mind).

Joe Bloe at the bus stop, whose an agnostic, or dull-witted, or just trying to get the shopping home (or all three) will shrug and call it ‘one of those things’ – a mystery.

The skeptic will say it never happened in the first place, or if it did it can’t be shown to happen in the lab in a reliable repeatable way, so it has no credibility. Those experiencing it are delusional, or the victims of fraudsters, or they themselves are the liars.

Personally, I’m at the bus stop with Joe. I’m there waiting for the piece of science that says it’s proved one way or the other whether this bizzare event or phenomenon is possible. My religious friends pray that God will give me faith to accept that He works in mysterious ways. My skeptical friends think I’m so open-minded I’ve let my brain fall out.

So why am I at the bus stop? Because over time so many things have been taken off the ‘supernatural’ list – from earthquakes to epilepsy, they are no longer seen as the petulant or malevolent impositions of gods or demons, but as natural things with natural causes. How we arose from the primordial slime is now explained by evolution – no zebras or tse-tse flies or humans appearing ‘ping!’ at the wave of an Intelligent Designer’s wand. Quantum mechanics – unfathomable by 99.999% of human brains – explains, we are told by the 0.001%, how very small stuff works, and they have the maths to prove it.

A lot of these changes, these advances in understanding, involved some serious mind-boggling. And I suppose I’m just skeptical that the boggling is over, that our scientific methods have come as far as they can, that we have the territory mapped out. I think it’s possible that in the future there may be scientific explanations for things like psychic experiences, out-of-body consciousness, distant-viewing, intuition, and so on.

But, as real life, so in ideas – I don’t know when, or even whether, the bus will turn up. Could be a long wait.