The offer to answer your questions still stands. Each Thursday will be devoted to answering your questions, assuming there are any to answer. It’s your chance to determine what goes up on the blog (unless of course you want to write a guest post). This week’s question came from the reader survey, so it’s anonymous. 

I find the idea of the supernatural confusing and have always wished that someone could explain it to me. Maybe this is the wrong blog for that, but maybe you could explain any reasons why you used to believe, if there are any tha are more explanatory than just that you grew up always hearing that.

We all know what the natural is. It’s the things that we can directly experience with our senses or detect with instruments. The natural realm can be understood and to a large extent it is. It’s what us rational people would call reality.

In the realm of the supernatural, we have by definition things that are beyond nature in someway. The supernatural is inherantly more powerful than the natural and is beyond the ability of science to detect.

Throughout history the supernatural has been replaced with the natural. For much of hisotry the sun and moon have been thought to be gods and the weather, earthquakes, volcanoes, disease, mental illness, and neurological disorders were all thought to be supernatural.

We now know that mental illness and neurological disorders (such as epilepsy) are cause by chemical or structural abnormalities in the brain, not demons. We know that lightning is caused by an electrical charge in the cloud formation, not Thor’s hammer. We also know that the sun is a ball of mostly hydrogen and hellium, not a god.

With each major discovery the supernatural has gotten smaller. The gods, angles, and demons have been left with much less to do and less room to hide. Over the last four hundred years the natural realm as expanded to the point where the supernatural is no longer nessisary. Hopefully in the next four hundred it will expand to the point where there is no room for the supernatural.

So why did I believe? I was heavily indoctrinated and I was delusional.

My indoctrination included a very real belief that the end was near and that the earth was a battlefield between the forces of good and evil. I loved science, and would watch Bill Nye the Science Guy and National Geographic Videos every chance I got, but as soon as I heard “millions of years” I would filter that as being Satan’s deception. There was nothing wrong with Bill Nye, he had just been tricked by someone who had spent the last 6000 years perfecting his ploys.

Growing up in an apolocalyptic cult, you are always looking for the next possible fulfilment of prophecy. Any horrific story in the news is exciting, the more gory and the more shocking the better. The clincher for me was the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Rather than see it as evidence of the danger of religion, I saw it as evidence that the Great Controversy was real.

I then turned to the prophecies, searching them so that I would be ready for what was to come. I became convinced that I needed to spend my life helping people prepare for the end of days. Hense my sense of calling to the ministry.

Then through the four years of doubt on my journey out of the church the one thing that kept me going more than anything else was that sense of calling. It had seemed so real. God spoke to me. God had called me. I was also afraid that Satan was trying to derail me from God’s plan for my life.

It was even harder to admit that this was a delusion than it was to admit that I was ignorant of reality.

In general, confirmation bias goes a long ways to maintain an early indoctrination. Bertrand Russell put it well when he said:

If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.

A lot of people beleive due to that indoctrination, for others it’s ignorance of science and reality, and for still others it’s based on some fear of death or feeling that there must be more to this universe. Why people like Dr. Francis Collins began to believe is a much different story and one that I hope Michael Shermer’s The Believing Brain will explain.

***Entering preaching mode– For those who beleive out of ignorance or some thrist for mystery, there is so much more out there than they know, so much more incredible and amazing. There’s no need to call it divine, spiritual, or anything else to have sense of awe about the wonders of our planet and universe. The mountains, sunsets, Milky Way, extremophiles, and the enormity of it all is so incredbile! From my experiance it’s so much more profound when you understand how it works than it whatever sense of mystery clouds your mind. –Leaving preaching mode***