ENTURIES ago it was easier to believe in a realm beyond the material (apart from the tooth fairy) when anyone could reason thus:

We came from somewhere. Since tools of humans were crude and simple, only a most-powerful incorporeal being could be capable of a feat such as assembling a cognizant, feeling person out of raw earth (no wonder we like our earth raw). Therefore such a creative entity must exist, it being God.

As technology improved, so did economics, diet, health, communication, and education— hence intellectual and ratiocinative capabilities, if not prime-time television.

But it wasn’t until evolutionary hypotheses started coming our way— followed soon after by Jerry Springer— that many of us could entertain the idea that everything in our existence might ultimately have a natural explanation.

While some kind of long-term incremental process for human development has been generally accepted, many still believe that it all bears witness to a guiding force, a sentient creator, giving when needed a push or a tug— human beings (much less laptops) being far too intricate to be entirely the result of unconscious force.

This could be true were it but a matter of atoms being randomly assembled in different ways until a human was hit upon with a lucky guess (tonight’s lotto: 5-9-11-31-32-43) but that ain’t the way it’s set up.

Because the fittest are most likely to survive, a trial and error process is in place which empowers nature as a great albeit unconscious architect (albeit— that’s a strange word when you stop and think albeit).

Evolution

How this operates may be described as follows (apologies to Ken Ham :):

Imagine selecting groups of ten letters at random, one new group every second— 60 times a minute, 3,600 times an hour, 86,400 times a day, etc.

Since there are about 144 trillion possible combinations (an American trillion equals a British billion which equals a Zimbabwian zillion) even after a million years the chances are less than one in four (do the math) that we’ll have hit upon the first ten letters of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, much less be visited by the prize patrol.

Let’s try a slightly different technique. No, nothing sneaky.

We’ll still randomly search for letters of the Britannica, one try every second, but now only one letter at a time, beginning with the first. It wouldn’t have to be done by monkeys, but could be.

When a match is made, we’ll call that the fittest, and lock it into position. Then we’ll randomly search for the second letter until we establish it, and so forth.

With this system it will take on average less than five minutes to find those first ten letters, and only about a hundred and fifty years to complete the entire Encyclopaedia— even throwing in Catcher-in-the-Rye.

By such a process of trial and error it becomes possible to explain everything from the most primitive life-form through Captain Kirk in terms of natural forces, without the need of a supernatural architect working outside the realm of known physical laws.

In fact naturalism (the belief that scientific laws are sufficient to account for any phenomena) seems adequate to explain most if not all entities or occurrences that we would otherwise have had reason to call supernatural— the Cubs winning a World Series, for example.

Even a credulous person, much less one more strictly-scientific, would admit that beings, objects, or events which are truly unexplainable via our present knowledge (if any actually exist— UFO’s don’t count, since they’re explainable as hoaxes or aliens) cumulatively represent at most but a small portion of perceived reality.

Even a strictly-scientific person, much less one more credulous, would admit that far from every natural law is now known, at least by us; there’s still a lot that our best investigatory minds with today’s finest instruments (Steinway, Gibson) do not understand or have not even discovered, every answer begetting new questions.

Therefore it’s likely that any and all experience heretofore regarded as preternatural or supernatural— and not misconstrued or fraudulent— isn’t beyond all science, but simply outside the range of current knowledge, and not necessarily repeatable with stuff you can order from Edmund Scientific. Yet, anyway.

Cryptonaturalism

Preternatural and supernatural as adjectives— in this world at least— can both be replaced with cryptonatural, meaning apparently extra-natural, yet known (even if only in principle or theory) to be natural and ultimately explainable as natural— the crypto- designation is temporal.

Also attitudinal. Whether something’s natural or cryptonatural is in the mind of the beholder.

For most people, the stage-magic trick of sawing a woman in half is natural— many have been wanting to do it for years. Even though they may not be able to explain exactly how the illusion works, they know it’s nothing more than that— an illusion.

Some mentalist acts are a different story. If a performer claims or implies real extrasensory powers, to those in the audience who believe in such and are convinced, a stunt might be seen as cryptonatural; to those who still write it off as trickery— again even if they can’t figure out exactly how it’s done— it will be seen as natural.

Alien spacecraft, whether or not they exist, are a good object lesson— an unidentified flying object lesson, to be precise. Let’s say a UFO appears in the sky, lands, and disgorges a being that is definitely not native to our planet, or even has eyes like Ted Koppel’s.

Our first reaction (after cardiac arrest and defib) would be that we were witnessing the arrival of a craft bearing an ambassador or explorer from another solar system who was, while evolved differently and more advanced in space travel, still a natural phenomenon— an entity perhaps remotely like ourselves, even to the extent of having opposing thumbs.

However, our reaction three thousand years ago to the same event may have been that while the craft was perceivable as some kind of vehicle comprised of natural material (a chariot-of-the-gods perhaps, or King Tut on a Harley) the occupant was more like a deity than an equal.

Thirty thousand years ago the occurrence would likely have been regarded as simply the sudden appearance of a divine spirit, with neither the vessel nor its passenger being recognized as natural.

Primitive humans were thought to have regarded virtually all phenomena as having supernatural import— this would have been millennia before either Ezekiel or Project Blue Book.

The more cognizant we become, the easier it is to envision all mysteries as subject to scientific explanation.

To sixteenth-century humans, radio waves were entirely inaccessible, yet they existed. The same waves we now pick up from space with radio telescopes were, then as now, passing through everything, including alleged witches on trial (talk about misogyny!). People then had no way to postulate the waves’ existence, much less detect them.

If a person from the future could have shown up with a radio transmitter and receiver, those devices would probably have been regarded as possessed of supernatural (demonic) power and burned along with their owner, unless explained. In that case they might have been kept to amuse the royal court, at least till the batteries died and the king blew his crown.

Similarly for us, if we think there might actually be some small amount of genuine cryptonatural phenomena, it is likely none is supernatural in the sense of being not ultimately explainable vis-à-vis natural laws.

All are natural phenomena, beyond our comprehension— for the time being at least. Perhaps a taste of yet-unknown wonders.

Psychic Phenomena

What few manifestations of power there are, if any, beyond what we now consider natural, must not only be small in ratio to normal experience, but next-to-impossible to access at will (or at won’t)—

Otherwise stage magicians would incorporate such techniques into programs now entirely dependent on illusion, and gamblers use them to upset the slim house-edge at the pass line in craps.

Psychics maintain that their powers are dependent upon fluctuations involving subtleties of human emotion rather than either the mathematical coldness of probability or the mindless— but sexy— greed generally associated with gambling.

Yet the determinants of what constitute feeling and selflessness— or the lack thereof— should be hospitable to a marginal scale if anything, and the casino’s margin when taking maximum odds allowed on all point-numbers rolled (at triple-odds or better tables) is only about half of one percent or less.

To anyone purporting to maintain even a modicum of objectivity, these excuses seem flimsy indeed, and wouldn’t do with postal employees.

Tricks performed by mediums as evidence of their powers, while often fooling even scientists, have been exposed by magicians as various forms of sleight-of-hand— those not directly unmasked being dismissed as easily duplicative using standard illusionary methods.

Spiritualists and channellers who honestly believe in their own abilities (many exist, though I haven’t been in telepathic contact with any lately) are according to this reasoning self-deluded—

Their success dependent on subtle-albeit-unconscious sensory perception, a sticking to generalities that sound specific, and the lucky guess occasioned by a vast outpouring to numerous clients, their popularity fueled by the public’s thirst for help in dealing with the loneliness of separation and apparent meaninglessness of death.

It’s unlikely there’s anything substantive to any kind of fortune telling, divination, or prophecy that does not have incorporated into it educated guess and/or naturalistic forecasting components (transistors, rheostats, etc.).

Many of the most famous, and allegedly most accurate, of would-be modern-day prophets have been written about in books that became popular, especially with the socially-challenged, starting in the 1960’s.

Naturally these writers honed in on the few predictions out of thousands made that turned out to have had some validity, ranging from assassinations to wars. Thus millions of readers— including some of the intelligentsia, not just people with washing machines on their porches— were taken in.

Often these books ended with a chapter or two on predictions for a future now past, and all one has to do is go back and read them to see that none did any better than would have been expected using ordinary knowledge and guesswork— and oftentimes worse.

(We’re not talking about Ye Guyes of Olde, like Nostraedamus, whoe haeve the enormouse benefite of sympaethetic aefter-the-faect extraepolation.)

While detraectors of haerd-nosed skepticism find it easy to see closed-mindedness in such attitudes, every negativity offers its converse as a positive: rejecting foreordination makes possible human freedom, regular glasses instead of rose-tinted admit more light, selecting an older mate reduces the chance of a living mother-in-law, etc.

Science

Scientists as well as others of a naturalistic bent are often perceived as being more distrustful than objective with regard to phenomena that does not seem to fit into their vested cosmos-views, when actually the reverse is true:

(If you haven’t already surmised, a colon at the end of a paragraph means, “Support for and/or elaboration of the just-made statement is forthcoming. So before you get worked up or blathered, read on.”)

Theoreticians look for verifiable incongruities, such having been shown to be the surest path to new discovery and better knowledge. (Humor is starting to wear thin. Time to give it a boost with a laugh-track.)

In the best science, oddities are rebuffed only after verifiability is repeatedly denied— suggesting either that the observation was biased or otherwise in error, or the researcher flunked something in school (ha-ha-ha).

Nor for that matter should scientists themselves be immune from having similar skepticism applied to them, especially if they either missed their booster shots or were reared in a ten-wide on a half-acre lot (ha-ha... ha-Ha-HA-HA-HA-Ha-ha).

Even some scientists were convinced, before the hoax was confessed-to and fully explained, that the so-called crop circles could not have been made by humans, simply because the ones they themselves replicated with their guessed methodology lacked the correct signature, even though the routing, account, and check numbers matched (ha-Ha-HA-Ha-ha).

The infamous Shroud of Turin seduced a few others, again before its dating to the Fourteenth Century, and the identification of an amazing but medievally quite-straightforward painting technique capable of having been used to create its enigmatic negative image— more obscura than camera (ha-ha).

Occasionally light is inadvertently shed on an old mystery by scientific research being conducted in a seemingly unanalogous vein [or if Frank and Joe turn to their father, the renowned detective Fenton Hardy, for help (ha-ha-ha)], as in a recent case:

Some had still regarded as supernatural the phenomenon of planchette writing and Ouija boards, wherein the stylus or pointer seems to move by itself to draw or indicate letters that spell meaningful words, despite the firm (lie-detector-passable) belief of the party or parties whose hands touch the device that they are not in any way controlling it.

Completely unrelated to this, a technique called facilitated communication was developed in the hope of helping autistic children. It involved using the aid of a specially-trained person to steady the hand of the young patient as he tapped out messages on a computer keyboard.

However it was later demonstrated, through a simple but incontrovertible experiment, that the facilitators— despite their sincere convictions to the contrary— were not only steadying, but without consciously realizing it, guiding the patient’s hand, and composing the messages themselves, without being the least aware of it.

Theologians and others who, like the theologians, may or may not have had any idea what they were talking about (ha-ha) have written of the day when humanity would come of age— when we would outgrow our need for the supernatural.

While our attraction for mystery and the unknown will undoubtedly continue to increase as long as passionate beings are extant, there is foreseeable a human intellectual attainment wherein all verifiable phenomena have been explained, and all yet-unexplained phenomena are unverifiable (z-z-z).

Much as lovers of ESP, ghosts, the occult, and even respectable-in-comparison-UFO’s are reluctant to admit it, that time may be near. Still there’s no need to anticipate ever having to give up either ghost stories or campfires (weak laughter followed by a pause, then a single, embarrassed clap).

However a dearth of verifiable supernatural experience in the world doesn’t necessitate lack of transcendent reality, which we’ll define as anything that is currently completely inaccessible; furthermore it in no way evidences lack of the ultimately transcendent, which we’ll define as any transcendent reality that is eternally completely inaccessible.

[Probably irrelevant to us anyway unless we aspire to become Doctors of Speculative Metaphysics, or PhDSM’s (hoot followed by sporadic claps).]

Most importantly, denial of supernatural reality in our cosmos doesn’t posit denial of supernatural reality out of this cosmos (boo-hiss-boo).

Even if all of what we thought might have evidenced supernatural power turns out to be misconstrued or fraudulent, that in no way necessitates nonexistence of a small, or even stupendous (ha-ha) amount of transcendent reality.

Nor does it, for a evening’s entertainment, prevent us from dusting off the Ouija board and asking great-great-grand-uncle (may he never rest in peace) which side of the war he was really on (ha-Ha-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-Ha-ha).

Thank you, you’ve been a great audience! (enthusiastic applause)