"When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing — they believe in anything"
Isn’t God by definition super natural?
Yes, Chesterton was very often spot on.
Beat me to it. I was going to suggest that we now have social-scientific confirmation of Chesterton’s dictum.
Or put another way: If you stand for nothing you fall for anything.
Yep ... some people are superstitious, spiritual, believe in ghosts, angels demons, space aliens, think that their own “minds” can create something out of nothing (in a tangible sense), think that they are “god” or free agents of the universe — but — find it impossible to believe that there is such a thing as our Creator God of the universe, as described in the Bible, who did what is described in Genesis and Exodus (and further on in the Bible).
In contrast, just 8 per cent attend a church or other place of worship at least once a week.
Even if this was a random poll, there is some self-selection in who stays on the line to answer the questions. Still, the results are disappointing for Christians, traditionaists and rationalists.
Makes sense. Ghosts and superstitions pronounce no moral judgement on people, nor do they require any self-denial. God expects more from us, and has provided His grace to make us better than we would be.
I am still exercising Thomas Jefferson’s axiom:
“Question everything.”
I go to one church, taking a blue denim covered TEV bible. The preacher berates me for having ‘such an abomination’.
I go to another church, carrying the RSV bible, the other preacher demanded I obtain, and am told by this one, ‘We don’t use that, here, but you may in your own home. We use ‘this’’.
I make a trip to a third church, and, yup, you guessed it, ‘wrong version again!’ This time, it was a gifted-by-the-preacher-himself NIV Study bible!
Maybe not to you, but to me, a bible is the same as a rose, (by another name it is still a bible). All three churches, supposedly of the same twig, of the same branch of Christianity, but reviled at any other “edition/version/rewriting” of the bible, than their own chosen one.
The U.K. has a long tradition of supernatural happenings, as well as the home to both the Druids and Celts, both folks that have kinships with the supernatural.
All this means, as one looking from the outside, if y’all can’t agree on the source of all the holy writ necessary to be a Christian, than, of course, folks are going to look elsewhere, and to other things!
Coming full circle.
Modernity, with classical predeterministic physics only allowed the physical material. To believe in anything else was anti-scientific and considered faith-based religious and to be shunned. As modernity fell, it opened up acceptance to again believe in something other than physical. Enter Post-modernity, with quantum physics, entanglement, non-locality. Is the wave function real or not, etc. etc.
Post modernity allows people to become spiritual again without having to feel shunned by the scientific community. But most will still not embrace the True One, but they have embraced Mother Gaia, occultism, etc. etc.
...Advancing naturalism (the belief that nature is all there is) produces both expected and unexpected effects. The Harris poll found that belief in Darwin’s theory of evolution increased to 47 percent, up from 42 percent in 2005.
...As a result, some will crow that “Science is winning over superstition!” But it isn’t. Between 2005 and 2013, belief increased in
– ghosts from 41% to 42%
– UFOs from 35% to 36%
– astrology stayed the same at 29%
– witches decreased significantly from 31% to 26%
– reincarnation increased from 21% to 24%
While the noted increases are small, we should expect declines nearly across the board instead, if the “science wins” thesis were correct. (The one exception is UFOs; as a “sciencey” belief, they correlate with naturalism despite lack of evidence.) Further, we would expect young people (18–36) to reject ghosts and reincarnation more strongly than older people (68+) do.
And they don’t. On the contrary, younger folk believe in ghosts at 44% to seniors’ 24%. In UFOs at 36% to 30%. In astrology at 33% to 23%. In witches at 27% to 18%. And in reincarnation at 27% to 13%.
In short, naturalism offers liberation, not from the bonds of superstition but from the burden of rationality. And we must address the fact that increasing numbers of young people are embracing that liberation. More.
What is “supernatural” other than an arbitrary ascription for that which one cannot access tangibly by way of senses and reason? The word is applied on a case-by-case basis by both individual and corporate humanity.