Science & The Supernatural

I see you reading a blog post a few moments from now...

By all the stars!
    A few days ago I was talking with someone who claimed her horoscope was always extremely accurate.  Horoscopes claim that fusion reactions taking place trillions of kilometers away can influence the personality traits and lives of humans here on Earth.  That’s an astonishing claim if it’s true.  And millions of people seem to think it is, so maybe there’s something going on there. 
    I suggested to her we carry out a series of simple tests to see if her horoscopes were genuinely as good as she thought.  She agreed and we set about devising experiments to put them to the test.  The outcome was sadly the same as every other test into the accuracy of astrology ever conducted: resoundingly negative.  We couldn’t find any evidence that her horoscopes were trustworthy.
    It's a real shame.  Had the test yielded a positive result I would have been exhilarated.  Imagine being the first person in history to confirm the existence of a link between star positions and human behaviour.  I would have loved to find evidence in favour of horoscopes.  Sadly however, that wasn’t what we found.  
    At this point, my friend became rather unhappy because we had ruined something.  The result was easy for me to process because I went from “I’ve seen no evidence to trust horoscopes” to “I’ve seen no evidence to trust horoscopes”.  Her journey was different however; she had to abandon a belief.  
    Admittedly, the more you get used to Science the easier this becomes, because you learn to be proven wrong regularly...but the first few times it happens it can sting like a nettle down the neck.
Intellectually, we should be just as satisfied with a negative result as a positive one because we still learn from it, but we are emotional beings as well as intellectual ones and having our cherished views dissolved can be horrible.

This has nothing to do with the blog, but did you know the Teletubbies have had babies?

Scientists - ruining everyone’s fun forever
    Perhaps unsurprisingly, people who believe in the supernatural often see Scientists as enemies.  We are accused of trying to destroy belief systems or (far more often) of being “closed minded”.  Scientists want to subject everything to tests, often sucking the beauty and mystery out of the world, and if we can’t find it in a test-tube we decide it isn’t real.   
    I know why we come across like that.  Science has a long history of debunking and discrediting supernatural claims, so it’s no wonder people think Science is anti-supernatural.  But this simply isn’t true.  Scientists are very open minded.  We are literally prepared to believe anything, no matter how ridiculous, if there is evidence for it.  You want me to believe in Unicorns?  Bring me a unicorn and I’m sold.  
    We’re not trying to ruin everybody’s fun at all.  Scientists just go looking for answers by investigating.  If someone claims there are Gods living on Mount Olympus we’re the ones who decide to climb the mountain and look.  If we fail to find evidence for something you believe in, that’s not because we were trying to destroy it, it’s because the evidence was undetectable and that’s nature’s fault not ours.

I always kind of assumed they were brothers and sisters

The war on magic
    There are all sorts of supernatural claims Science has investigated over the years and found zero evidence for.  Mediumship, telekinesis, mind-reading, sympathetic magic, prophecy, ghosts, crystal-healing, oujia boards, homeopathy, dowsing, reiki and a whole buffet of others.  They’ve all been scrutinised by Scientists who were trying to prove them right, and came up empty-handed each time.  
    These things could absolutely be real, but investigations have found nothing to support them, so we are left with a simple choice.  Either we say “I don’t know if it’s true” or “I’m going to believe it anyway”.  If you decide to pick that second option and believe in something without evidence, you have to answer the following question: what is your belief based on if not evidence?  
    The idea of magical forces watching over our destinies is exciting for sure, but to be a Scientist is to commit yourself to either evidence or ignorance.  Nothing in between.    
    I’ve met people who have countered this line of argument by pointing out that even though the evidence is lacking for a claim, it could still be true.  I agree of course, but believing something because it could be true is a dangerous position.  Magnetism could be caused by invisible gnomes who only speak Welsh.  Penguins might secretly be red and they put on the black outfits when they see us coming.  Ewan McGregor could be Britney Spears...have you ever seen them together?
    The problem with believing something because it could be true is that it’s a slippery slope to infinity.  There are so many possible things out there it would be impossible to believe them all.  And many of them would contradict.  Scientists stick to what we’re confident probably is rather than what could be.  It doesn’t mean we close our eyes to the possibilities, we just reserve judgement until we know more. 

I guess technically they still could be related, we don't know how common inbreeding is in their species

When demons walked
    So, why can’t Scientists just leave things alone and let people believe what they want to?  Why does it matter if someone has a few unsubstantiated ideas in their head?  The problem is that a person’s beliefs determine their actions, so  if their beliefs are crooked their behaviour will be too.  
    The Ku Klux Klan act on the belief that black people are inferior to white people.  Nathalie Rippeberger’s parents caused her death by refusing to take her to see a doctor because they didn’t believe in medicine.  We used to burn women alive at the stake for witchcract and we believed we were right to do so.  Saying “everybody is entitled to their beliefs” only works if people decide what to believe based on reason.  That’s why Scientists want to get things right, even if that means abandoning a supernatural explanation.  A world where everyone believes what they want is an abhorrent and primitive one.      
    There was a time when people didn’t know about bacterial or viral infections.  If you got sick it was the will of the spirits.  People who heard voices weren’t treated for schizophrenia or epilepsy, they were possessed of demons or communing with angels.  Science has made us abandon these supernatural explanations and it has replaced them with life expectancy and good mental health.  That’s a fair trade, I think.  
    After all, there was a time when we didn’t even know what air was and doors slamming would have been the result of poltergeists rather than differences in air pressure.  I mean, imagine growing up in a civilization where people didn’t know where the rain came from, why food spoiled, or where the Sun went at night.  
    The pre-scientific world was one of ghosts and goblins.  It was a place where humans were diseased and helpless.  Then along came the radical notion that you could learn what reality was like by investigating and testing it.  Once we realised this elegant truth, we began looking for answers rather than guessing at them.  And the answer to every mystery so far has been predictable cause-effect relationships between testable laws and particles.  The answer has never turned out to be magic or mysticism.
    That doesn’t mean magic isn’t real.  But if you want to use magical explanations to account for your world, you must also recognise that magic is an ever-receding pocket of ignorance which has been shrinking like a shadow before a candle.  You’re welcome to choose magic, but I cannot help but wonder, why would you choose igorance and darkness?

Come to think of it, where are their reproductive organs???

Beyond our understanding
    There are certainly deep and confounding mysteries which fill our Universe from edge to edge.  What happens inside a black hole?  Why is spacetime expanding?  Does quantum gravity work?  Or, perhaps the greatest mystery of all time, when you listen to the song Doctor Jones by Aqua the guitar intro for the first 14 seconds is a beautiful piece of music, while the rest of the song sounds like Doctor Jones by Aqua.  How is this possible?  
    Some things in the Universe are so strange it can be hard getting our heads around them.  But is it possible there are things which can’t be found in a laboratory?  Things which don't conform to logical laws and textbook explanations?  The answer is again, yes.  There could be things which transcend natural law.  But if such things really do exist, nobody would know about them...including the people making the claim in the first place.
    Science is all about investigating the world through experimentation.  Anything which can’t be tested for is supernatural.  But if you claim to have knowledge of supernatural things, you are claiming they are detectable because you yourself have detected them.  And since the part of you which detected these things obeys natural laws (your brain) natural laws can clearly be used to search for them. 
    The laws which give you awareness are the same laws which underpin equipment in a laboratory.  It’s not a matter of Scientists applying the wrong approach.  Scientists are using the same approaches as supernaturalists, we’re just being cautious about it because we know how easily nature can play tricks on our senses.  Salt looks like sugar and clouds look like cotton.  We have to be better than that.  

Is this how they breed???

Kill the Myth
    In a 2014 interview with Bill Moyers, Niel deGrasse Tyson explained that when people are wishing on stars they are more than likely wishing on planets.  Moyers asks Tyson “Don’t you sometimes feel sad about breaking all these myths apart?”  Tyson responds quickly: “No, because some myths deserve to be broken apart out of respect for the human intellect.”
    We aren’t trying to ruin people’s fantasies, we just think people deserve to know the truth.  We think people are smart enough to handle the facts, even if it means giving up a comforting superstition.  We don’t think people should be patronised with fairy tales and spook-stories.  We think grown-ups should have the right to grasp reality by the horns.
    This doesn’t mean you have to abandon a world of mystery and wonder though.  Supernatural beliefs offer you magical and fanciful ideas, but Science can beat them all. 
    Every atom in your body was formed in the core of a star and the atoms of your left hand came from a different star to the ones in your right.  There are species of plant and jellyfish which are immortal.  The sky is actually purple.  Sugar glows in the dark when you crush it.  On Venus it snows metal and on Neptune it rains diamonds.  Time slows down or speeds up depending on where you’re standing.  There are gases which can set fire to water.  Whales used to walk on land.  Diamonds are vomited to the Earth’s surface by volcanoes but we’ve learned to make them out of peanut butter.  You can make frogs levitate in magnetic fields.  We have helped paraplegics walk and brought hearing to the deaf.    
    The world is full of strange stuff and there’s enough genuine magic out there for the entire species.  To be quite frank, Science doesn’t oppose the supernatural, it just finds it a bit limited and boring.

Image Credits
Supernatural: Steiner98
Tiddlytubbies: Teletubbies wiki
Teletubbies 1: The Sun
Teletubbies 2: The Mirror
Teletubbies 3: hdnux
Teletubbies 4: onedio