How can we prove that the supernatural or paranormal doesn't exist?

Question

Agnostic theists and atheists believe themselves to be hopelessly ignorant concerning the existence of the supernatural or paranormal. To them, gnostic atheism isn't adequately supported by evidence, and because "absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence," and "all you know is that you know nothing," they suspend judgment on whether or not there is a god, soul, ghost, demon, or afterlife

"There might be a god that doesn't interfere with the world it created, you could never know," they say

But can we know? Can philosophy prove that there is no such thing as supernatural or paranormal? How can we argue against every interpretation of god, soul, ghost, demon, or afterlife, if their existence can't be proved or disproved?

Answer 1

You cannot prove it, and that is why the debate is endless.

What you can prove is that it is impossible for all religions to be true, since they make mutually exclusive claims, and you can point out that religions are a form of indoctrination, but those arguments have been made by Dawkins and other for years with little measurable impact.

Of course, a handicap one faces in trying to muster scientific arguments to challenge ideas about the supernatural etc is that science can't yet explain the thing we believe most- consciousness. So if science can't encompass consciousness properly, what else is it missing?

Answer 2

There is a lot of poor thinking one find in theism/atheism discussions, and you have a few as assumptions in this question.

Many falsely think one cannot “show a negative”. But this is how most hypothesis testing is done. Come up with a hypothesis, such as that your neighbor makes their money dealing drugs, and one can make predictions based on this. If the hypothesis is true, the neighbor would have to have a stock of drugs, spend a lot of their time in one on one meetings, in which money and objects change hands, and would need a supply themselves of the drugs. So, check these out. If you search the neighbor’s dwelling and there are no drugs, they don’t spend time in one on one’s with furtive exchanges, etc, then one has shown the negative — your neighbor isn’t actually a drug dealer. This is how all of science operates — “proving” negatives over and over. But as noted above, all of these demonstrations fall short of “logical proof” because EVERYTHING empirical can only be provisionally shown to be true.

A major misunderstanding is the possibility of, and necessity for “proofs”. Whether a particular god exists is an empirical question about our world and logic proofs are not applicable to supporting evidence for or against an empirical question.

This leads into the impossible standard fallacy and false dichotomy of gnostic vs agnostic atheism. Since god questions are empirical questions, and nobody can ever be certain on an empirical question, there isn’t anybody who ever meets the certainty criteria for “gnostic” atheist or theist.

Another is the widely made claim that theism is a faith based view. If one spends much time actually talking with theists about why they believe what they do, and they will cite things like personal prayer experience (first person empiricism), experienced and historical miracles, and the reliability of historical testimony. This is an evidenced, empirical justification.

Atheists likewise, when asked why they think atheism is true, will cite things like the repeated refutations of scripture claims, the LACK of miracles and direct experiences of god in the world, the incoherence or immorality of religious doctrine, and the relative utility of a secular worldview. Actual theists and atheists are not “agnostic” either. Nobody actually falls into any of the four boxes of that silly graphic.

Back to another part of your question: how to refute the “supernatural”. This is a poor term, as one common meaning is “that which is beyond evidence and reasoning”, and if you use that definition then you CAN’T provide either evidence or reasoning against the supernatural, by definition. A far better term would be spiritual.

For an atheist to provide high confidence of the falsity of all spiritual beliefs, the best method to do so would be to show that we can have very high confidence in the truth of materialism. IF materialism is reasonably taken as true, then there isn’t any spirit, and can’t be any Gods.

Answer 3

No phenomenon in reality is supernatural or paranormal by definition.

Only explanations can be supernatural or paranormal, i.e. outside of known physics.

Gods, ghosts and souls are not existing things, they are just attempted supernatural explanations for natural phenomena. They are not testable scientific theories, they are pure fiction.

Answer 4

You can't prove that anything doesn't exist as long as that thing is coherent. However, you can't prove an infinite number of things. You can argue against it in the sense that you can say you have no reason to believe in them. And ultimately, that is all that matters.

Answer 5

Gnosticism is probably best defined not as complete and total certainty, but rather as being as sure as we can be about (religious) claims.

Pretty much no-one would claim to be uncertain about the existence of their own family members, even though their existence are empirical questions and we can't (justifiably) have complete certainty on that.

Pretty much no-one would claim to be uncertain about the non-existence of an invisible unicorn in their back yard, even though we can't have complete certainty on that.

To put religious gnosticism on a pedestal of complete certainty with irrefutable proof, that no existence or non-existence claim can meet, renders the idea of gnosticism entirely pointless.

So to call oneself a gnostic atheist is roughly to say "I'm as sure that a god doesn't exist as I am that there isn't an invisible unicorn in my back yard".

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Although atheism is typically more a question of whether to reject existing/known god claims (not any god claim).

Some atheists may concede the possibility of the existence of some unknown god, but this is not a useful question. Given the very fact that they're unknown, we know nothing about them, we don't know what they want or whether there's any consequence to not doing what they want, and we don't know whether they even know that we exist. We would need to wait for their existence to become known before it should reasonably influence our lives in any way.

So that leaves existing god claims, and for that it would be up to theists to provide evidence before you'd become convinced that their claim is true (much like if someone wants to claim there's a unicorn in their back yard). And if you've evaluated their evidence and found it to be lacking, you may be convinced that their claim is false.

Answer 6

Statistical: For example, because we all have smartphones now, people are 10x more likely to have a camera with them at any given time, so there should be approximately 10x more serious claims of ghost and UFO photographs - but there aren't anything like that number. That's a "good enough" proof that photos of UFOs and ghosts aren't real.

Answer 7

To claim the nonexistence of a metaphysical entity, you must show that it would be logically impossible for it to exist. You cannot use observation because your senses are part of the physical, so the metaphysical entity would not be subject to them even if it did exist.

Successful examples of this include mathematical and geometrical proofs, such as the non-existence of the square root of 2 or a squared circle.

For gods or demons, it is unlikely you will succeed, because these beings are generally speaking not all that illogical. I am not aware of any logical argument for the non-existence of God. There are, however, many arguments that God can exist and even must exist, such as those from Medieval philosophers.

Generally the existence of God is not a matter of logical proof but faith. You must have faith that God exists and loves His creation, that if you accept His authority and entrust your life to Him, He will provide that your life will take the appropriate course. This divine guidance would likely not happen in some overt and easily observable way, because by its nature it is a metaphysical phenomenon, and it is ultimately your faith that is being tested and not your senses or your reason. Therefore, believers in God are rarely interested in logical or empirical evidence of His existence which would either fail to promote or possibly even diminish their faith.

The paranormal is an entirely separate thing. It means outside of normal experience and usually refers to apparitions, UFOs, cryptids, psychics and the like. There is nothing inherently metaphysical about these things and paranormal enthusiasts will readily produce naturalistic explanations for their favorite phenomena. To prove that UFOs or Bigfoot or telekinesis don't exist would be the exact same process as proving that Willy Wonka's chocolate factory or your morning cup of coffee doesn't exist. These methods are well documented in many places so I won't reproduce them here, I refer you to the works of Karl Popper and others.

Answer 8

tl;dr– It might not make sense to assert that external concepts do-or-don't exist. Below is a story to showcase the ambiguity.

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Thought experiment: Intertwined simulated worlds.

Alice and Bob are friends.

Alice and Bob both decide to play SimWorld, which is based on an older game called "The Sims". Basically, Alice and Bob each get to create their own virtual-world filled with artificially-intelligent people called "sims".

Alice and Bob each go home and make their own worlds individually:

1. Alice tells SimWorld to start with a model like the world she's already in. Partial to stories about magical users who're secretive about their abilities, Alice adds in a magic system that the sims can use.

   Alice chooses to focus on her in-simulation counterpart, Sim-Alice, who she grants powerful magical abilities.

2. Bob likewise tells SimWorld to start with a model like the world he's already in. Partial to stories about eccentric inventors who're secretive about their abilities, Bob allows sims to have technical skills that allow them to build amazing devices with ease.

   Bob chooses to focus on his in-simulation counterpart, Sim-Bob, who he grants powerful mad-scientist abilities.

The next day, Alice and Bob talk to each-other about their new sim-worlds. Each is amused by the other's fantasy, deciding to have the other's in-simulation counterpart to experience delusions of such abilities in their own worlds. This is:

1. In Alice's sim-world, Sim-Bob thinks that he has powerful mad-scientist abilities, but doesn't.

2. In Bob's sim-world, Sim-Alice thinks that she has powerful magical abilities, but doesn't.

Alice and Bob both agree that Sim-Alice and Sim-Bob should meet up in both of their sim-worlds to go flying through the air on a flying-carpet.

1. In Alice's sim-world:

   • the flying-carpet can fly because Sim-Alice cast a magic-spell causing it to fly;

   • Sim-Bob thinks that he caused the carpet to fly, but didn't.

2. In Bob's sim-world:

   • the flying-carpet can fly because Sim-Bob instructed his helper-nanobots to fuse anti-gravitational particles to it;

   • Sim-Alice thinks that she caused the carpet to fly, but didn't.

Alice and Bob both submit their simulations to be run on a cloud-server. The same server receives both, and due to its advanced evaluation-engine recognizing an opportunity to fold the work into a single evaluation, runs the same evaluation to effect both Alice's sim-world and Bob's sim-world. The cloud-server reports the result back to both Alice and Bob, having satisfied the evaluation-constraints for both of their simulations.

Reviewing the simulations, both Alice and Bob realize that, in both of their sim-worlds, Sim-Alice and Sim-Bob argued about if magic was real and if their flying-carpet worked magically. Which of them was correct?

Answer 9

In Philosophy, there's the concept of Russell's Teapot: an example which acts on the example of "disproving the existence of a tea kettle floating around Saturn"

It's a reference to the fact that some things that are ridiculously unlikely but are also ridiculously hard to prove.

The thing is, though, that this doesn't mean they are impossible to prove.

However, there are two ways I'm aware of to disprove Russell's Teapot, and a third way that doesn't apply to the teapot itself, but some similar claims.

The first is the long way - to disprove at each possible instance. In the case of a tea kettle, take the space of a tea kettle, and simultaneously search a grid of the entire orbit around Saturn with a grid resolution of that size, and if there are no tea kettles, then it is disproven.

The second is the induced way... to find some claim about about the subject in question that doesn't match what is possible, and it requires some impossible aspect of the claim. In the case of the tea kettle, it would be specifically designating a tea-kettle as a human-made object, and going through all human space flights to show that none have put a kettle in orbit around Saturn. Although not as absolute, it's still pretty solid proof.

The third way is if the definition of the "teapot" itself is somehow fully accessible by definition. For example, if instead of a Teapot, Russell's proof said, "a magical lamp that instantly creates a copy of itself in the hands of anyone who dons cream colored pants and a hat." At which point you could disprove the existence of this particular lamp that floats around Saturn using any person that puts on cream colored pants and a hat.

All cases require full coverage to prove... either full coverage of teapots in the second example, full coverage of Saturn in the first example, or full coverage of accessibility in the third.

Each case, however, will require having a very firm definition of the subject matter. If you're trying to philosophically debate someone on the topic of the supernatural or paranormal, unless it's a purely academic philosophical debate, they're likely going to be highly resistant to actually making a concrete definition.

This is in philosophical debate. However, in non-philosophical debate, this usually doesn't convince people (in no small part because many people don't fully grasp logic).

The few times I've had that debate in regards to the paranormal with someone, the best I got was "whatever the definition is in the dictionary"... this was an "easy" philosophical solution, as the dictionary I looked it called the supernatural 'outside of what is natural', and then I looked up natural and it was 'not man-made', thereby meaning all man-made things are supernatural by definition... this did not sit well with the person I was debating with.

However, not a philosophical proof against the supernatural, but a physics one making use of full coverage, is CERN's experiments with particle physics. If you consider the supernatural being active non-physical things that influence the physical world, CERN has tracked every particle capable of interacting with fermion (basically, the type of matter we're made of), so we are fully aware of all physical interactions with humans... aannnndd... none of them were potential methods for human interactions by ghosts/souls/etc.

Another argument is that, if you consider humans natural, as :in nature or deriving from nature" is another definition of natural, then anything that exists is, by definition, natural. Therefore, by definition, the supernatural simply doesn't exist, as supernatural becomes a synonym for imaginary or non-existing.

Answer 10

In order to prove the supernatural doesn't exist a person would have to have traversed the whole of the universe...and beyond. But to prove the supernatural (supranatural) exists, all the deity has to do is show up once!

And this is what many eye-witnesses claimed happened in the first century when Jesus showed up! (Christmas comin' down) Of course, anyone can claim to be a supranatural being, but someone who worked miracles that can only be characterized as being done by a deity, would qualify as this deity. Creative miracles (nihil sine deo) beyond the ability of Nature (physical laws), cannot be dismissed when witnessed by credible observers who could not only verify, but if necessary falsify them.

As to the credibility of the various documented witness accounts concerning Jesus, Simon Greenleaf (expert on judicial evidence from Harvard) and other experts have researched and declared them credible! The witnesses were contemporary with Jesus, and were from various walks of life: tax accountant, doctor/historian, businessman, companion for three and a half years, members of the Sanhedrin, etc.

So it is impossible to disprove the existence of the supernatural (supranatural). God has a lot to say about this!