The leap refers to people mentally crossing the gap between what we can know and what we believe without knowing. What we can reason out to be true, versus what we must believe intuitively.
All supernatural claims are leaps. In each case some assumption must be made that is outside of explanation within our natural world. Yes, we have learned that some of our explanations were wrong in the past, but we did so by finding the truth of some proposition, not by insisting we always knew the truth.
The leap isn’t an educated guess, or a hypothesis of how natural laws might explain something. The leap isn’t made by wondering if we live in a geocentric or heliocentric piece of space. The reality of our solar system arrived after observation and reason were applied. We see the sun at the center now because we figured out that it is, not by insisting that it must be.
The leap always crosses the line between knowledge and imagination. It is always imagination that creates the supernatural. The only evidence of the supernatural are claims made by those who believe in it. The only place we can find these claims are from the mouths and pens of humans. In each and every supernatural claim there is a leap made from what we can discover and infer from evidence, to what we must accept as real on faith.
None of the supernatural claims have anything but stories behind them. Not gods, not astrology, not reincarnation, none of them.
The apologist (regardless of which supernatural claim is made) has made that leap. They see no answer in nature so they insert one from without. It is a leap because we don’t know if there is anything from without – I mean from outside of nature.
The universe exists, and we continue to learn more of its depth of time and its vastness, but the universe is always within nature. Studying the universe reveals many answers, but the universe never reveals the answer to at least this one question: Why?
Whatever we discover about time and space and the cosmos around us, we never get an answer to why. On this the cosmos is mute. It is there that imagination kicks in.
The history of human existence is a history of humans being wrong about the answers to the questions that are beyond our knowledge. The lesson that should teach us is to stop making the leap from what we can know is true and what we wish were true.
When the apologist asserts their imagined truths, they are asking you to make the leap they made. But they have the disadvantage in that they presume a leap of some kind must be made. They do not understand the position of someone never taking such a leap. To the apologist there is the supernatural, and the only question is which supernatural claims feel more true.
They do not grasp the idea that if only the natural exists, then all explanations must come from nature. For each of us, the knowledge about nature and the explanations it offers can be divided between what we do understand and what we don’t. Here I use the universal “we,” as each of us cannot hope to fully understand all science, and each of us will differentiate between which parts of science we seek answers in. Collectively we have found many answers.
The thinking person makes their stop there. They don’t insert the imaginary into the natural to gain some closure for their finite mind. The thinking person can understand that we learn over time, and knowledge builds upon knowledge. The total sum of knowledge is beyond our capacity to learn, but collectively we have learned each of billions of truths over time. At no place did we stop seeking answers to that which mystified us. Except of course when people make those leaps.
The leap can be comforting. But only as long as that leap can be sustained. When a leap is discovered to be in error, the committed believer will often adapt their belief to sidestep the discovery (If it was earth’s plates moving that caused the volcano, then it was God who caused the plates to move. If thunder comes from friction in the air columns due to pressure gradients, then it was God who caused the pressure gradients. Etc, etc, etc). But this is little more than moving the goalposts. It is shifting the claim beyond the ability to falsify it.
Our curiosity compels us to seek answers. We all do this all of the time. Show me the person who never asks a question of anyone about anything. We all are learning. As we discover the answers within nature, it often conflicts with the imaginings we were raised believing.
Nature has shown the age of the earth and length of human existence to vastly exceed the thousands of years postulated by some religious groups. When this happened we saw divisions form. There are those who recognized the frailties of putting belief before knowledge, and abandoned un-examined belief entirely; there are those who adapted their beliefs to allow them within the context of science (as exampled above); there are those who believe that science has got it wrong, and that they only view test results the way they do because they want to deny god; and there are those who refuse to believe the science, and insist that a grand conspiracy is underway and the perpetrators of science are lying in order to deter people from belief in god. That’s a heck of a leap.
To open one’s mind and abandon belief in these imaginary assertions of whatever supernatural claims are made requires no leap. It requires only the refusal to take those leaps.
This will put us in line with nature, in that nature (so far as we can tell) is not withholding its mysteries from us, nay it doesn’t consider us at all. As we are part of nature we affect nature. But nature has no conscious plan for us, no purpose for us. It has only the reaction to us in the same way we react to nature as it affects us. We are part of nature, and nature is (most probably – almost certainly) all that there is. New discoveries – that can be shown to be true – are still part of nature, regardless of what we previously knew.
We look to understand our lives, our world – all life and all existence, really. But all the prizes offered for discovery of truths are shared only among other humans in a universe beyond the scope of human importance.
Not knowing why there is anything is only frustrating to those who believe we should know the answer to that question. If there is no why (which seems most likely to me), then we can live contently in our pursuit of knowledge about the how of existence, without turning to our imagination for answers that only offer closure. The supernatural claim is an end to discovery and exploration. Once you plant that flag and declare it to be true, there is no more need to investigate the world.
What improvements to our lives have been made by such exploration and discovery? Can you imagine if the apologists were able to stifle the pursuit of knowledge in the dark ages? We might still be treating the four humors and flaying our backs with burning brands to purge demons.
But more importantly, we can turn away from belief in the imagination of others, who in each generation place new assertions on our table for consumption.*
*When acknowledging assertions of supernatural claims, we must understand the usefulness of such claims to gain power over others. Every person who claims special understanding of the supernatural is doing so to gain power or influence over others. Those who profess to only wish to save someone’s soul, only do so with dictates of how that should be done. Never do you hear them suggest that a person merely seeks out god in his own way, and in so doing save his soul. No, such offers always come with A prescription of method, and the requirement to obey the rules that they are assigning to them.
One may be so trapped in their belief that they can’t understand someone who will not make those leaps. But the path to wisdom is first recognizing that they have made such a leap. Then look for the countless leaps that have been made and later shown to be wrong. The volcano wasn’t an angry god, and the sun wasn’t pulled by a chariot.
When we recognize that our leaps have no more support than the leaps made by those who believed in Vulcan or Helios, we are on our way to understanding skepticism.
To be free is to be unbeholden to any supernatural claim. Freedom is found in understanding our limits. We are finite. We cannot (probably) comprehend the vastness of space in distance and time, but we have good reason to think the universe must comport with our shared reality.
We have good reason to reject all supernatural claims, and can be much happier rejecting them. No, this doesn’t mean there can’t be some supernatural being. I can’t know the vastness of time and space, so I can’t prove something doesn’t exist.
But why would there be such a thing? How could there be anything that isn’t part of our natural world? We can see and study thousands of years of humans assigning cause to the supernatural, and never once has such a claim held up to science – once science was developed enough to study it.
Demonic possession isn’t a thing, and bleeding people when they caught a cold wasn’t such a good choice.
At the top I mentioned using intuition as an alternative to reason. I don’t think this is a good idea. This is so evident to me, that I am surprised how many people would rather rely on intuition.
Intuition is programming. Nothing more or less.
We instinctively suckle at our mother’s breast when born, but this has been programmed in us over tremendous amounts of time. We react to some stimuli exactly as our ancestors did. The baby clings to the neck of its mother when frightened, though it never learned to do it in its short life. It learned to do it by genetic programming.
But intuition includes more than just what we carry with us genetically. It carries all the knowledge we gain as we grow, from the sound of different voices, the feel of different materials, the exposure to other people and what they do, and the incidents that happen from very early childhood, many of which we will carry no memory of to adulthood. The child learns the stove is hot from touching it, not from the instinctual awareness of generations of burnt fingers.
Some things we learn, and they become part of our intuition. This means that some of our intuition could be flawed, because it was built on false premises, or misunderstanding of circumstances.
Most people get religion from the earliest parts of their lives. Even if they don’t attend regular services, they are raised by people who have made the leap to belief, and who never knew it happened.
The knowledge we learn as babies, the deference to whatever claim your family group believes in, the near universal acceptance of supernatural intercedence in human affairs that most children are raised around; all combine to make belief in such claims automatic. This is the default position, and most people believe it at such depths, they cannot comprehend not believing.
But behind it all is nothing. Assertions turned into scripture, and scripture indoctrinated into the minds of the young. They are claims without connection to reality, and include the requirement that we take leaps.
There is only us, and we invent for ourselves whatever purpose we wish. We have purpose because we create purpose, or we accept the purpose assigned to us by someone else.
For the latter we can often thank religion. People adopting the beliefs of their parents, who had adopted those beliefs from their parents, their grandparents, and the stories attributed to their ancestors.
Any of these people can easily see the frailty of the arguments that come from customs and religions different from their own, but they cannot comprehend that they too might be indoctrinated.
But from these instincts we also learn that cooperation and empathy are beneficial to the survival of our species. So intuition isn’t bad, per se. But it is a poor means of determining truth claims. What “feels” right only reflects what you were programmed to be accustomed to. Beliefs must be questioned and examined.
Making the leap stifles curiosity. It ends discussion, and slaps on a label of permanence that must be adhered to perpetually.
We can withhold belief until such a time that good evidence can be provided. We do not know what we do not know. When our path to knowledge is blocked by lack of information, or lack of the correct tools of discovery, it is an error to assert knowledge to fill that gap.
For example, and to use an American sports analogy, I’ll offer this: If one was out for a hike in the forest – without any device to communicate with the outside world. Or perhaps sailing across an ocean, insulated from the news of the world. And this trip corresponded with, say, the Super Bowl (American football). Perhaps one might be setting up camp or fixing their position on a chart, and they begin to wonder about the outcome of that game. Assuming the outcome mattered to them, or that they had a preference to which team would win that game, they would be left only to guess, to wonder about the outcome. In this moment they would likely accept that all they could do was guess, and wait until they reached civilization or connected with the world in some manner to find out the result. They would wait until discovery of the facts could be ascertained, rather than insisting on the answer. They would be content to not know the outcome of the game until such time that the answer could be found.
In this way we demonstrate that it is possible for us to withhold belief until evidence is presented. We are not compelled to decide an answer without evidence, and would find it absurd if someone insisted they knew the answer when no possibility of discovery could be shown. And if one does guess correctly, they would be delusional to think it was anything but a guess.
It should be the same with all claims. The acceptance of a claim should be weighed against the ability to show evidence of such a claim.
If someone tells me they have a pet dog at home, I am generally safe to assume this is true based solely on their assertion. But if they tell me that this dog channels the spirit of Greta Garbo, I will withhold belief until it can be demonstrated. And that demonstration needs to clear a high bar before I would give it any credence, if ever at all. But in neither of these claims am I affected. I can assume the first is true and the second untrue without any further investigation. Neither matters to me.
Such is the nature of deistic claims. If someone says they believe in a god, I am in good shape accepting that they hold such a belief, without accepting the belief itself. Should the line be crossed where their claim begins to affect me, then I must insist on evidence, and that evidence must meet my satisfaction.
There’s a rub there, as I have no idea what evidence would satisfy such a claim.
If the supernatural can be evidenced, then it is part of the natural world, and not supernatural at all. It isn’t really magic we see on the stage, though it defies explanation within our base of knowledge. We accept the magician has completed a trick, and that he didn’t conjure something from the ether.
Apologists often fall back on personal revelation. But this is too frail an answer. All personal revelation does is express one’s acceptance of a claim – a leap.
Should some stranger present himself at your door claiming he has communicated with a god, who has instructed him to collect from you all your money, you would surely doubt such a claim. Even if you had a honed sense of deception and were satisfied that he was sincere in his belief, you would assume he was delusional. After all, any god that could give him such instructions could give those instructions directly to you.
But what if you received such a revelation?
Reason has an answer for that. If you can agree that this other man could be genuinely sincere yet deluded in his belief, then you must accept that you too could suffer from such a delusion. I would and must hold that even a personal revelation of the supernatural must be suspect, and that I should be skeptical. I am more likely to be suffering from a delusion (which we have ample evidence for in the natural world), than to be in communication with a deity (for which evidence remains non-existent).
Alas, no supernatural claim should be accepted at all, under any circumstance. As Arthur C. Clarke correctly observed, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Something we don’t understand might turn out to be true, but only through the examination of the natural world can we justify belief.
Just because we have no explanation for something, does not give us cause to assign an explanation. If we don’t know, we don’t know. We need to accept our limitations, and recognize that some questions may never be answered.