Critics, how do you explain real-world spiritual warnings?

[_DonBradley]

Scottie,

I don't rule out the supernatural, but don't believe in it either. It could be that there are real supernatural warnings given to people. But I think it likely that there are generally, if not always, better explanations.

For one thing, we tend to underestimate the role of chance in our lives. The presence of a feeling of danger, or what have you, prior to an actual danger will happen sometimes just by chance.

Everyone sometimes has feelings of foreboding, thoughts that something will turn out very badly, and the like. But since most of these experiences come to nothing, we tend to forget them. The mere absence of a later disaster doesn't register as an event: we probably never think of these forebodings again, and therefore never notice that they were repeatedly disconfirmed. The presence of disaster, on the other hand, registers quite clearly! So, on the rare occasions when a thought or feeling predicting disaster is followed (purely by chance) by an actual disaster, the incident stands out, creating the mistaken impression that our thoughts and feelings are sometimes endowed with supernatural predictive power.

Another explanation for some apparent incidents of "warning" is that we often pick up on more data than we can verbalize or even consciously recall. Our brains are remarkably attuned to what is "normal" in everyday life, and when something happens that is not normal, this can register intuitively, even if we can't identify what's wrong. Since disastrous events sometimes preceded by unusual chains of circumstance, we are sometimes "warned" by intuition, even entirely in the absence of any supernatural intervention. Indeed, there's a good deal of psychological research on intuition, and it can be described and understood readily as a natural ability of the human mind. As an example of this, some studies have tested the intuitive judgments of experts in a given area, and compared them with those of nonexperts. Even when experts can't explain the reason behind their judgment (hence its categorization as intuitive), they are much more likely to be accurate than are nonexperts. Since there is nothing supernatural about expertise itself, we can safely assume that the greater intuitive power in given domain displayed by experts in that domain is itself a purely natural phenomenon.

However valuable and meaningful experiences of "warning" may be--and, indeed, they can be life-saving, this doesn't mean they need be supernatural in origin. Such experiences would occur even in a world bereft of the supernatural, as, indeed, they probably do.

Don

[_DonBradley]

I think it is natural for us to look for confirmations for things like this, but fail to see the mountains of disconfirmations.

Precisely, GoodK. Richard Feynman called this the fallacy of "the enumeration of favorable circumstances," meaning that we only notice, and therefore only count, the "hits."

Don

[_DonBradley]

The reason we look for reasons is that it is human nature to either explain what happened or at least be able to describe it. If we didn't do this we wouldn't learn. We need, and do, make connections. Sometimes those connectins turn out to be wrong, e.g. superstititous behaviors. This is particularly common among athletes, with lucky shoes, and shirts, and little rituals at bat, etc.

Hey Charity,

Fantastic post!

I'm sure you're drawing here on studies into the psychology of superstition. As you probably know, these are well summarized, and analyzed, by Stuart Vyse in his book Believing in Magic: The Psychology of Superstition.

Don

[_DonBradley]

I agree with those who stated part of this phenomenon is the subconscious mind gathering information, processing, and then the information suddenly pops into our consciousness in a way that makes it feel it had an external source.

Another factor is that we tend to only notice when the "warnings" actually panned out. We forget about all the other times, which are likely far more numerous.

It's cool to see how many on this thread are informed about probability and about the pitfalls of everyday thinking--not that I'm the least bit surprised that you would be, Beastie. Tarski on the other hand...!

:-P

Don