Forget the supernatural. I have. The word is an oxymoron.
Everything that happens is natural. It must be. Otherwise it would not happen.
I love the way we scare ourselves. The scariest thing we know is the unknown. Now, as you might recall: there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns, that is to say the things we do not know we do not know.
That actually makes perfect sense. Donald Rumsfeld is quite the philosopher, in some respects. Who knew I could base a theological argument on a paraphrase of Rummy?
To get there from here, we need to do the first part and question what this statement means. Firstly we have known knowns. So, what do we know?
We know little. The are so few immutables in the universe. From our frame of reference, we have much more than a few observations we conceive of as immutable.
The universe is one of possibly innumerable universes. We cannot yet understand our universe. To us it looks like a bunch of galaxies. Our universe is trapped by time, which must be factored into the definition of universe. I like to think of it as basically everything we have observed and a lot of what we haven't trapped in a bubble we perceive as time. Now, the universe does not exist without time. Time is how we think of as movement. When motion stops, the universe ceases to exist.
We are told by those scientists gals and guys that the universe expands outward from the event which caused it to exist. It has been doing so for umpteen billion years (I'm not sure what the latest number is, it keeps changing). We have been here for maybe a million or more years, but as modern humans, about one tenth of that time, we have existed to learn intimate details in a way no other specie seems to want to.
Our experiences have been written for a few thousand years, and thus begins our true frame of reference. From what we have experienced and documented, we take ideas, learn them and call them knowledge. We know what we have learned. These are known knowns. A known has been proven beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Known unknowns are things we know we do not know, like the square root of negative one. We call it 'i' so that we can use it in math. Pi is the same. We may never get to the bottom of pi, but that will not stop us from trying. This is one of the traits which separates us from the rest of the world, as a specie. Our quest to limit our doubt about the world and its universe has brought us to the most wonderful age of reason. We know more than ever. We also know about a gazillion other things we do not know.
The final category, unknown unknowns, pretty sums up the majority of the known universe. Every time we think we know something, the rules change. Think of gravity and time. Our frame knows only one time and one gravity. But earth time is pretty much limited to the earth, and the same with our gravity. As permanent as these rules of the universe seem to us, they are limited. Thus my premise that there are few true, if any, knowns. I like to think of knowledge as undoubt, the opposite of doubt. I undoubt that when I drop a brick, it will find the most direct route to my toe. Every time.
I have undoubt about the sun, that it will come up tomorrow. It does every day. One day it will explode, and this will no longer be true. Ergo, I propose that knowledge is transitive, which pretty much makes everything I write true, until it is true no longer.
When we think of the supernatural, we thinks of ghosts, esp, miracles, and all other things mystical. This is a known unknown in as much as we cannot prove anything about the supernatural. Otherwise it become a known known and no longer be supernatural. At that point it's perfectly natural, like the earthquakes, liquefaction, floods, hail, volcanic eruptions, locust plagues and all sorts of ther things once attributed to the supernatural.
The Oracle was just debunked. She huffed methane. That's her secret. She didn't even know herself. Folks would come by and get fits along with her. They would interpret their hallucinations and seizures and use it to guide their decisions. Great coping skills? I think not. Anyhow, I digress.
Another one of my basic assumptions in my cosmology is that everything that happens is natural. Otherwise it would not happen. A supernatural event cannot happen. There is nothing unnatural about our universe. In fact, that is the definition of natural.
Therefore, I do not believe in bewitched houses, demons, angels, ghosts and goblins or anything supernatural. What I believe is what I have learned either through direct experience or a reputable source. I judge each source and add to my attic what I feel is true.
I have collected what I consider to be knowledge, just as everyone else has. My knowledge is that we know nothing. I choose to measure my undoubt, rather than stand firm on so called knowledge. Along this line of reasoning, I doubt anything supernatural happens or exists. If something happens, it must be natural. When I see a ghost or a goblin, I will think it's perfectly natural.
That's my universe. And there's room for you, too. It could be endless (although if it's expanding, it must be finite).
Now as for her song, I shall leave you with this:
She is us and everything. She is alive. Life is existence and vice-versa. She grows. That's her song. And as such, we grow with her. And that's why we're here, how we got here, our basis for knowledge and our destiny.
