I’m an atheist and have been for several years. I was raised as one of Jehovah’s Witnesses and spent most of my life within what I now consider to be a cult-like environment. After spending hundreds of hours researching different religions and studying science, I came to the conclusion that the concept of God is a human invention—something we developed to explain the world around us, create cohesive social structures, and, in many cases, influence or control the beliefs and behaviour of others.
That said, I’ve witnessed or heard about experiences that I find difficult to explain. For example, people having dreams that later come true in remarkable detail, knowing things before they happen, or seeming to know what’s on your mind without any obvious clues or prior knowledge.
Since I don’t believe in God, I’ve wondered whether these experiences could instead point to aspects of the human brain that science doesn’t yet fully understand. Perhaps there are cognitive abilities or natural phenomena that we haven’t discovered yet, or maybe there are aspects of the universe that we simply don’t understand at this stage in our development as a species. I know that sounds a bit like science fiction, but it’s an interesting possibility to consider.
I’m also aware that many of these experiences can be explained by coincidence, subconscious pattern recognition, confirmation bias, or information that someone has picked up without consciously realising it.
I’m curious to hear what others think. Have you had experiences like these, and if so, how do you explain them?
Don’t forget mental illness, flat out lying for fame and profit. Our senses are also prone to glitches and blind spots. Magicians make good livings exploiting these. Seeing the future falls squarely under the realm of the supernatural. Machines seem to be getting closer to telling what someone is thinking , but in controlled test no one has ever been proven to do so. So called “lie detectors” are notoriously inaccurate, except of course by people who manufacture lie detectors.
I, or close family members, have had a couple of experiences in those general categories. Most notably of late, my wife’s former partner from her late teen years (so we’re talking 50 years in the rear view mirror, and no even casual internet contact for probably a dozen years), died recently from some kind of sudden medical event, off in Latin America someplace. She had a dream one night that he had died, which she thought odd, as she hadn’t given him a thought in a long time. She shrugged it off, although she mentioned it to me that morning. But she was informed a couple of days later through former high school friends that he had died – on that exact day.
As unbelievers, this gets filed under “I don’t know / can’t explain it at present”. Along with a fuckton of other stuff, most of it more prosaic or inconsequential. Also under, “things we don’t make up explanations for when we don’t have one”. One thing about the religious is that they find not having all the answers to be intolerable. We don’t.
As a former evangelical now for a few decades, I have to say that the cognitive dissonance is 99% better now than when I was a believer. I never really expected it to be 100% better. I can live with 1% kinda stuff like this. It certainly doesn’t produce any angst or doubt about how in touch with reality I am.
In addition to that, if it turns out there are, say, psychic ties that form between some people such that you can sometimes sense them unraveling through death, via mechanisms currently unknown, that’s a long way from afterlives and divinely-mediated miracles. It’s more akin to Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious.
These kind of psychic ability are never repeatable, making them impossible to test. In my worldview this isn’t hard to explain: you can’t measure what doesn’t exist. People with more “interesting” worldviews require tying themselves into knots to try to get past this simple fact that when you check closely, the “effect” vanishes instantly.