Atheism

I do not currently believe in any supernatural anything, for the exact same reasons I do not believe in gods.

1. There is no persuasive evidence of anything supernatural
2. Many supernatural phenomena were discovered to have naturalistic explanations
3. The only evidence provided for supernatural phenomena is anecdotal

It's entirely possible for there to be supernatural stuff, but the time to believe it is when it is demonstrated.

One point that I don't see raised a lot is that otherwise perfectly mentally healthy people can experience hallucinations. They may even find them comforting, and some even then do not believe the visions are real. I have a suspicion that a lot of ghost sightings, etc, might be such hallucinations. But I can't demonstrate that, and I'm honestly not sure how we could, unless we can find a way to trigger such hallucinations on purpose.

While James Randi was alive, he offered $1,000,000 for proof of the supernatural. He never got that proof. I think that's pretty telling.

I'll believe anything you tell me, including gods and magic, as long as you can present evidence appropriate to your claim. Anyone who wants me to believe what they're saying about anything divine or supernatural had better be able to back it up, or else I'm going to laugh in their face.

Sorry but I'm going to call out what I see as some pretty blatant motte-and-bailey argumentation by the OP and their offense taken to people trying to nail down the definition of supernatural is illustrative.

They have their bailey, belief in things like the occult, ghosts, demons, etc, that are almost certainly bullshit. To the extent that they can be falsified, they have been. This is the typical definition of what people think when you say "supernatural" and people are right to answer "no" when asked if they believe in it.

But then you have OP falling back on their motte when this happens, taking a nebulous definition of supernatural and asking rhetorical philosophical questions about reality, perception, and the unknown. The fallacy is that these questions do nothing to strengthen or refute the original argument about the supernatural.

Nobody is here to argue that nothing is unknown and even unknowable but that doesn't make the things that people typically call "supernatural" any less bullshit. Demons and ghosts are just not the kinds of things that are waiting around to surprise us. And shifting the conversation from your bailey to your motte to protect your feelings on the former is not a good way to have a friendly debate.

All that aside, if you are interested in expanding your understanding of the universe then I'd really encourage you to divert the effort you're putting into the "supernatural" into learning about the actual natural universe instead. Our universe really is fantastic on its own. There's plenty of interesting, wacky, and unknown things happening all around us that you can learn about without resorting to magic. If anything, magic is the boring answer imo.

Paraphrasing I believe — Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic

No nothing is “supernatural “. We may not yet know what we’re seeing or exactly what happened… we simply don’t understand it yet.

Yet is relevant point there IMHO. We will.

Slight nitpick, I don't "believe" there is no higher power. I don't believe in any of the claims people have made that a higher power exists. By default we don't believe in anything.

I think it's hard to find "true experiences with the supernatural" credible because even if the person believes it happened: humans make for awful sensors. They might feel warm when they're cold or vice versa. They regularly see things that don't exist. More than half of us appear to be some kind of moron.

And why would a ghost be unmeasurable? Why could something be truly ethereal when everything ever measured or recorded is not? Plus, the seemingly random limitations on any sort of fairy, ghost, or deity make it pretty much dead in the water as far as theories go. Imagine this, you're some kind of land-god of wealth and/or stealing and potentially eating babies. But you go years or decades without fulfilling your own theme or being seen by humans? And you can't leave your territory as defined by human maps like you need permission from city councilmen?

All of this on top of the belief I hold that life is a culmination of billions of tiny mechanisms that, upon systemic failure, result in something akin to gears no longer turning in a clock means: either machinery and electronics all have "souls" or humans don't. Where would you draw the line? Do waterfalls have souls? The grand canyon? Dogs?

So pretty unlikely, all things considered.

Supernatural phenomena do not actually exist as far as I can tell. There's no actual evidence to my knowledge, and plenty of evidence that humans are not particularly good at perceiving or interpreting the universe around us as it actually is. Our brains are not a reliable narrator, supernatural phenomena are most likely a consequence of this rather than anything genuinely supernatural.

• 60% the person experiencing it misunderstood or misinterpreted what they were looking at because they were stupid and gullible, but not maliciously making things up.

• 35% completely fabricated and never happened and created to legitimately defraud or troll others.

• 5% something scientific that we simply don't understand yet.

• 0% actual supernatural occurrences.

“Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and the tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations - and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there were`t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learn to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favours the paranoid. Even here in the 21st century we can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us.”

― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

The only phenomenon that I take seriously as potentially supernatural, or connected to something we have no way of explaining is the experience of consciousness.

I think it's highly unlikely and the universe is amazing and bizarre enough without us imagining outside forces acting on it.

Our Brains are a meat pudding that runs on less electricity than a light bulb. I don't think it's unreasonable to get some hallucinations and signal interference. Especially when the pudding is stressed or poisoned . Plus we straight up know there are senses and ranges of senses we do not perceive. Reality is another thing all together through the eyes of a mantis shrimp. Our perception is incredibly biased and limited, so miracles (magic) are an easy explanation when our senses fail us.

I’m a strict naturalist - I believe that supernatural phenomena do not exist. I do not believe in the unknown.

I don't think it makes sense as a term. If it occurs in the real world, has real impacts on it, but is hard to understand that doesn't mean it is supernatural, just not understood. The double slit experiment is not supernatural, just hard to understand. Things can happen in coincidental ways, but something had to happen so even if very coincidental it can be natural. What would it mean to be supernatural? I mean, really, some small part of the universe behaving badly for a moment for a reason we don't understand is not magic, it is just ignorance on our part. So I am open to phenomena, they happen, but a supernatural explanation could never be justified in my view. Just because I can't think of why something happens doesn't make it magic, it could far more easily be something we have seen time and again, my own ignorance.

I'm fully atheist, but I have seen ghosts in front of me, clear as day, while completely sober, during the daylight.

“Supernatural” is just unexplained, or misunderstood, natural phenomena.

I’ve spent years working in supposedly haunted buildings (as security.)

the guy who loves sharing his ghost story really didn’t appreciate being told that the “fleeting man” he saw apparitions of, were his own reflection (specifically in a corner window of a conference room, or in certain circumstances, in double-paned windows.)

Nor did he appreciate being told the ghost “walking” down the stairwell was really just the fire sprinkler standpipe clunking against the stairs as the building cooled off. (And the reason it happened around the same time every night was the building’s hvac being set to a lower temp to save energy.)

He most certainly didn’t enjoy being told that the doors closing in his face were caused by shorts in the magnetic door holders and that he really should have put that in his report (he was written up for not reporting a maintenance issue.)

He also got written up when we found out that he was leaving windows cracked in the space above him, but he wrote them off as ghosts screaming instead of the wind whistling through a slightly cracked window.

Our understanding of the universe is imperfect- and it probably always will be. The point of science is to improve that understanding using evidence and experimentation.

I’ll take science any day of the week.

"Natural" simply means "real". Any phenomena that does exist, known or not, is by definition natural.

You know how various fantasy and sci-fi settings will say something like, "____ uses both science and magic," when describing how the world works? That ususally makes no sense. If magic has laws consistent enough to be used in machinery, it is just another branch of science. But with that out of the way, is that the only thing magic can be?

If magic was not just another type of science, it would have to supercede the natural world. Imagine a fantasy world that has gods who bestow power to their acolytes. Rather than using a natural process that could be recreated by mortals, the gods could actually break physical laws or even write new ones on a whim. In this world, magic isn't bound by a naturalistic worldview since it can change based on what a free-thinking entity chooses at any given moment.

That was a roundabout way of saying, "I don't think it matters." If the supernatural (magic) is knowable, we do not currently know it. If it turned out to be real, we may not even have a way of meaningfully interacting with it.

My thoughts on supernatural phenomena?

Name one.

There hasn't been any proof in all of history that any supernatural phenomenon was real.
Until there is, my thoughts on it are: not real, never happened.