That Guy From China

I’m someone who experienced quite a number of what I considered to be ‘supernatural’ experiences as a youth; and know others who claimed quite sincerely to have experienced others.

I’m now an atheist…and that required a significant re-evaluation of those occurrences. Let me share with you how I came to the conclusion that they were not, in fact, supernatural. There are two main phenomenon that I’d like to mention in this regard.

First, the fact that there are many real experiences which can, most definitely, appear entirely supernatural. You have people who really do hear voices telling them what to do. Sometimes its because of a diagnosable psychological condition. Other times, it can be a hallucination, or simply wish-fulfillment (you want it so badly that your mind causes it to happen). I certainly experienced the latter…as a teenager, when I was going through some particularly difficult problems, I prayed desperately for God’s guidance. There was one situation that required me to make a decision that, no matter what decision was made, would cause great difficulty for myself and others. I didn’t know what to do…so I asked God to tell me. I prayed over and over and over again, with no answer. And then finally, one night, after another round of desperate, pleading prayer, I quite literally heard a voice in my head, telling me what to do. I can still remember this quite clearly now. It wasn’t just a voice, either…there was a clear sensation of ‘someone’ being there with me, and a feeling of calm and peace.

At the time, I interpreted this as God speaking to me; and, in addition, as concrete proof of God’s existence, and his involvement in my life.

Today, I interpret it as my own pysche’s means of dealing with a very stressful situation, and providing me with an answer to a situation that absolved me of personal responsibility — it was God’s decision, not mine, so whatever difficulties resulted from that decision were on God, not on me. I had many similar experiences of the ‘supernatural’; and I know many others who’ve had ‘supernatural’ experiences that are every bit as real to them as my experience was to me.

So then, how did I come to change my opinion on this? How did I go from “This was a supernatural proof of God’s existence”, to “This had nothing to do with the supernatural, it has an entirely natural explanation”?

Through knowledge. I’ve always had an insatiable thirst to learn, and particularly to understand others. At the time, as a Christian, I wanted to help others see The Truth, and bring them to a Personal Relationship With Their Lord And Savior, Jesus Christ. But it wasn’t enough for me to just preach at them about my beliefs…I felt it was necessary to understand their beliefs, and their experiences, so that I could relate to them on a much deeper and more meaningful level. So I started learning about Muslims, and Buddhists, and Scientologists, and Mormons, and all those other groups out there.

As I did so, I discovered something rather disturbing (at least, it was disturbing to me at the time). There was absolutely no religious or supernatural experience that I had experienced, that peoples of other religions did not also claim to have experienced. And their belief in the reality of those experiences was every bit as sincere as my own.

At first, I tried to fob this off with “Satan is wily, and of course he will ‘counterfeit’ supernatural experiences so that he can lure people away from the One True Path”. But the more I studied, the less this excuse worked. First, if some experiences were real, and others were ‘counterfeit’, there must be some way of distinguishing between the two. But there wasn’t. Essentially, in every religion, it came down to “If my god did it, its real; if someone else’s god did it, its not”.

And then as I got into university, and started learning more about human psychology, I learned that exactly the same phenomenon could be reproduced without any religious involvement at all. The use of certain drugs. The instigation of certain psychological states. Mass hysteria. Hypnotism. The list goes on, and on, and on.

Derren Brown is probably one of the very best examples of this…he’s been able to consistently and predictably reproduce a wide variety of ‘supernatural experiences’ in people…despite the fact he’s an atheist, and can give a 100% rational, non-supernatural experience for all of them. He’s convinced people to convert to Christianity after they felt the power of the Holy Spirit flowing through them. He’s convinced top psychics of his own significant psychic powers. He’s reproduced amazing martial artist performances demonstrating the power of ‘qi’.

As the evidence grew and grew, I came to realize that my own experience, regardless of how real it was to me, had an entirely rational, non-supernatural explanation. And I came to the conclusion that if a non-supernatural answer existed to explain what had happened, then there was no reason to accept a supernatural answer, unless there was significant evidence to the contrary.

There wasn’t. And there isn’t now.

But I said above that there’s a second aspect to this. Its what I call “righteous lies”. Its a phenomenon that I experienced quite regularly as a Christian. That is, another Christian would talk about some supernatural event that they’d experienced (“I was talking to this Chinese guy about Jesus, but his English wasn’t very good, and then suddenly I started speaking in fluent Chinese, even though I’ve never studied the language!”). I’d hear that story, and think, “Wow, that’s amazing!”.

But the thing is, even Christians are competitive. We want everyone to think of us as “good Christians”, people who can demonstrate their real relationship with God. Having miracles happen means that you’re on good terms with god; no miracles means that you must be doing something wrong.

So, I’d appropriate some of those stories for my own. I’d re-tell the story, but with myself being the one who actually experienced the miracle. And I didn’t really consider it to be lying…because the other guy who told me the story was a Christian, so he obviously didn’t lie about it. I was telling a story that was 99% true…the only part that wasn’t true was that I was the one who had experienced it.

Not only was the story “true”, but by re-telling it, I was also giving Greater Glory to God. I was giving other people real evidence of God’s amazing power. If I told the story as “something that someone else told me”, then it lacked authority (those damn skeptics would ask, “If it happened to someone else, how can you know its true?”). But if I told the story as “something that happened personally to me”, then people couldn’t question it without directly accusing me of being a liar.

Thus, it was justified as a small, white lie…but one that worked towards glorifying God, and thus was justifiable.

Now, here’s the thing. On two different occasions — once at a Christian summer camp, and once at Bible College — I talked with other Christians about this…I mentioned that at times, I’d claimed other people’s “miracles” as my own. Both times, almost everyone else in the group (all of them sincere, Bible-believing Christians) admitted that they’d done the same thing.

And all of us concluded that it may not be the best thing (it was, after all, lying)…but that as sins went, it was a very minor one. After all, for the most part, we were telling the truth!

And it didn’t occur to most of them (although it occurred to me, and is one of the things that started me questioning the reality of such miracles), that the person they heard the story from might also have heard it from someone else, and then appropriated it for themselves. Nor did it really occur to them that others would hear their story, and assume that “because they’re a Christian, it must be the truth”…and likewise appropriate that story for their own use.

The important thing here is that when I, or other Christians I knew, related such stories, we did so with complete sincerity. I had no doubt that such a miracle had happened (it just didn’t happen to me). Thus, I could relate the story as a real event, something that had absolutely happened.

Between the two different explanations I’ve listed above, I’ve come to find that there is absolutely no “supernatural experience” that doesn’t, in fact, have a completely rational, natural explanation.