![]() ![]() Many contemporary religious folk believe they can sense divinity by means of some sort of sensus divinitatis or god-sense. The Delphic oracle believed she received communications from the god Apollo while perched on her tripod. Second, many will also claim a subjective sense of presence: they ‘just know’ their dead Auntie is in the room with them, or that they have a guardian angel, by means of some sort of extra sense: a spirit sense. Any New Age bookshop will be able to provide numerous testimonies regarding invisible agency that might seem hard to account for naturalistically in terms of hallucination, self-deception, misidentified natural phenomena, trickery, and so on. ![]() First, to testimony: to reports of sightings, miraculous events supposedly caused by such beings, and so on. When people are asked to justify their belief in such invisible beings, they often appeal to two things. And of course, supposed evidence for such beings – sightings of ghosts, fairies, angels, gods and their miraculous activities – is regularly debunked by investigators. Science has also demonstrated that many of these beliefs are false: for example, diseases are produced not by demonic beings but by entirely natural causes. But it’s not just disagreement between believers that reveals many of these beliefs to be false. People also hold dramatically differing beliefs about the characteristics of these divine beings, ascribing to them incompatible attributes and actions. Some believe there’s one god others (such as the Manicheans) that there are two gods others: pantheons of gods. We know many beliefs are false because they contradict other similar beliefs. Why are we drawn to such beliefs? The answer cannot be simply that they are true. In the United States, for example, a 2013 Harris Poll found that around 42 per cent believe in ghosts, 64 per cent in survival of the soul after death, 68 per cent in heaven, and 74 per cent in God. As Steven Pinker notes in ‘The Evolutionary Psychology of Religion’ (2004), in all human cultures people believe that illness and calamity ‘are caused and alleviated by a variety of invisible person-like entities: spirits, ghosts, saints, evils, demons, cherubim or Jesus, devils and gods’. Belief in the existence of such person-like entities is ubiquitous. Human beings are remarkably prone to supernatural beliefs and, in particular, to beliefs in invisible agents – beings that, like us, act on the basis of their beliefs and desires, but that, unlike us, aren’t usually visible to the naked eye. ![]()
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