"Good Superstition:" Making Space for the Spiritual in Everyday Life

How Understanding Necessary and Sufficient Conditions can Make us a Little Less Naturalist

Sketch by the author

An undetectable ghost makes a candle float. A spirit burgles my socks. A ghoul leaves the toilet seat up again after I’ve gone to the bathroom. All silly and irrational notions, right? After all, we rarely encounter such striking, obvious supernatural events.

Just because we don’t encounter such paranormal activity doesn’t mean the spiritual realm doesn’t affect our everyday lives, every day.

Most westerners are naturalists, meaning they only believe in natural causes and explanations. Many more are functional naturalists, meaning they act as though there are only natural causes and explanations. Many Christians even hold a subconsciously naturalistic worldview. If we can’t see it, test it, or put it under a microscope, it’s not real or didn’t happen.

This is partially the case, I think, because we put supernatural causes in a box. We imagine supernatural events are only the blatantly obvious, visible, unmistakable miracles. Since those don’t seem to happen all too frequently, the spiritual realm must not be very active.

In our WEIRD-ness (Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic), we’ve dried up reality of its spiritual richness. In this essay, I hope to re-immerse our world in the spiritual, with what I want to call “good superstition.”¹

I aim to give one way to conceptualize how the spiritual realm can be pervasive in our world and lives. I won’t try to argue against naturalism. Rather, I’m aiming to help functional naturalists make space for the spiritual in their worldview.

Let’s dive in (no pun intended) to the thrust of this essay, the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions.

Rick’s Skydiving Tragedy: Necessary and Sufficient Conditions

Philosophers are notorious for strange and silly examples. I won’t break tradition here.

Rick is going to go skydiving later. For lunch, he eats some bad sushi and gets a miserable stomach ache. He decides to proceed with his thrill seeking, as he doesn’t want to pay the cancellation fee.

Up in the air at around 10,000 feet, Rick goes to jump attached to his instructor, who will guide him to the ground safely, pulling their chute when needed. However, the instructor doesn’t connect him properly. When they leap out of the plane, Rick detaches from his guide. He falls, hits the ground, and dies. RIP Rick.

In the aftermath of Rick’s tragic death, it would be silly for his family to sue to sushi restaurant and argue that the contaminated fish contributed to his death. Him eating sushi and dying aren’t casually related.

Why? Because he would have gone skydiving whether he had eaten sushi or not. So, what caused his death? We can say the instructor’s mistake led to his death.

However, say in the preceding case, Rick had a personal, backup parachute all along. In midair, frightened out of his senses, he tragically forgot to pull the chute.

In this case, Rick’s death required two causes: Him forgetting to pull his own chute, and the instructor not connecting them. These are both necessary causes for his dying. If either of them didn’t happen, Rick would still be with us.

Here’s the point: There can be multiple, necessary causes of a single event.

Back to the sushi. Imagine that Rick doesn’t go skydiving at all because of his violent stomach ache. Say he receives an infection so bad that it kills him in a few days. Assuming he has no other medical conditions, we could confidently say the bad sushi alone was responsible for offing him. In other words, the contaminated fish was sufficient to cause his death. Then, the family would be well within their rights to sue the restaurant.

Some events are necessary conditions, others are sufficient conditions, and still others are irrelevant to any given occurrence.² Necessary and sufficient conditions are helpful logical tools for finding proper explanations for certain events.

Now, causes can run in chains. A causes B causes C. A is sufficient to cause B, which is sufficient to cause C. So, A is sufficient to cause C. Knocking over the first domino is sufficient to, eventually, knock down the one at the end (if you’ve set them up right).

On the other hand, you might find that D and E cause F, but not D or E alone. D and E are necessary to cause F, but neither are sufficient. For Mark to have a pint in the beer garden, it’s necessary for (D) the sun to be out and (E) it to be the weekend. Well, maybe (D) is sufficient in this example, but you catch my meaning.

The distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions seems at least pragmatic, notwithstanding the philosophical debate about the soundness of the concepts, and that’s enough for my goals here.³

So, how does this nerd-speak help us understand the spiritual realm and good superstition?

Unseen and Supernatural Necessary Causes

We often admit to the existence of unseen causes. I’ve never seen the inside of an iPhone, for example, but I’m assuming some chips and fancy soldering make it flash its lights to display the E-sports tournaments on YouTube I spend countless hours watching every week.

We not only commonly believe in unseen causes, as in, causes which are “offscreen” so to speak, happening when no one’s looking, but causes which seem principally unobservable.

Take memories, for example. Fond memories of my grandpa who recently died might be necessary for me to write an essay in his honor (which I’ve done, incidentally), but no one can observe my memories directly. We might call unobservable explanations like these psychological explanations.

So, what about spiritual explanations? As I mentioned earlier, it’s common to think of the supernatural as only the outstandingly miraculous (e.g., the Red Sea splitting in half, water turning into wine, or the sun shining in the UK longer than two hours).

As such, we normally think of spiritual interventions as obviously, transparently, sufficient conditions for crazy occurrences. In other words, if the Red Sea really did bunch up at the sides and let the Israelites through, there would be no other explanation than the supernatural, and that supernatural explanation is a sufficient one.

Simply because we don’t usually observe massive, miraculous events, with clear, observable sufficient spiritual causes, doesn’t mean there aren’t countless necessary spiritual causes to everything happening in the world, all the time, which aren’t observable.

In other words, people think of the supernatural causes are rare because blatantly obvious miracles are rare. What if, instead, supernatural causes are frequent, necessary, but not sufficient, causes to events like mundane acts of kindness and love.

For example, an elderly lady named Katharine sits next to a young woman in a scandalously revealing outfit. She has the predisposition to silently judge her. Instead, remembering the loving grace shown to her by Jesus, and recalling the passage “love, because he first loved us,” Katharine strikes up a pleasant conversation.

It’s easy to witness a kind act like that and think there’s nothing “supernatural” going on, because we witness the event and physical and/or psychological explanations present themselves. But there might be hidden spiritual causes which are necessary for Katharine to have been kind instead of judgmental.

Of course, if you believe in spiritual powers of evil, the same applies. Take another example that doesn’t include psychology as a plausible cause. Your algorithm presents a thirst trap at a low moment, like immediately after a job rejection. It’s easy to default to “it’s just a coincidence.” The algorithm’s physical mechanism is sufficient to explain the salacious post’s impeccable timing. Maybe, however, it was necessary for a malicious spiritual intervention to butt in and twist things such that the post sprung up in your feed at just the right (wrong) time to catch you out.

Now that we’ve carved out space for hidden, unseen, supernatural, necessary (rather than sufficient) causes, hopefully it helps you fill in the lines with greater spiritual richness.

It’s worth noting that as far as I can tell, most people in most cultures throughout history have thought this way. Instead of AI-generated Instagram slop, people have historically worried about things like the spiritual causes of weather, disasters, politics, and war. It’s only in recent centuries or even decades that we’ve emptied reality of its spiritual causality, into a husk of deterministic, sufficient, physical, and mechanistic operations.

Now, before you go schizophrenic on me, there are bounds of reason we can put around looking for spiritual causes to every spilled tea, strange shadow, or stubbed toe. (“Satan is tempting me to swear, I just know it!”) I think we can be sensible, as the Brits might say. Where you draw boundaries depends on your convictions. How to draw boundaries is, again, beyond the scope of this essay.

Epistemic conundrums like these are where Naturalists will pounce, of course. “Do you have some reliable method for determining what has necessary spiritual causes?” The short answer is no, not by scientific standards. But we know all kinds of things outside the scientific method. (No—no arguments against naturalism. Must keep the essay short.)

The point remains: If you already believe that the spiritual realm exists and can interact with the world, but find yourself struggling to believe in its day-to-day effects, remember that there can be many necessary, but unseen, causes for a single event.

Spiritual Continuity

What got me thinking about spiritual causes was Parfit’s essay on identity, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. He argues that what really matters to us about people is psychological continuity—not one-to-one relations of identity. If that doesn’t make sense at first read, fair enough. I recommend reading my previous essay or the footnote to get a summary.⁴

What if, instead of psychological continuity, we care about spiritual continuity. Instead of one-to-one, individual identity, the collective unity of spiritual associations matters most. I doubt a psychological or spiritual continuum can entirely replace the idea of a metaphysical, one-to-one identity, but it’s no secret that much of the New Testament talks about the importance of the collective spiritual powers, mission, and community of the invisible church.

Surely, there’s much to explore here. Much has been said about misreading the Bible through an individualistic, western lens. I’m currently reading The Unseen Realm by the late, great, Dr. Michael Heiser, and I already highly recommend it.

Here’s a bite-sized bit of food for thought to close. What if there are countless necessary spiritual causations in the world which stem from, and make up, the invisible, but real, influence of good spiritual powers and dark spiritual powers?

Hopefully, the spiritual in the audience will be a little less functionally naturalist after reading this essay.

Do you believe in the spiritual realm? Are you a philosophical naturalist? Do you find yourself struggling to believe in the power of the spiritual in our world? Have you experienced miracles which had undeniably sufficient supernatural causes? Leave a comment and we’ll discuss.

Thanks for reading.

Soli Deo Gloria

1. I define good superstition as the belief that the unseen and supernatural can affect lives and events in the real world, and does so frequently, but that the supernatural needn’t cause undue fear, chaos, or temptation to the occult.

2. Caution: The necessary/sufficient distinction, and the standard theory of logic, is contested by linguists and philosophers based on the ambiguity of “if.”

3. All of these examples take some arbitrary boundaries around the context for the event, like domino tipping. You could, of course, ask about what caused the person to tip the domino over, or what caused Mark to like beer gardens. You can keep going back, and back. If you take all events, ever, you’re now talking about materialistic determinism, the causal closure of the universe, and various free will debates (might Oedipus Rex have not slept with his mother? Etc., etc.) That’s far outside the narrow scope of this essay.

4. In “Personal Identity,” Parfit argues that things like ideas, memories, beliefs, and other psychological states are what really matters to us when we interact with others, and these are on a scale, a continuum. So, by asking “is that Mark?” What you really want to know is not a matter of black and white, yes or no, but “is that bundle of memories, ideas, values, etc., continuous with the same memories, ideas, values, etc., which I knew before?” Most of the time, personal identity works just fine for that, so you can say “yes” or “no.” But in edge cases, the psychological continuum theory of identity states that there’s no black or white answers. This is its strength. Take a gander if you’re interested in that philosophical argument and/or enjoy the Apple+ show, Severance.