Where does the Sun go at night, and what makes it move across the sky?
Why do earthquakes happen?
How did all of the numerous varieties of life come to be?
These are (or were, once upon a time) all mysterious questions that inspired human curiosity for millenia. A thousand years ago, the answers to these questions were much different from the answers we would give today.
In ancient Greece, you might have heard that the Sun is actually the bright, golden chariot wheel of Apollo as he drives across the sky, and that at night he travels through the Underworld until finally repeating his journey the next morning. Today, nearly anyone you ask will tell you that the Sun doesn't actually move (relative to the Earth anyway), that the Earth is turning and this creates the appearance of a moving Sun, and that the day/night cycle simply corresponds to whether your part of the Earth is facing toward or away from the Sun.
Earthquakes were once described as being caused by angry gods. Today, you would hear an explanation involving the movement of massive rock plates upon which the continents rest, and the buildup and release of pressure with corresponding sudden movement as they grind against each other.
The variety found in life is explained in multiple ways even today; ask a Creationist why there are so many varieties, and you'll be answered that a god created each "kind"
ex nihilo. If you ask a biologist, you'll be told an explanation involving small changes that occur during reproduction, the spread of these changes when they give a reproductive or survival advantage throughout a breeding population, and the gradual accumulation of those changes eventually creating such divergence within the parent population that daughter populations can themselves be identified as new, distinct species.
What is the real difference between these answers? The immediate response seems to be that some of the answers call upon what we typically identify as "supernatural" forces, while the others are naturalistic.
But look deeper. A "supernatural" explanation is really just the attribution of the cause to an as-yet-unknown entity. In that way, "supernatural" explanations are not really all that different from dark matter in physics - a mysterious phenomenon is identified, and so a term is created ("god," "dark matter") as a label for the cause of that mysterious phenomenon, even though the actual cause remains an unknown.
The real difference (and the difference between the above "supernatural" explanations and dark matter) is that some of these answers are
real answers with explanatory and predictive power (even when they still contain some unknowns, as with dark matter), while others are just mysterious answers to mysterious questions and stop curiosity in the intellectually lazy without actually increasing understanding.
What is a mysterious answer? A mysterious answer is an answer lacking in explanatory or predictive power. A mysterious answer is one that does not increase our understanding of the question it attempts to answer, and instead often utilizes vague, poorly defined (if defined at all) terms as a sort of password to stop further investigation and shut down curiosity. At its heart, a mysterious answer is one that appeals to an emotional sense of satisfaction rather than an actual increase in intellectual understanding.
Human beings are uncomfortable with the unknown. Our greatest weakness with regard to rational thought is not that we posses the capacity (and willingness) to make up stories to fill in those unknowns, but rather in our ability to feel satisfied with those stories to the point that we stop investigating mysterious phenomenon even when we still don't have a real explanation. In the case of religion, investigation (and especially the answers gained from further investigation when they contradict existing dogma) has historically been actively resisted in favor of the mysterious answer.
But despite resistance to discard those emotionally satisfying answers, you cannot answer a mysterious question with a mysterious answer. It's not really an answer at all. And "supernatural" explanations are simply one subset of mysterious answers - they exist outside the bounds of faith as well.
Fire has always been one of the keys to human civilization, and yet for the longest time we had no idea how it worked. A few centuries ago the prevailing theory involved a mysterious substance called "phlogiston" - flammable materials contained phlogiston, which was a mass-less, colorless, tasteless, odorless substance that is released during burning. A material is more or less flammable depending on the amount of phlogiston it contains, and there is no way to detect phlogiston except by measuring the flammability of the material.
This sounded reasonable at the time. Why does a candle burn? It has phlogiston in it, of course!
But the answer was mysterious. What is phlogiston, other than "that which burns?" What makes it burn? Why does phlogiston not
always burn, even without a match or spark or friction to start the fire? What is combustion? Phlogiston theory was nothing more than a password for "the stuff that burns" that emotionally satisfied curiosity.
Thankfully phlogiston theory did not stop further investigation of combustion. The theory was discarded when modern models of chemistry provided an actual explanation for the mysterious phenomenon of fire, complete with predictive power to show, in advance of burning a substance, how hot the fire will be, what color, whether it will burn at all, what the products of the combustion will be, etc.
Predictive power is the key to any
real answer. If your explanation of a mysterious phenomenon does not allow you to, in advance, make a prediction about the outcome of an experiment regarding that phenomenon that then proves to be accurate, then you don't really have an explanation at all - you have a mysterious answer. Your curiosity is being satisfied, but you really still don't know what's going on.
Sounding reasonable is insufficient to be classified as a real explanation. Fantastical nonsense like Apollo's chariot sound reasonable (or did to those with the background information of the ancient Greeks, who knew little of the real nature of stars and solar systems). Only those theories that can make their own predictions (not simply fulfilling the predictions of other theories) and expose themselves to falsification can potentially be real answers.
In everyday life, mysterious answers are relatively harmless. Most people don't really know how a computer works - and if they ask, a simple answer like "there's a processor inside that uses programs to turn all the ones and zeroes into something you and I can understand and use" is usually enough to stop the average person's curiosity even though they still have no idea how the computer works. That's okay - most people will never find that they need that information anyway. In an ideal world, we would all seek to fully understand every topic and wouldn't waste time with mysterious answer; in reality we all have limited time and attention to spare.
But we need to recognize when our answers are mysterious, because confusing a mysterious answer for an actual explanation is dangerous. Mysterious answers are much more likely to be flat-out wrong (rather than just inaccurate and vague), while real explanations with accurate predictive power are more likely to be extremely accurate even if they aren't perfectly precise. Confusing a mysterious answer for a real explanation leads to overestimating one's own competence in a field - just because your personal curiosity has been satisfied on a topic does not mean you actually have any real competence. Confusing a mysterious answer for a real explanation can lead to defending the mysterious answer against a real explanation - especially if the mysterious answer offers greater emotional satisfaction than the real explanation. Confusing a mysterious answer for a real explanation leads to exalting falsehoods while disdaining facts, clinging to emotion while rejecting reason. Recognizing the real extent of our own understanding means ignoring the emotional sense of satisfied curiosity and rationally evaluating the real accuracy of our beliefs, and the
limits of one's understanding.
Real answers require evidence that comes from the real world. Mysterious answers lack that requirement - and this means that mysterious answers often have no way of possibly describing the real world with accuracy except by pure, blind chance. If your answer for a mysterious phenomenon relies exclusively on "evidence" that is not entangled with the real world ("feelings," for example), your answer is mysterious, and is no better than a random guess.
But what about unknowns, where we don't have sufficient real-world evidence to form a real answer with predictive power? Nearly all "supernatural" hypotheses attempt to answer such questions, or at least this is the case when the hypothesis is generated. People flock to mysterious answers as a solution to their curiosity when there are no alternatives. Is it okay to accept a mysterious answer under such circumstances? Is it acceptable to state with [i]any/i amount of confidence from "I'm certain" all the way down to "I'm not really sure, but I like to think..." that a mysterious answer in this case is likely to be correct?
If I asked you to draw a map of the surface of a planet orbiting a distant star that nobody had ever seen, what would it look like? Would you draw a terrestrial planet like Earth, with oceans and lakes and rivers and mountains and deserts, or a gas giant with multicolored stripes of atmospheric gasses? Would it be the size of Mars, or larger than Jupiter? What are the chances, no matter what you draw, that your map would in any way look like the actual planet? Would it be reasonable to say, with any amount of confidence from "I'm sure" all the way down to "I'm not really sure, but I like to think that..." your map is even remotely accurate?
Would you even be sure there was a planet orbiting that star
at all?
Mysterious answers that do not depend on evidence that is entangled with the real world are the absolute worst kind to believe, and it's extremely important to recognize these on sight. Fortunately, they're also the most obvious. They have no greater chance of being accurate than a hand-drawn map of a planet orbiting a distant star that nobody has ever seen or detected and which may or may not even exist. If someone claims to have an intangible, invisible, scentless, silent, mass-less dragon that does not respire or consume food or expel waste in their garage, there is absolutely no way that this person could have knowledge of this mysterious creature from evidence in the real world, and therefore all of the knowledge the person does possess about the creature comes from within his own imagination (draconic telepathy only counts if it is reproducible in other people, and even then only increases the probability that telepathy exists, not that the source is an otherwise undetectable dragon). People tend to fall for these sorts of mysterious answers when they have extreme emotional fondness for the answer, or where there are no competing answers because our ability to collect real-world evidence has not yet progressed to the point where we can form a rational theory on the subject.
Much more dangerous are those mysterious answers that
sound like reasonable solutions. These are far more likely to be believed by even intelligent and rational people - they are intellectual traps. This encompasses such mysterious answers as "a deity guided evolution to result in humanity," or "the Grand Canyon was formed through erosion, like scientists say, but was actually formed rapidly by the waters of a global Flood as opposed to being cut from the rock slowly by a river over millions of years." These answers do not immediately sound mysterious, and to many people they sound perfectly credulous. They are, after all, offering what
sounds like a "mechanism" in attributing a guiding force to evolution and specifying the specific cause of the erosion that formed the Grand Canyon. It is certainly
conceivably possible that a deity could "guide" evolution, and to anyone without an education in hydrodynamics or geology, rock being eroded by moving water sounds like a lot more water moving much faster on a huge scale could cut a lot of rock much more quickly.
But answers like these are still not
real answers - they are mysterious answers. The carry no predictive power. What appears to be a mechanism is instead a placeholder where the mechanism
should be. By adding the guidance of a deity to the Theory of Evolution, you do not actually increase your understanding of how new species evolve - there is no mechanism for the divine interference, you can make no prediction as to where to look for the telltale signs of the deity's influence, and your answer is not based on any evidence gained from the real world. All you've done is suggest that, while combustion is the result of chemical reactions that produce heat and light in addition to their chemical products, the chemical components of the reaction must
also contain phlogiston. You've stopped your curiosity for the question "is there something else guiding the evolution of life?" with a desirable thought rather than a testable predictive mechanism that would actually increase your understanding. Only by including the mechanism by which the proposed deity provides guidance to the well-known evolutionary process would the answer cease to be mysterious and be sufficient to satisfy curiosity. Claiming that the Flood caused the Grand Canyon does not in any way show
how a Flood would ever cause any such formation, much like saying that flammable objects burn because they have phlogiston doesn't actually show why phlogiston is a reasonable answer.
So why do we continue to use mysterious answers? Why do we continue to confidently answer a mysterious question with a mysterious answer and pretend that we've actually solved the problem? Why does our curiosity become satisfied by what should
obviously only spawn more questions? When someone, anyone, claims that the Earth was made in six days by a deity, why is the first word out of everyone's mouth not "how?" Why do the words "God can do anything" satisfy that question, without really answering it at all?
The only answer I can suggest is that emotional
preference guides our beliefs to a far greater extent naturally than do reason and logic. For many of us, searching for an answer to a mysterious question is not simply a search for the facts behind a mysterious phenomenon; it's a search for an answer we
like. If an answer fits better with our pre-existing views of the world, or better appeals to our sense of fairness, or otherwise lets us rest easier at night than competing hypotheses, we initially feel an urge to accept that answer as the correct one and stop additional research - after all, if we keep looking after we find the answer we like, we might have to confront the possibility of an answer we
don't like that fits reality better.
Are there other possibilities? It seems incontrovertible that, in any sufficiently large group of people, several subgroups will hold mutually exclusive beliefs, and that many of these beliefs will be mysterious answers to mysterious questions. Some people will believe that prayer can heal the sick; some will believe that the Earth was Created with magic words by a single god some 6-10,000 years ago; some will believe that human suffering is due to the influence of long-dead brainwashed alien souls; some will believe in an afterlife, while others will believe in reincarnation; some will believe that a super-diluted solution of caffeine will act as a sleeping aid; some will believe that vaccines cause autism; some will believe that disease is not caused by germs, but rather by poor nutrition, misaligned "energy fields," and so on. Some of these answers will be religious, others will not. Every supernatural hypothesis I've ever heard takes the form of a mysterious answer, and many popular naturalistic hypotheses do as well.
Are all of these beliefs held because of an emotional preference, an artificial satisfaction of curiosity because a useless but preferred answer tends to be believed over a useful but less preferred one? It's the best answer
I can come up with...but what about everyone else?
I think Faith and Belief is the best fit.
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