The Inexplicable and the Supernatural

Extract

An appeal to the inexplicable has always been a favourite tactic of the Supernaturalist; and even today those Supernaturalists that remain seem to derive some comfort from it. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, the orthodox Protestant apologetic in this country laid great stress on the ‘inexplicable’ events allegedly associated with Christ's life as anthenticating the truths of revelation. (A. G. N. Flew, God and Philosophy, London, 1966, p. 142–3.) A more general thesis has been put forward as often, and even more often assumed: that the occurrence of inexplicable events demonstrates the reality of a ‘spiritual’ realm. And in current literature we can find it claimed that the hegemony of science or the tenability of materialism is threatened by those inexplicabilities which are now known as the phenomena of ESP. (See, for example, ‘A World of Spirits’, a dialogue between J. Pearce-Higgins and C. Evans in Theoria to Theory, Vol. I, No. 4.)