According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, there are four species of superstition:
- improper worship of the true God (indebitus veri Dei cultus);
- idolatry;
- divination;
- vain observances, which include magic and occult arts.
What most, or possibly all, of these have is the desire to control things beyond one’s power. Creating idols, for example, is the attempt to localize God (or some minor power) into a place where one can interact with it on one’s own terms, so one can convince it to do what one wants through worship. (Interestingly; this is the purpose of the golden calf—it is not supposed to be a strange god. Once it is cast the people said, “This is your God1, O Israel, who brought you out of Egypt.” The whole point is that they want to be able to worship it directly, rather than having to wait for Moses to come back down from the mountain.)
I will not waste your time, dear reader, pointing out how divination and vain observances are attempts to go beyond one’s power.
The exact same thing—the vain attempt to go beyond one’s own power—can be done in entirely naturalistic ways. From my observations, it behaves in exactly the same ways superstition. But we don’t have a word for it.
I suspect that we’ve all seen this sort of thing. Vitamins and other supplements are a very common form of it. Vitamins are real, of course, as are all manner of nutrients. But people attribute all sorts of powers to these things which they have no reason to believe that the things have, and with no curiosity whatever to find out what their real powers are.
People go from the fact that vitamins are miracle cures for vitamin deficiency diseases to holding that the vitamins have unlimited powers to confer their effects. They ignore that the vitamins work by doing something, and that the body does not need an unlimited amount of that thing. For example, vitamin C is used by the body in the process of making collagen (it’s just one of many things, but it’s noticeable here for our body not being able to make it). If you have no vitamin C, you stop being able to make collagen, and the parts of your body that need to make new collagen start to greatly suffer from not being able to make it. But contained in this is the natural limit to the effects of vitamin C: once your body has made all of the collagen it wants to make, more vitamin C does no good. (I’m oversimplifying, of course, because vitamin C is used elsewhere in the body, too, but to the best of human knowledge it’s the same story all over—once you have enough, your body can do what it needs to and more does nothing.) It’s like building a house. If you don’t have enough wood, you will build a rickety and drafty house. If you have twice as much wood as you need, you will have a well built house and a big pile of wood. If you have three times as much wood as you need, you will have an equally well built house and a pile of wood that’s twice as big.
Taking large amounts of vitamins as if their effect scales with their dose is directly analogous to superstition, especially to the improper worship of God (such as holding that if one says a prayer in a particular way it will automatically be granted exactly the way you ask for it). Then we come to other ways which are more analogous to divination and vain observances: attributing vague positive benefits to things.
Example of this sort of thing are saying that garlic is “anti-cancer” or that 5G makes chickens lay fewer eggs. Cancer isn’t even one thing, and there’s no reason to suppose that a somewhat improved packetization scheme for data in the radio transmissions used to transmit data to and from cellular phones could have any effect whatever on the way that chickens lay eggs. (I suspect that the fear of 5G was actually about millimeter-wave cell bands, but those are deployed in very few places because they’re so high frequency that they penetrate approximately nothing; on millimeter-wave bands standing in front of your cell phone is enough to have no reception. So far as I’m aware they’ve only been deployed in a few cities and in a few sports stadiums. Most phones don’t even bother incurring the expense of supporting millimeter-wave radio.)
The world is a strange place, we know very little about it, and all sorts of things have effects that we do not know that they have. The problem is not the supposition that effects we do not understand are occurring. The problem is the wild mismatch of certainty to evidence. This is selectively believing in our ignorance; it is believing in it only where one wants to. Is it possible that despite us having no idea how, garlic can cure all forms of cancer? Yes. But there’s just as much reason to believe that garlic causes cancer, or that garlic causes cancer if you take more than twice as much garlic as you eat olive oil, or that garlic causes strokes if you eat more of it than you eat oregano. Lots of things are possible. When one has moved from possible to probable or certain only out of the desire to achieve the effect, this is the naturalistic analog to superstition.
And I really wish we had a word for it.
1. Technically the Greek is plural and many English translations render it as “These are your gods,” but I suspect the translations which take this to be a plural of respect are the more likely to be correct. (An example of the plural of respect is a king saying “we” instead of “I”.) The Jews were certainly not monotheistic at this point, but it makes no sense for them to attribute the bringing them out of Egypt to multiple gods, and still less sense to call one calf multiple gods. No matter how you take it with respect to “theoi”, you certainly have the problem of the plural being used to refer to one thing in the calf.
Chris Lansdown 