The Existence of the Paranormal: A Sadotheistic Perspective
If God exists, it is empirically established that the world he created is filled with suffering. Having observed as much, we can proceed to assert that God might very well take pleasure in this suffering. And, if we go on to apply the principles of operant conditioning to this suffering, we can posit that God is able to maximize its negative effect by meting out personal and societal tragedy on a non-fixed schedule. These are the core principles of what I’ve called “sadotheism” (see Gosham 2021). This theological model comes with a plethora of consequences and possesses an abundance of explanatory power applicable to all sorts of non-theological domains. God’s sadism can, for instance, even provide insights into seemingly far-flung, esoteric, and heretofore inexplicable areas such as the supernatural. And so, in what follows, we will consider a possible explanation for paranormal phenomena such as ghosts, cryptids, and demons and how they might be able to “exist,” in some sense, in a sadotheistic universe.
With considerable frequency, certain people claim to have had encounters with ghosts, demons, and cryptids, among other eldritch phenomena. It is difficult to explain what’s going on in these cases, given there is no physical explanation for ghosts and demons. Cryptids, by contrast, could conceivably be undiscovered species of animals, but even this explanation is unlikely. In the case of the sasquatch or bigfoot, for instance, the relatively limited number of sightings suggest that the breeding population of this supposed species is tiny, surely not enough to sustain the continued evolution of a primate. Were sasquatches to survive, we would see them as often as we do bears and other forest megafauna. Accordingly, when someone reports seeing a bigfoot, the rational person assumes there has been a misunderstanding. Perhaps the witness has misidentified a bear. Meanwhile, when someone reports seeing a ghost or being possessed by a demon, the rational person assumes that some form of cognitive anomaly or mental illness, either episodic or long-term, is at play. A supposed ghost might be a misapprehension of light and shadows, a projection of embodied fear, or an outright hallucination. An apparent demonic possession, meanwhile, might be some sort of sustained psychosis or long-term schizo-dissociative state. All that said, this cognitive impairment hypothesis is not wholly satisfying, as we still hear a host of paranormal accounts from rational-sounding sources. We also see video clips of apparent anomalous entities on cable television and the internet. Oftentimes, the details of these sightings cannot be wholly attributed to simple visual or auditory hallucinations.
But if we accept the existence of a sadistic god, the appearances of ghosts, cryptids, and demons starts to make more sense. The crucial point of the sadotheistic thesis is that God tortures people on an intermittent schedule. Our lives, after all, are not pure suffering. We all have our occasional good days, and we have many, many non-descript days. Earthquakes and mass shootings do not happen every day (though the latter does not entirely hold for the United States). It is only through occasional misfortunes that God truly brings the pain. This intermittent quality maximizes the force of the negativity, and adds the element of shock along with it, thereby redoubling the suffering. To be sure, if we are experiencing all bad, all the time, we get conditioned to our torture, potentially curbing the intensity of the negativity. Any good or neutral feeling in our lives helps to set up the pain we experience when acts of God befall us, societally or personally.
It is on this personal level that paranormal encounters might serve the aims of a sadistic god. The natural world, we’d probably all agree, is filled with no shortage of horrors, from disasters to predators to poverty to serial killers. But isn’t the horror further amplified when some confounding, unnatural element is added into the mix? For this reason, the insertion of chilling spectres into abandoned houses, demonic entities into suburban basements, and hulking primates into North American forests becomes another important device in God’s torture tool-kit. Indeed, each of these beings throws a wrench into what we think material reality should be. All of the above are things that shouldn’t be, and so a perception of their seeming existence can cause severe disruption to any given human psyche. Their inexplicability makes for a genuine horror. And so, paranormal encounters haunt witnesses long after the sighting in question has occurred. More’s the pleasure for a God who gets off on human suffering.
Imagine seeing, say, a shadow person several times inside your home, and then trying to explain to your friends and family why you don’t like being alone in your house. Imagine seeing a hairy, eight-foot-tall, bipedal mammal and trying to talk about the experience with college-educated acquaintances. Most will not believe you, some will question your sanity, and others might even shun you permanently. This serves to add interpersonal indignity atop your initial scare, not to mention long-term alienation from friends and loved ones. Moreover, you may very well beat yourself up with self-doubt in your post-sighting life. Perhaps this all makes for a more subtle sort of suffering than mass casualty events, tragic deaths in the family, or bodily harm upon one’s person, but it’s a horror nonetheless. By peppering reality with ghosts, demons, and cryptids, among other phenomena, God has put in place an insidious and persistent source of stress and horror. And when witnesses capture video evidence of paranormal entities, this represents another means for spreading the suffering, as millions of impressionable viewers-cum-believers can also share in the indignity and alienation, even if they didn’t personally witness anything. All told, paranormal and cryptozoological entities are a great investment for a sadist God, who, like a capitalist seeking multiple streams of income, no doubt wants to open as many channels of human suffering as possible.
Our present exploration of sadotheistic explanations for the paranormal is not simply navel-gazing or intellectual onanism. Rather, this excursion can help to further understand the underpinnings of a sadistic god, namely by establishing that “sadotheism” is the correct neologism for this theological dispensation. By injecting non-physical entities along with new and bizarre types of cryptids into the world in order to bewilder us, God shows not only that he can be present in creation, but also that he can override natural processes. Thus, we may entertain no doubts that we are dealing with a sadotheism and not a “sadodeism.” Here we are taking “theism” as a term to refer to a system where God can intervene in creation, and we do so to draw a contrast with the typical definition of deism as a system of thought where God does not intervene in the physical world. “Sadodeism,” as it were, would have God as a psychopathic watchmaker who has set in place ghosts, demons, and cryptids, among other “mysteries,” alongside more common natural phenomena such as earthquakes, floods, and serial killers, in order to generate suffering like clockwork, the results of which he can then watch and enjoy from a position apart from the mundane world. In this hypothetical “sadodeism,” the paranormal is just another aspect of the natural, pain-inducing order. However, ghosts, demons, and cryptids are not presently empirically verifiable (despite what paranormal profiteers on TV tell us). Certainly, ghosts and demons will never be empirically verified, as they are, as Hobbes long ago pointed out, “incorporeal substances” and therefore a contradiction in terms. The point here is that ghosts, demons, and cryptids are not part of the physical world, and so when they do show up, it could only be the result of miraculous, divinely authored interference. This isn’t a very nice miracle for God to work, though. Accordingly, those sightings of ghosts, demons, and unverifiable species that are not hallucinations are better explained as interventions by a higher power who is malevolent in nature. This means the sadist God has to be a theist divinity in order to enter into his creation and perform these novel paranormal conjurings (see figure 2).
(Readers will notice we have heretofore avoided the subject of extraterrestrials in our discussion of the paranormal. This is the case because the existence of alien beings is not exactly inconceivable given the size of the universe. One day, the existence of extraterrestrials could be verified. That said, God still may use their likenesses to needle, probe, and confound human beings in the meantime.)
Even having established the function of paranormal entities under the parameters of a sadist God, we are still left with the vexing ontological question of “are ghosts, demons, and sasquatches actually real?” Or, more colloquially, we might ask: “Where do bigfoots go once God is done wielding them?” Your present author suggests that ghosts, demons, and cryptids exist as little more than temporary chimeras put into the world by God. The Bigfoots, then, disappear not into some interdimensional rift, as some cryptid enthusiasts would have it, but into nothingness. With that said, however, the manifestation of ghosts, demons, and cryptids represent a real and recognizable pattern of illusion, and a divinely conjured one, at that. Ghosts, demons, and cryptids are real chimeras, if you will, put in place by the will of God. Moreover, they are as real as their effects — that is to say, the confusion and alienation they engender in humans and the subsequent pleasure they engender in God. Indeed, seeing a person who once described herself as “rational” puzzling over why she repeatedly saw a black-eyed child in the attic may very well be like fine wine for God after he’s gorged himself on mass shootings and tsunamis.
