The Horror Movie Test for Naturalism

So reading a lot about “The Outsider Test for Faith” and watching my normal allotment of horror movies (as well as writing a horror story) reminded me of something that I brought up on an old Atheism vs Christianity Google group years and years ago with I will now officially dub “The Horror Movie Test for Naturalism”.  The challenge was this:  the naturalist must place themselves into any horror franchise or universe they wish, as long as it contained a supernatural element, and show how they could use their proper skepticism and evidence-based approach to convince themselves to accept, at least provisionally, that the supernatural entity existed to at least give them a shot at surviving the movie/episode/season.

This is a good test, it seems to me, because of the traits of such universes.  First, for most of them what we have is a world that is almost identical to ours and so all of the evidence that they have that the supernatural doesn’t exist would still be present.  The only difference is that there happens to exist a hostile supernatural entity in a localized situation that in general there are only legends about at best before the hero encounters them.  In such universes, there are always examples of the sorts of skeptics that naturalists often claim to be proud to be, and those skeptics end up dying in totally predictable ways, while the heroes only survive — those that do survive — because they accept that the supernatural thing exists and act to stop it using equally unproven and supernatural defenses.  And most importantly, since taking the right stance wrt these entities is literally a matter of life and death it’s an important proposition; the naturalist cannot remain neutral on the topic.

This example is particularly important for those naturalists who claim to only promote methodological naturalism because by that for all they know this universe is that sort of universe.  We could have a local malevolent supernatural entity that they might come into contact with if they go to the wrong place.  Thus, at a minimum they cannot dismiss the thought experiment as being too artificial since it could easily be this universe (which is rather the point of those movies, to make us feel that, yes, this could happen here).  And if it can happen here, then it would seem like their epistemology had better be able to handle such a situation and not get them killed, or else it’s a pretty crappy epistemology.  And since this would be a rather urgent situation, they couldn’t rely on claiming that they’d wait for science to settle the question, as they’d have to rely only on their own senses and experiences and the things they could do to verify it quickly and easily.

This isn’t really an attempt at a “Gotcha!” for naturalists.  I’m actually genuinely interested in seeing they’d shake out such an event in their epistemology and what evidence they’d consider reasonable and reliable for such a case.  Would they trust a friend telling them that, contra Hume and some of their own claims about what you should think in such cases?  Would they trust only their own eyes?  Would they want to do more testing?  Is that sort of testing something they could do without getting themselves killed?  What would it take for them to trust that the normal defenses that seem like superstitions are the right way to go?  It seems like it would be a good example for naturalists to use to demonstrate what the right approach to the supernatural would be, how a proper skeptic/naturalist would deal with that situation, and thus how what we currently have must by necessity fail those standards.

I don’t think any committed naturalists are reading my blog anymore (Jonathan MS Pearce read it off and on, I recall, and Coel seems to be long gone) but if any of them are still reading and want to take it on, or if anyone here wants to pass it along to naturalists they know and give them a shot, I’d be very interested in seeing what they come up with.