'So you think there is no supernatural force, the metaphysical?'

I have been asked a few times: So you think there is no supernatural force, metaphysical force, unseen energy, etc.? I'll give a brief answer. One man's supernatural force is another woman's mumbo-jumbo, and what you consider 'the metaphysical' may not be more than what an illusionist will conjure from his bag of tricks. Derren Brown is a British illusionist who always tells his audiences that what they are about to watch is no more than tricks, the sleight of hand and plain illusioneering (which includes endlessly fascinating mathematical magic). To many people, Derren Brown can only be nothing but a jujuman, a wizard, someone who got his wondrous 'powers' from mammy wata (water nymph) or from behind a burning bush or some otherworldly thing. But this is not the case: everything Brown does can be unpacked. In my book, Schopenhauer's Child, I describe him as a mindfuck artist. He does that very well: mindfuckery. Which is another name for metaphysical claptrap. One of his easier routines is hypnosis and mind control. To many, you can only make someone 'go to sleep' or behave in specific ways with juju or by some kind of fetishised drivel. But even I, though magically untrained, am au fait with the trick of hypnosis; it has nothing to do with the supernatural; it's a suggestional trick of the mind.
So, can anything be described as preternatural, hyperphysical or paranormal? The simple answer is No. Anything possible, doable, conjurable, and achievable is natural, immanent within nature, not extranatural. I'll use astroscience - simply because it's science - before I begin to speculate on voodoo, animism, miracles and other forms of superstition. Many pragmatic achievements in space travel and orbital mechanics are decidedly and literally out of the world. Not only cargo-cult islanders who see England's Prince Phillip as God would marvel at the science of space travel, but the majority of other humans, including those who understand the physics, would find it intriguing - and even if humans were to conquer Mars, tame it, transplant themselves there, that would count as a phenomenon, a signal human phenomenon. Although the trajectory might be squiggly, tortuous and complex I will always double-back agential responsibility on the human.
Besides the fantastic accomplishments in space science, the antics and farcicalities of voodoo, juju, and muti are paltry and insignificant. But hundreds of millions of people, many from my dear continent, still take these things seriously despite their overappropriation of foreign religions like Islam and Christianity. As it is, these Middle Eastern religions have further metastasised belief in Africa's primal shibboleths. But for the sake of philosophical argument, I will not dismiss out of hand what millions and millions of people hold true; such absolutism does not have a place in philosophy, not even in science, although secular positivists like Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking uncompromisingly and rightly pooh-pooh supernaturalism. Even then, using philosophy to prove or disprove supernaturalism is all but impossible - which is why the occasionally forced consilience between philosophy and theology is forbiddingly loose. The weakest link in the vast galaxy of Immanuel Kant's philosophy is where, in Critique of Practical Reason, he clumsily tries to manipulate transcendence and God into being.
In the same way that the burden rests with theists to prove the existence of God, so does it rest on the believer in juju to prove its virtues, efficacy, and, above all, preterhuman potency. But proving this is as impossible as proving the existence of God. If someone came to me and said a young girl who died yesterday was killed by a witch through invultuation - sticking pins and needles in her mini graven image - I would tell the person to prove the truth of his statement to me. In the best of all philosophical worlds, proving or disproving this assertion would necessitate a rollout of arguments, which might include anyone from Aristotle through Hume to Sartre, anything from causality to counterfactuality. But we do not live in the best of philosophical worlds; we do not even live in a philosophical world; as a matter of fact, maggots like paranormal investigation, shamanism, and other religions not only thrive on the corrupt meat of antiscience but also on the ordure of antiphilosophy (in its pure literal sense). If no concrete evidence has been provided for any kind of 'paranormal activity,' if no one has been able to win the 1 million dollars prize for solving the Miracle Question from James Randi Foundation, if no substantiation has ever been provided that the 'witch who cackled last night when she flew past caused the death of my neighbour's child' then I will never get any tangible and satisfactory explanation from the person who purports that a witch had killed a young girl. Hume's scepticism about what he called 'the idea of necessary connection' still holds true today, and nowhere is this more relevant than in the attempt to anchor the galleon of reality in the quicksand of irreality. All I would expect from the dewy-eyed supernaturalist is obfuscation, mystification and a regress into infinite idiocy.
If I felt pain, a growth, anywhere, for example, I'd prefer to go and see a doctor who would make the correct diagnosis and prognosis rather than a babalawo, a sorcerer or a witchdoctor who would maunder about a poison-tipped arrow shot from the invisible bow of an 'enemy,' who would then fob snake oil on me after extorting shedloads of money. Or a 'pastor' or 'prophet' who would offer another kind of greasy placebo. There has also been a rather clever argument that juju, or mojo, might work owing to a sort of telepathic synchronicity between wishful thinking and wish fulfilment, that in societies which believe in these sorts of things, a critical mass of magical thinking might on occasion trigger results. The submission is if Africans stop believing in fantasia like curses and spells, juju and whatever horseshit is out there, they will no longer have no effect - just as it has happened in Europe over hundreds of years. Is this really the case? Did the slippery hacceitas, thisness, of witchcraft, spell-casting, and vampirism ever come near the testability, for instance, of Newton's laws of motion? Did alchemists ever find the philosopher's stone, the elixir? Did 'witches' ever use broomsticks to fly in Pendle, and were there 'possessions' in Loudun? A mere browse through the protosadistic and sinister document called The Malleus Maleficarum would show the houndlike cussedness, the utter ignorance, at the heart of the medieval embrace of superstition and the supernatural in Europe.
For argument's sake, let's put the problematic of causality aside, cool the ardour of our scepticism and hazard belief in the supernatural, but then the measliness, the limitations and the poverty of the signifiers of 'fancies' like witchcraft are enough to short-change any argument for their importance. Even if juju, or witchcraft, did succeed in killing one person, or two, or three, could it have been useful in winning the First or Second World War, or even any war for that matter? A Yoruba politician who was once seen as the embodiment of juju, the incarnation of an ancient Yoruba shogun-like General with occult powers, was routed and blasted to eternity with the guns of young soldiers during a coup after his mojo failed him; he had picked up a gun and used it to defend himself - to no avail. And just as Christian miracles and faith healing cannot help bring back a missing limb, witchcraft can only do so much in killing anyone. This is the biggest argument against superstition, its insignificance, its blurred myopic scope - the worm's-eye view captives have of the world around them. Put a coven of shamans and sorcerers in a dark room with a group of physicists and electricians and challenge either side to bring forth light...