I don’t understand. What honest scientist would ever claim that there are no forces and things in existence that they are unaware of?
The problem, as I see it, is that even if we ignore for the moment the question of whether there is a meaningful distinction of existence called natural and supernatural (ignatural?), any given unknown phenomenon could be indeterminably either. There are plenty of things which were once utterly unknown, that now are included as whatever those classify as “natural.” Our understanding of even what everyone agrees we can call “natural” is severely limited. If there is something we don’t know, how can we classify it?
—“the compendium of phenomena that are NOT consistent with the lawlike conditions of interaction understood through the science of physics, or any presently conceivable elaboration thereof.” Nothing in (each of) those descriptions involves expressly mutually negating descriptors.—
What about the fact that if there exist things that do not follow what are known as the laws of physics, then those laws are thus falsified?
The ideal of physics is to explain “what exists”: how reality works. If you say that there exists a class of objects called “the supernatural” that the laws of physics fail to explain, then whatever we decide to call this category of things, physics is lacking, and its laws require some serious revision.
—Lib: That is necessary existence by definition.—
Wait… I missed a step in the train of thought. Your description went from talking about descriptive variables to the existence of things.
I was particularly confused by the wording of this last step: “For every variable, it is necessary that there does indeed exist some variable that is equivalent to some other variable.” The way I read that, it almost seems to say, for every X, there is a Y equivalent to Z. But what’s the connection between the X and the Y and its equivalence to Z? It’s like saying “for every skyscraper, there is an elephant that is equivalent to a pachyderm.” That can’t be what you’re saying, but after several “in other words” I still don’t get it.
Also, how does existing in all possible worlds mean that something exists outside of the actual world (doesn’t that just show that it exists in the actual world)? As far as I understand the concept of “actual existence” at least in the plain, non-technical way people use it (really exist, vs. don’t really exist), nothing can exist outside of it by definition. Supernatural things, whatever they are, if they exist, actualy(really) exist. Necessary existence is, to most people’s understanding, a special class of things that actually(really) exist: the actually existing things for which it is (for some reason?) not possible for them not to exist. I also don’t see how the technical definition of actual existence correlates to anyone’s normal usage of “natural” or necessary existence to “supernatural.” If necessary existence really is what most people seem to include in the class of things they call supernatural, then why would something that necessarily exists be, for instance, hard to detect (at the very least) by things that only actually exist? Why does it have that characteristic simply by being necessary? One would think that it would be easier to detect.
