Many recent threads about religion are turning towards a discussion of the supernatural, so I thought it might be useful to devote a thread to it. Some initial thoughts
First, how would you define supernatural? Being outside the universe defines it out of existence, so how about defining the supernatural as that which violates physical laws without invalidating them. We can resolve this apparent contradiction by defining laws as applying only to the natural. Thus, if God, a supernatural entity, can violate the speed of light limit, which he certainly would be able to, this does not make the law invalid for the natural universe.
Now, given a definition, what can we say about the supernatural? If there is no interaction with the natural universe, clearly nothing, since the universe without the supernatural would be equivalent to one with it. However we can speak of a projection of the supernatural onto the natural universe, in the same way we could speak of a shadow of a 3d object appearing in a 2d universe. So, if God created a flood, or made the sun stand still, we’d be able to measure the effects of these actions, without being able to explain or understand how he did them.
To be clear, I haven’t seen any evidence that the supernatural does exist, but I don’t rule it out a priori, because of the reasons given above.
As I said, not if you define physical laws as applying to natural, not supernatural, entities. If one believed in the Bible, then one would believe that miracles can be observed. That’s the projection of the supernatural onto the natural.
When we say nothing can move at the speed of light, we are actually talking about nothing with mass being able to travel at the speed of light.
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True. I should have said talking usefully about the supernatural. We can make up all sorts of fantasies. But many people talking about the supernatural treat it far more seriously than a fairy story. I’ve seen a lot of people talking past each other about this. by defining the supernatural out of existence. We skeptics get a bad image for doing things like that.
The counter sin to defining the supernatural out of existence, I think, is claiming it exists while claiming evidence for it can’t exist even in principle. I have problems with some common arguments on both sides of this debate.
As Arthur Clarke once said 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Your definition is interesting, but assumes that God is not ‘natural’. (That discussion could start a whole new thread.)
Given that physical laws are the result of observations, if we see something ‘supernatural’ happen, then we need to update the scientific theory to include it. If God makes something travel faster than light, then Einstein needs to be updated. Immediately. If God makes the Sun stand still, there are interesting implications on controlling gravity and coping with massive momentum.
Science does not assume something is true, then bend the evidence to fix it.
Indeed! I think this just pushes the definition back one step: if supernatural things violate physical laws without invalidating them, and physical laws by definition apply only to natural things, we’ve got a pretty little circle going on.
I might say, for example, that you can’t push your finger through natural things, that this is a physical law, and that Miracle Whip is therefore supernatural. As near as I can tell, this fulfills all the criteria of your definitions, but is plainly ridiculous (although I’ll admit that the stuff is supernaturally nasty).
We might try to set up other definitions for natural, such that everything we currently know of falls within these definitions. Even there, I think we’d run into trouble. May we define natural material as being made up of atoms with fewer than 150 electrons? To the best of our knowledge (and by “our” I really mean “my,” since I’m no physicist), everything in the universe matches this criterion: it’s 100% true. However, if some laboratory manages to synthesize Dorkonium, with 151 electrons per atom, has a supernatural event occurred?
Another possible definition, albeit a problematic one: the supernatural is that for which no natural explanation is possible. The question becomes, how can we ever conclude that something is supernatural?
I think the gist of your comment is how can we tell the natural from the supernatural. That’s a very good question. If we observed something traveling faster than light, the first thing we’d do is to look for hyperspace, or subspace, or some other means by which we could reproduce this. If we found it, it would not be supernatural.
On the other hand, can’t you conceive of some observations where the alternatives would be either throwing out the laws of physics or accepting the supernatural as a special case? I’m not saying this has happened, or that I ever expect it to happen, but if we did observe miracles the supernatural might be a better explanation.
I tried to stay away from the word “possible” for just this reason. Clarke’s First Law (I think) states that the only way of deteriming the limits of the possible is to go beyond them to the impossible. Nevertheless, we might imagine a case where a supernatural explanation is the simplest tentative explanation for an observation. This does not rule out eventually finding the man behind the curtain.
For instance, if the Joshual miracle were repeated, and the Earth stopped rotating, instantaneously, then started up again, with no ill effects to anything, and nothing detected on any instrument, I’d be inclined to call it supernatural rather than throw out momentum. But, and this is the second part of my point, we can and should apply the rules of science to studying the phenomena. So I think science can study the supernatural, though science might not be able to come to any good conclusions about how it works.
Examples are helpful, definitely; thanks! In this example, I would be inclined to think that there must be some major aspect of momentum that we don’t understand. The event might signify a radical advance in our understanding of multidimensional physics (I’m throwing out Trekspeak, I know; how else does one speak about such matters?), or our understanding of the real purposed behind the SDI program, or our understanding of alien lifeforms, or our understanding of a divine power.
In such a case, how can we meaningfully distinguish between the last two options? One way would be simple: if the aliens can explain to us how they stopped the earth in a fashion that we can understand, we can safely rule out the supernatural. If they just say, “We are God!” how can we decide whether they’re supernaturally powerful, or just advanced scientists who aren’t in a sharing mood?
Hm. That’s a good starting point. Statistical anomalies of clear and present violations of apparent physical law, which can not be reproduced reliably, may qualify as supernatural?
If I could cast a fireball spell every day at 1 PM, it would be natural, and subject to examination by science.
If it could not be experimented with, or surveyed, it might be supernatural. That is, if I could cast the same spell once in my lifetime under uncontrolled circumstances?
But what if we can’t udpate the laws (except in some totally ad hoc fashion). When it was discovered that certain rocks containing uranium compounds caused film to fog even in a darkened drawer; or that a rainbow produced by a prism contains darker and brighter lines; we were able to produce theories that explained those things and even made predictions about new phenemena that we hadn’t yet encountered.
But suppose God only makes the Earth stand still once; the event is empirically confirmed–not just Bronze Age hearsay, I mean, but (to everyone’s astonishment) the Earth stands still and stops rotating on its axis for 24 hours on April 28, 2006, and all the, I don’t know, telescopes and GPS receivers and so on all confirm this, and the event is recorded in various ways. But it never happens again, and we never can figure out how to make it happen ourselves, or even how in principle someone with control over a lot more energy than we have could have caused the particular event we observed. We could come up with some silly “theory”–F = ma, except on April 28, 2006–but it would be totally unsatisfactory.
I’ve also written before of a being who obligingly will reproduce a particular miracle; turning water into wine. Some laid-back Jesus shows up at James Randi’s house and offers to demonstrate, right then and there and also thereafter under whatever conditions anyone cares to name, that he can turn water into wine. Now, at first (once we’re satisfied he doesn’t just have a flask of merlot concealed up his sleever or whatever), we might think “Aha! He’s a Space Alien with a miniaturized atomic transmuter concealed somewhere on his person!” But suppose, although every test we do shows that the contents of the container are water, then poof!, they’re wine, we never get any other information out of the process. There’s no heat signature, no neutron flux, not even any excess neutrinos, putting the container behind a lead shield doesn’t affect the process, nor does saturating the area with radio frequency interferance. Just, 100% water, verified by any instrument anyone can come up with, then poof!, wine–and as far as we can tell, the process is instantaneous; we never detect a state where the container is filled with watered-down wine or unfermented grape juice or anything like that.
Under those conditions, I don’t see how we could avoid saying that what is occuring is miraculous, i.e., the “supernatural” detectably impinging on the natural.
Under the first one, I’d really hesitate to call it a supernatural occurrence. Rather, I’d consider it an anomaly, of the sort that occurs occasionally. True, most anomalies aren’t observed by the entire population of earth; but they still occur. Even if we aren’t able to explain it, it seems plausible to me that we encountered something beyond our understanding.
The laidback Jesus, though, I’d be more willing to consider as a miracle.
Except, even then, I have to compare it to other situations. If I took a videophone (and some cell towers) back to medieval Europe and used it to communicate with a friend of mine who also had a videophone, I suspect that the locals could run all the tests they could think of, and as long as they didn’t break the device, they’d never come up wtih an explanation of how we were communicating. They wouldn’t know the right tests to run.
Your laidback Jesus might have access to technology many generations beyond ours. In such a case, his sufficiently advanced technology would be literally indistinguishable from magic.
If the supernatural is that which breaks the laws of physics, we have to keep in mind that the laws of physics are not immutable. Our understanding of those laws may one day change such that the event we previously classified as supernatural no longer defies our new understanding of the laws, and the supernatural therefore becomes natural.
Since that’s true, I don’t know that we can ever definitively declare something to be supernatural.
I reject the biconditional implication that whatever exists is necessarily natural, and that what is natural is all that exists. What law of nature imposes existence? What is its formula? Of what property is it a function? What is its unit of measure?
By the way, just so you know, may comment was with respect to the OP — in particular, this statement: “Being outside the universe defines [the supernatural] out of existence”. Not so.
That is, the people who live in the Matrix observe and live their lives under the “natural” laws of the Matrix world.
However, someone who could hack the Matrix (like Neo, or Agent Smith) could do stuff no one else can do (just like the administrator on a computer can do stuff normal users can’t)
Wouldn’t we be able then to classify all the rules the normal inhabitants of the Matrix have to live by as “natural laws”, and classify all the stuff that Neo does as “supernatural”?
Of course, if someone like Neo levitates, we could update the “natural laws” to include being able to levitate, and just say that, under the right conditions, anyone would be able to do it.
That might be a valid approach, but I think that levitation would result from violating the rules of the game, from hacking it, so it is hard to call it a “natural” occurance.
The above was for inhabitants of a Matrix-style world.
In our world, if someone was able to make the earth stand still or bring a half-decomposed corpse back to life before our eyes, I would be more inclined to think that we do in fact live in a type of simulation, and that that person is just the avatar for an administrator or hacker, rather than amend “natural laws” to include bringing half-decomposed corpses back to life.
I’m nervous about the position that no matter what evidence there is for the supernatural or god, it must be rejected. I fear that leads to the charge that atheism is religious. I prefer to say that I’m open to evidence for the supernatural, but the level of evidence required is very high. I’d rather cast the argument in terms of “if you got this evidence, show me” rather than about whether it is fair to reject it. I’m pretty confident (have faith?) that I’ll never see any.
As for your question, I think we can decide just like we decide any scientific question. The two hypotheses are supernatural and natural. Even if we tentatively accept the supernatural one, we should still work on finding a natural explanation, and test these beasties for non-godliness. Or, in the words of that famous theologian, James T. Kirk “Why does God need a starship?”
I don’t see it as rejecting evidence for the supernatural; I see it as a matter of definition, such that, by definition that which occurs is natural. “Supernatural” is still a useful word, as a subset of “nonexistent.”
If God exists, then God is natural. I believe that God is supernatural.
To clarify, I agree with this, because I consider by definition everything that exists to be part of the natural world. Science cannot examine that which does not exist.