Supernatural and Atheism

[Belacqua]

Another definition: Some things that are unknown to human now are considered supernatural.  For example, the ancient people considered thunder and lightning to be the cry and fire of God's anger.
  

This is an interesting point. 

Ancient people attributing bad weather to a god isn't the definition of supernatural that I'm talking about - simply because it is in the nature of a god to affect the weather. 

Back when people believed this sort of thing, I wonder what words they used for it. I don't know if they had an exact equivalent for "supernatural," since our own definitions of what is natural and what is supernatural are relatively recent. They didn't know how weather worked, but they assumed that it was normal for a god to affect it. Is that supernatural, or just very powerful?

They might have said something like "divine," to express that it was a power beyond the human. 

For a long time people used the word "occult" just to mean that the process by which something happened was hidden. But the process wasn't necessarily a supernatural occurrence. For example, for a long time people felt that "action at a distance" was an occult power. They believed it was possible for one thing to affect another thing that was far away without touching, but they had no explanation for it. Yet it was also a part of nature, and therefore not supernatural. Galileo rejected "action at a distance" as being too mysterious, but Newton, more accepting of the occult, described it and renamed it "gravity." So it became less occult after Newton, but no more or less natural. 

 Or the weeping blood of the statue of Mary, which is unknown to some people and seems supernatural, but it is a trick by the sculptor.

This certainly seems supernatural to those who don't know that it's a trick. Because it is not in the nature of wooden sculptures to weep blood.