(June 2, 2020 at 6:56 pm)Grandizer Wrote: It's a bit weird to me when people seem to be equating naturalism to something that could be aptly labeled "possibilism".
That's fair.
I have been defining "natural" as that set of things which it is possible for a given thing to do. If we see it doing something which we take to be impossible, that is evidence for the supernatural, for people who don't rule it out a priori.
And in this view, since it is possible for Zeus to shoot lightning from his fingertips (or would be if he existed), then it would be natural for him.
I think our whole category of natural/supernatural is likely modern and misleading. The Greeks thought that daemons, muses, and gods were a normal part of the world. In their view, there was no separation between the part of nature we observe and gods with powers greater than human. I can't think of any ancient text that talks about the supernatural -- only the super-human, the hidden, the greater-than-we-can-know.
