(June 3, 2020 at 8:04 am)polymath257 Wrote:(June 2, 2020 at 6:56 pm)Grandizer Wrote: Even if we couldn't come up with a clear definition of natural vs supernatural, I do believe there is nevertheless a general imprecise intuition shared by many of us regarding the boundary between what's natural and what's supernatural. If there are gods involved that spin fire out of "nothing" and mysteriously make frogs sing Italian songs randomly and unpredictably, I think we're more likely to intuit that as supernatural rather than simply an unexpected instance of the natural. It's a bit weird to me when people seem to be equating naturalism to something that could be aptly labeled "possibilism".
I disagree with this. If you went back 200 years, many of the things we do on a daily basis would have been considered 'magical' or 'supernatural'. We communicate instantly with people across the world, we can remotely control machinery, we can bring up moving pictures of events, we can cure diseases, etc.
Much of the modern world would have been considered to be supernatural not all that long ago. The only reason we don't consider it so today is because it is part of the technology we use and we feel we understand it.
I have yet to see a coherent definition of the term 'natural' that takes into consideration the actual methods of science and the possibility of scientific revolution that can lead to significantly different technologies.
As Clark said, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'.
I get what you're saying. Just because we think something is impossible/magical now doesn't mean it actually is. We might think it's impossible to go past the speed of light given our current scientific knowledge, but maybe one day a major unexpected flaw will be exposed in our understanding of physics and reveal that we can indeed do so. But I think this is besides the point. Whatever it is we observe in this reality, as naturalists, we expect a pattern happening that we can potentially make use of to make solid predictions because, as naturalists, we expect things to operate in line with the laws of nature (if you don't like this wording, we expect regularities not violations of these regularities). And whatever shocking observations we find, we expect (or hope) to eventually find some explanation grounded in our background scientific understanding.
On the other hand, going back to the singing frog example, if after continually making observations and analyzing frogs all around the world, you keep failing to see a clear pattern you can go by and there's basically no plausible explanation you can think of that would explain what's going on with the singing frogs, and other things start to happen where all of a sudden we're seeing fairies and pixies and white-bearded divine-looking figures wielding lightning bolts or whatever, and this is being witnessed by heaps of people and such, wouldn't your credence in how you currently perceive the world as a purely naturalistic realm decrease (if just slightly)? Is your credence in what could be aptly considered "supernatural" exactly 0?
