(June 3, 2020 at 8:04 am)polymath257 Wrote: 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.
Here's a definition of "natural" which takes into consideration the methods of science and tech.
I mentioned it earlier. It's a version of the definition used in the mystical tradition, without necessarily accepting all of their conclusions.
The natural is that part of the world which can be known by humans. Or to adapt it to your polymathic monomania, we could say that the natural is that part of the world which can be analyzed by science.
The point is that just because there is a part of the world that can be analyzed by science, that's not proof that there's lots of other parts that can't.
Consider our friends the earthworms. The range of what they can consider is different from our own. They don't know math, physics, or meteorology. They are indifferent to music and art. They don't know the history of civilizations. People know all that stuff, but it all falls entirely outside what an earthworm can conceive of.
Why should I believe that human beings are able to know all of the world, when earthworms can't? In the evil old days of religion, people thought that the mind is a portion of the divine Logos, the principles and logic of the universe, and therefore our minds are constructed so as to know the world. But we scientific type people scoff at all that. People evolved to pass on their genes, just as earthworms did, and we know what we need to know for that.
So let's imagine that "nature" is the range of things people can know. That would make the supernatural all the realm of things we can't know. How much is there? We can't answer that, because by definition we can't know it.
At this point the normal objection is that if something is unknowable to us then it makes no difference, it "might as well" not exist. I think that's silly. An earthworm doesn't know anything about neoliberal economic policy, but such policies are still going to cause climate change and habitat loss that will significantly affect worm life. So the supernatural could be affecting us all the time, and we just wouldn't know it.
This is different from the definition I was using earlier. In that usage, the part of the world we don't understand might be acting according to its nature, and would thus be hidden but natural. In this other definition, anything which is knowable to science is natural and anything which isn't knowable is supernatural.
