What is Supernatural?

[vorlon13]

Weird shit happens, people misidentify what's up.

Having typed that, damn, some shit is REALLY weird.

[Angrboda]

But is the supernatural that which hasn't been explained, or that which cannot be explained, and how do we tell the difference?

[Anomalocaris]

Bullshit.

"Supernatural" is a pill that induce a delusion of adequacy in yokels and intellectual bums who fear the concept of "finding out" as well as those who do the finding out.

[The Valkyrie]

It's all about the Winchesters....

[brewer]

Picked up some at a health food store once. All I got was constipation.

[KUSA]

Basically it's magic.

[vorlon13]

But is the supernatural that which hasn't been explained, or that which cannot be explained, and how do we tell the difference?

perhaps we fail to realize the thousands/millions/billions/trillions of odd things that could happen that don't, but since there are so many of them, there is going to be a gotcha maybe more often than we might realize

[robvalue]

Like God, it's something that has never been positively identified as existing at all, so if people want to make claims about it it's up to them to define it properly prior to their claim. I don't much care what definition they use, I'll kick the crap out of the claim regardless for the inevitable logical fallacies. And again like God, the people who argue for its existence I suspect don't really know what they are even describing.

Any definition which includes our current inability to explain it is stupid; just call it unexplained and stop trying to smuggle in extra mystery points. Similarly, saying it "breaks the laws of nature" is stupid because we have no definitive list of what the laws of nature are. It would just an unexplained apparent problem with our model of the laws.

Nature doesn't mean "Stuff we understand". Or if it does, that's a stupid definition.

[thehedglin]

I call Clarke's laws. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Seriously, though. I think we are conflating to different concept here, one is if something can currently be explained naturally, and the other is if something can ever be explained naturally. Not all that long ago people would have thought cell phones where supernatural, but they most definitely are not. Likewise, there is no way to accurately determine if something we didn't currently understand was supernatural or not.

Supernatural should mean more than simply something we can't explain, it should mean something utterly impossible in the natural world. The ever-vanishing pocket of our scientific ignorance is not an appropriate place to hide unsupportable nonsense like gods and magic, as we actually do know that they violate the natural order to some extent, but the unexplained does not lend support to the unsupportable by any measure. The fact that I don't know why quantum particles have mass does NOT mean that an explanation including fairies somehow becomes more reasonable, that would be ridiculous.

Seems to me that the "supernatural" is a concept some people attempt to use to shoehorn utter nonsense into legitimate holes in our understanding. Therefore, I find it imminently more reasonable to dismiss the entire concept until someone can demonstrate it, rather than consider it more credible simply because I am not omniscient.

[ignoramus]

There are lots of things that "act" supernatural. Only because we haven't fully ground out the exact scientific reasons yet.
Let's not confuse that description with the Disney Studios or Hollywood version.