Naturalism

[robvalue]

Good point. What we call the "laws of nature" are our description, they are not prescriptive. If something happens, then obviously it can happen. If we didn't already have a "law" that accounts for it, then we are missing laws or our models are wrong/incomplete.

I'd much prefer people say "unexplained" than "supernatural" as the latter doesn't add anything useful, and suggests unfounded properties. What is and isn't "nature" is ultimately arbitrary.

[The Grand Nudger]

The supernatural needn't -contradict- the natural, it simply needs to behave in a manner -unrelated- to the natural. For example: Natural rocket flies because of pressure. Supernatural rocket flies because of magic.

[Cyberman]

A supernatural thing is any thing which is unfalsifiable, I reckon.

Naturalism has supernaturalism in a strangehold. There cannot be any evidence of the supernatural because it's all unfalsifiable.

How about "the set of things that have to be unfalsifiable in order to exist"?

[downbeatplumb]

So no nudes then!

[Brian37]

A supernatural thing is any thing which is unfalsifiable, I reckon.

Naturalism has supernaturalism in a strangehold. There cannot be any evidence of the supernatural because it's all unfalsifiable.

No, that is like saying "Naturalism has Santa in a stranglehold". Others trying to make the supernatural a valid debate doesn't make it worthy, it just means some people cling to the past.

There is no such thing as the supernatural, never was. There are simply humans who don't have an understanding of nature and gap fill out of ignorance.

[Angrboda]

I would define supernatural as anything that contradicts the laws of nature.  The first problem being the underlying assumption that we know all of the rules of nature. The second being that if phenomenon follows any pattern at all, then it would appear to be following a natural law of some kind.  Which leaves me with a more personal definition:  supernatural is that which one person doesn't  understand and intends never to understand.  Obviously,  it's in the eye of the beholder.

This is a fundamental problem with demonstrating the supernatural. If it repeats the same effects, then it becomes a candidate for natural law. If it doesn't repeat, then it simply falls into the bin marked unexplained. So in neither case can we identify the supernatural as being beyond the natural. It is a label without a subject.

[Jackalope]

Evie, not a bad attempt at a definition, but not satisfactory in my opinion. An example for concreteness: There can be parts of nature which become separated from us causally. E.g. what happens now in a galaxy at the edge of our observable universe. If the universe keeps expanding, these events will never come in causal contact with earth, and any claim about what happens there is unfalsifiable. It is not sensible to call these places supernatural.

True, but those things are unfalsifiable -to us- only because of our unprivileged position in the cosmos. To an observer wih such disability, it would not be the case. The supernatural is unfalsifiable to -any- observer.

[The Grand Nudger]

Un-falsified and un-falsifiable take on two distinctly different meanings in this context.  Presumably, a supernatural microscope would be able to detect supernatural "matter" - as a natural microscope can detect natural matter.  There's no reason to concede or consider the supernatural to be unfalsifiable.  That's what believers in the supernatural have been begging us to do since the first man called the first bullshit on the first supernatural liar ( "maybe I cant prove it, but you can't prove me wrong, checkmate!" ).  TBT, we don't have any experience with the unfalsifiable, nothing about us equips us to handle that.  As a consequence, we aren't exactly experts in coming up with unfalsifiable propositions.  Try it, see if you can actually create an unfalsifiable proposition...rather than an unfalsified one.