Atheist VS Naturalist - the latter sounds more appealing to me...

[The Architect Of Fate]

Thank you. It's the only definition of "supernatural" that I understand.

I'm pretty sure it's the original meaning. Back when people started talking about this stuff, they were clear about what they meant. Gradually the system they used fell out of fashion, but some of the terms stayed in use. So we still use the word, but have mostly forgotten what it was supposed to mean. That's why it's incoherent to most modern people. (There are some other examples of this kind of thing.)

Even if you don't like their system overall, I see no reason why we have to jettison all of the concepts. For example when we talk about a thing's "nature" we're just referring to what the thing is and does, as opposed to something else. There's nothing supernatural, anti-science, or anti-modern about that. 

In fact just now I was watching a TV show (nicely full of sex and drugs) called "Flack" and one of the characters told a joke with exactly that usage of "nature." So I know it's still in use.

And, using your example, if a frog was found that could sing Mozart duets, then that is an observation of what it can do. By your definition, it would then be in the nature of that frog to sing Mozart duets.

Would that be an unusual frog? Certainly! Could it potentially lead to a revolution in science? Absolutely.

But could it be studied using science? Absolutely.

Science is NOT limited to 'explanations' that are dependent on current physics, chemistry, etc. In fact, current physics, chemistry, etc. are around because those are the best model we have for the observations we can make.

But, in a sense, the quantum world acts in ways that are *very* different than those of the classical world. Causality is mangled, realism is wrong, and things can appear and disappear for no reason. And yet, science manages to find patterns and use those patterns to give a predictive theory. And that predictive theory *is* the explanation.

---

But Poly we have to respect metaphysical making stuff up and demanding actual standards we know work as opposed to the invisible dragon is" faith "

Physicists 'make up possibilities' all the time. And there are some very strange suggestions that are made.

The key is testability: is there a way to make some observation that distinguishes between the proposal being true and it being false.

So, saying ghosts raise my garage door when I push the button isn't a good explanation not because it uses 'supernatural beings', but because we know a better explanation that fits into a larger theory whose predictions work in every case we have found. Adding ghosts to the mix doesn't actually help at all in the explanation, especially when E&M theory explains the magnitude of the forces involved.

But that's the point metaphysicians are interested in testing and theology seems to want to dodge it at all cost

[LadyForCamus]

Food for thought: parrots can mimic human speech and song. Before we knew much about parrots, it probably seemed that a bird singing Yankee Doodle was “beyond its nature,” and therefore supernatural; it has no lips after all; until we learned how parrots mimic human speech and sound patterns. We find it is very much “within its nature” for a parrot to speak English and sing songs. “Beyond its nature” is just another example of an argument from ignorance.

[The Grand Nudger]

The term supernatural explicitly requires there to be some distinction between nature and super nature.

The only distinction in the definition that we're considering is what Bel knows about a frogs nature, not the frogs nature and it's super nature, themselves...and we haven't even gotten to the ultra nature yet, so obviously we can't discuss the explicit distinction between it's nature, super nature, ultra nature...and the great overriding mega nature.

A bridge is beyond the nature of silica, and thus supernatural - but since the supernatural is so cheap, can we skip to the stuff over and above that?

[Rhizomorph13]

What about the many varied phases of nature!?

What about polarized nature!?

What about subnature!?

[The Grand Nudger]

Nobody talks about the subnature anymore.

[Belacqua]

Not 'testable according to science'. Testable in the sense that there is some potential observation that would show it to be wrong, yet all actual observations fail to do so.

"Testable according to science" means "testable in the sense that there is some potential observation that would show it to be wrong." 
You're telling me, several times in this post, that only science can address these issues, and only science can tell us anything. Science is the only tool you accept. 

if a frog was able to sing Mozart duets, that would be an observation. And it would lead to further investigation, not simply throwing up hands and proclaiming it to be supernatural.

In fact it might be supernatural. But because you have ruled that out a priori, you rely on the faith that it must be natural. 

I am not saying that there are supernatural things. I am only saying that your firm commitment to a naturalist metaphysics begs the question. 

Why? That seems to be all you are giving.

You brought up Aristotle, said his view of things was harmful, and said I shouldn't use the term "nature." But you haven't said why. 

I am curious as to why you think that's so.


This kind of "it's bad because I say it's bad" isn't helpful.

No, testable in the sense I gave. It requires falsifiability and accessibility to non-beievers. That is all.

Yes, this is how science works. I believe we've covered that.

Is there some way in which they *would* be testable? Again, in the sense that an explanation using them could be shown wrong by some potential observation?

If I'm understanding you correctly, you only accept as meaningful things that can be shown wrong by some potential observation. 

Many metaphysical beliefs can't be shown wrong in that way. The supernatural, if it existed, probably couldn't. 

Your own metaphysical commitment, that there is nothing unknowable to science, is also unfalsifiable in the way that you stick to it. Because if we did find something that science couldn't know, you would insist that through further tests science eventually would prevail. You just got through saying that above. 

So you are comfortable with at least one very strong unfalsifiable belief.

If you cannot do that, even in theory, what sense does it make to even say something exists?

Here I think your commitment to science is so strong that you are asking: if science can't address something, then we are OK to say that the thing doesn't exist. So in a metaphysical way, you are declaring that only those things addressable by scientific means exist. 

Again, this may be true, but it can't be proven.

Science has done a great job of demonstrating the kind of thing that science can demonstrate. This doesn't mean that nothing else exists.

---

Food for thought: parrots can mimic human speech and song. Before we knew much about parrots, it probably seemed that a bird singing Yankee Doodle was “beyond its nature,” and therefore supernatural; 

It probably seemed that way. Then we discovered that it wasn't.

But please don't make the same mistake as Mr. Polymath and assume, therefore, that it will be the same in absolutely every case. We don't know.

“Beyond its nature” is just another example of an argument from ignorance.

If you are committed to the metaphysical belief that every question can be settled by scientific means, then you think that all problems not yet solved by science involve only ignorance. 

But you can't know this. 

What you and poly are offering here is "promissory naturalism." This is the term Popper used to point out that people with your type of metaphysical commitment promise a natural explanation for all questions, even before any such explanation is available. 

It works in practice. It can't be proven.

[Rhizomorph13]

This is exhausting

Science includes any way that a thing can be tested so what other ways are there to know things that are somehow outside of science?

[Belacqua]

This is exhausting

Science includes any way that a thing can be tested so what other ways are there to know things that are somehow outside of science?

Here's an example. I'm not saying it happens; it's a thought experiment.

The human mind is complicated. Ideas may occur to us unexpectedly. 

Freud-type explanations say that there are parts of the mind that are only partially accessible to us, and that unexpected ideas, obsessions, etc., "arise" from those parts. But this is notoriously unfalsifiable. 

The ancient Greeks thought that any idea, obsession, inspiration, etc., that occurred suddenly into the conscious mind had been placed there from outside. A god, a daemon, a muse, or something like that gave it to us. 

Imagine that there really are such entities giving us ideas. How would this be testable? 

Poly would insist that even though we don't know where the idea came from, it must be natural. But this can't be tested. Maybe he will even insist that in the future super-MRI machines will read our subconscious minds and tell us where the ideas came from. In other words, he is sure that although we don't know now, we can just beg the question and say that it will be testable some day. 

In a sense, this is not supernatural, according to the definition I'm using. It is in the nature of the mind to take in ideas. It is in the nature of the daemons to give us ideas. But it isn't testable according to science. It may happen all the time, and we wouldn't know it. Especially if we rule out a priori anything that isn't testable by science, we will just assume the idea came from within the mind in some way (even though this, too, isn't really testable). 

As long as people like poly announce by fiat that only testable things exist, we will assume only testable explanations exist. But there may be other things going on all the time, which affect us. 

I'll anticipate the objections of the committed metaphysical naturalists: they will say that daemons, if they exist, will someday be demonstrated by science. But they don't know this.

[The Grand Nudger]

There are all sorts of entities™ giving us ideas. It's a testable claim, as are the underlying claims to the existence of those entities. All we need to do is follow the chain of interactions back to the boogeyman.

Being personally unaware of where in your brain a thought arises is no different from being personally unaware of the mechanisms involved in your heart beating. Ironically, the fact that we're unaware of the mechanism behind our thoughts is predicted by a scientific theory of consciousness. There are no more nails to lay in the coffin of the idea that our thoughts arise from somewhere other than our brains.

This world could be choked all the way up to the stratosphere with supernatural boogeymen galore...and it would still be demonstrably true that human thought originates in human brains.

[Belacqua]

I'm afraid that this commitment to the idea that everything is knowable by scientific means is a hold-over from religious thinking. Science itself should cause us to be more skeptical.

The metaphysical underpinnings that gave rise to modern science were religious and optimistic. They held that God is Idea and God is rational. They said that the universe operates according to God's Logos, which is a set of principles or logic.

While God itself is too much to be known directly by the human mind, we can know a great deal about the Logos, which is orderly and consistent. The human mind operates according to this Logos, and the intellect of man is a miniature version of the intellect of God. The two are inseparable, so the one is knowable by the other.

We no longer believe this metaphysics, for the most part.

We don't hold that the mind is some sort of spark of the intellect of God. The mind is what the brain does, and the brain is meat. It evolved for survival, not truth. It has different sections which may think different things. It can contradict itself.

Likewise we no longer believe in a single metaphysical Idea (i.e. God) holding the universe in existence and in order.

Therefore there is no reason at all to believe that the human intellect, through its rational tools, can have access to everything that's going on. To think that our useful methods exhaust the possibilities -- that nothing lies outside the approaches we currently use -- is pure faith.

Skeptical thinkers have to hold open the possibility that all kinds of things are going on which the human mind can't understand. Some of these may be affecting us. Some of them may eventually be knowable, but there is no guarantee of that.

To say that we don't know of anything inaccessible to science, or we can't imagine anything like that, therefore nothing like that exists, would be arguments from ignorance or personal incredulity.