Supernatural and Atheism

[Angrboda]

What is the supernatural?

It's like the natural, only sooper.

[Silver]

The only realistic supernatural:

[Astreja]

That's not a problem - that's a feature.

Unrealistic and improbable occurrences are outliers - they generally can't be used as reliable guides to life, simply because they're unpredictable, cannot be duplicated and cannot be counted on as solutions to everyday problems.  Waste of fucking time to chase after them, if you ask me.

So you're saying hallucinogenic drug trips are a waste of time? That's a big LOL

Psychoactive drugs are currently being studied in medical settings as treatments for PTSD and mood disorders.  In that context they're not a waste of time.

If you expect your trips to take you to places that exist outside your own imagination, though...

[Belacqua]

What is the supernatural?

Nice to see you again! I expect you've had some eventful times recently. I hope that you and yours are all doing well.

Not supernaturally well -- just, you know, as well as can be expected. 

I think I've been through this before, but let me type it out here now in a simple way, on the off chance that it might tighten up definitions.

Everything has a nature. The nature of the thing is what it's made of, how it's put together, what its potentials are, what it can do, what's likely to happen to it. All natural stuff. 

So there's a badger in my garden. It has the nature of a badger. It does badger stuff. Digs, eats, makes little badgers. It goes crazy for cat food. A zoologist could tell us more -- badgers differ from raccoons in this and that quality, etc. etc. Science tells us what the badger nature is like. 

Everything with a nature has things it can't do. The badger can't fly. It can't eat molten lead. It can't write lengthy treatises on early Latin literature. If it did any of these things, those things would be above and beyond its nature. In a word: supernatural. 

So "supernatural" means: when a thing does something beyond what its nature is capable of doing. 

We are all good scientists who severely doubt that a badger could ever do something supernatural. Therefore we doubt that the supernatural is possible. If we did hear a report of a badger typing out a treatise on early Latin literature on its little laptop, we would almost certainly reject this. It must be a lie, a drug hallucination, etc. Because our way of understanding the world rejects the idea that anything can act in a way over and above its nature, and our beliefs about the nature of things come from accumulations of centuries of scientific observations.

I am not arguing that the supernatural is possible. I am saying that this is the ancient definition of the word, and is still the only one I know which makes sense.

[Deesse23]

Everything with a nature has things it can't do.
So "supernatural" means: when a thing does something beyond what its nature is capable of doing. 

Supernatural = impossible

...unless Bel is going to provide us with examples of things doing stuff beyond their nature. ONE thing actually would be enough. But hes not gonna do that.

[Belacqua]

Everything with a nature has things it can't do.
So "supernatural" means: when a thing does something beyond what its nature is capable of doing. 

Supernatural = impossible

...unless Bel is going to provide us with examples of things doing stuff beyond their nature. ONE thing actually would be enough. But hes not gonna do that.

We are all good scientists who severely doubt that a badger could ever do something supernatural. Therefore we doubt that the supernatural is possible. If we did hear a report of a badger typing out a treatise on early Latin literature on its little laptop, we would almost certainly reject this. It must be a lie, a drug hallucination, etc. Because our way of understanding the world rejects the idea that anything can act in a way over and above its nature, and our beliefs about the nature of things come from accumulations of centuries of scientific observations.

I am not arguing that the supernatural is possible. I am saying that this is the ancient definition of the word, and is still the only one I know which makes sense.

[The Architect Of Fate]

How do we know it's not an incredibly intelligent badger that's part of a secret race of badgers that long ago achieved sentience and has long evaded human observation by appearing as regular badgers?

How do we know the badger isn't being controlled by a hyper-intelligent alien parasite?

Do either of these seem supernatural....

[Belacqua]

How do we know it's not an incredibly intelligent badger that's part of a secret race of badgers that long ago achieved sentience and has long evaded human observation by appearing as regular badgers?

How do we know the badger isn't being controlled by a hyper-intelligent alien parasite?

Do either of these seem supernatural.

If it is in the nature of the secret race of badgers to behave that way, then it's natural.
If it is in the nature of the aliens to control badgers in that way, then it's natural. 
Neither of these seems supernatural.

[Eclectic]

What is the supernatural?

Nice to see you again! I expect you've had some eventful times recently. I hope that you and yours are all doing well.

Not supernaturally well -- just, you know, as well as can be expected. 

I think I've been through this before, but let me type it out here now in a simple way, on the off chance that it might tighten up definitions.

Everything has a nature. The nature of the thing is what it's made of, how it's put together, what its potentials are, what it can do, what's likely to happen to it. All natural stuff. 

So there's a badger in my garden. It has the nature of a badger. It does badger stuff. Digs, eats, makes little badgers. It goes crazy for cat food. A zoologist could tell us more -- badgers differ from raccoons in this and that quality, etc. etc. Science tells us what the badger nature is like. 

Everything with a nature has things it can't do. The badger can't fly. It can't eat molten lead. It can't write lengthy treatises on early Latin literature. If it did any of these things, those things would be above and beyond its nature. In a word: supernatural. 

So "supernatural" means: when a thing does something beyond what its nature is capable of doing. 

We are all good scientists who severely doubt that a badger could ever do something supernatural. Therefore we doubt that the supernatural is possible. If we did hear a report of a badger typing out a treatise on early Latin literature on its little laptop, we would almost certainly reject this. It must be a lie, a drug hallucination, etc. Because our way of understanding the world rejects the idea that anything can act in a way over and above its nature, and our beliefs about the nature of things come from accumulations of centuries of scientific observations.

I am not arguing that the supernatural is possible. I am saying that this is the ancient definition of the word, and is still the only one I know which makes sense.

Therefor, so far, two definitions for the supernatural have been expressed by friends in this thread:
 One definition is doing something unexpected by a living being: for example, a naked man sitting in a tub of boiling water at a temperature of 100 degrees Celsius for an hour and not getting burned and staying healthy.  Or the example of a badger.

 Another definition: Somethings that are now unknown to human .  For example, the ancient people considered thunder and lightning to be the outcry and fire of God's anger.
   Or the weeping blood of the statue of Mary, which is unknown to some people and seems supernatural, but it is a trick by the sculptor.

[Belacqua]

Another definition: Some things that are unknown to human now are considered supernatural.  For example, the ancient people considered thunder and lightning to be the cry and fire of God's anger.
  

This is an interesting point. 

Ancient people attributing bad weather to a god isn't the definition of supernatural that I'm talking about - simply because it is in the nature of a god to affect the weather. 

Back when people believed this sort of thing, I wonder what words they used for it. I don't know if they had an exact equivalent for "supernatural," since our own definitions of what is natural and what is supernatural are relatively recent. They didn't know how weather worked, but they assumed that it was normal for a god to affect it. Is that supernatural, or just very powerful?

They might have said something like "divine," to express that it was a power beyond the human. 

For a long time people used the word "occult" just to mean that the process by which something happened was hidden. But the process wasn't necessarily a supernatural occurrence. For example, for a long time people felt that "action at a distance" was an occult power. They believed it was possible for one thing to affect another thing that was far away without touching, but they had no explanation for it. Yet it was also a part of nature, and therefore not supernatural. Galileo rejected "action at a distance" as being too mysterious, but Newton, more accepting of the occult, described it and renamed it "gravity." So it became less occult after Newton, but no more or less natural. 

 Or the weeping blood of the statue of Mary, which is unknown to some people and seems supernatural, but it is a trick by the sculptor.

This certainly seems supernatural to those who don't know that it's a trick. Because it is not in the nature of wooden sculptures to weep blood.