It’s also often used to mean “not material,” or “not obeying the same laws as most stuff we see.” So the stuff we see around us is the “natural,” and things that don’t follow natural law are “supernatural.”
I suspect most supernatural beliefs are non-reductable just because they’re made up by people and people don’t generally think in terms of reductionism. I prefer “magic” form for complicated human-interacting ontologically basic things.
Sounds like a reasonable way of putting it. So a weapon shooting invisible (to the human eye) bullets would be classified as “supernatural” by someone from the stone age, because to them, killing someone requires direct contact with a visible weapon or projectile, that has appreciable travel time. Right?
Although “hard science” would have to be excluded from this, even though it contains lots of stuff that doesn’t obey the same laws as most stuff we see.
It’s also often used to mean “not material,” or “not obeying the same laws as most stuff we see.” So the stuff we see around us is the “natural,” and things that don’t follow natural law are “supernatural.”
I think this is the key. Supernatural phenomena can’t be defined to obey natural laws; if they did, they would be blatantly impossible. (For a really detailed example of this, see Sean Carroll’s blog post Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory.)
It’s also often used to mean “not material,” or “not obeying the same laws as most stuff we see.” So the stuff we see around us is the “natural,” and things that don’t follow natural law are “supernatural.”
I suspect most supernatural beliefs are non-reductable just because they’re made up by people and people don’t generally think in terms of reductionism. I prefer “magic” form for complicated human-interacting ontologically basic things.
Sounds like a reasonable way of putting it. So a weapon shooting invisible (to the human eye) bullets would be classified as “supernatural” by someone from the stone age, because to them, killing someone requires direct contact with a visible weapon or projectile, that has appreciable travel time. Right?
Although “hard science” would have to be excluded from this, even though it contains lots of stuff that doesn’t obey the same laws as most stuff we see.
I think this is the key. Supernatural phenomena can’t be defined to obey natural laws; if they did, they would be blatantly impossible. (For a really detailed example of this, see Sean Carroll’s blog post Telekinesis and Quantum Field Theory.)