Topics Science

Question What's the best definition of Nature and its contrast to the supernatural?

Accepted:
October 8, 2005

Comments

I'm sure that I can't say what the "best" definition of the natural is, but I can try to say why an answer to your question has proven very difficult. Many philosophers, like myself, thinking of themselves as enlightened, scientifically educated folk, have wanted to avoid committing themselves to anything "supernatural." They balk at the idea of immaterial souls, ESP, poltergeists, miracles, vampires, magic, and the like. But just what do these things have in common in virtue of which they count as supernatural? It can't be that they aren't now recognized as existing, or as ever having existed, by current natural scientists. Current natural scientists will be the first to confess that they do not know all that exists in the universe: they expect to be surprised by future discoveries of natural phenomena. It can't be that what makes something supernatural is the fact that the recognition of such objects would require that one countenance the existence of objects that would violate those laws of nature that current natural scientists recognize, since, surely, our current knowledge of the laws of nature is still imperfect. Could it be that supernatural objects are objects that could not even in principle be recognized by natural scientists? At first sight this answer seems to be a non-starter, but on reflection it is the best that I can come up with now. At first sight it seems obviously wrong, since there seems to be nothing about vampires, for example, that rules out the very possibility of there being overwhelming empirical evidence for their existence. However, I wonder whether, if we were to discover empirical evidence for the existence of vampires, we would continue to regard them as supernatural. It seems to me that if there were scientific evidence that human beings have ESP, that wouldn't be evidence for the existence of something supernatural; it would be evidence that ESP is a natural phenomenon after all. If there were overwhelming empirical evidence for the occurrence of some event that was commonly regarded as a miracle, that wouldn't be evidence for the occurrence of a supernatural event or even of a miracle, but evidence that what we used to regard as a miracle (because we thought that its occurrence violated the laws of nature) in fact is not a miracle, because the new scientific theories that we have had to come up with in order to acknowledge the occurrence of such events also include modified accounts of the laws of nature. So, although the distinction between natural and supernatural seems on the face of it to be an ontological distinction, I wonder if it is really epistemological. Something counts as supernatural if it is the sort of thing that could not, even in principle, be discovered by means of the methods standardly used in the natural sciences. Were a given object to be so discovered, we would conclude that the object is natural rather than supernatural, despite what we had originally thought.

I thank the poster for this challenging question and Jyl especiallyfor her stimulating response. Her idea is a nice one: that we deemsomething to be supernatural just in case we take it to be foreverbeyond the limits of scientific understanding. I'm not sure though. Ifsomeone were like Jyl and didn't believe that there are anysupernatural objects, then it would follow that she didn't believe thatanything was in principle beyond the limits of scientificunderstanding. Now, many people do believe that it's likely that there aresome truths about the universe that are in principle beyond humanunderstanding (for instance, see here).Does this belief commit them to the existence of the supernatural? Thatdoesn't seem right. If you want to make room for someone who believesthat, say because our minds have the particular structure they do,there are things about the world that we cannot in principle understandand yet who also holds that there are no supernatural phenomena, thenwe'll have to understand the latter claim in some other way than Jyl'sproposing.

Perhaps this is also recommended by the fact that(sometimes) when someone takes something to be a miracle she takesherself to be making a judgment about that thing itself, not a judgmentabout her cognitive relation to that thing: it is a miracle, period, she might insist, not a miracle relative to my mind's present cognitive structure.

Iam not sure what to propose, but I am interested in this idea: to viewsomething as a miracle is to view it as something for which thequestion of whether there is a scientific explanation for it is simplynot an appropriate one. To view something as a miracle is not to look atit as a potential object for scientific scrutiny. Once the question iseven raised about the prospects for a scientific explanation, themiracle disappears: as Jyl notes, it's now either something we've got ascientific explanation for or something whose explanation presentlyeludes us — but either way, there's no whiff of the miraculous.

In the early modern period, there was considerable debate about the metaphysical status of miracles. Philosophers as different as Hobbes and Malebranche seem to agree, however, that some event is a miracle if and only if it caused by God's willing that that event take place.

On this account, even an event that normally takes place according to natural laws could occur miraculously, if and only if it were a direct effect of God's will. This would be a metaphysical characterization of a miracle. Even granting this definition, of course, there remains a question as to how one could know that some event were a direct effect of God's will. This would be an epistemological question.

An alternative definition of miracle, advanced by Leibniz, is that some event is a miracle just in case it cannot be understood by a created mind. According to Leibniz, all natural events can in principle be understood by created minds, provided one has access to the information necessary to understand that event; a miracle cannot be understood by any created mind, because comprehension of a miralces requires access to knowledge that goes beyond the order of nature.

Although the preceding definition is akin to that proposed by Jyl, it differs from hers insofar as it postulates that natural events are in principle comprehensible and supernatural events are in principle incomprehensible. According to Leibniz, the reason that all natural events are comprehensible is that we can at least know the laws that govern those events, even if we lack access to the information necessary required to instantiate those laws, whereas supernatural events are subject to laws that we cannot know. In this respect, Leibniz's proposal is akin both to Alex's, and to the first definition I presented above. Leibniz has an argument why there must be laws in principle inaccessible to us, which turns ultimately on his belief that there is a divine providential order, distinct from the natural order.

This commitment is, of course, shared by proponents of the first definition presented above. It may turn out that whether one is willing to countenance the miraculous depends on whether one believes that God exists.

Question What's the best definition of Nature and its contrast to the supernatural? Accepted:October 8, 2005

Question What's the best definition of Nature and its contrast to the supernatural?

Accepted:
October 8, 2005