It means ‘beyond the natural world’, I think, but what does ‘natural’ mean? That is exists without humans? That it’s good for the planet? That it’s something theoretically knowable by empirical means? That’s it’s something knowable by logical/rational means?
I believe that I as a conscious experience exist. I don’t believe anything else with certainty, although I believe a great many things conditional on the empirical (‘natural’?) world being assumed to be true.
But the “laws of nature” are just provisional rules we’ve deduced through observation. When we see things that violate the rules as we’ve deduced them (and we often have), we figure out new rules—we don’t just assume there are things to which the rules don’t apply.
Were electrons supernatural before we had the laws to describe them? Would something that’s supernatural now still be supernatural if we came up with laws describing its behavior?
I appreciate I made an edit to add more to my comment that you may not have seen; are you equivocating ‘the laws of nature’ with empirical knowledge (ie knowledge which can be gained by evaluating our sensory experience and assuming that it represents a true world)? If not, how are you defining it?
What do you mean by supernatural?
It means ‘beyond the natural world’, I think, but what does ‘natural’ mean? That is exists without humans? That it’s good for the planet? That it’s something theoretically knowable by empirical means? That’s it’s something knowable by logical/rational means?
I believe that I as a conscious experience exist. I don’t believe anything else with certainty, although I believe a great many things conditional on the empirical (‘natural’?) world being assumed to be true.
The word supernatural: phenomena or entities are those beyond the laws of the nature
But the “laws of nature” are just provisional rules we’ve deduced through observation. When we see things that violate the rules as we’ve deduced them (and we often have), we figure out new rules—we don’t just assume there are things to which the rules don’t apply.
Were electrons supernatural before we had the laws to describe them? Would something that’s supernatural now still be supernatural if we came up with laws describing its behavior?
I appreciate I made an edit to add more to my comment that you may not have seen; are you equivocating ‘the laws of nature’ with empirical knowledge (ie knowledge which can be gained by evaluating our sensory experience and assuming that it represents a true world)? If not, how are you defining it?