{"id":1598,"date":"2013-08-31T19:51:36","date_gmt":"2013-09-01T02:51:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/?p=1598"},"modified":"2013-09-14T13:29:42","modified_gmt":"2013-09-14T20:29:42","slug":"natural-and-supernatural-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/natural-and-supernatural-i\/","title":{"rendered":"Natural and Supernatural I"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a recent post I described a list of things<\/a> and events<\/a> which we Christians believe in.\u00a0 For obvious reasons, I didn’t belabor the existence of pandas and hurricanes, which are not in dispute for most people.\u00a0 Thus, while I mentioned the existence of the physical universe (something which not all religious traditions believe in, by the way), I wanted to focus on the things that nonreligious people of a skeptical bent don’t accept.\u00a0 These things\u00a0are normally called supernatural<\/em>, because they are not a part of the world of “Nature”.\u00a0 That is, they are not among the “visible<\/a>” things; they cannot be seen by our senses or deduced through ordinary scientific research.\u00a0 They are therefore <\/em>above, or additional to, the things which Naturalists believe in.\u00a0 The latin word for above is super<\/em>, and thus we get the word “supernatural”.<\/p>\n

Whether or not this word is useful depends on what use we want to put it to.\u00a0 An apt choice of word can illuminate a subject, while the wrong word can lump things together which ought to be kept separate.\u00a0 Arguably, the word “supernatural” as defined above<\/em> tells us more about what Naturalists\u00a0<\/em>think is important, than what Christians believe.\u00a0 If we want to do a compare-and-contrast of the different worldviews, then it may be a useful word.\u00a0 But if you want to explain what Christians think, the word is highly misleading.<\/p>\n

Here’s why.\u00a0 Everything we Christians believe in, is supported by one of these two kinds of evidence:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. It has causally influenced the physical world at one time or another, and therefore made an observable difference to the actual sense experiences<\/a> of some human beings.\u00a0 If the human being is someone other than us, then we normally learn about this event, not through the scientific method<\/a> but through the equally empirical historical method<\/a>.\u00a0 In other words, some one writes it down in a book, we decide that their testimony is credible, and decide to believe it.<\/li>\n
  2. God (who falls into the first class due to his interactions with the world<\/a>) has communicated to us, directly or through intermediaries, that something is in fact the case.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    In the case of God, there is also a set of philosophical arguments for Theism which people can accept without necessarily being Christians.\u00a0 Some of these arguments are even supported by things we have learned from Science<\/a>!<\/p>\n

    If it really is true that supernatural entities are known to exist by these means, it isn’t all that different from the way we know about most other things in life.\u00a0 We all rely on sense experience, history, and authority in everyday life.\u00a0 You don’t have a separate name for things I know because my Aunt Rose told me<\/em>, as though that by itself set it apart into a different category.\u00a0 Well, you might if Aunt Rose was a notorious liar, but if you think Aunt Rose is a truth-teller, then they are just facts<\/em>.\u00a0 For some purposes, we may want to distinguish between historical <\/em>facts and scientific<\/em> facts, but it isn’t as though there were a clear-cut distinction between those two things.<\/p>\n

    So we shouldn’t really distingush between the natural and supernatural on the basis of how we know<\/em>.\u00a0 Could we distinguish them on the basis of how frequently they interact with our world?<\/p>\n

    I’ve said<\/a> that Heaven (in the theological sense) and Earth are like two separate universes.\u00a0 However, they aren’t watertight compartments, since things can sometimes go back and forth between them.\u00a0 If we try to define the supernatural as things which seldom interact with the world we live in, it would seem that <\/em> gravitons<\/a> would also be a supernatural concept since, even though they are predicted by our scientific theories, they interact so weakly with everything else that it is hopeless to ever observe an individual graviton.\u00a0 That clearly isn’t right.<\/p>\n

    Can we distinguish them on the basis of what kinds<\/em> of things they are?\u00a0 Well, we know something about what ordinary matter is made out of.\u00a0 If there are supernatural entities out there, and if any of them have parts, they would presumably have to be made out of something else<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    Of course, even here on Earth, some things are made out of different building blocks than others.\u00a0 Light is composed of photons, elephants are made of atoms.\u00a0 But the two interact with each other.\u00a0 Physicists like myself\u2014er, excuse me, I guess this should actually be physicists\u00a0unlike <\/em>myself\u2014have studied the interactions between different kinds of matter, and figured out how they all work.<\/p>\n

    We have succeeded to the extent that we can write down a set of general equations which describe all of the experimentally known forms of matter.\u00a0 Except, uh, for dark matter<\/a>, which is 5 times as abundant as ordinary matter, and which we only know about through its gravitational effects.\u00a0 And perhaps dark energy<\/a> (although that can be explained with a simple modification<\/a> to Einstein’s equation of general relativity, which Einstein originally proposed to make the universe unchanging with time, thus missing out on the chance to predict that the universe is expanding<\/a>).\u00a0 And several different kinds of fields which may or may not be needed to describe physics shortly after the Big Bang.\u00a0 And we have no idea how to treat gravity quantum mechanically.\u00a0 But besides <\/em>all that, we’ve got a pretty good handle on a precise description<\/a> of the “fundamental” laws of physics, even if they’re really just an approximation<\/a> to something we don’t have yet.<\/p>\n

    These equations<\/a> have a certain amount of mathematical beauty and coherence<\/a>.\u00a0 Although they don’t reduce everything down to one <\/em>basic principle, they do reduce it to a medium- sized number of particles \/ fields<\/a> which interact via four forces: gravity, electromagentism, and the strong and weak forces.\u00a0 Although these four forces are not the same, there is a certain similarity in the way that each of them is handled.\u00a0 (They also interact via the Higgs boson<\/a>, but nobody ever calls this a fifth force, because it is not really very much like the others.)<\/p>\n

    But again, it seems provincial to define supernatural simply as things we can’t describe with mathematical precision<\/em>.\u00a0 For all we know, if we could do experiments on angels, we would find that they also conform to an elegant set of mathematical equations.\u00a0 (Although, considering that it took us thousands of years to find the right equations for the physical universe, which we interact with every minute of our lives, I wouldn’t advise that you hold your breath.)\u00a0 Besides, would we really want to say that until the time of Galileo, a ball falling to the ground was a supernatural event?\u00a0 Once again, the concept which we thought was a description of the thing, turns out to be a fact about its relation to us, like the word foreign<\/em>.<\/p>\n

    However, in Christian theology, there does<\/em> turn out to be a distinction which is grand enough to justify a portentious word such as supernatural.\u00a0 There actually is a way to divide the universe into two classes of entities, such that one really is “super” to the other, not just with respect to the limitations of our own knowledge, but in reality.\u00a0 More on this next time.\u00a0 But if you can’t wait for the next post, ask yourself this question: what exactly is it again that the Jews are famous for?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    In a recent post I described a list of things and events which we Christians believe in.\u00a0 For obvious reasons, I didn’t belabor the existence of pandas and hurricanes, which are not in dispute for most people.\u00a0 Thus, while I mentioned the existence of the physical universe (something which not all religious traditions believe in, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1598"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1616,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1598\/revisions\/1616"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wall.org\/~aron\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}