Like how relativity and quantum physics contradict Newtonian laws?my suggestion is:
if the phenomenon contradicts a well known and stablished law.
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Like how relativity and quantum physics contradict Newtonian laws?my suggestion is:
if the phenomenon contradicts a well known and stablished law.
my suggestion is:
if the phenomenon contradicts a well known and stablished law.
No, its more like, "we know and understand the relevant natural laws" based on this knowledge we know that we cant walk though walls.
therefore walkign though a wall is a supernatrual event.
But again this is just semantics, this is just my personal suggestion on how can the supernatural be identified.
In any case the relevant question should be weather if I walked through a wall or not, label it as “supernatural” or not seems irrelevant to me.
With the explanation above, I hope you can see why this is not analogous to what I am proposing.
my suggestion is:
if the phenomenon contradicts a well known and stablished law.
also responding to @Meow Mix who made a similar point.Like how relativity and quantum physics contradict Newtonian laws?
also responding to @Meow Mix who made a similar point.
that us why I was very clear and said well understood and stablished laws (not all laws are well stablished and well understood).
Newton himself admited that he didn't really know what gravity is.
The second law if thermodynamics is an example of a well known and understood law, so any event that contradicts this law would be labeled as supernatural (my personal suggestion )
but at the end of the day this is just semantics, if someone walks through a wall, turns water in to wine, or has a conversation with a ghost, we could in theory agree that those events happened, the only difference is that I would label it as "supernatural and you would label is as "unknown natural law that trumped known natural, laws in that particular moment"
i personally don't think the label is relevant. but if I where to bet, I bet that most people would prefer my label.
.That's the a priori assumption, yes.
But when that which was deemed impossible occurs anyway, then the only thing that can be said is that we don't understand how it occured.
From that, you can't draw any conclusion of how it did occur.
Therefor saying that, is an argument from ignorance.
Our knowledge tells us X is impossible.
If X occurs anyway, then our knowledge can't explain that. So WE DON'T KNOW.
If from that you then draw the conclusion "therefor it was supernatural" - that's textbook argument from ignorance.
Why for example, couldn't we conclude "therefor, advanced technology was used that allows someone to walk through a wall anyway".
How is that less likely then "something supernatural / magical happened"?
And apparently, you're fine using an argument from ignorance to do so.
Then why are you yapping about it?
You didn't explain anything. You just restated your assertion by using the exact same argument from ignorance while denying you are using an argument from ignorance.
And no, its the exact same thing.
If people knew what lightning was, they wouldn't have said/believed it was Thor smashing his hammer or Jupiter throwing lightning bolts from the sky.
But since they, just like you it seems, were uncomfortable with "i don't know", they just made something up and / or blamed it on "magic", which is the ultimate cop-out of actually trying to answer the question properly.
Why for example, couldn't we conclude "therefor, advanced technology was used that allows someone to walk through a wall anyway".
again my suggestion is that you can label something as supernatural only if the event contradicts a well known and well understood law.And no, its the exact same thing.
If people knew what lightning was,
Our knowledge tells us X is impossible.
If X occurs anyway, then our knowledge can't explain that. So WE DON'T KNOW
So what room is there for anything to be "supernatural?" There would have to be some property or list of properties that would distinguish it, but what would that possibly be that doesn't fall into the above three pitfalls?
Note that this is not saying "things labelled as supernatural do not exist." This argument says nothing about whether ghosts exist, or leprechauns, or demons. It only argues that if they do, it only means we had an incomplete understanding of the universe's laws. Trying to separate things into the categories "natural" and "supernatural" is meaningless unless that separation can be characterized by some qualifying properties. If that could be done, surely someone would simply post it?
Thanks for your informative posts in this thread, I think you've been advancing a very lucid and compelling argument here.
I would say that in terms of the universe's laws, a hypothetical 'omniscient, immaterial creator God' is a claim about something that allegedly lies outside whatever we can test, quantify or reproduce through experiment / observation or even testable consequences. This is why it's often termed 'supernatural', because even if we posit that something like an immaterial disembodied 'consciousness' which is not dependant on the neuronal firing and synapses of a brain could exist, we aren't going to be able to 'test' for it using our present instruments.
It's like accepting that the particle horizon will always act as a 'barrier' to how far our telescopes can peer, such that even if the 'multiverse hypothesis' of causally disconnected 'bubble' universes arising from eternal inflation were correct, sans a bubble collision we aren't going to be able to test for it - so it remains a good empirically based philosophical hypothesis, more than a theory within the ken of 'science', so to speak.
Granted, our understanding of what constitutes "physicality" and "the natural" has evolved quite considerably since the time of the Greek atomists of the classical era and the early pioneers of mechanistic science in the 18th century.
The "physical" order of things is now understood to be - and you can correct me here if I get this wrong - at its most irreducible and fundamental level, quantum fields that interact and are described by a wave-function. That's a bit more than just "atoms in a void" as the classical authors would've understood it. Anything under the laws of quantum mechanics and the laws of the Newtonian/general relativity model of physics are de facto "physical".
But what to make of the actual "laws" themselves?
These seem to be irreducible brute facts which somehow pre-exist. In some sense, the laws of physics aren't really part of the Universe, are they? Professor Sean Carroll, a cosmologist at Caltech, explains how: “There is a chain of explanations concerning things that happen in the universe, which ultimately reaches to the fundamental laws of nature and stops… at the end of the day the laws are what they are.”
As the South African cosmologist Professor George Ellis once noted: "They [the laws of nature] underlie the Universe because they control how matter behaves, but they are not themselves made of matter. Laws of physics aren't made of lead or uranium."
Physical processes and all material objects depend upon these laws, yet the laws themselves (at least in their high-temperature version) are not affected by any physical processes.
Thus back in the 1980s, the late Stephen Hawking tried to explain the Big Bang singularity (including the origin of time) in terms of the laws of quantum gravity (i.e. the reconciliation between quantum mechanics and general relativity that's still yet to be achieved). For this type of explanation to function, the laws need to be presupposed?
Laura Mersini-Houghton, professor of cosmology and theoretical physics at the University of north Carolina-Chapel Hill, argued as follows in a 2015 paper:
The Multiverse, the Initial Conditions, the Laws and, Mathematics by Laura Mersini-Houghton
I use implications of the work of Gödel and Cantor to demonstrate that limitations of mathematics may suggest it is contained within the realm of laws. I reason laws need to be in an independent realm from the universe, which is space and time independent.
Ah - so quantum thermodynamics, if it pans out, would be "supernatural"?also responding to @Meow Mix who made a similar point.
that us why I was very clear and said well understood and stablished laws (not all laws are well stablished and well understood).
Newton himself admited that he didn't really know what gravity is.
The second law if thermodynamics is an example of a well known and understood law, so any event that contradicts this law would be labeled as supernatural (my personal suggestion )
The new thermodynamics: how quantum physics is bending the rulesThere is reason to suspect that the laws of thermodynamics, which are based on how large numbers of particles behave, are different in the quantum realm. Over the past five years or so, a quantum-thermodynamics community has grown around that idea. What was once the domain of a handful of theoreticians now includes a few hundred theoretical and experimental physicists around the globe. “The field is moving so fast I can barely keep up,” says Ronnie Kosloff, an early pioneer of the field at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel.
Right, but this is because I infer what "natural" is based on what actually happens. It's not at all clear how you're defining it, or how you would decide that something is "supernatural."but at the end of the day this is just semantics, if someone walks through a wall, turns water in to wine, or has a conversation with a ghost, we could in theory agree that those events happened, the only difference is that I would label it as "supernatural and you would label is as "unknown natural law that trumped known natural, laws in that particular moment"
i personally don't think the label is relevant. but if I where to bet, I bet that most people would prefer my label.
I am fine with supernatural as a colloquialism. I noted earlier (in a different response, somewhere else) that I'm an avid fan of supernatural horror. I know what I mean when I use that term, too.
However, things get hairier when the question someone might ask us is, "do you believe supernatural things exist?"
At that point, if we are being careful not to mis-speak or to claim to have more knowledge than we really do, we have to be precise about what exactly it is we're being asked exists or not.
The difference I see comes down to level of personal investment.Ok so at least colloquially/trivially we have a good idea on what w mean by supernatural, and we usually can tell the difference between “supernatural” and “unknown natural mechanism”
Ghosts, resurrections, turning water in to wine, walking through doors, are typically labled as supernatural
And things like dark matter, dark energy, or the orbit of mercury before Einstein, are labled as “we don’t know”
So the question in the OP seems to be “is there any meaningful and objective difference between the so called “supernatural” and the “we don’t know” or is this difference just cultural convenience?
I would argue that usually the “we don’t knows” are simply things that we can’t explain, while the supernatural tend to be things that contradict current and well established knowledge. or are very unlikelly according to our knowledge, Or atleast this is my best try to distinguish both.
Sure there are always exceptions, but the same applies to almost any other word, If I challenge you to tell the difference between a chair and a table I am pretty sure I will always find flaws in any definition that you might provide.
Ah - so quantum thermodynamics, if it pans out, would be "supernatural"?
The new thermodynamics: how quantum physics is bending the rules
Again what people usually label as supernatural are things that contradict well established knowledge.Right, but this is because I infer what "natural" is based on what actually happens. It's not at all clear how you're defining it, or how you would decide that something is "supernatural."
I am not sure if being invested in being true is necessary for the label, but sure the supernatural label usually comes with stuff that affects us at a personal level.The difference I see comes down to level of personal investment.
Dark matter and dark energy are suggested by some pretty solid physics, but if they were proven wrong, people would accept it.
OTOH, people are heavily invested in ideas like the existence of their gods and that their loved ones are in Heaven.
From what I can tell, that's the only criteria that determines whether something is a "don't know" and "supernatural": the "supernatural" are things we don't know that people are heavily personally invested in being true.
It implies that the Second Law of Thermodynamics may have exceptions.Does that article imply that it is possible to turn water in to wine?
But that's not true.Again what people usually label as supernatural are things that contradict well established knowledge.
I personally define the supernatural as "things that don't have good evidence, but that people are heavily invested in regardless."If you want to define supernatural as “something that by definition can’t exist” then we simply mean something different, but is just semantics.
It implies that the Second Law of Thermodynamics may have exceptions.
But that's not true.
Just about every major advance in science "contradicted well established knowledge." Nobody called, say, plate tectonics "supernatural" when it was first proposed.
I personally define the supernatural as "things that don't have good evidence, but that people are heavily invested in regardless."
It's a mix of things that exist - which will he called "natural" if their existence is clearly established - and things that don't exist.
Edit: if you have a different definition, I can work with that, but I don't know what that definition is. In fact, I'm not even sure that you have a coherent definition.