supernatural events
Kenn Barry
>>>What IS a miracle? The definition describes an event
>>>ASSUMED to be of "supernatural" (could someone PLEASE, for the last time,
>>>define the difference between natural and supernatural without playing
>>>anthropocentric word games?) origin solely because WE don't understand its
>>>nature. [ROSEN]
Sure. Here's one possible definition: something is "supernatural"
when it does not obey any physical law. Not just outside *known* physical
law, mind you, but a truly lawless event.
>> One part of the idea of a miracle is a boundary between
>> the reality we are in, and another reality.
>
>Are these "boundaries" and "sides" any more than our own attempts to pigeon-
>hole and categorize for our own convenience, based on what we do and don't
>understand? Are things we don't understand necessarily different than those
>things we do understand? Are they of some different sphere of reality simply
>because we don't understand them?
Maybe, no, and no, respectively. Hey, I don't believe in supernatural
events, either, I'm just trying to define what they might be, *if* they
existed. I think that events which we do not yet understand will turn
out to be, without exception, either due to physical principles we have
not yet discovered, or due to principles we know, only we haven't yet
figured out the connection. But, we *could* be wrong about this, Rich.
We can't logically exclude the possibility that some Agency is able to
cause things to happen just by wishing it so, without regard to whether
that event is possible under the laws of physics. The hidden premise
I see in your reasoning is that physical law is absolute and inviolable.
But suppose it isn't? As long as physical law works as we expect when
it's not overridden, that is, almost all the time, then our teakettles
and toasters will continue to work as expected. As an example (and note
this is an *analogy*, *not* an attempt to equate quantum mechanics with
the supernatural), current theory suggests that it's possible for the
water in your teakettle to freeze instead of boil, but it also says that
such a thing is so collosally unlikely that it'll almost certainly never
happen, anywhere in the universe, no matter how many billions of years
you wait. So we can safely ignore this when boiling water. In the same
way, the apparent absolute reliability of physical law doesn't *prove*
it can't be overridden, it only shows that such overriding must be at
best a rare event.
>When we talk about the universe at large, is it really
>"divided" into "supernatural" and "natural" realms, or the former only a
>separate "realm" in terms of its classification by us on the basis of our
>lack of knowledge about it?
It's *probably* lack of knowledge, but we can't *exclude* the
supernatural as a logical impossibility. The most we can say is that
it seems unlikely, and that there's no decent evidence of supernatural
events. And it may be impossible to ever know, which makes supernatural
agency a pretty useless hypothesis. As you point out, the explanation
for any event might always be just over the next scientific horizon;
but, as you also pointed out, "we don't know" means just that, we really
don't know. Until we find an explanation for a given phenomenon, we can't
actually exclude the possibility that it was an example of genuinely
unlawful behavior, rather than of unknown laws. We don't know.
- From the Crow's Nest - Kenn Barry
NASA-Ames Research Center
Moffett Field, CA
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