How To Define And Identify The Supernatural

 

I've been having a brief online exchange with atheist Richard Carrier regarding his rejection of the supernatural. I've previously written about similar errors he's made (see here, and more generally here), but after he sent me five or six articles arguing why he believes supernaturalism is false, I thought it would be worthwhile to explain why I believe most atheists begin with a flawed assumption about the supernatural - an error they continue to repeat, no matter how many articles they write to expand on it. Before proceeding, I’d first encourage you to read (or re-read) my previous blog post on How Economics Can Solve The Supernatural Problem, because it has key passages that will supplement the below.

I think most atheists agree with me that science studies the natural world using empirical methods, but what they often miss is that a proper definition of ‘supernatural’ means it won’t conform to those same constraints. Their argument assumes that if a natural explanation exists, it must be the correct explanation – but the problem is, the term ‘natural explanation’ is the initial error, especially when they use it to conclude that “the observed base rate of the supernatural is zero”, as Carrier does in one of his articles. If the whole thing is supernatural – that is, created by God – then the category distinction won’t manifest in a way that is scientifically testable, making it impossible to determine a true base rate in the way Carrier is attempting. His base rate is faulty from the start, which undermines a large proportion of his work on this. For many, "supernatural" is typically thought to be something outside of or breaking the normal laws of nature, but it’s more accurate to state that everything within creation is inherently supernatural because it originates from God. There are, of course, embedded narratives within the grand narrative – that we can justifiably refer to as miraculous events – but ‘embedded narratives’ is a better way to discern them rather than making false distinctions between natural or supernatural (as we’ll see in a moment).

Carrier thinks that the idea that "we should have found at least one verified supernatural event by now" assumes that the supernatural, if real, must behave in a way that is detectable and repeatable under controlled conditions. But my response to him was; it’s akin to fish looking for wetness – it’s an embedded narrative in their ocean life. I will expand on this analogy here, because what we need to understand about the supernatural is that it is a qualitative categorisation, not a quantitative one. This realisation also undermines the general atheistic mistake that because science has explained many past mysteries naturally, we should see the world as entirely natural – which is mistaken logic. 

Richard Carrier seems to have arrived at a figure he plucked out of the air – that the probability of supernatural claims is "billions to one against". Erm…you can see from the Blog link above that I’ve had issues with his grasp of probability before, but this is to ignore the necessity of probability assessments requiring a well-defined sample space and clear methodology, neither of which Carrier provides. Carrier is misassigning probabilities without a valid methodology or an established framework for measuring supernatural events. It’s a bit like a fish saying the probability that this ocean is wet is a billion to one because it can only perceive the ocean. It assumes its limited perspective is the whole of reality. In other words, the fish is trapped in a mistaken local perspective that it confuses with absolute reality, because the ocean is both water and wet, depending on how it is being defined.

Similarly, nature is created by God, so it is all supernatural for those who know God is the Creator, whereas those who call it natural are just stating it as a proxy for not knowing it is actually supernatural. If the fish could see the full picture, they’d understand that ocean, water and wet are three ways to describe the same properties of their environment. Similarly, calling everything ‘natural’ doesn’t refute the supernatural - it just assumes, without justification, that what we call ‘natural’ isn’t ultimately part of or defined as a supernatural reality created by God. If natural means not created by God (i.e. God doesn't exist) then a creation created by God must be called supernatural, because it is more than just natural - it is fundamentally contingent on and sustained by the Divine. Under these superior definitions, natural can only mean not Divinely created, so a reality that is wholly dependent on God cannot be natural - it must be supernatural by necessity. It is ‘super’ because it is created by God and ‘natural’ because it is not God, therefore it is supernatural.

So, I must reiterate this essential point that underpins most errors people are making when they talk about natural and supernatural – it’s not the right way to think of creation. As God is the Creator of all that exists, then what we call nature is, in reality, the supernatural at work - it is simply creation operating in a consistent and orderly manner. Calling something natural or supernatural ultimately depends on how one defines the entire structure of created reality. It’s similar to how Jack might call Everest a mountain, while Jill refers to it as a big rock - both descriptions are acknowledging the same thing, just from different perspectives. But if Bob, viewing it from a great distance where it appears no larger than his index finger, calls it a stone, that doesn’t change the fundamental nature of Everest as a mountain. It simply means Bob isn’t perceiving its full scale and gravitas. In the same way, calling creation ‘natural’ doesn’t negate its Divine origin; it just reflects a limited perspective on a much grander reality to which we become accustomed once we have the Holy Spirit.

Those who recognise God as the source of all things understand that nothing is truly natural in the sense of being independent from the Divine creation. If there are only two categories – God and creation ex nihilo (out of nothing) – then everything that isn’t God belongs in the same category (created). The only real category division is between God and His creation, not between natural and supernatural within creation – which becomes clearer once we get to grips with the idea of creation being one grand narrative with embedded subset narratives – which is also where we get to understand the fact that reality is interfaced with through varying lenses of apprehension (with science being only one lens). Those who refer to the world as natural are merely using the term as a placeholder for their lack of awareness or recognition that what they observe is, in fact, the ongoing work of God. If you don’t know God, then everything in creation might look natural, just as if you remain distant from mountains, they may all look like small stones.