I don't believe in God, I believe in Gravity

Think I will have a go at this. Something that violates the laws of nature and by this I mean the actual laws, not just our current understanding of them. It needs to be impossible, but since we can never tell if something was actually impossible or if it just seems impossible because we don't fully understand what is possible or not, we could never call something supernatural.My standards on this are pretty high but in my view if something is supernatural then no amount of knowledge or understanding should be able to bring it into the realm of the natural.Edited by Mutwa, : No reason given.

If you conclude that it was supernatural then that is exactly what you are doing. You have found the cause, you have found the how and it is supernatural, in that it is unable to be explained by science and it violates the laws of nature.How could you possible know this?If what you mean instead is that this event appears to violate the laws of nature but you don't really know how it happened and need to investigate further, then what you should be saying is that the answer/cause is unknown. Sure, except that I don't think we could demonstrate that anything meets the definition of supernatural, except in instances where calling the cause unknown would not be more appropriate.

quote:

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supernatural adjective \ˌs-pər-ˈna-chə-rəl, -ˈnach-rəl\
: unable to be explained by science or the laws of nature : of, relating to, or seeming to come from magic, a god, etc.

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Full Definition of SUPERNATURAL

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1
: of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe; especially : of or relating to God or a god, demigod, spirit, or devil
2
a : departing from what is usual or normal especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature
b : attributed to an invisible agent (as a ghost or spirit)

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The word has baggage and I suspect that most people would assume the primary definition above, or at least the first definition under "Full Definition".If you are instead using something closer to 2(a) then, as explained above, I think unknown would serve better and avoid the implication that science will never be able to explain it.

How do you provide evidence for the supernatural? The same as any theory, you examine the proposed mechanism and determine what you would expect to find and also what you would not expect to find.The problem? The is no mechanism for the supernatural and if there were then it would no longer qualify as supernatural but would instead be natural.What if scenarios of "but what if there was evidence" are fun but they don't help solve this problem.

Indeed, so why object when I use the more commonly accepted definition?

quote:

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supernatural adjective \ˌs-pər-ˈna-chə-rəl, -ˈnach-rəl\
: unable to be explained by science or the laws of nature : of, relating to, or seeming to come from magic, a god, etc.

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I am simply going with what the word means.Science can only investigate the natural world, it can only come up with natural explanations.We would be having this same discussion if you claimed to be able to explain the unexplainable. If you can explain it then it isn't unexplainable.

Except that it would no longer qualify for the supernatural label. Why? Because we have evidence and a mechanism, making it a natural phenomenon. I am not saying that we can not investigate what most people think of as supernatural. I am saying that if we can figure out how it works then it was never supernatural to start off with and those that thought it was were wrong. No, it would be a world in which what we call magic would be part of the natural world.

I don't agree. If the supernatural existed and could influence the natural world then we could only investigate those effects, since they are part of the natural world.We would have a number of things for which we have no explanation and asked for a cause we would have to say that we didn't know what it was. What we would not say was that it was supernatural, or God, or magic.

Exactly. So how could we ever conclude that something was supernatural and still claim to be doing science? If all you are saying is that we can have evidence for what people call supernatural then I have no objections. But if we have evidence then they were wrong to ever think it was supernatural. Strange? Unexplained? I don't know, but I would not conclude that it was supernatural. I would either discover a cause, making it natural, or not, meaning the cause was unknown.

We would only be studying their effects in the natural world.