How do we distinguish the supernatural from the natural? When we contemplate any object, what are its characteristics that justify our ascribing it to one realm as opposed to the other?
Answer: none.
We could, of course, classify as supernatural all anomalous or extraordinary events, thereby reducing supernatural to a statistical classification, like a big shoebox where we stash everything that surprises us (“god of the gapes”). But that would be dumb. Alternatively, we could catalogue as supernatural those events that fit our preconceived notion of godly acts. Even dumber.
Before we speculate that the natural was designed by the supernatural, we must distinguish the natural from the supernatural. The sentence you just read is the most important sentence in the entire book. Let me repeat it with emphasis. Before we speculate that the natural was designed by the supernatural, we must distinguish the natural from the supernatural.
Our inability to distinguish the natural from the supernatural is a demarcation problem. Among the potential explanations as to why this demarcation problem exists, the simplest is that everything is natural. After all, one cannot reliably identify a distinction where none exists.
Around 350 BCE, Aristotle taught that the inherent behavior of objects on Earth was to seek Earth’s center, at least until they encounter resistance (typically in the form of Earth’s surface), and then to remain at rest. Aristotle viewed the celestial sphere as operating by different rules. The sun, stars, and other heavenly orbs did not follow a straight path toward Earth’s center. Instead, they traced perfect circles around Earth.
When Isaac Newton arrived on the scene nearly two thousand years later, he united the Earthly and heavenly realms, demonstrating that the falling of an apple and the orbit of the moon abide by the same principles of motion.[1] Newton showed that the traditional distinction between Earthly and heavenly objects was illusory. I propose that we continue the synthesis launched by Newton. It is an illusion that there exist two independent realms, one natural and one supernatural. We need a unified perspective.
A few brave thinkers, to avoid drawing arbitrary distinctions between natural and supernatural events, classify everything, from butterfly burps to gamma-ray bursts, as acts of God. Baruch Spinoza adopted this remedy, portraying everything as ultimately supernatural. Thomas Hobbes attributed everything post-creation to the natural order. Although these philosophers started from radically different premises, they nonetheless converged on the conclusion that a single classification applies to all our experiences.
Albert Einstein expressed a similarly unified perspective, as when he allegedly said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein agreed, insisting in proposition 1 of his Tractatus that “The world is all that is the case.” Carl Sagan recognized a single classification when he remarked during the opening scene of his Cosmos television series that “The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.” Joseph Conrad, in the preface to The Shadow Line, put it more explicitly, “Whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part.”
These proclamations may seem strident and closed-minded to a person who naively presumes that there must be some intelligible distinction between natural events and supernatural events. But there is, in fact, no intelligible distinction to be made. All we ever know are events. The events we witness are not categorically differentiated into natural and supernatural. By convention, we usually say that events we observe in our daily lives fall within the natural realm, but the adjective natural adds no new information to the phenomenological description of an event.
Our senses have been sculpted by nature and are thus inevitably tuned to the natural realm. Talk of anything supernatural, whether confirming or denying its existence or speculating on its characteristics, is literally nonsensical.
Primitive religions spoke of gods perceptible through our aboriginal faculties. These gods were brawny titans who roamed the real world rather than being quarantined to some invisible realm. We could potentially see them, hear them, and feel the ground tremble when they stomped. But we eventually outgrew these primitive gods. We couldn’t find them in the woods or on mountaintops. They were relegated to the inaccessible depths of the sea or sky. Their populations dwindled as the surviving specimens were herded into remote and confined habitats.
Then along came natural theology with its ambition to invent an artificial habitat, a new and expansive hiding place. To make this hiding place credible, theologians hijacked our natural faculties and forced us to conceptualize a hypothetical supernatural sphere. A new residence was thereby built for the divine, and a new breed of divinity—mysterious, elusive, tantalizingly beyond our comprehension—was promptly invented to occupy the residence.[3]+
Modern theologians, amidst their tedious disputations over the personality and politics of God, are conspicuously mute with respect to the demarcation problem. Yet the theologians’ interminable wrangling is itself an ominous sign that something is amiss. Whether anything supernatural exists raises questions we humans seem structurally unsuited to answer. We evolved to interact with the natural realm, the only realm that demonstrably exists.
A critic of my position might respond, “If you’re going to start with the premise that the supernatural is inherently inaccessible, then you have closed your mind to all religion.” But I do not start with such a premise. I merely suggest that our minds and senses may not be—and there’s no reason to think they would be—portals to some transcendent realm.
Perhaps I am wrong about that. Perhaps our evolved cognitive faculties are incidentally suited to comprehend extra-natural objects. We cannot rule that out. Yet the claim that natural selection, a notoriously miserly process that prunes away talents and organs that don’t pay their way in terms of physical survival, would endow us with faculties to penetrate beyond our physical environment and into supernatural spheres is a counterintuitive proposition that at least demands some reasonable proof.
I would joyfully affirm the supernatural, but only if two commonsense conditions are met. First, an intelligible definition must be provided for the term supernatural. Second, adequate evidence must be provided to justify belief in the supernatural. The second condition cannot be met until the first condition is met, and no one has yet provided a meaningful definition of supernatural.
In practice, humans apply the word supernatural to any being imagined to possess powers that, while demonstrable to us through our senses, are nonetheless so exceptional as to permanently defy explanation by all systemic principles of nature. In other words, supernatural, in practice, means “magic.” Though the word magic is sometimes burdened with derogatory connotations, my intention is not to prejudice the case. There is simply no more fitting word.
A man who could snap his fingers or speak commands and thereby cause weather to abruptly change, as did Jesus (Matthew 8:26–27), would be performing magic. He would therefore meet our working definition of a god. Baby Jesus was honored by the magi (Matthew 2:1–12), from which we derive the word magic. A central message of the New Testament is that Jesus was magical.
As stated above, to qualify as magic, an event must permanently defy explanation by all systemic principles of nature. The belief in magic thus appeals exclusively to individuals of a peculiar disposition. Picture in your mind the kind of self-assured person who would proclaim that some phenomenon must forever elude scientific or rational comprehension. Such a brash proclamation reflects, in addition to self-assuredness, a deep-seated pessimism about the progress of human knowledge. It signifies an entrenched knee-jerk anti-intellectualism, the kind that is typically coupled with grotesque credulity toward the superstition du jour.
If those who believe in magic are right, how could we recognize a magical being? The British theologian William Paley opined that a magical being could reveal itself to us only by intruding into the natural realm, violating the normal operations of nature: “Now in what way can a revelation be made, but by miracles? In none which we are able to conceive.”[4] In the words of Jesus, “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe.” (John 4:48, KJV). The invisible gods invented by theologians will have to temporarily step out of their hiding place and step back into the real world to be detected.
We humans stand ready and eager to greet the returning gods. Hell, many of us would settle for a leprechaun. Confronted daily and eventually fatally by our natural limitations, we ache for contact with a being immune to familiar natural constraints. We hope to get under its protection, mimic its technique, or snatch it and squeeze out its magical juice as an elixir. Disappointed by the absence of evidence for such a being, we grasp at straws, allowing ourselves to become mesmerized by sly conjurations such as the design argument.
People too sophisticated to endorse vulgar forms of magic, such as healing the blind with spit (as done by Emperor Vespasian and Jesus) and turning wooden oars or staffs into snakes (as done by Dionysus and Moses), nevertheless crave the managerial magic of a Grand Designer. Such magic affords hope that natural limitations do not always apply and that there may be some gap in the iron jaws of mortality, through which a desperate, mournful wretch might squirm. It’s not called salvation for nothing, a word translated from the New Testament Greek word soteria, which denotes magical cures and apotropaic spells.
Supernatural and magic are not synonymous. On a Venn diagram, magic appears as the intersection of the supernatural and natural. Consider the two regions of the Venn diagram where there is no intersection. One of these two regions depicts the natural realm while the other depicts the supernatural realm. These two regions may not be as distinct as the diagram suggests. Can a purely natural event have a supernatural cause? Or would having a supernatural cause qualify the event, at some level of abstraction, as supernatural? This question harks back to the dispute between Baruch Spinoza and Thomas Hobbes.
Given our lack of a rigorous definition of supernatural, we cannot profitably apply that term. Be forewarned, however, that culling this empty husk of a word from our vocabulary wrecks the full gamut of religious apologetics. This chapter commemorates just one of the many casualties. The design argument, though delivered to the world with high hopes and with lots of intellectual heaving and hoeing, lies before us stillborn.
[1] Noson S. Yanofsky, The Outer Limits of Reason: What Science, Mathematics, and Logic Cannot Tell Us (MIT, 2003), 170.
[2] Albert Einstein, “Everything Is A Miracle,” quoted by David T. Dellinger, From Yale to Jail: The Life Story of a Moral Dissenter? (Catholic Worker, 1993), 418.
See also: https://fakebuddhaquotes.com/debunking-fake-albert-einstein-quotes/
[3]Francesca Stavrakopoulou and other historians argue that Jewish scholars returning from the Babylonian exile (ca. 539 BCE) promoted a less anthropomorphic vision of Yahweh while shifting away from panentheism toward monotheism. Joseph Lam links the destruction of the Jewish temple (about 50 years earlier) with the notion that Yahweh lives everywhere, not merely in a stone temple. Interestingly, the Babylonians had similarly elevated their god Marduk before the Jews elevated Yahweh, so the concept of an ever-present god was already part of the cultural milieu. Jews may not have invented the notion of an inaccessible monotheistic god, but they readily adopted it. Christians had additional reasons to adopt it. In her book The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels argues that Christians were incentivized to embrace full monotheism because doing so empowered the Church hierarchy. It also justified establishing a single pope, mirroring the Roman emperor. The sequence of early steps toward an elusive, incomprehensible god further combined with Greek philosophy which, dating back to Anaximander of Miletus, invoked the concept of apeiron, an unchanging and spatially indefinite source of everything. Greek philosophy employed abstract arguments that characterize even modern theology. This is why Greek philosophers get mentioned so often in modern philosophical and theological discussions. The increasing remoteness and abstraction of God lies at the heart of the demarcation problem.
[4] Quoted in: William Paley, A View of the Evidences of Christianity, in Three Parts; and the Horae Paulinae, ed. Robert Potts (Trinity College, 1849), 2.