Back to Supernaturalism III, part 3 of the series
Investigating supernatural claims
Now that this is out of the way, let us continue investigating supernatural claims. Because people will keep insisting that I am presupposing naturalism, I switch to presupposing supernaturalism over naturalism. Let's assume that supernaturalism is true and start our investigation from there.
We have to deal with a supernaturalistic realm with supernaturalistic causes, either by supernaturalistic agents or something else. Then there is, of course, a naturalistic realm with naturalistic agents governed by natural laws and maybe some supernaturalistic elements. But there is another realm that we have to cover: the realm of the unknown.
Because our understanding is limited, we must take that into account. There are, in our model, unknown supernatural causes and natural causes. Some causes are known; most are not.
Exhaustive list of possible cases
Now we have to create distinctive cases to view all possibilities:
- The supernaturalistic realm does not exist. That is strong naturalism, and we won't investigate this possibility until later.
- There is a supernatural realm that causally interacts with our natural realm both ways.
- The supernatural realm influences the natural world, but the natural world does not influence the supernatural realm.
- Our natural world influences the supernatural realm, but causes do not go the other way.
- The supernatural realm does not interact with the natural realm in any causal way.
- One of the cases is 2-4, but science cannot detect what the case is. Supernatural causes cannot be known, investigated, or observed, or measured with scientific methods.
All the entries in the list propose that supernaturalism is a rational approach to solve problems. In this case it should solve the problem that we do not understand the causes of certain events.
Eliminating the cases
We already eliminated case #1. We can eliminate case #5, too, because that is not supernaturalism. That case is indistinguishable from case #1. We cannot know if that is the case anyway.
For the same reason, we can get rid of case #4. We have no way to decide if #1 or case #4 is true. Besides, that is not what supernaturalism claims. This leaves us with possibilities #2, #3, or #6.
We do not know all the causes of what is happening around us. That much is certain. What distinguishes a supernatural cause
from an unknown cause
? Nothing—except for the purely fictitious claim that there is a non-verifiable, invisible, supernatural realm
that influences our world! In short, ignorance, or lack of knowledge, is the basis of this claim. There is no way to backtrack what is happening and why it happens. No explanation is, therefore, logically possible. Except that naturalism has a way to detect unknown causes and can backtrack them. So in the scenario #3, all causes we can detect are natural causes. We can perceive or measure events exactly for the reason that we deal with an interaction. We can draw logical conclusions from an effect to what causes it because of the interaction. So we cannot distinguish case #3 from #1, #4, or #5.
But the moment we can backtrack a natural event to a cause, that cause automatically belongs to the natural world. What we understand from the natural world is evolving and expanding. Even case #2 cannot be distinguished from case #1, or #4, or #5, and we have already eliminated these alternatives. We must eliminate case #2, too, for the same reasons we discarded #3, #4, and #5.
Supernatural = unknown
In other words, supernatural
and unknown
are synonyms. Which means nothing apart from that the true nature of the supernatural is ignorance. We know nothing but make many claims—that is the motto.
It is a logical contradiction to claim that one knows
about the supernatural when that does not belong to what we know. We do not know what we do not know. Thus, the idea can be described as irrational or unreasonable—and for good reason. This is the common denominator for #2, #3, #4, and #5.
This only leaves us with alternative scenario #6, which I call modern supernaturalism
.