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Monday, August 31, 2020

The truth about the supernatural

 

What is "the supernatural"? It means from Latin: super- "above" nature refers to entities, forces or phenomena that some consider to be beyond nature, in the sense that they cannot be explained from the notions and laws of the everyday world .


Supernatural themes are often WRONGLY associated with magical and occult ideas and are also a classification for explanations that invoke explanatory constructs that are, in principle, beyond human conception, understanding, or verification. Most supernaturalists of any given religion only believe in a จักรวาลThe Conjuring of all supernatural explanations of reality when all supernatural beliefs of all religions, past and present, are taken together.

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Cases of supernaturalization; In the Hebrew Bible, plagues and other misfortunes are described as signs of God's wrath or vengeance. Too often in theological discussions, I hear the term supernatural, and most people on both sides of the argument tend to accept the term nebulous as a sensible concept (whether they agree or not that supernatural events exist).


Non-believers first consider miracles like walking on water impossible because they violate the laws of physics; then the believer defends the claim by labeling the supernatural event as if it were magically transformed into a test for the unbeliever. Hence the discussion revolves around whether this supernatural event really happened or not.


What does someone mean when they call something supernatural? What this means is that any event that may happen is natural; in fact, it can be said that such things simply fall into the category of the previous meaning of supernatural given above.


The only thing left for supernatural events to be are things that could never be observed, that could never affect us in any way. We can present innumerable, indeed infinite, possible supernatural things (for example, that our universe exists as the super-fast flicker of a subatomic particle in some other unreachable meta-universe with which we will never be able to interact; or that every subatomic particle in our universe composes a universe completely separate by itself), but we have no reason to believe that any of them are true, and such views are in no way verifiable, so they are meaningless.


Creation is itself a miracle of God's planning and intervention. The only possibility I see remaining is that there are certain absolute natural physical laws in our universe (whether we know them for sure or not at this point), and supernatural events are events that do indeed happen (hypothetically observable to us) but that contradict these absolute laws.


Which means that all evidence in favor of a supernatural event is always circumstantial. And in my opinion, circumstantial evidence is never adequate to validate supernatural events. I recognize that there must be some point at which a set of circumstantial evidence can be so great that perhaps accepting that a supernatural event occurred might be reasonable.


Supernatural events are common. John Wesley: An honest man by nature, he maintained a childlike openness to all forms of natural and supernatural possibility. Human curiosities, Natural curiosities, Natural events, Supernatural events, Human curiosities.


It was inevitable that someone who traveled as much as Wesley would encounter unusual people, their accomplishments, and their eccentricities. (Journal, 1790) For Wesley, the natural and the supernatural were an extension of each other, and he never hesitated to attribute events to divinity that he knew were also part of the natural order. (Journal, 1773) Some experiences were, of course, beyond scientific explanation.

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