Defining the Natural and Supernatural
Follow up to: What is Naturalism-Humanism? and A-Unicornism and the True Definition of Atheism
Editor’s Note: This is an updated, reposted, and retitled revision of a previous post.
Those that dislike naturalism, typically say that naturalists just assume naturalism for no reason as a core belief, and then use it to justify the evidence. So, as the critique goes: “Of course you naturalists believe God, creationism, unicorns, and Santa aren’t real! They all conflict with your assumption / dogmatic belief that the supernatural doesn’t exist!”
It would be remiss of me to not reply with the typical rejoinder: “Well, of course you’d critique naturalism like that, naturalism conflicts with your assumption / dogmatic belief that the supernatural does exist!”. And I guess we’re back to square one.
However, in my dream world where arguments are not I know you are, but what am I? retorts but helpful statements designed to facilitate understanding of the world around us. We can do much better. And not only that, but we can stop assuming things about naturalism that just aren’t true. So this is my chance to clear it up even further: work on explaining what it is that naturalism entails, and lay the idea that “naturalism excludes the supernatural based on some dogmatic belief” to rest.
Naturalism is Confusing
Why do I call myself a metaphysical naturalist? In “What is Naturalism-Humanism?”, I explained:
I don’t actually have any problem identifying me with the terms “atheist”. The problem is that atheism doesn’t imply enough for me. There is no need to reject the soul to be an atheist. There is no reason to reject reincarnation to be an atheist. There is no reason to reject anything besides God to be an atheist. Sure, it’s true that the vast majority of atheists also reject all of the supernatural. A vast majority of atheists are probably naturalist-humanists. I just prefer to be more specific.
But what is a naturalist? This is where it gets confusing, because almost all naturalists simply say they don’t believe in the supernatural, but then don’t explain what the supernatural is. Or worse, the supernatural is defined circularly as “whatever isn’t natural”. So naturalists don’t believe whatever it is they don’t believe… how helpful.
I mentioned in my essays on knowledge that if you don’t know how the world would be different if a belief was true instead of false or vice-versa, then that specific belief isn’t true or false — it is meaningless. Meaningful statements are statements that allow us to anticipate something about reality that we wouldn’t have anticipated without that belief.
The Supernatural and Testability
Most commonly, the supernatural has been defined as that which can never be tested. But as Richard Carrier argues in his essay “Defining the Supernatural”:
The underlying mechanics of quantum phenomena might be physically beyond all observation and therefore untestable, but no one would then conclude that quantum mechanics is supernatural. Just because I can’t look inside a box does not make its contents supernatural.
Conversely, if I suddenly acquired the Force of the Jedi and could predict the future, control minds, move objects and defy the laws of physics, all merely by an act of will, ordinary people everywhere would call this a supernatural power, yet it would be entirely testable. Scientists could record and measure the nature and extent of my powers and confirm them well within the requirements of peer review.
The supernatural is also something we routinely challenge believers to demonstrate, as I do in “The Twelve Reasons I Don’t Believe in Supernatural Claims”. If the supernatural were whatever cannot be tested, and if things that aren’t testable aren’t provable, then we would be challenging people to prove something that cannot be proven, which is unfair.
Defining The Supernatural
So what is entailed by the idea of supernatural things? I summarize Carrier in my essay “What is Naturalism-Humanism?”, defining naturalism in three prongs:
- there is no good reason to believe that something exists which is not solely the result of a combination of matter-energy in space-time
- there is no good reason to believe that something can happen with no mechanism behind the action (even if we may not know what that mechanism is)
- there is no good reason to believe that it is possible for the laws of physics to be or become suspended or transcended
Matter-Energy in Space-Time
Carrier describes the supernatural as fundamentally, ontologically, irreducibly mental, which Victor Reppert elaborates as meaning “there not being any mental explanations at the basic level of analysis”, further stating that “[i]f something normative, subjective/perspectival, purposive, or intentional is at the basic level of analysis, then it isn’t naturalistic according to my definition.”
So what this means is that if naturalism is true, absolutely everything that exists and can be examined thoroughly enough will be found to be an arrangement and interactions of stuff that is not capable of thought and purpose; that thought and purpose will all be found to be the result of non-thought and non-purpose. If naturalism is false, we will find something that cannot be reduced to something with no thought or purpose.
This is why it is said that everything is arrangements of matter-energy in space-time — movement of quarks within atoms, possibly as the result of strings. We won’t know exactly what is going on here without many more revolutions in physics, but we do seem to be at the point where we can confidently say that most things completely reduce to purposeless, mindless forces and interactions, with little to indiciate otherwise.
The Need for a Mechanism
The second part of naturalism is that in order for something to interact with something else, it needs an underlying cause. If naturalism is true, it is impossible for something to just happen by will alone. For instance, a compass detects north by measuring the electromagnetic field — if there was no electromagnetic field, there wouldn’t be a way for a compass to detect north. A supernatural compass can detect north by just having an innate sense of north, without needing any mechanism at all. It can just will the knowledge of where north is and have it without having to make any measurements or detections of any sort.
This part actually doesn’t make sense. Something happening without a mechanism actually seems logically impossible, since it means that something is interacting with something else without any way of interacting with that something else. How exactly does someone go about having an innate sense of north or just willing something into existence? The answer is that it just happens, because any explanation would require an underlying mechanism to explain.
Unbreakable Laws of Physics
The third and last part of naturalism is that the laws of physics can’t be transcended or suspended. Since many miracles are said to be examples of the laws of physics being ignored, this means that if miracles happen, naturalism is false.
This also has to do with mechanisms. If naturalism is true, everything is the product of interactions within physics, and therefore can not somehow step outside of physics — there is no mechanism within physics that can go outside physics.
What is this Stuff?
Well, what is this matter-energy stuff? Around 1916, Einstein found out that matter and energy are really the same thing. It turns out that matter is a special bundling of energy. Matter doesn’t really exist as an actual solid per se. Instead everything is energy, e = mc2 style.
What is energy made of? That’s the current frontier of physics. No one knows for sure yet. The current data seems to be pointing toward some sort of string theory variant.
Space-Time
Now we move onto space-time. It’s also weird to think about, but space and time are all kind of the same thing as well. It’s all a four or more dimensional universe. General relativity showed us that gravity comes from the bending of space-time. While it’s not conclusively known, new research also points to the idea that all physical laws may also be reducible to the bending of space-time.
Dummies.com has made three guides that makes space-time, matter-energy, and the special theory of relativity pretty easy to understand, so I don’t feel the need to reinvent the wheel and elaborate. See their guide on gravity as geometry, gravity as acceleration, and space-time / matter-energy.
Love and Other Abstract Things
While gravity, trees, rocks, and rivers all exist “out there” in the world, what about things like love? Does love exist?
All of this is the fault of Plato. He made this theory of forms which stated that things like the literal number 4 itself, the quality of love, and the redness of red, all exist in some magical supernatural realm.
Here’s another key to naturalism. Denying the supernatural does not mean denying everything within Plato’s realm. Rather, things can exist as abstractions or patterns. These things exist in our brain. For example, we can look at an apple and see that it reflects light at our eye between 630 and 740 nanometers. Our brain interprets this incoming light as red. We then can form a pattern of every single object that reflects a similar kind of red at us and group them into a pattern. We call this pattern “red”.
When we talk about love, we’re talking about a very specific phenomena of emotion that happens to us, and hopefully another person. Love is also an abstraction of similar experiences, grouped together as a pattern and called “love”. This also exists in our brain along with all other emotions, which are different patterns of experiences.
The number 4 also doesn’t literally exist. It isn’t some transcendent being. Instead, we can see four things. We can group every single time we’ve seen four things or imagined four things and abstract them into a group and call this group the concept of “four”.
Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism
So how do we tell naturalism from supernaturalism? Well, it really depends on how things are being described. For instance, consider the soul. The soul is commonly considered supernatural, and if the soul refers to something that is not reducible to purposeless interactions but instead is fundamentally purposeful and capable of transcending physics, then the soul is supernatural.
However, if the soul was interactions of purposeless, mindless particles that just weren’t detectible by our current scientific equipment, it would be paranormal (something not known or explicable by current science), but still metaphysically natural. This soul could even go to a Heaven or Hell, as long as that location was in a physical location accessible by purposeless, mindless particles using the laws of physics. This soul could even support the preservation of thought functions and personality after death, if it were able to reproduce a brain through the interaction of purposeless, mindless particles.
Gods
What about gods? Gods have almost always been said to do anything by mere acts of will, without requiring mechanisms. Gods have also long been said to be disembodied, floating minds that are immaterial and therefore not reducible to purposeless, mindless forces. Gods are also almost always capable of transcending physics on a regular basis to do any sort of otherwise impossible miracles.
However, gods aren’t always this way. The Epicurean gods, for instance, were always reducible to purposeless, mindless forces and were fully made of matter-energy. They did not have the ability to break the laws of physics, but were capable of doing things within the laws of physics that we humans were not able to do, making them the source of whole host of paranormal, but otherwise metaphysically natural abilities.
Miracles
Now finally miracles. Are miracles supernatural? Depends on what the miracle is. For instance, if Jesus turned water into wine by simply suspending physics and allowing water to morph into wine, then that is a supernatural power. However, if Jesus turned water into wine by opening up a wormhole to a wine cellar, dumping the water through the wormhole, and pouring in wine through the wormhole, then his miracle was paranormal but not supernatural.
Consider something David Hume once thought was a miracle in the 18th century: a wizard capable of lighting fire underwater. This claim was considered by Hume to be supernatural, because he thought it would be summoned by wizard magic, transcending the laws of physics. However, we in the 21st century have the ability to light fire underwater through the use of chemicals Hume knew nothing about — a paranormal claim by 18th century standards.
Conclusion
It is possible for there to be naturalistic souls, naturalistic gods, and naturalistic miracles. So naturalism doesn’t exclude souls, gods, and miracles directly, but rather nearly all modern conceptions of them. Furthermore, naturalism doesn’t exclude claims of the supernatural for a dogmatic “because I feel like it” reason, but because of qualms about whether interactions without mechanisms are logically possible and make sense, qualms about how something can transcend physics, and qualms about how the existence of the fundamentally, irreducibly, ontologically purposeful and mindful entities can be established to exist.
In fact, naturalism isn’t really a set of things to exclude, but rather a disbelief that “it happens just because it does” is an acceptable explanation. For no supernaturalist I know of can explain how the supernatural can be detected or how the supernatural interacts with the world, despite claims that they know of (detect) and feel (interact with) the supernatural on a regular basis.
Followed up in: The Magical Magician: A Naturalist’s Allegory
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On 10 Aug 2011 in All, Naturalism. 12 Comments.
19 Oct 2011, 2:18 am
A few queries, if you don’t mind, because today is dragging on.
1) Are you happy with the idea of Epicurean Gods? Personally I’m ambivalent. I have heard the line of thought that givem an extreme length of time and progress and alien species or even ourselves, could eventually attempt the creation of a universe (with the famous, but controversial required fine tuning to support life), and some theists feel this alone supports their view.
2) the transcends the Laws of Physics bit. I’m painfully aware of how bad I am at metaphysics…but can’t you just insert whatever mechanism you please (gravity gremlins) and nobody can question a thing.
3) ” it happens just because it does” aren’t naturalists left with this at times, why is a constant that value, how can mathematical laws start a umiverse, why does mass affect the geometry of space-time.
Sorry if 1 was especially mundane i rushed past the conclusion.
19 Oct 2011, 4:08 pm
I’m not sure what you mean by “happy” here. I think the idea of Epicurean Gods (Gods that are made of physical matter, but just have very advanced technology) is coherent and truth-apt, a step above supernatural Gods. (I really need to write a post about this soon.)
Do I believe in the existence of Epicurean Gods? Well, I can assign them some probability of existing, given the size of the universe and how technology seems to develop without end, but I have no actual evidence to indicate their involvement in our affairs, or indication that such a God is responsible for the origins of our particular universe. Right now, it’s only a possibility.
And even if an Epicurean God is responsible for the origins of our universe, we still must eventually ask how they came to be. An infinite regress of Epicurean Gods seems even more odd than a nebulous first cause or an eternal universe.
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You can, but that just makes your theory ad hoc and unfalsifiable in our current practice, and I personally don’t like those kinds of things. A successful explanation isn’t something that is possible, but something that is actually likely given what we know.
We don’t actually have a successful explanation for how the universe originated, to the best of my knowledge.
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I wouldn’t say so. It just means we have a lot of unanswered questions left over. But we have been able to answer a lot of other stuff to get to this point, and that shows the success of modern physics.
Naturalism, done right, will never have to retreat to a “it just happens” brute fact — we will just always have things left to explain. And as long as everything is explainable in principle, I don’t see anything wrong with there being an infinite amount of things that need explanations.
It’s also important to note that postulating a God does nothing to answer any of these questions. In fact, postulating a God closes off inquiry completely in the way you mentioned. How can God start a universe? He just can because he can.
20 Oct 2011, 11:09 am
“And even if an Epicurean God is responsible for the origins of our universe, we still must eventually ask how they came to be. An infinite regress of Epicurean Gods seems even more odd than a nebulous first cause or an eternal universe.”
This caught my eye, if the universe was eternal an infinite regress of epicurean gods, would, on first thought, seem inevitable. I’ll put that in my interesting but weird idea box.
Also on “How can God start a universe? He just can because he can”, i feel this is very weak theology. Theists should be genuinely interested in science as a means of explaining God’s mechanisms, as Isaac Newton was. Then I get back to epicurean Gods…
20 Oct 2011, 12:40 pm
But that’s just it, it seems: supernatural powers don’t need mechanisms. They just do things. There is nothing to be interested in. It just happens. Poof!
Perhaps I’m wrong about the theist position, or positions since there are a large multitude of them, but the origin of the universe by God seems closed to inquiry. Sure we can explore gravity as an explanation for how God allegedly ordered the planets, but what can we do to explore how God brought about gravity in the first place? At some point there is a “poof” moment that we, in principle, cannot explain.
6 Apr 2012, 11:47 pm
I recently argued this very position, using it against your own definition of naturalism, which doesn’t seem to exclude anything, inasmuch as supernaturalism, you contend, is incoherent.
I think I was wrong, and you’re wrong here. It makes sense to hold a position that denies an incoherent position. (Thus, it makes sense to hold a position that makes no difference to the world. Denying an incoherent position, of course, isn’t itself incoherent.
6 Apr 2012, 11:55 pm
But isn’t that exactly what quantum mechanics insists on? Wouldn’t a more careful analysis of “mechanism” reveal that the purport of this claim must be to exclude “spooky action at a distance.”
Your Carrier quotes show that he has a faith in hidden variables, even if their existence can’t be tested. But didn’t Bell show that any version of qm must include nonlocality, hidden variables or not. (Nonlocality could be compatible with a mechanistic analysis given superliminal speeds, but I doubt your metaphysical convictions are so strong you would be driven to agree with Bohm.)
[I have some attempted answers to these objections, but I'm interested in yours.]
7 Apr 2012, 12:18 am
Can you? Certainly such is the assumption of Bayesian epistemology, but it doesn’t–notwithstanding some presentations–follow from Bayes theorem. Rather, it requires interpreting probabilities as degrees of belief. Some very naturalistic decision theorists disagree with this analysis because, to them, degrees of belief seem as mysterious as divine intervention.
24 Apr 2012, 6:41 pm
Quantum Mechanics!
I don’t understand what you’re saying. What, specifically, am I wrong about?
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It could be what quantum mechanics insists on. I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to get to the bottom of QM, but obviously haven’t been successful yet. I have hope for Many Worlds Interpretation, which I think would fix this, though I’m not sure how yet.
Basically, if QM does insist that things happen without underlying mechanisms, then I’m still puzzled. But my personal befuddlement doesn’t dictate the laws of physics. I assume it would mean I’m wrong about the possibility of supernaturalism too. I need to reassess these views.
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Carrier is well aware of Bell Inequalities, and argues against them in this comment and the comment below, and elaborates on his personal theory of QM in “Calling All Physicists”. I’m obviously not in a position to tell if this theory is legit or not.
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Now I’m interested in yours.
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Epicurean Gods and Bayesianism!
Why are degrees of belief so mysterious? It seems clear that if you flip a coin and don’t look at the result, the optimal decision theory will say you assign a 50% probability to “heads”.
27 Apr 2012, 4:07 pm
I think I was saying you’re right, but anyway, the issue is whether it’s meaningful to take a position that has no factual entailments. I’m saying such a position, contrary to my previous contention, is meaningful because the denial of an incoherent statement is meaningful.
Nobody is because Carrier hasn’t formalized his analysis mathematically, although Carrier obviously knows more about qm than I. From an epistemological standpoint, what most struck me about that posting and its comments is that Carrier was only concerned with whether any experimental findings contradicted his analysis, without concern for the plausibility of his constructions and its fit with the rest of science. I’m not competent to evaluate his theories about the folding of space, but the sole fact that it accounts for the qm findings wouldn’t be enough, even if it did. (I don’t think. But maybe it’s a more severe test than appears.)
Carrier’s believes in the plausibility of any theory that can leave his metaphysical foundations undisturbed. These foundations include determinism and locality. It’s generally conceded, even by Bohmians, that non-locality can’t be avoided–Carrier excepted. My understanding of the Bell theorems is that it rules out non-locality. Determinism is still potentially obtainable through hidden variables. Many worlds is a non-local theory; Yudkovsky, for example, emphasizes its nonlocality as what is uniquely important and hard to understand about qm. I agree with Hilary Putnam about many worlds: it’s incoherent because it simply doesn’t account for what the theory is designed to explain, the Born probabilities.
Does naturalism or materialism or physicalism need locality and determinism. It seems to me that locality, despite Einstein’s great respect for it, is a remnant of an early version of materialism, mechanism. The clockwork model may be how it’s best known. If you think physical events require a _mechanism_, I think you need to say more about what that means. We have an intuitive concept of one thing bringing about another by physical contact, but the concept of “explanation” in physics usually starts with Hempel’s covering law analysis. I don’t see a problem for materialism from non-locality, provided there are necessary and sufficient conditions, regardless of where they occur.
Determinism is something else, and I’m uncertain about whether qm provides evidence against materialism by showing that reality is stochastic at bottom. My bias is for Bohm, even though my efforts to be objective have led my in opposite directions, even recently. I think qm is unlike general relativity in that qm does _not_ offer a direct window on reality. One can only use qm as a premise in determining what’s reality affords, in the manner of Bell. That’s because qm doesn’t describe what reality is doing, only the result of measurements (and it can’t account for its own measurement process). There was a time (the era of logical positivism) when this was all science was supposed to be about, but fortunately realism seems today ascendent.
There is one way I see whereby even the Bell theorem can be circumvented that I haven’t seen in the literature (so maybe I’m wrong). It seems to me not only the case that qm is incomplete (per Bohm) but also the case that it’s _wrong_. This is because it must include in its description of physical conditions a _classical_ description of the measuring apparatus, not a qm description. Since qm shows the classical description is false, qm–which incorporates it–must be false.
The main thing I’ve been working on privately for some decades is a theory of probability. But I still don’t know what my conclusion is. In fact, two things I constantly flip-flop on is whether the universe could be probabilistic and whether the cosmos could be infinite (whether in past duration or its extent). Are these even philosophical questions? Even of that I’m unsure. It may even be that we are condemned to agnosticism here.
But my present leaning is that the very concept of probability is incoherent because probabilities are conceivable only as byproducts of deterministic forces within a system.
What’s mysterious about subjective probability? The .5 probability of Heads is unproblematic because the probability can be taken as a description of the chance set up (i.e., coin flipping) rather than as a belief state. But what does it mean to say that I have a .7 degree of belief in materialism? Does it clarify anything to say I have a 7/10 degree of belief? Degrees of belief (plausibilities) obtain their meaning by analogy to physical probability. If probabilities are rooted in the conflict of deterministic forces, the probability can’t _fundamentally_ be subjective.
27 Apr 2012, 4:12 pm
I mean the very concept of probability as foundational is incoherent, not the concept of probability per se.
27 Apr 2012, 5:42 pm
Stephen, your comments on probability, and realism, remind me most of the “ensemble interpretation”, favoured by Albert Einstein.
28 Apr 2012, 9:48 pm
Stephen, in case you don’t get this message at TWIM, or your own blog, you seem to be assuming I’ll do as requested unconditionally, in which case that would be unprincipled. That is not the case. Sorry Peter Hurford for using your blog this way.