8/16/10

Is God Supernatural?


Well, everybody says  it is, but I don't see why.  Seems to me there are only three possibilities


  • Things we already know about
  • Things we don't know yet, but maybe could someday 
  • Things that we can't possibly know about.




By 'know', I mean detectable in some scientific way.  Also, it's useful to distinguish between the Cosmos and the Universe.

The Cosmos is the  known, physical universe.
The Universe is everything that exists, IOW everything natural.

The universe includes the known Cosmos and also other things that we don't understand or know about. If things exist, and interact in any way with the natural cosmos, then there's a chance we'll find out about them someday, and even if we don't, they're still part of the natural universe. 

Anything super-natural would be outside these two circles. We'd never know such a thing is there unless we managed to detect it interacting with our universe, and that would make it just another part of our known universe. If anything super-natural exists but we can never know about it, it's just the same as if it doesn't exist. 

That outer ring includes things that don't exist, and, anything that does exist but is beyond our understanding and always will be--it goes in there too. If you're a philosopher I guess you want to talk about the outer ring, but it's a big fat waste of time.


Where do the gods come in?  If they're super-natural, they either don't exist or don't matter, so why does everyone insist they are?

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