Against the supernatural as a profound idea

By Paul Almond

The term "supernatural," and similar terms, cannot have any of the profound meanings that people normally think they imply. This leaves a choice of discarding the word as incoherent or accepting its use but only with less profound meanings. This has implications for the frequent theistic claim that a "supernatural" god exists who is profoundly different from anything else.

The existence of the supernatural is a common religious claim. This is often because it provides a convenient place in which God can exist. When asked to define the word "supernatural," theists typically say that it is anything that is not "natural." When it is pointed out that this does not tell us anything they are likely to explain that "natural" means "in reality" and "supernatural" means "outside reality," or that "natural" means "material" and "supernatural" means "immaterial." This does not help, because if we ask what the meaning of "outside reality" is we are quite likely to be told that things that are "outside reality" are "supernatural": the definitions are circular. The common idea is that the "supernatural" somehow involves "higher things." Terms like this make no sense unless defined properly. The definitions cannot make sense if they all rely on each other.

The Problem of Boundaries

The supernatural is rarely defined in terms of what it is, but more usually in terms of what it is not. For example, supernatural things are said to be not in reality, not physical, not scientifically understandable, not made of matter, not explainable by science, not describable by science, not scientific, not subject to human understanding, not subject to logic, etc. The "supernatural" claim, expressed in these terms, is based on the idea that everything can be divided into two categories: those things in the "supernatural" category and those in the "natural" category.

I want to establish first that if you are going to say that there are two classifications of things, "natural" and "supernatural," you are declaring a boundary -- a diving line separating those things. Your concept of "supernatural" only makes sense if you can define that boundary in some meaningful, useful way.

Here is a simple example. If I draw a circle on a piece of paper and place a coin inside the circle I can say, "The coin is in the circle." If I place the coin outside the circle I can say, "The coin is outside the circle." When making these statements I am splitting the sheet of paper up into two parts: inside the circle and outside the circle. This only makes sense because I have declared a boundary between these two parts of the piece of paper, and that boundary is the circle's perimeter. It is clear what "inside the circle" and "outside the circle" mean. Now, suppose that I place the object on the paper but do not draw a circle. I place a coin on the blank piece of paper and say, "It is outside the circle." Suppose also that nobody had ever said the word "circle" to you before. You would be justified in saying that I had not provided enough information to make my claims that things are inside or outside the circle mean anything at all. In fact, my very ideas about "inside the circle" or "outside the circle" mean nothing. If I wanted to ensure that my ideas of "inside the circle" and "outside the circle" meant something, there are a number of things that I could do. I could draw the circle and point out which part of the paper is the inside and which is the outside, or I could describe the circle using mathematics: there is an equation that exactly describes a circle, which is the sort of thing you might use if you wanted to program a computer to draw a circle.

The point here is that it is meaningless to divide everything into parts unless you can describe what makes one part different to the other. This makes it meaningless for a theist to divide things up into "inside reality" and "outside reality," "physical" and "non-physical," etc., unless he/she can describe what form the boundary between these two parts of existence takes.

An advocate of the supernatural could make the objection that I naively think that, if the supernatural exists, it should be a region of space, separated from natural things by a boundary in space, like the circle on the piece of paper. I do not claim this. I simply claim that what makes the "natural" and "supernatural" different, the boundary separating them, must be described if the idea is to have any meaning. The boundary need not be spatial, or take any other particular form, as long as it is defined.

Humans tend to group things into sets. We have, for example, a set of living things and a set of non-living things. The terms "living" and "non-living" split the world into two parts, just as the terms "supernatural" and "natural" attempt to do. However, for the terms "living" and "non-living" we have a proper definition of what we are talking about. If we encounter something we can apply various rules to decide if it is living or non-living and these rules act as the circle does on the piece of paper. They define the boundary between living and non-living things. How is the boundary between "supernatural" and "natural" things defined?

Trivial Boundaries

Even if an advocate of the "supernatural" manages to define the boundary between "supernatural" and "natural" things he/she would still have the problem of persuading us that the definition is not trivial. Anyone can define the "supernatural" to be where they wish. As an example, there is a main road near where I am writing now. Suppose I define the "natural" world as ending at that road and everything beyond the road as "supernatural." Why should my way of defining the supernatural, the place where I draw my line, be any better than anyone else's? Why should their boundary be any better than mine? Given that it is difficult for anyone to show that where they draw their line between the natural and supernatural is valid, why bother with the word at all?

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