What Is Supernatural?

Giordano Bruno is generally credited with being the first to put forward the cosmology that we are all familiar with today. Bruno relied mainly on intuition but Galileo's discoveries using his telescope largely confirmed and began the popularization of the modern cosmological view.

Before Bruno and Galileo, the Aristotelian/Biblical Cosmology held that the universe was divided between heaven and earth. While we no longer divide the cosmos in this fashion, pretty much everyone still thinks in terms of the natural and the supernatural. Even atheists who deny the existence of the supernatural.

But what is supernatural?

Christianity holds that God created the cosmos. God is not, therefore, part of the cosmos. But God did create all manner of spiritual beings, angels and souls for example.

Science, on the other hand, concerns itself with what it can observe and predict. So it might seem that natural and supernatural can be so divided: that which can be observed and predicted is natural and the supernatural that which is attributed to some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature.

But there are problems there too.

First, what is observable and predictable varies over time. Did the planets become natural when they became predictable or when we realized that they consisted of the same matter as the earth? Can we know what we might be able to observe and predict in the future?

Second, and perhaps as importantly, Christianity holds that human beings have observed the supernatural. Most plainly in the person of Jesus but others who have experienced the supernatural  include Abraham and Moses not to mention all who have witnessed miracles of one sort or another. Granted, human experience of the supernatural is rare and fleeting but if the supernatural were truly imperceptible there would be no Christianity.

There is a related problem: even within what we casually refer to as the natural world there is unobservability and unpredictability. We cannot, for example, observe the past or the future and despite the advance of science most of our daily experience involves the unpredictable. It is impossible, for example, to predict the stock market in part because any such prediction would affect it. We live in a very unpredictable cosmos.

Some atheists postulate a hard reductionist, materialist determinism operating through causality. According to this view, the cosmos operates like a giant mechanism (often a clock analogy is used). If we only knew the starting point and momentum for each particle we could predict the future with 100% reliability. But this theoretical view has been largely undermined by quantum and chaos theory. The cosmos is no longer regarded as even theoretically knowable or predictable.

The traditional Catholic solution is to make two separate distinctions. God is supernatural and all creation, including angels and souls, are natural. Additionally, the cosmos is divided between the spiritual and the material. God, angels and souls are spiritual but souls are joined to material bodies.

Using the terms this way, the scientific field of psychology, for example, can be said to be concerned with observing and predicting the spiritual as well as the material since human behavior is, in the Catholic concept, a manifestation of both the physical body and the spiritual soul.