Does the supernatural exist?

Consider that most supernatural events in the Bible have explanations - causes - associated with them. For example, God causes the sun to stand still (Joshua 10:12), to allow the Israelites more time to defeat their enemies. Consider that these explanations were seen as perfectly reasonable within the understanding of physics and cosmology of the day. Gods and other supernatural beings were seen as being able to manipulate the world - to exert force- just on a scale and to an effect not available to mortals. The concept of supernatural precedes naturalism - it is a later gloss to view the supernatural as a violation of natural laws. The gods acted naturally to the pre-scientific mind, just more potently.

As such, I propose that a better definition for the supernatural is simply those things done directly by God. This acknowledges the unexceptional admission that most stuff “just happens,” but sometimes God intervenes directly in the world. It is this direct action, and not the mechanism, that defines supernaturalism.

The mind exposed to the scientific method (however superficially) expects to find "real world" evidence of God's activities. Many Christians, for example, regularly attest to concrete experiences of God's activity - the activity of the supernatural - in their lives. For that matter, large numbers of people see ghosts, experience physic effects, contact the dead, receive spiritual, emotional and physical healing, experience strange coincidences, act on unexplained urges that result in them taking actions that save themselves and others from harm - in short, it is nature of the experience, not the scientist’s understanding of its causation, that marks something as supernatural in most folks eyes.

The recent focus on studies that investigate intercessory prayer, and the explorations of Intelligent Design, are examples of this process of looking for the fingerprint of God in the accumulated experience of daily living. If you believe in a God who acts in the world, you expect (insist?) on finding this proof – how could it be otherwise? If you believe in a God who is somewhat more subtle, you may have lowered expectations for the result of these investigations.

Today’s difficulty is that we don’t understand the mechanism of many of the miracles. For example, in Joshua 10:12, both the sun and moon stand still – which I take to mean that the earth was halted in its rotation. Here is a particularly interesting case study for literalism, by the way, because if the sun was stopped in its movement through space (relative to the earth?) would it have made any difference to the length of the day? In any event, we don’t know how to stop the earth’s rotation, what with all the problems that that would entail. But that does not mean that God could not have done it. My objection to the traditional notion of supernaturalism is that it does not imply that we don’t understand the mechanism, but that there could have been no (natural) mechanism (with the caveat that, since supernaturalism = not following any natural process, the religious can imagine anything they want happened).

When most religious folks I know talk about the activity of the supernatural, they don’t speak of non-natural mechanisms; they speak of concrete manifestations of the power of God in the world.

But the question is, “Does the supernatural exist?” My personal response is that if it does, it will leave evidence. I recognize that it is not enough to show that people of a particular religion act, in aggregate, in a way that demonstrates Devine intervention, or that something occurred (a healing, for example) that confounds medical experts. You will also have to show that there are no “natural” explanations. This is made even more difficult by the fact that ruling out all known causes does not rule out the possibility that some natural cause exists that has not yet been identified. In fact, this is the “God in the gaps” approach to the supernatural – find something that cannot be explained, and attribute it to God’s direct intervention.

Many people of faith have accepted this working definition of the supernatural, and believe that sufficient evidence has been provided to convince them of God’s intervention in “ordinary” life. Personally, I have experienced many things that I attribute to the supernatural – so I say it exists. Can I prove it? Well, I am fairly perplexed that when I look at broad measures of Christian behavior, I fail to see the significant differences I expect.