>In reading this essay, I notice that when I come to the word "supernatural" in
>item A., no definition has been given for that term. I can understand the
>distinction that was made in the SC2 item between events at least partly caused
>by intelligent activity and those that are not ( even though in a particular
>case, I may not be able to tell the difference ). Is "supernatural" a special
>kind of intelligent activity such as that caused by "God"?
Good point. Even within Christianity there are several possible
supernatural causers of events: God, angels, demons,...
It seems to me that a large part of the difficulty of including the
supernatural in science is that the agents we postulate as causers are
intelliegent, have wills, and may take steps to prevent us from discovering
them or -- in the case of demons -- even mislead us.
>I have a hard time
>understanding the utility of making a division of events between natural and
>supernatural. I would tend toward considering all tangible events as natural,
>i.e., if it happened in "nature", it is natural. That God may interact with
>nature in ways that are foreign to me seems no more reason to separate these
>actions as not natural any more than for a humans interaction with the rest of
>nature.
This is another point that has bothered me too, although it's never risen
to the top of my mind when I'm in front of a keyboard. Suppose a demon
zaps the computer in my car, causing the engine to stop. All it required
was a momentary action on the part of the demon, and momentary phenomena
are notoriously difficult to capture in real systems. The rest of the
process is natural: the car slows and stops because the engine quit. As
many a dealer knows, too, precisely what caused the computer to decide to
reset itself and leave me on the shulder of the road may never be known
either. Novelists sometimes like to create a chain of events in which
small failures in a system combine to bring about a catastrophic failure.
Such things sometimes happen in real life. How could we show that the
pattern of small failures (which occurred _once_) was or was not the result
of intention and design?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William E. Hamilton, Jr., Ph.D.
1346 W. Fairview Lane
Rochester, MI 48306
(810) 652 4148