VG,
No it doesn't make any difference. The rules of the natural world that science has come up with refers to the rules of the scientific method. The explanations of the natural world are derived from following those methods. The scientific method is the way of acquiring knowledge about natural phenomena by observing, hypothesizing, testing, and concluding. It involves applying skepticism, induction, deduction, and statistics to confirm, reject, or modify the hypotheses based on the experimental results. Any concepts that this method cannot be applied to are outside science - such as gods and their judgement of people after death, and subsequent accountability. Hence these concepts are described as supernatural.
This is still flat wrong.
First, you’re just avoiding again. Your initial claim of what’s “supernatural” was anything science hadn’t explained
as of today’s date (“currently”). Your later, edited version of the same claim referred instead only to science generically but without the temporal part.
Your initial version means that anything that science hasn’t explained
yet (but might explain tomorrow) is therefore “supernatural”. This would mean that, say, lightning was “supernatural” before science explained it but stopped being supernatural once science had explained it. (And presumably would also then revert to being supernatural again if the scientific explanation was later falsified.)
In short, which of the two versions of the claim you’re now proposing does make a great deal of difference.
Second, both are wrong in any case for the reasons I keep explaining and you keep ignoring. Scientific understanding concerns our state of knowledge
about something, not the state
of the thing itself. No matter what science (or any other method we may happen to come up with) has to say about something, it’s either natural or supernatural (pretending for now that the latter term is even a coherent one, which it isn’t) in itself, not because we may or may not have an explanation for it.
Science not explaining something (either as of today’s date or in principle) tells you nothing about whether or not that thing is “supernatural”. All we can then say about it is that we have no naturalistic explanation for it, but we cannot for one moment conclude that it must therefore be “supernatural” (which state would in any case require an entire
a prori ontology of its own before we could even consider it).
In short, “supernaturalism” means “outside naturalism”, not “outside scientific explanation” (whichever version – temporal or in principle – you’re now opting for).
Incorrect - the supernatural is an adjective given to phenomena such as gods etc etc, which can't be investigated or explained using the rules of science, which was the point I was making originally, and which is supported by the dictionary link I gave.
Wrong again – see above. And you’re now shifting ground again, this time from whether something is “actually” natural/supernatural to the adjectival choices of authors about their stories of supernaturalism.
When you say the supernatural is beyond the scope of any other means of investigation,…
I don’t – you do. Any current or potential means of investigation of natural phenomena that failed to provide an explanation would only ever be able to reach a “don’t know” about possible naturalistic explanations, but would not thereby jump to “therefore supernatural”. To do that you’d have to build from the ground up a whole ontology to demonstrate “supernatural”
at all, and then you’d have to develop a means to investigate and verify whatever you thought populated it.
I am curious to know what you mean by other means of investigation? Do you mean subjective investigation - e.g. meditation, trances, inward mental focus? How would you determine what it is possible to investigate subjectively and what is experienced as reality inside someone's else's mind?
Not my problem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
