In the discussion on defining and distinguishing between naturalism and supernaturalism, is it coherent to entertain the notion of a supernatural realm governed by rules or laws, and if so, would it make sense to explore the potential for a testable predictive theory of the supernatural?
In short, is the notion of "supernatural laws" a sensible concept, or an oxymoron?
Related discussions:
Are there versions of theism or supernaturalism that offer testable predictions?
Is it possible to define "the supernatural"?
Is naturalism falsifiable?
Working definitions of naturalism and supernaturalism
The term “naturalism” has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. Its current usage derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. The self-proclaimed “naturalists” from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars. These philosophers aimed to ally philosophy more closely with science. They urged that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the “human spirit” (Krikorian 1944, Kim 2003).
So understood, “naturalism” is not a particularly informative term as applied to contemporary philosophers. The great majority of contemporary philosophers would happily accept naturalism as just characterized—that is, they would both reject “supernatural” entities, and allow that science is a possible route (if not necessarily the only one) to important truths about the “human spirit”.
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As indicated by the above characterization of the mid-twentieth-century American movement, naturalism can be separated into an ontological and a methodological component. The ontological component is concerned with the contents of reality, asserting that reality has no place for “supernatural” or other “spooky” kinds of entity. By contrast, the methodological component is concerned with ways of investigating reality, and claims some kind of general authority for the scientific method. Correspondingly, this entry will have two main sections, the first devoted to ontological naturalism, the second to methodological naturalism.
Of course, naturalist commitments of both ontological and methodological kinds can be significant in areas other than philosophy. The modern history of psychology, biology, social science and even physics itself can usefully be seen as hinging on changing attitudes to naturalist ontological principles and naturalist methodological precepts. This entry, however, will be concerned solely with naturalist doctrines that are specific to philosophy. So the first part of this entry, on ontological naturalism, will be concerned specifically with views about the general contents of reality that are motivated by philosophical argument and analysis. And the second part, on methodological naturalism, will focus specifically on methodological debates that bear on philosophical practice, and in particular on the relationship between philosophy and science.
1. Ontological Naturalism
1.1 Making a Causal Difference
A central thought in ontological naturalism is that all spatiotemporal entities must be identical to or metaphysically constituted by physical entities. Many ontological naturalists thus adopt a physicalist attitude to mental, biological, social and other such “special” subject matters. They hold that there is nothing more to the mental, biological and social realms than arrangements of physical entities.
The driving motivation for this kind of ontological naturalism is the need to explain how special entities can have physical effects. Thus many contemporary thinkers adopt a physicalist view of the mental realm because they think that otherwise we will be unable to explain how mental events can causally influence our bodies and other physical items. Similar considerations motivate ontologically naturalist views of the biological realm, the social realm, and so on.
It may not be immediately obvious why this need to account for physical effects should impose any substantial naturalist constraints on some category. After all, there seems nothing a priori incoherent in the idea of radically unscientific “supernatural” events exerting a causal influence on physical processes, as is testified by the conceptual cogency of traditional stories about the worldly interventions of immaterial deities and other outlandish beings.
However, there may be a posteriori objections to such non-natural causal influences on the physical world, even if there are no a priori objections. We shall see below how modern scientific theory places strong restrictions on the kinds of entities that can have physical effects. Given that mental, biological and social phenomena do have such effects, it follows that they must satisfy the relevant restrictions.
Note how this kind of argument bites directly only on those categories that do have physical effects. It places no immediate constraints on categories that lack any such effects, which arguably include the mathematical and modal realms, and perhaps the moral realm. We shall return to the question of whether there are any further reasons for ontologically naturalist views about such putatively non-efficacious categories in sections 1.7 and 1.8 below.
Supernaturalism, a belief in an otherworldly realm or reality that, in one way or another, is commonly associated with all forms of religion.
Evidence of neither the idea of nature nor the experience of a purely natural realm is found among primitive people, who inhabit a wonderworld charged with the sacred power (or mana), spirits, and deities. Primitive man associates whatever is experienced as uncanny or powerful with the presence of a sacred or numinous power; yet he constantly lives in a profane realm that is made comprehensible by a paradigmatic, mythical sacred realm. In the higher religions a gulf usually is created between the sacred and the profane, or the here and the beyond, and it is only with the appearance of this gulf that a distinction becomes drawn between the natural and the supernatural, a distinction that is not found, for example, in the classical religious traditions of Greece and China. Both the Olympian deities of ancient Greece and the Tao (“Way”) of ancient China were apprehended as lying at the centre of what today is commonly known as the natural; yet they were described in language that was imbued with concepts of the sacred.
Paradoxically, the most radical division between the natural and the supernatural is established by those forms of religion that posit a final or ultimate coincidence between the natural and the supernatural, or the sacred and the profane. This is true both in Indian mystical religion and in Near Eastern and Western eschatological religions, which are concerned with the last time that inaugurates a new sacred age. Buddhism, from its very beginning, established a total distinction between the realm of life and individual (saṃsāra), which it identified interiorly as the arena of pain and suffering, and the goal of the Buddhist way, Nirvāṇa, which is understood in wholly negative terms as a final and total release from saṃsāra. As Buddhism developed in India, however, and did so in part by way of making the distinction between Nirvāṇa and saṃsāra ever more comprehensive and pure, it gradually but decisively reached the point of identifying Nirvāṇa and saṃsāra, and this identification, according to some scholars, became the foundation of Mahāyāna (“Greater Vehicle”) Buddhism.
Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islām, which emphasize eschatology (the doctrine of last times), posit a radical dichotomy between the old aeon and the new aeon, or this world and the Kingdom of God. While normative Judaism cast off eschatology, although it was reborn in a mystical form in the Kabbala (Jewish mysticism), Christianity arose with an eschatological expectation of the immediate coming of the Kingdom of God. Primitive Christianity identified Jesus with the eschatological figure of the Son of man, a divine redeemer whose coming would inaugurate the Last Judgment and the end of the world. This early Christian faith went hand in hand with the belief that all things whatsoever will be transfigured into the Kingdom of God. Such a form of faith refuses to accept the world as simply world or nature but rather understands both nature and history as constantly undergoing a process of transformation that will issue in a wholly new creation or new world.
The secularization of modern Western civilization has created a gulf between the natural and the supernatural because of modern conceptions of the physical universe as being controlled by scientifically knowable and predictable laws and as existing apart from the influence or control of God. Hence, the world becomes a profane reality that is wholly isolated from both the sacred and the supernatural.
Additional thoughts
Note that a negative answer to this question would legitimize (and thus undermine some of the reasons some users brought up to criticize) this question.
