Agents or aliens
The more I think about it, and read what other people have to say about it, the more I think “supernatural” is a meaningless word. That’s just another way of saying I’m a naturalist, I guess. I think the same thing about the word “god” or “gods” – I think that word brings a lot of excess baggage, and warps thinking about it from the outset. I kept stumbling on that in a discussion on a post of Jerry’s yesterday. Sigmund said
I suspect we will be unable to determine whether such evidence indicates a ‘God’ or a ‘God-like alien’.
And I thought, and said, what is the difference anyway?
Really – what is the difference? The idea is: maybe there is something out there, something with a mind, something that can do things. Maybe it has powers that go way beyond any we have. But that could be something natural, and there’s no obvious reason to call it “god.” I find it not at all hard to believe that there could be agents elsewhere in the universe, but if there are, they’re part of nature.
Maybe Karen Armstrong is right after all. Maybe the ‘apophatuous god’ is the true god.
I don’t think the issue has anything to do with finding the cause, source, or meaning of life or existence, for most religious people. So I suspect that even if some alien being was found that could reasonably claim responsibility for all scriptural “miracles,” we’d find the religions scrambling madly to disavow the aliens’ role.
Churches, for instance, couldn’t collect money to do god’s work if god was shown to be uninterested in that work (which seems to consist of building more churches and funding political movements.) People who found solace in the superlatives, in the omniscience and omnipotence and perfect goodness, wouldn’t be able to cope with these simply being wishful thinking. Those who had some form of power by siding with the ultimate authority figure would have no leg to stand on.
That’s why I find these discussions somewhat pointless. Whether or not you win any debating points when asked, “what would it take for you to believe?”, the interest really isn’t in evidence in the slightest. You can usually establish this by turning the question back onto the person asking, and inquiring what it would take for them not to believe. You will almost certainly find that they have no standards for this. I’m betting you can find no one who, for instance, will refer to falsifying the Strong Anthropic Principle, establishing what existed before the Big Bang, finding the evolved source of the bacterial flagellum, or historical evidence that contradicts the events in scripture – or any item that they claim as proof right now. Hell, there’s already a million things that they openly ignore, and even add really bizarre concepts to their belief systems, like the fossil record being manufactured false evidence to test faith. When they make it up as they go along, why bother trying to establish good definitions for their debate misdirections? It’s far more useful simply showing that they don’t know what evidence is.
Yes, that is my view. There is no difference between what is supposedly called “supernatural” and what is “natural”. Even in a supposedly supernatural realm, there can be no absense of laws, because without laws, there could be no causality, and no known consequences to actions. The idea of a lawless state is meaningless, but if there are laws, those laws can be empirically researched, and if that is the case, what’s the difference from naturalism?
I would go even further. If you will forgive me for being quite harsh to some good people, I think that the mistake of conceding that there is some situation which is beyond the reach of “natural law” is exactly the same as the mistake that we rationalists all accept of conceding that there are some biological features that are beyond the reach of “biological law”. We utterly reject as an unscientific scam the idea of Intelligent Design. So why is there not a similar rejection of there being identifiable limits to natural law? Is it perhaps because supernaturalism is supposedly more benign than Intelligent Design? But then isn’t the acceptance of supernaturalism actually a form of accommodation?
I suggest we go on the attack against even the concept of supernaturalism, and label it for what it is: “Intelligent Naturalism” sounds kind of right to me – it’s trying to assume a mind behind the actual laws, just like ID assumes a mind behind design.
Saikat. I can see if you call it the ‘apo<i>fatuous</i> god’, but if you’re using the adjectival form, as in ‘apophatic theology’, then it should be ‘apophatic’. It comes from the same root word as ‘epiphany’. ‘Phaneo’ means to show or to appear, so an epiphany is an apearing in (some form or other), but an apophany (if there were such a word) would refer to something that did not appear, something apart from an appearing, and so negativing appearance. So apophatic theology is negative theology, the idea that god is so great as to be beyond human thinking or telling.
And I think, basically, that you are right, Ophelia, something supernatural would refer to something that does not appear within the natural world, indeed, cannot appear within the natural world, because it is beyond it, and not of it. So it refers as near as possible to nothingness. Interestingly, Henry Mansel, in his 1859 Bampton Lectures, argues that the idea of an experienced infinite or absolute (as god is often presumed to be) is a thought which, as he says, “annihilates itself.” Since thought is a form of limitation, because it separates one thing from another, one thing which appears in a particular way out of a range of possibles, it cannot apprehend infinity or absoluteness.
I’m not sure whether this means there could not possibly be infinite mind, though I suspect it must, for to introduce limitation into infinite mind would make in non-infinite. Infinite mind could not be intentional, in other words, for this would immediately introduce limitation into infinity. So infinite mind couldn’t do aboutness (which, one would think, is necessary for creation). So, a god, not part of the natural world, seen as, in some sense, infinite, as possessing infinite perfections, would be incapable of thought of a finite realm, for that would introduce limitation within its infinite mind. What meaning would infinite or absolute mind or being have? Like Aristotle’s gods, it’d have nothing to do but contemplate itself. So, yes, I think if we thought it through, we’d find that the idea of god doesn’t make sense — well, Olympian gods might, but then they’re naturalistic gods, finite gods, storied gods. That’s different.
Consciously, unconsciously or somewhere in between, what people say they are doing can be quite different from what they are actually doing.
God can take a variety of forms in the minds of theists, and atheists have a variety of ideas of God, posed in terms of various things(?) God is not. However, I have never been able to find a better concept of what is actually going on in the world of the theists than the one which as far as I know originated with Durkheim: that the congregation, village or whatever is actually worshipping itself. This Durkheimian god is by definition, perfectly natural.
That natural as far as we know lies within the bounds of matter and energy: nothing simultaneously immaterial and non-energetic, let alone at the same time intelligent beyond human conception has ever been discovered.
Just as a lot of little computers can be cabled together to produce a big one, so a lot of ordinary human minds can be linked together to produce a superhuman mind. The cabling in this case is language and literature, requiring each unit in the complex to be able to understand and interpret the code running within and between them all. A collection of cockroaches of whatever size could not do the same because of the intelligence limitations of the individual organisms involved. However, there may well be a planet out there with individual organisms on it of such intelligence that beside the least of them the greatest human thinkers of all time would be as cockroaches are to us.
Worship (coming from the likes of us) might not be on their collective agenda, but on the other hand respect may well be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptions_of_Godhttp://www.philosophersnet.com/games/whatisgod.php
Eric, I’m pretty sure Saikat was making a clever pun! I like ‘apophatuous.’
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Agents or aliens http://dlvr.it/7zSd1 […]
Big Al, yes…but I suppose these discussions are aimed not so much at believers as at apologists and various kinds of compatibilist. The Pigliuccis and fans of NOMA and the like. I suppose I partly have in mind Massimo’s insistent “science cannot investigate the supernatural.” He takes that to be some kind of rebuke of the trespassing of scientists on philosophy’s turf, but I take it to be a diversion. He never goes on to say that nobody else can investigate the supernatural either, but that is of course the case. I keep trying to get a grip on the idea – on what people mean by it and on what claim’s like Massimo’s are supposed to mean or imply.
I agree with Ophelia’s question: “whats the difference?” If something with the properties of either turned up it wouldn’t make much practical difference to us which one it was.
My point about being unable to tell whether it was specifically one or the other was in answer to Jerry’s point about whether there could be convincing evidence of God (in particular, the God of some religion). My conclusion is that we will not be able to tell whether it is simply evidence of an advanced alien technology. I think this is important since I think such a scenario – the existence of an advanced ET – is both ‘natural’ according to accepted definitions of ‘natural’ and a reasonable hypothetical – considering the size of the Universe it is not unreasonable to think such beings MIGHT exist somewhere.
What this ultimately indicates, I guess, is that there really isn’t any evidence that will be convincing for the existence of a religious God. No 700 foot tall Jesus, no prayers answered, no verse of the bible spelled out in the stars. None of that will prove the existence of a religious God.
Right.
So the question should perhaps be something more like…”is there any evidence that would convince me there is an agent or an advanced alien technology that matches human projections about ‘God’ so well that it has to be that ‘God’ and nothing else?”
And that immediately makes the question almost impossible even to get a grasp on. Jeeeeeeeez, I want to say, how should I know? Human projections are many and various – and all the official rules and canons and criteria and catechisms that lay down the law about what ‘God’ is or is not are just so much straw in the wind when it comes to deciding “what God really is” or “how God is different from an advanced ET and how to detect those differences.”
So I guess I’m taking the ‘no’ side – or I’m changing the question and then taking the no side. I can easily think of evidence that would convince me there is an advanced ET, but I can’t think of any that would convince me there is a ‘God’ that can’t possibly be an advanced ET instead. I can’t think of any because I can’t see how anyone could know. I can’t even figure out what the rules would be.
Can anyone?
Eric:
So, a god, not part of the natural world, seen as, in some sense, infinite, as possessing infinite perfections, would be incapable of thought of a finite realm, for that would introduce limitation within its infinite mind.
But you also said:
thought is a form of limitation, because it separates one thing from another,
Which seems a contradiction. If by thought you mean anything analogous to thought, then God being perfect can’t do it. Not only because of limitation, but because it requires change.
What meaning would infinite or absolute mind or being have? Like Aristotle’s gods, it’d have nothing to do but contemplate itself.
It couldn’t even do that. Because contemplation seems to require activity or change. It’d be inert.
“Supernatural” is simply a name for the gaps which the God of the gaps is in charge of. As more is explained, more of what was considered supernatural becomes part of what we consider natural.
Ophelia, I’m sure you know this, but ‘apophatuous’ was marvelously coined by Richard Dawkins. It’s a great pun but also neatly describes the hogwash that is ‘apophatic theology’.
Saikat, oh, no actually I’d forgotten that. As had Eric! :- )
I’ve said this before, too many times, but seriously, everybody who’s interested in this subject should read Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained.
I’ve said most of this before, too, here and/or at WEIT:
“Supernatural” isn’t a meaningless or hopelessly vague term—in normal sincere use, it has a pretty definite and fairly precise meaning, even if most people can’t consciously articulate it. Whether something is “supernatural” is an intuitive judgment that actually follows unconscious rules about basic categories of things. You can tell that by how people do and don’t talk about purportedly supernatural entities, and which things they realize aren’t supernatural once they understand them. (Like lightning and x-rays.)
What makes something supernatural or not isn’t about being unfalsifiable or lawless—not at all. It’s about working in certain ways and not others, and people do generally “know it when they see it.”
If it existed, the supernatural would be part of the natural world in the broad sense of “natural,” which basically means real and more or less lawful. It’s also distinct from the “natural” in the narrow sense in which “natural” just means “not supernatural.” There’s no hopeless ambiguity there, just a word with distinct senses. (Rather like “artificial.” Artifacts are “natural” in the broad sense of being part of the real, more or less lawful world. They are also “artificial,” and not “natural,” in the narrower sense that they involve artifice. That’s not incoherent or meaningless, and doesn’t make the distinction between natural and artificial useless. It’s just that “natural” has multiple distinct, reasonable, and useful meanings, and you have to be careful not to equivocate between them.)
Supernatural things are assumed to have essences closely and irreducibly related to interesting high-level things like truth and/or falsity, wisdom, knowledge, skill, luck, beauty and/or ugliness, love and/or hate, etc.. They are assumed not to operate by the same rules as utterly mindless brute matter, but by high-level principles of intuitive (“folk”) psychology. They involve meaning and/or values and/or goals, somehow, even if they overtly don’t have minds. They aren’t just brute, mindless, meaningless matter and energy.
Even Karen Armstrong’s apophatic theology involves the supernatural, in a thinly-veiled way. She claims that there’s a faculty (“intellectus”) of the human mind that transcends mere reason and can fairly directly apprehend Deep Truth that can’t be articulated rationally.
That’s not meaningless or useless. It’s just wrong. Deep truth is not something you can just apprehend fairly directly, because Truth doesn’t have an essence like that, and minds don’t have an essence that could just do that with it. The appeal of her ideas is based on the same basic kind of category mistake that other supernaturalist ideas make, and that is why what she’s talking about is religion—she’s appealing to implausible supernatural insight by spiritual adepts—and why it’s wrong.
If we go around saying that supernaturalist concepts are meaningless or useless, we’re wrong, and it’s self-defeating. It won’t eliminate the intuitive appeal of the supernatural, and will just make us sound closed-minded and off base, even if the supernaturalists themselves can’t articulate how. It’s much better to say that yes, it’s certainly meaningful, then clarify that meaning and show why it’s intuitively appealing, but nonetheless clearly empirically wrong.
If we can’t explain both the intuitive appeal and the wrongness, we’re not going to convince most people; they will rightly think we’re “missing something important,” and most will wrongly just tune us out, rather than sorting it out correctly for themselves.
Paul W. s post comes close to the idea Richard Carrier expounds in detail in his essay Defining Supernatural (see http://richardcarrier.blogspot.com/2007/01/defining-supernatural.html)
I think it’s also worth mentioning the novel _Inferno_ by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle. The protagonist is a 20th science fiction writer who dies in an accident & then finds himself in what appears to be Dante’s version of Hell. For a large part of the book his working hypothesis is that it is a construct made by sadistic Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. ( http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SufficientlyAdvancedAlien ) After witnessing enough nasty ‘miracles’ he decides that whoever constructed the Inferno is so powerful he might as well be god, though not necessarily one that deserves respect, much less worship.
We’re still doing Descartes, and the challenges that he faced. How can an immaterial substance (mind) influence a material body?
I can decide (in my mind) to raise my right arm, and then i raise it.
Obviously it’s much more complicated than this, but the 1st person vs 3rd person perspective on minds/brains has not been fully resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
Charles: There is no immaterial substance – and Descartes basically knew the fundamental counterevidence – conservation laws.
Paul, well I’m not really going around saying the word “supernatural” is meaningless; I said here (which can’t possibly be considered “around”) that the more I think about it the more I think it’s a meaningless word. The concept seems to fall apart when one tries to figure it out, which is consistent with the fact you mention: that people can’t articulate what it means.
I realize it has meaning as commonly understood, but what’s commonly understood doesn’t hang together if one pushes on it.
To expand the point, I don’t think it’s better to do what you suggest, or worse either – I think we should do both. I’m not claiming that saying that supernaturalist concepts are meaningless or useless is the best thing to say for all purposes, I’m just trying to figure out what the concept itself can mean, what it would take to convince me that something was supernatural, what the criteria could be, how one can figure that out, and the like. I’m not campaigning, I’m thinking, and talking.
Ophelia,
Sorry if I overreacted a bit; I’m a bit frustrated by the circles that the conversation has gone around in over at WEIT. It’s not so much that you personally are going around saying “meaningless,” but that a lot of people on the “atheist” side do, and it tends to confuse and derail.
I think we need to be really careful about words like “meaningless.”
There are several different questions here. (Somebody posted a shorter list over at WEIT.) Most people seem to be running the different questions together. (Even me, sometimes.)
1. What does “supernatural” mean?
2. Is the meaning of “supernatural” usefully precise, if you don’t let people freely bogify it and move the goalposts?
3. Is the meaning of “supernatural” internally coherent? (Or perhaps hopelessly contradictory? Note that that’s different from being meaningless or imprecise. E.g., “4-sided triangle” is both meaningful and precise, but incoherent.)
4. Is the meaning of “supernatural” coherent with what we’re pretty sure know from science?
5. Is there ultimately a difference between a supernatural entity and a natural one? (In the sense of “not supernatural,” not in the broader sense of “part of reality”.)
6. If there is such a difference, could there be evidence for the supernatural? (That is, evidence that would make you take the “supernatural” seriously, and not be as skeptical as you are now, if not actually believe it.)
7. Could there be good evidence for the supernatural, such that you should believe in it, provisionally and defeasibly?
8. Could you ever be sure that something was supernatural? (But by the same token, can you ever be sure that something is purely natural?)
Here are my answers:
1. “Supernatural” basically means having irreducibly mental or teleological properties, i.e., a close relation to high-level things like Truth or Love or Knowledge or Wisdom or Wrath or whatever, that doesn’t reduce to brute mindless matter/energy/spacetime/whatever. I think Boyer and Carrier have this pretty much right—supernatural means something pretty specific, relative to the normal ways people cognize the world. Despite it being hard to articulate because the categories operate mostly unconsciously, it’s actually pretty simple once you recognize it. (At least for the present purposes. There’s all kinds of interesting questions in the cognitive science of religion.)
2. Yes, the notion of “supernatural” is usefully precise, once you articulate it correctly. It is what a lot of people believe in, talk about, care about, and get all regligious about. If you’re going to argue with them, you need to understand what they’re talking about. Besides, it’s interesting.
3. Yes, the notion of “supernatural” is internally coherent, i.e., not necessarily contradictory, if you don’t use empirical definitions of things that we know from science. E.g., if you don’t know that minds are information processing processes, it’s not self-contradictory to believe in disembodied minds. (That doesn’t mean that particular elaborations of basic supernaturalistic ideas aren’t incoherent. Most religious supernaturalist schemes are internally incoherent because supernatural ideas are elaborated inconsistently, trying to do too much. That’s not a problem with supernaturalism per se, though—it’s a problem with big elaborate schemes with no evidence for them, and the devaluing of rationality in favor of faith. Religion typically takes simple intuitive ideas that happen to be wrong and turns them into elaborate, hopelessly inconsistent monstrosities that are not even wrong.)
4. No, the meaning of supernatural is not coherent with what we know from science. It’s generally assumed that there are irreducible essences, or something close to that, with high-level properties—basically, relatively simple things that can “just do” complicated things. The success of reductionism in science shows that most of those things do in fact reduce to configurations and processes among simpler things, down to nonmental, nonteleological brute matter. Examples: living organisms are just machines, and life is what they do; brains are basically a kind of computer, and minds are what they compute. All the interesting stuff is made out of less interesting stuff, down to really stupid mindless stuff like molecules or whatever.
5. Yes, there is ultimately a difference between a supernatural entity and a natural one. A god is not just a powerful alien with advanced technology, but a specific kind of powerful “alien” that’s alien in a special way. It works by different principles than we work by, involving irreducibly mental or teleological essences.
6. Yes, there could be evidence for the supernatural, but it’d have to be really extraordinary to make a big dent in the credibility of naturalism, given its amazing success so far.
7. Yes, I think there could be good enough evidence for the supernatural that we should think it was probably true. It’d have to be mindbendingly good evidence, though, maybe involving realization that we’d been dreaming or hallucinating a lot of the apparent success of naturalism. It’d be like discovering that the world was flat after all—maybe conceivable, but very implausible at this point.
8. No, you could never be sure that what you were seeing was really supernatural, as opposed to sufficiently advanced technology—for example, aliens could be manipulating your mind to make you think anything they want. By the same token, we can never be absolutely sure that naturalism is true, either. Everything we see could be made out of irreducibly mental or teleological stuff at a lower level, or it could all be a dream and our seemingly good arguments will not seem convincing when we wake up.
philosopher-animal:
I don’t think we should assume that conservation laws are fundamental.
It might turn out, for example, that conservation laws are only a very, very good approximation in our observable hunk of reality, and that they’re really an emergent phenomenon and a weak anthropic thing.
What we see as stable objects might in fact be infinite flows of streams of generating stuff, viewed at a high level of abstraction. (Rather the way we can see a continuous flow of water as a river, or a bunch of molecules zipping around as “a gas” with a stable temperature and pressure.) We don’t know that what we perceive as stable and fixed is stable and fixed at lower levels of abstraction.
And suppose there’s an infinite network of universes in the multiverse, and that deeper reality doesn’t have conservation laws per se—it just has some deep regularities that do allow endless generation of stuff, in ways that make the “laws of nature” different from universe to universe. In universes where there’s a balance between forces, and not either a collapse to nothing or an endless ramifying instability, you’re way more likely to have complex patterns emerge, and eventually intelligent life that could ponder the question. The fact that our universe has conservation laws may say more about us than about universes in general—where there are no conservation laws (or close approximations) there’s less likely to be life and intelligence to ponder the question.
I don’t think conservation laws are <i>constitutive of</i> the “natural” or even utterly fundamental to doing science. (A universe without conservation laws wouldn’t be supernatural, and there’s no necessity that supernatural entities violate deep conservation laws.) They’re the way our universe seems to work (and it appears to be a naturalistic one) but that’s an empirical observation rather than a constitutive principle of science or “naturalism.”
Paul, well I think I was being careful in starting the post with “The more I think about it, and read what other people have to say about it, the more I think “supernatural” is a meaningless word.” I think it’s pretty obvious that that’s not meant to be the opening to an exhaustive account of the subject, much less a definitive one. I think it’s pretty obvious that that’s the opening to a thought or some thoughts on the subject, from one angle, at one moment. I like to take bites at things, especially in blog posts as opposed to books or long articles.
Yes, it makes sense as a category of intuitive ideas, but that doesn’t mean it makes sense as an ontological category.
And I have a slightly different recollection of Religion Explained – I think Boyer included examples of different kinds of category violations under “supernatural”, not only those that involve minds behaving/existing in unusual ways, although the mind-related ones seem to be by far the most common.
Yes that’s it. Of course it makes sense in the sense (sorry) that I know what people mean by it, but when I try to dig into it as an ontological category, it melts away. When I try to think about what it means in the claim that “science cannot investigate the supernatural,” it becomes an empty box. If science can’t investigate it it’s because there’s nothing to investigate, which means that nobody [we know of] can investigate it, because nobody can investigate nothing-to-investigate. That indicates that it doesn’t refer to anything that actually exists.
Windy:
I’m not sure what you mean. Depending on what you mean by “makes sense” and “ontological category” I could either say that it makes sense the former way (intuitive ideas), and either does or doesn’t make sense as an ontological category.
I don’t think it “makes sense” in the sense of believing such things actually do exist, in light of modern science, e.g., the evident reducibility of life and minds to nonteleological and nonmental brute matter and energy. Now that we understand what what life and minds actually are, empirically, it’s hard to see how either could be a matter of an irreducible essence.
(If we found “life” or a “mind” like that, it’d be so radically different from life and minds as we know them that it’s hard to see how they would even count as life or mind. It’d be like finding water that wasn’t H20; now that we empirically know what water actually is, nothing but H20 counts. For somebody who doesn’t know what water actually is, it’s not incoherent or senseless to think it might be something else. For somebody who does, it’s incoherent.)
Boyer’s basic ontological categories include brute matter, tools, plants, animals, and human-like intelligent agents. Tools are a funny case, but the others fit into a spectrum between brute matter and things with higher levels of mentality or at least teleology, which is mind-like. (And in prescientific terms, the difference is very unclear. Even in scientific terms, it’s not very clear what it means to have “teleology” without an information processing system rather like a mind, which can represent goals, at least procedurally.)
What you have there is not just dualism, but triplism or quadruplism or something, with different kinds of irreducibly teleological/mental essences.
For most of our purposes, we can slightly oversimplify that to dualism, one way or another.
Basically, you have brute matter on the one hand, and not-just-brute-matter on the other. (With tools sort of being in either category, depending on whether you view them as brute matter suitably arranged, or somehow imbued with an essence of purpose.)
The not-just-brute-matter category includes plants, animals, and people, all of which behave in goal-seeking ways. (Even plants may turn toward the sun, grow roots in the right direction to provide water, “know how” to develop into their adult forms and heal wounds, etc.)
When Richard Carrier says that supernatural entities have irreducibly “mental” properties, that’s pretty much what I take them to mean—he’s lumping nonmental teleology together with mental intentionality, and I think that’s basically right, but needs to be carefully explained.
It’s right to lump them together, because people generally do lump them together—e.g., Aristotle talking about “plant souls,” “animal souls,” and “person souls” or something like that. In prescientific terms, they’re all akin to having minds—something that magically pursues goals.
In scientifically literate terms, quadruplism or whatever ends up reducing to dualism in a different way. Scientifically literate people should recognize that plants and animals are basically machines, and life and “lower” forms of teleleology and intelligence reduce to the operation of brute matter. They disagree as to whether there’s something left over that must be done by a soul in humans and maybe other kinds of animals.
The upshot in modern, scientifically literate thought is that everything below roughly human-like “souls” reduces to brute matter, so we just have a binary split between the stuff that can be done by nonteleological and nonmental brute matter—including growth, development, basic perception and locomotion, etc.—and the stuff that some people still think requires a supernatural soul.
(And of course, for materialists, even human-like thought and consciousness reduces to brute matter, so it reduces to monism.)
That is an oversimplification, though. You are right that I’m not quite doing justice to Boyer, because his theory can explain some “supernatural” concepts that mere dualism can’t.
IIRC one of his examples is trees that are basically just trees, but can also remember and replay conversations that people have nearby. That’s involves a mixing of categories that are conflated when you oversimplify to dualism. The supernatural trees are trees with something like “plant souls,” but with an extra feature grafted on from human-like minds—the ability to hear and speak in a limited way. (That’s their “superpower,” viewed as trees.) You can’t explain that correctly with either of the dualist oversimplifications above—it’s not grafting a mental or teleological power onto brute matter, but grafting a power from a higher mental category onto something in a lower mental or teleological category.
That’s why I say people should read both Carrier and Boyer. :-) I think Carrier’s dualistic split is about right for most discussions about this sort of thing in western societies, but Boyer’s more refined taxonomy is more powerful, cross-culturally, and you need it to cash out Carrier’s slight oversimplifications correctly.
The oversimplification is appropriate for most of Carrier’s purposes, because his focus is on naturalism vs. non-naturalism. He mainly needs to contrast things that reduce to brute matter with things that don’t, whether the latter involve plant-like teleology or human-like mentation (or associated properties like Truth and Justice and Love).
Boyer’s framework is more general, because he’s trying not just to distinguish between naturalism and supernaturalism, but to explain how all supernaturalist concepts are constructed in all cultures, including talking trees; those are only of marginal interest for modern Western (a-)theological discussions that hinge on purported human souls and/or gods.
Yes. I meant that it could be meaningful in the first sense and meaningless in the latter.
I don’t know if this has been discussed elsewhere recently, but “normal” human and animal minds are not usually considered supernatural, right? So supernatural entities are not simply those with irreducible mental properties, they require intuitive dualism plus exceptions. That’s (one reason) why it’s problematic as a ontological category. It’s like the category “mythical creatures” – most people would have an intuitive sense of what we mean by it, but it would be hard to conceive of evidence for “mythical creatures” in general. (You could conceive of evidence for individual mythical beasts, but that usually means that they stop being mythical. They would be parts of nature, as well)
windy:
Yes. I addressed this somewhere. (At WEIT I think, but maybe here.)
The word “supernatural” has two distinct senses. For dualists (or triplists or quadruplists, etc.) there’s a sense in which a lot of everyday stuff is assumed to be supernatural. (As in “the ghost in the machine” or “we are spirits in the material world” or “Brahman is identical to Atman.”)
So, for example, it’s assumed that when we communicate, we use our material bodies in the normal everyday way to accomplish communication between our spiritual souls.
That obviously supernaturalism, but it’s not usually called “supernatural,” except in certain relatively abstract discussions, because it’s the norm.
The word supernatural is usually used to refer to things that involve supernatural entities in a remarkable way, e.g., if our spirits commune more directly, bypassing the need for speech and body language. Supernatural ESP is more likely to be called “supernatural” than normal conversation, because the supernatural entities are intruding into our experience in an unusual way.
Similarly, a God who can just will something to happen is more markedly and remarkably supernatural than a human whose spiritual will has to be expressed through normal bodily motions, etc.
I don’t think there’s anything unusual about that ambiguity in senses—a lot of adjectives work that way. For example, most people are selfish to a certain extent, and I can say that without much fear of contradiction in this abstract discussion, but if I just call somebody “selfish” in a normal context, that’s different. It implies that they’re unusually selfish, or that their selfishness manifests itself in an unusually direct way, or something more striking like that.