What is the difference between supernatural and natural

Belief in the natural sustains or feeds into the belief that there is a certain mode, certain events we can depend on. Not only depend on, but something we are owed.

Something that belongs to us. Gravity, the path of the sun and earth, the balance in the universe, the ability of the universe to deal with change: is that not also a miracle? I am saying that the mysteries of the universe, both explained and yet to be explained, are miraculous. God has made and s sustaining all that is. God is not a god of the gaps. As the gaps in our knowledge shrink, God does not. God is the god who sustains. Which makes me think, what is the difference between supernatural and natural; what is a miracle?

A miracle is an act of God. That is my best definition. An act of God in our world we call miracles. But if God is always acting to sustain this world. Since we should consider the original intentions of the author as reflecting the authority of God in the text, we cannot claim the Bible says something that makes no sense in the original context.

They believed that when they planted a grain of wheat, wheat would grow. But God would be no less involved in that than if barley grew instead. In the same way, we cannot infer from Genesis whether God created humans naturally capable of scientific description or supernaturally beyond the regular and predictable cause and effect processes just because God is taking an active role.

They believed God always took an active role. At times the text also emphasizes that the God of Israel, not another god, is in control of the events. Think of the plagues of Egypt. The Old Testament focuses on the fact that he could do what no other god could do. God is certainly capable of bypassing normal causes, but it is not safe to infer that he did so just because the Old Testament reports that he acted.

Only the logistics of the scenario could lead us to that conclusion. For example, in the New Testament when Jesus turned water into wine, he obviously bypassed natural processes.

Some insist we should also believe that God bypassed natural processes in the creation of Adam. We could do so if the text or the scenario made it necessary to do so. At the wedding in Cana there is clearly no time for the normal process to have taken place.

As such, it is the scenario more than the language of the text that demands we understand that normal processes were bypassed.

In Genesis 2 there is neither a distinction being drawn by the language nor a scenario that rules out a scientifically describable process for the creation of human beings. This drifts toward deism distancing God from the operations of the cosmos by suggesting that God only acts some of the time.

This kind of thinking is responsible at least in part for bringing about the divide between science and the Bible. The biological origin of human beings was not a concern of the ancient Israelites or any of their neighbors. God made Adam; God made all of us. In the Hebrew language, the same verb can be used for both instances, and God is no less involved in one than in the other. Although these four forces are not the same, there is a certain similarity in the way that each of them is handled.

They also interact via the Higgs boson , but nobody ever calls this a fifth force, because it is not really very much like the others. But again, it seems provincial to define supernatural simply as things we can't describe with mathematical precision. For all we know, if we could do experiments on angels, we would find that they also conform to an elegant set of mathematical equations. Although, considering that it took us thousands of years to find the right equations for the physical universe, which we interact with every minute of our lives, I wouldn't advise that you hold your breath.

Besides, would we really want to say that until the time of Galileo, a ball falling to the ground was a supernatural event? Once again, the concept which we thought was a description of the thing, turns out to be a fact about its relation to us, like the word foreign. However, in Christian theology, there does turn out to be a distinction which is grand enough to justify a portentious word such as supernatural.

There actually is a way to divide the universe into two classes of entities, such that one really is "super" to the other, not just with respect to the limitations of our own knowledge, but in reality.

More on this next time. But if you can't wait for the next post, ask yourself this question: what exactly is it again that the Jews are famous for? Your email address will not be published. Your email:. Everything we Christians believe in, is supported by one of these two kinds of evidence: It has causally influenced the physical world at one time or another, and therefore made an observable difference to the actual sense experiences of some human beings.

If the human being is someone other than us, then we normally learn about this event, not through the scientific method but through the equally empirical historical method. In other words, some one writes it down in a book, we decide that their testimony is credible, and decide to believe it.

God who falls into the first class due to his interactions with the world has communicated to us, directly or through intermediaries, that something is in fact the case. Before that, I read Great Books at St. John's College Santa Fe , got my physics Ph. The views expressed on this blog are my own, and should not be attributed to any of these fine institutions.

This entry was posted in Theology.