First, so I’m not misunderstood: Science does of course exist and it is not religion. But:
- Not all published science is, in fact, science. The Replication Crisis is a real problem, meaning that a significant portion of published science is actually incorrect.
- Only a very tiny portion of the population reads scientific papers and has the ability to understand them. That includes scientists and other well-educated people who don’t have any expertise on the specific field. Being a renown physicist doesn’t mean you know anything about psychology.
- Scientific papers are filtered through science journalists who might or might not have any expertise in the field and might or might not understand the papers they write about. They then publish what they understood in a more accessible format (e.g. popular science magazines).
- This is then read by minimum wage journalists with no understanding of any of the science, and they publish their misunderstandings in newspapers and other non-scientific publications.
- This is then read by the general public who usually lack the skills and/or the resources to fact-check anything at all.
- These members of the general public then take what they understood as fact and base their world view on it. At this point it hardly matters whether their source of incorrect information is the stack of Chinese whispers I wrote about above, or if it’s just straight-up made up by some religious leader.
There’s thousands of little (or big) misunderstandings in non-science that people believe and have faith in, that forms people’s world views and even their political views. And people often defend their misconceptions, like they would defend some religious views.
(Again, just to make sure I’m not misunderstood: I am no exception to this either. I got my field where I have a lot of knowledge, but for most fields I blindly trust some experts, because I have no way to verify stuff. I, too, for example, put my faith in doctors to heal my illnesses, even though I have no way to verify whether anything they say is true or not.)
Tbh, there’s hardly another way of defining the supernatural.
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that God really exist. He’s a personified being that’s omnicient and omnipotent (let’s ignore paradoxi created by these facts, as they aren’t really relevant to the argument).
Since he’s omnicient he knows how his omnipotence works. Since he’s omnipotent he can replicate what he’s doing and he can show a scientist how he does it. Since he’s omnipotent, he can even make it possible that said scientist can replicate it the same way.
Is this still supernatural, or is it just advanced science?
And to go further, is he breaking the laws of nature, or did we just misunderstand the laws of nature? Like you said, gravity existed before Newton, and that theoretical God’s omnipotent abilities break our understanding of the laws of nature would to me just mean that our understanding was wrong.
To put it differently, someone using the relativity theory is breaking Newton’s laws. That doesn’t mean they are breaking the laws of nature, but only Newton’s understanding of them.
Good point with breaking Newton’s laws. I think that showcases nicely how our understanding isn’t identical to physical reality. We’re just forming models to describe it.
Debating about a world including an omnipotent God is really complicated. He can do everything. Surely God can give arbitrary power to an individual like a scientist? Turn supernatural into natural and the other way round… Create paradoxes… He wouldn’t be omnipotent if he couldn’t do it. We’re leaving the realm of logic with that. Everything and its opposite is possible with that at the same time. At least that’s my understanding. So there isn’t really anything to discuss here, we can’t apply logic or conclude anything. It just doesn’t abide by these things any more.
That’s why I purposely left out paradoxes created by omnipotence/omnicience, because you are right, they are incompatible with logic.
The main thing I wanted to argue is that as soon as something supernatural becomes explainable, it’s not supernatural anymore.
The same argument could be made with anything else supernatural, doesn’t really have to be an omnipotent God. As soon as something supernatural exists, it is part of the laws of nature. It might not fit our model of the laws of nature, but that’s a problem with our models/our understanding, and not a problem of breaking the actual laws of nature.
And at that point it’s something that we can either explain (and thus it’s not supernatural) or something we will be able to explain with enough understanding (and thus also not supernatural).
Unless, that is you follow the definition of magic we talked about above: Magic is what we cannot (yet) explain, and we call it magic because we don’t want to admit that we can’t explain it.
(And with magic I mean any handwavy non-explanation like magic, supernatural, God, aliens, …)