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Supernatural refers to phenomena or entities that are beyond the laws of nature. The term is derived from Medieval Latin supernaturalis, from Latin super-,("above, beyond, or outside of") + natura,("nature"). Although the corollary term "nature" has had multiple meanings since the ancient world, the term "supernatural" emerged in the Middle Ages and did not exist in the ancient world.
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The supernatural is featured in folklore and religious contexts, but can also feature as an explanation in more secular contexts, as in the cases of superstitions or belief in the paranormal. The term is attributed to non-physical entities, such as angels, demons, gods and spirits. It also includes claimed abilities embodied in or provided by such beings, including magic, telekinesis, levitation, precognition and extrasensory perception.
The supernatural is hypernymic to religion. Religions are standardized supernaturalist worldviews, or at least more complete than single supernaturalist views. Supernaturalism is the adherence to the supernatural (beliefs, and not violations of causality and the physical laws).
Etymology and history of the concept
Occurring as both an adjective and a noun, antecedents of the modern English compound supernatural enter the language from two sources: via Middle French (supernaturel) and directly from the Middle French's term's ancestor, post-Classical Latin (supernaturalis). Post-classical Latin supernaturalis first occurs in the 6th century, composed of the Latin prefix super- and nātūrālis (see nature). The earliest known appearance of the word in the English language occurs in a Middle English translation of Catherine of Siena's Dialogue (orcherd of Syon, around 1425; Þei haue not þanne þe supernaturel lyȝt ne þe liȝt of kunnynge, bycause þei vndirstoden it not).
The semantic value of the term has shifted over the history of its use. Originally the term referred exclusively to Christian understandings of the world. For example, as an adjective, the term can mean "belonging to a realm or system that transcends nature, as that of divine, magical, or ghostly beings; attributed to or thought to reveal some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature; occult, paranormal" or "more than what is natural or ordinary; unnaturally or extraordinarily great; abnormal, extraordinary". Obsolete uses include "of, relating to, or dealing with metaphysics". As a noun, the term can mean "a supernatural being", with a particularly strong history of employment in relation to entities from the mythologies of the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
History of the concept
The ancient world had no word that resembled "supernatural". Dialogues from Neoplatonic philosophy in the third century AD influenced the development of the concept of the supernatural, which later evolved through Christian theology. The term nature had existed since antiquity, with Latin authors like Augustine using the word and its cognates at least 600 times in City of God. In the medieval period, "nature" had ten different meanings and "natural" had eleven different meanings.Peter Lombard, a medieval scholastic of the 12th century, explored causes beyond nature, questioning how certain phenomena could be attributed solely to God. In his writings, he used the term praeter naturam to describe these occurrences. In the scholastic period, Thomas Aquinas classified miracles into three categories: "above nature", "beyond nature" and "against nature". In doing so, he sharpened the distinction between nature and miracles more than the early Church Fathers had done. As a result, he had created a dichotomy of sorts of the natural and supernatural. Though the phrase "supra naturam" was used since the 4th century AD, it was in the 1200s that Thomas Aquinas used the term "supernaturalis". Despite this, the term had to wait until the end of the medieval period before it became more popularly used. The discussions on "nature" from the scholastic period were diverse and unsettled with some postulating that even miracles are natural and that natural magic was a natural part of the world.
Epistemology and metaphysics
The metaphysical considerations of the existence of the supernatural can be difficult to approach as an exercise in philosophy or theology because any dependencies on its antithesis, the natural, will ultimately have to be inverted or rejected. One complicating factor is that there is disagreement about the definition of "natural" and the limits of naturalism. Concepts in the supernatural domain are closely related to concepts in religious spirituality and occultism or spiritualism.
For sometimes we use the word nature for that Author of nature whom the schoolmen, harshly enough, call natura naturans, as when it is said that nature hath made man partly corporeal and partly immaterial. Sometimes we mean by the nature of a thing the essence, or that which the schoolmen scruple not to call the quiddity of a thing, namely, the attribute or attributes on whose score it is what it is, whether the thing be corporeal or not, as when we attempt to define the nature of an angle, or of a triangle, or of a fluid body, as such. Sometimes we take nature for an internal principle of motion, as when we say that a stone let fall in the air is by nature carried towards the centre of the earth, and, on the contrary, that fire or flame does naturally move upwards toward firmament. Sometimes we understand by nature the established course of things, as when we say that nature makes the night succeed the day, nature hath made respiration necessary to the life of men. Sometimes we take nature for an aggregate of powers belonging to a body, especially a living one, as when physicians say that nature is strong or weak or spent, or that in such or such diseases nature left to herself will do the cure. Sometimes we take nature for the universe, or system of the corporeal works of God, as when it is said of a phoenix, or a chimera, that there is no such thing in nature, i.e. in the world. And sometimes too, and that most commonly, we would express by nature a semi-deity or other strange kind of being, such as this discourse examines the notion of.
And besides these more absolute acceptions, if I may so call them, of the word nature, it has divers others (more relative), as nature is wont to be set or in opposition or contradistinction to other things, as when we say of a stone when it falls downwards that it does it by a natural motion, but that if it be thrown upwards its motion that way is violent. So chemists distinguish vitriol into natural and fictitious, or made by art, i.e. by the intervention of human power or skill; so it is said that water, kept suspended in a sucking pump, is not in its natural place, as that is which is stagnant in the well. We say also that wicked men are still in the state of nature, but the regenerate in a state of grace; that cures wrought by medicines are natural operations; but the miraculous ones wrought by Christ and his apostles were supernatural.— Robert Boyle, A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature
Nomological possibility is possibility under the actual laws of nature. Most philosophers since David Hume have held that the laws of nature are metaphysically contingent—that there could have been different natural laws than the ones that actually obtain. If so, then it would not be logically or metaphysically impossible, for example, for you to travel to Alpha Centauri in one day; it would just have to be the case that you could travel faster than the speed of light. But of course there is an important sense in which this is not nomologically possible; given that the laws of nature are what they are. In the philosophy of natural science, impossibility assertions come to be widely accepted as overwhelmingly probable rather than considered proved to the point of being unchallengeable. The basis for this strong acceptance is a combination of extensive evidence of something not occurring, combined with an underlying scientific theory, very successful in making predictions, whose assumptions lead logically to the conclusion that something is impossible. While an impossibility assertion in natural science can never be absolutely proved, it could be refuted by the observation of a single counterexample. Such a counterexample would require that the assumptions underlying the theory that implied the impossibility be re-examined. Some philosophers, such as Sydney Shoemaker, have argued that the laws of nature are in fact necessary, not contingent; if so, then nomological possibility is equivalent to metaphysical possibility.
The term supernatural is often used interchangeably with paranormal or preternatural—the latter typically limited to an adjective for describing abilities which appear to exceed what is possible within the boundaries of the laws of physics.Epistemologically, the relationship between the supernatural and the natural is indistinct in terms of natural phenomena that, ex hypothesi, violate the laws of nature, in so far as such laws are realistically accountable.
Parapsychologists use the term psi to refer to an assumed unitary force underlying the phenomena they study. Psi is defined in the Journal of Parapsychology as "personal factors or processes in nature which transcend accepted laws" (1948: 311) and "which are non-physical in nature" (1962:310), and it is used to cover both extrasensory perception (ESP), an "awareness of or response to an external event or influence not apprehended by sensory means" (1962:309) or inferred from sensory knowledge, and psychokinesis (PK), "the direct influence exerted on a physical system by a subject without any known intermediate energy or instrumentation" (1945:305).
— Michael Winkelman, Current Anthropology
Views on the "supernatural" vary, for example it may be seen as:
- indistinct from nature. From this perspective, some events occur according to the laws of nature, and others occur according to a separate set of principles external to known nature. For example, in Scholasticism, it was believed that God was capable of performing any miracle so long as it did not lead to a logical contradiction. Some religions posit immanent deities, however, and do not have a tradition analogous to the supernatural; some believe that everything anyone experiences occurs by the will (occasionalism), in the mind (neoplatonism), or as a part (nondualism) of a more fundamental divine reality (platonism).
- incorrect human attribution. In this view all events have natural and only natural causes. They believe that human beings ascribe supernatural attributes to purely natural events, such as lightning, rainbows, floods and the origin of life.
Cross cultural studies
Anthropological studies across cultures indicate that people do not hold or use natural and supernatural explanations in a mutually exclusive or dichotomous fashion. Instead, the reconciliation of natural and supernatural explanations is normal and pervasive across cultures. Cross cultural studies indicate that there is coexistence of natural and supernatural explanations in both adults and children for explaining numerous things about the world, such as illness, death, and origins. Context and cultural input play a large role in determining when and how individuals incorporate natural and supernatural explanations. The coexistence of natural and supernatural explanations in individuals may be the outcomes two distinct cognitive domains: one concerned with the physical-mechanical relations and another with social relations. Studies on indigenous groups have allowed for insights on how such coexistence of explanations may function.
Supernatural concepts
Deity
A deity (/ˈdiːəti/ or /ˈdeɪ.əti/ ) is a supernatural being considered divine or sacred. The Oxford Dictionary of English defines deity as "a god or goddess (in a polytheistic religion)", or anything revered as divine.C. Scott Littleton defines a deity as "a being with powers greater than those of ordinary humans, but who interacts with humans, positively or negatively, in ways that carry humans to new levels of consciousness, beyond the grounded preoccupations of ordinary life." A male deity is a god, while a female deity is a goddess.
Religions can be categorized by how many deities they worship. Monotheistic religions accept only one deity (predominantly referred to as God),polytheistic religions accept multiple deities.Henotheistic religions accept one supreme deity without denying other deities, considering them as equivalent aspects of the same divine principle; and nontheistic religions deny any supreme eternal creator deity but accept a pantheon of deities which live, die and are reborn just like any other being.: 35–37 : 357–358
Various cultures have conceptualized a deity differently than a monotheistic God. A deity need not be omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, omnibenevolent or eternal, The monotheistic God, however, does have these attributes. Monotheistic religions typically refer to God in masculine terms,: 96 while other religions refer to their deities in a variety of ways – masculine, feminine, androgynous and gender neutral.
Historically, many ancient cultures – such as Ancient India, Ancient Iraq, Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, Nordic and Asian culture – personified natural phenomena, variously as either their conscious causes or simply their effects, respectively. Some Avestan and Vedic deities were viewed as ethical concepts. In Indian religions, deities have been envisioned as manifesting within the temple of every living being's body, as sensory organs and mind. Deities have also been envisioned as a form of existence (Saṃsāra) after rebirth, for human beings who gain merit through an ethical life, where they become guardian deities and live blissfully in heaven, but are also subject to death when their merit runs out.: 35–38 : 356–359
Angel
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An angel is generally a supernatural being found in various religions and mythologies. In Abrahamic religions and Zoroastrianism, angels are often depicted as benevolent celestial beings who act as intermediaries between God or Heaven and Earth. Other roles of angels include protecting and guiding human beings and carrying out God's tasks. Within Abrahamic religions, angels are often organized into hierarchies, although such rankings may vary between sects in each religion, and are given specific names or titles, such as Gabriel or "Destroying angel". The term "angel" has also been expanded to various notions of spirits or figures found in other religious traditions. The theological study of angels is known as "angelology".
In fine art, angels are usually depicted as having the shape of human beings of extraordinary beauty; they are often identified using the symbols of bird wings,halos and light.
Prophecy
Prophecy involves a process in which messages are communicated by a god to a prophet. Such messages typically involve inspiration, interpretation, or revelation of divine will concerning the prophet's social world and events to come (compare divine knowledge). Prophecy is not limited to any one culture. It is a common property to all known ancient societies around the world, some more than others. Many systems and rules about prophecy have been proposed over several millennia.
Revelation
In religion and theology, revelation is the revealing or disclosing of some form of truth or knowledge through communication with a deity or other supernatural entity or entities.
Some religions have religious texts which they view as divinely or supernaturally revealed or inspired. For instance, Orthodox Jews, Christians and Muslims believe that the Torah was received from Yahweh on biblical Mount Sinai. Most Christians believe that both the Old Testament and the New Testament were inspired by God. Muslims believe the Quran was revealed by God to Muhammad word by word through the angel Gabriel (Jibril). In Hinduism, some Vedas are considered apauruṣeya, "not human compositions", and are supposed to have been directly revealed, and thus are called śruti, "what is heard". Aleister Crowley stated that The Book of the Law had been revealed to him through a higher being that called itself Aiwass.
A revelation communicated by a supernatural entity reported as being present during the event is called a vision. Direct conversations between the recipient and the supernatural entity, or physical marks such as stigmata, have been reported. In rare cases, such as that of Saint Juan Diego, physical artifacts accompany the revelation. The Roman Catholic concept of interior locution includes just an inner voice heard by the recipient.
In the Abrahamic religions, the term is used to refer to the process by which God reveals knowledge of himself, his will and his divine providence to the world of human beings. In secondary usage, revelation refers to the resulting human knowledge about God, prophecy and other divine things. Revelation from a supernatural source plays a less important role in some other religious traditions such as Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism.
Reincarnation
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Reincarnation is the philosophical or religious concept that an aspect of a living being starts a new life in a different physical body or form after each biological death. It is also called rebirth or transmigration, and is a part of the Saṃsāra doctrine of cyclic existence. It is a central tenet of all major Indian religions, namely Jainism, Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism. The idea of reincarnation is found in many ancient cultures, and a belief in rebirth/metempsychosis was held by Greek historic figures, such as Pythagoras, Socrates and Plato. It is also a common belief of various ancient and modern religions such as Spiritism, Theosophy and Eckankar and as an esoteric belief in many streams of Orthodox Judaism. It is found as well in many tribal societies around the world, in places such as Australia, East Asia, Siberia and South America.
Although the majority of denominations within Christianity and Islam do not believe that individuals reincarnate, particular groups within these religions do refer to reincarnation; these groups include the mainstream historical and contemporary followers of Cathars, Alawites, the Druze and the Rosicrucians. The historical relations between these sects and the beliefs about reincarnation that were characteristic of Neoplatonism, Orphism, Hermeticism, Manicheanism and Gnosticism of the Roman era as well as the Indian religions, have been the subject of recent scholarly research.Unity Church and its founder Charles Fillmore teaches reincarnation.
In recent decades, many Europeans and North Americans have developed an interest in reincarnation, and many contemporary works mention it.
Karma
Karma (/ˈkɑːrmə/; Sanskrit: कर्म, romanized: karma, IPA: [ˈkɐɽmɐ] ; Pali: kamma) means action, work or deed; it also refers to the spiritual principle of cause and effect where intent and actions of an individual (cause) influence the future of that individual (effect). Good intent and good deeds contribute to good karma and future happiness, while bad intent and bad deeds contribute to bad karma and future suffering.
With origins in ancient India's Vedic civilization, the philosophy of karma is closely associated with the idea of rebirth in many schools of Indian religions (particularly Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism) as well as Taoism. In these schools, karma in the present affects one's future in the current life, as well as the nature and quality of future lives – one's saṃsāra.
Christian theology
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In Catholic theology, the supernatural order is, according to New Advent, defined as "the ensemble of effects exceeding the powers of the created universe and gratuitously produced by God for the purpose of raising the rational creature above its native sphere to a God-like life and destiny." The Modern Catholic Dictionary defines it as "the sum total of heavenly destiny and all the divinely established means of reaching that destiny, which surpass the mere powers and capacities of human nature."
Process theology
Process theology is a school of thought influenced by the metaphysical process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and further developed by Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000).
It is not possible, in process metaphysics, to conceive divine activity as a "supernatural" intervention into the "natural" order of events. Process theists usually regard the distinction between the supernatural and the natural as a by-product of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo. In process thought, there is no such thing as a realm of the natural in contrast to that which is supernatural. On the other hand, if "the natural" is defined more neutrally as "what is in the nature of things", then process metaphysics characterizes the natural as the creative activity of actual entities. In Whitehead's words, "It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity" (Whitehead 1978, 21). It is tempting to emphasize process theism's denial of the supernatural and thereby highlight that the processed God cannot do in comparison what the traditional God could do (that is, to bring something from nothing). In fairness, however, equal stress should be placed on process theism's denial of the natural (as traditionally conceived) so that one may highlight what the creatures cannot do, in traditional theism, in comparison to what they can do in process metaphysics (that is, to be part creators of the world with God).
— Donald Viney, "Process Theism" in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Heaven
Heaven, or the heavens, is a common religious, cosmological, or transcendent place where beings such as gods, angels, spirits, saints, or venerated ancestors are said to originate, be enthroned, or live. According to the beliefs of some religions, heavenly beings can descend to Earth or incarnate, and earthly beings can ascend to heaven in the afterlife, or in exceptional cases enter heaven alive.
Heaven is often described as a "higher place", the holiest place, a Paradise, in contrast to hell or the Underworld or the "low places" and universally or conditionally accessible by earthly beings according to various standards of divinity, goodness, piety, faith, or other virtues or right beliefs or simply the will of God. Some believe in the possibility of a heaven on Earth in a world to come.
Another belief is in an axis mundi or world tree which connects the heavens, the terrestrial world and the underworld. In Indian religions, heaven is considered as Svarga loka, and the soul is again subjected to rebirth in different living forms according to its karma. This cycle can be broken after a soul achieves Moksha or Nirvana. Any place of existence, either of humans, souls or deities, outside the tangible world (Heaven, Hell, or other) is referred to as otherworld.
Underworld
The underworld is the supernatural world of the dead in various religious traditions, located below the world of the living.Chthonic is the technical adjective for things of the underworld.
The concept of an underworld is found in almost every civilization and "may be as old as humanity itself". Common features of underworld myths are accounts of living people making journeys to the underworld, often for some heroic purpose. Other myths reinforce traditions that entrance of souls to the underworld requires a proper observation of ceremony, such as the ancient Greek story of the recently dead Patroclus haunting Achilles until his body could be properly buried for this purpose. Persons having social status were dressed and equipped in order to better navigate the underworld.
A number of mythologies incorporate the concept of the soul of the deceased making its own journey to the underworld, with the dead needing to be taken across a defining obstacle such as a lake or a river to reach this destination. Imagery of such journeys can be found in both ancient and modern art. The descent to the underworld has been described as "the single most important myth for Modernist authors".
Spirit
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A spirit is a supernatural being, often but not exclusively a non-physical entity; such as a ghost, fairy, jinn or angel. The concepts of a person's spirit and soul, often also overlap, as both are either contrasted with or given ontological priority over the body and both are believed to survive bodily death in some religions, and "spirit" can also have the sense of "ghost", i.e. a manifestation of the spirit of a deceased person. In English Bibles, "the Spirit" (with a capital "S"), specifically denotes the Holy Spirit.
Spirit is often used metaphysically to refer to the consciousness or personality.
Historically, it was also used to refer to a "subtle" as opposed to "gross" material substance, as in the famous last paragraph of Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica.
Demon
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A demon (from Koine Greek δαιμόνιον daimónion) is a supernatural and often malevolent being prevalent in religion, occultism, literature, fiction, mythology and folklore.
In Ancient Near Eastern religions as well as in the Abrahamic traditions, including ancient and medieval Christian demonology, a demon is considered a harmful spiritual entity, below the heavenly planes which may cause demonic possession, calling for an exorcism. In Western occultism and Renaissance magic, which grew out of an amalgamation of Greco-Roman magic, Jewish Aggadah and Christian demonology, a demon is believed to be a spiritual entity that may be conjured and controlled.
Magic
Magic or sorcery is the use of rituals, symbols, actions, gestures, or language with the aim of utilizing supernatural forces.: 6–7 : 24 Belief in and practice of magic has been present since the earliest human cultures and continues to have an important spiritual, religious and medicinal role in many cultures today. The term magic has a variety of meanings, and there is no widely agreed upon definition of what it is.
Scholars of religion have defined magic in different ways. One approach, associated with the anthropologists Edward Tylor and James G. Frazer, suggests that magic and science are opposites. An alternative approach, associated with the sociologists Marcel Mauss and Emile Durkheim, argues that magic takes place in private, while religion is a communal and organised activity. Many scholars of religion have rejected the utility of the term magic and it has become increasingly unpopular within scholarship since the 1990s.[citation needed]
The term magic comes from the Old Persian magu, a word that applied to a form of religious functionary about which little is known. During the late sixth and early fifth centuries BC, this term was adopted into Ancient Greek, where it was used with negative connotations, to apply to religious rites that were regarded as fraudulent, unconventional and dangerous. This meaning of the term was then adopted by Latin in the first century BC. The concept was then incorporated into Christian theology during the first century AD, where magic was associated with demons and thus defined against religion. This concept was pervasive throughout the Middle Ages, although in the early modern period Italian humanists reinterpreted the term in a positive sense to establish the idea of natural magic. Both negative and positive understandings of the term were retained in Western culture over the following centuries, with the former largely influencing early academic usages of the word.
Throughout history, there have been examples of individuals who practiced magic and referred to themselves as magicians. This trend has proliferated in the modern period, with a growing number of magicians appearing within the esoteric milieu.[not verified in body] British esotericist Aleister Crowley described magic as the art of effecting change in accordance with will.
Divination
Divination (from Latin divinare "to foresee, to be inspired by a god", related to divinus, divine) is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic, standardized process or ritual. Used in various forms throughout history, diviners ascertain their interpretations of how a querent should proceed by reading signs, events, or omens, or through alleged contact with a supernatural agency.
Divination can be seen as a systematic method with which to organize what appear to be disjointed, random facets of existence such that they provide insight into a problem at hand. If a distinction is to be made between divination and fortune-telling, divination has a more formal or ritualistic element and often contains a more social character, usually in a religious context, as seen in traditional African medicine. Fortune-telling, on the other hand, is a more everyday practice for personal purposes. Particular divination methods vary by culture and religion.
Divination is dismissed by the scientific community and skeptics as being superstition. In the 2nd century, Lucian devoted a witty essay to the career of a charlatan, "Alexander the false prophet", trained by "one of those who advertise enchantments, miraculous incantations, charms for your love-affairs, visitations for your enemies, disclosures of buried treasure and successions to estates".
Witchcraft
Witchcraft or witchery broadly means the practice of and belief in magical skills and abilities exercised by solitary practitioners and groups. Witchcraft is a broad term that varies culturally and societally and thus can be difficult to define with precision, and cross-cultural assumptions about the meaning or significance of the term should be applied with caution. Witchcraft often occupies a religious divinatory or medicinal role and is often present within societies and groups whose cultural framework includes a magical world view.
Miracle
A miracle is an event not explicable by natural or scientific laws. Such an event may be attributed to a supernatural being (a deity), a miracle worker, a saint or a religious leader.
Informally, the word "miracle" is often used to characterise any beneficial event that is statistically unlikely but not contrary to the laws of nature, such as surviving a natural disaster, or simply a "wonderful" occurrence, regardless of likelihood, such as a birth. Other such miracles might be: survival of an illness diagnosed as terminal, escaping a life-threatening situation or 'beating the odds'. Some coincidences may be seen as miracles.
A true miracle would, by definition, be a non-natural phenomenon, leading many rational and scientific thinkers to dismiss them as physically impossible (that is, requiring violation of established laws of physics within their domain of validity) or impossible to confirm by their nature (because all possible physical mechanisms can never be ruled out). The former position is expressed for instance by Thomas Jefferson and the latter by David Hume. Theologians typically say that, with divine providence, God regularly works through nature yet, as a creator, is free to work without, above, or against it as well. The possibility and probability of miracles are then equal to the possibility and probability of the existence of God.
Skepticism
Skepticism (American English) or scepticism (British English; see spelling differences) is generally any questioning attitude or doubt towards one or more items of putative knowledge or belief. It is often directed at domains such as the supernatural, morality (moral skepticism), religion (skepticism about the existence of God), or knowledge (skepticism about the possibility of knowledge, or of certainty).
In fiction and popular culture
Supernatural entities and powers are common in various works of fantasy. Examples include the television shows Supernatural and The X-Files, the magic of the Harry Potter series, The Lord of the Rings series, The Wheel of Time series and A Song of Ice and Fire series.
See also
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- Journal of Parapsychology
- Liberal naturalism
- Magical thinking
- Paranormal
- Parapsychology
- Religious naturalism
- Romanticism
- Spirit photography
- Spirit world (Spiritualism)
- Transcendence (religion)
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Further reading
- Economic Production and the Spread of Supernatural Beliefs ~ Daniel Araújo (PDF). January 7, 2022.
- Bouvet R, Bonnefon J. F. (2015). "Non-Reflective Thinkers Are Predisposed to Attribute Supernatural Causation to Uncanny Experiences". Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 41 (7): 955–61. doi:10.1177/0146167215585728. PMID 25948700. S2CID 33570482.
- McNamara P, Bulkeley K (2015). "Dreams as a Source of Supernatural Agent Concepts". Frontiers in Psychology. 6: 283. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00283. PMC 4365543. PMID 25852602.
- Riekki T, Lindeman M, Raij T. T. (2014). "Supernatural Believers Attribute More Intentions to Random Movement than Skeptics: An fMRI Study". Social Neuroscience. 9 (4): 400–411. doi:10.1080/17470919.2014.906366. PMID 24720663. S2CID 33940568.
{{cite journal}}
: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) - Purzycki Benjamin G (2013). "The Minds of Gods: A Comparative Study of Supernatural Agency". Cognition. 129 (1): 163–179. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2013.06.010. PMID 23891826. S2CID 23554738.
- Thomson P, Jaque S. V. (2014). "Unresolved Mourning, Supernatural Beliefs and Dissociation: A Mediation Analysis". Attachment and Human Development. 16 (5): 499–514. doi:10.1080/14616734.2014.926945. PMID 24913392. S2CID 10290610.
- Vail K. E, Arndt J, Addollahi A. (2012). "Exploring the Existential Function of Religion and Supernatural Agent Beliefs Among Christians, Muslims, Atheists, and Agnostics". Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 38 (10): 1288–1300. doi:10.1177/0146167212449361. PMID 22700240. S2CID 2019266.
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Supernatural refers to phenomena or entities that are beyond the laws of nature The term is derived from Medieval Latin supernaturalis from Latin super above beyond or outside of natura nature Although the corollary term nature has had multiple meanings since the ancient world the term supernatural emerged in the Middle Ages and did not exist in the ancient world Saint Peter Attempting to Walk on Water 1766 painting by Francois Boucher The supernatural is featured in folklore and religious contexts but can also feature as an explanation in more secular contexts as in the cases of superstitions or belief in the paranormal The term is attributed to non physical entities such as angels demons gods and spirits It also includes claimed abilities embodied in or provided by such beings including magic telekinesis levitation precognition and extrasensory perception The supernatural is hypernymic to religion Religions are standardized supernaturalist worldviews or at least more complete than single supernaturalist views Supernaturalism is the adherence to the supernatural beliefs and not violations of causality and the physical laws Etymology and history of the conceptOccurring as both an adjective and a noun antecedents of the modern English compound supernatural enter the language from two sources via Middle French supernaturel and directly from the Middle French s term s ancestor post Classical Latin supernaturalis Post classical Latin supernaturalis first occurs in the 6th century composed of the Latin prefix super and naturalis see nature The earliest known appearance of the word in the English language occurs in a Middle English translation of Catherine of Siena s Dialogue orcherd of Syon around 1425 THei haue not thanne the supernaturel lyȝt ne the liȝt of kunnynge bycause thei vndirstoden it not The semantic value of the term has shifted over the history of its use Originally the term referred exclusively to Christian understandings of the world For example as an adjective the term can mean belonging to a realm or system that transcends nature as that of divine magical or ghostly beings attributed to or thought to reveal some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature occult paranormal or more than what is natural or ordinary unnaturally or extraordinarily great abnormal extraordinary Obsolete uses include of relating to or dealing with metaphysics As a noun the term can mean a supernatural being with a particularly strong history of employment in relation to entities from the mythologies of the indigenous peoples of the Americas History of the concept The ancient world had no word that resembled supernatural Dialogues from Neoplatonic philosophy in the third century AD influenced the development of the concept of the supernatural which later evolved through Christian theology The term nature had existed since antiquity with Latin authors like Augustine using the word and its cognates at least 600 times in City of God In the medieval period nature had ten different meanings and natural had eleven different meanings Peter Lombard a medieval scholastic of the 12th century explored causes beyond nature questioning how certain phenomena could be attributed solely to God In his writings he used the term praeter naturam to describe these occurrences In the scholastic period Thomas Aquinas classified miracles into three categories above nature beyond nature and against nature In doing so he sharpened the distinction between nature and miracles more than the early Church Fathers had done As a result he had created a dichotomy of sorts of the natural and supernatural Though the phrase supra naturam was used since the 4th century AD it was in the 1200s that Thomas Aquinas used the term supernaturalis Despite this the term had to wait until the end of the medieval period before it became more popularly used The discussions on nature from the scholastic period were diverse and unsettled with some postulating that even miracles are natural and that natural magic was a natural part of the world Epistemology and metaphysicsThe metaphysical considerations of the existence of the supernatural can be difficult to approach as an exercise in philosophy or theology because any dependencies on its antithesis the natural will ultimately have to be inverted or rejected One complicating factor is that there is disagreement about the definition of natural and the limits of naturalism Concepts in the supernatural domain are closely related to concepts in religious spirituality and occultism or spiritualism For sometimes we use the word nature for that Author of nature whom the schoolmen harshly enough call natura naturans as when it is said that nature hath made man partly corporeal and partly immaterial Sometimes we mean by the nature of a thing the essence or that which the schoolmen scruple not to call the quiddity of a thing namely the attribute or attributes on whose score it is what it is whether the thing be corporeal or not as when we attempt to define the nature of an angle or of a triangle or of a fluid body as such Sometimes we take nature for an internal principle of motion as when we say that a stone let fall in the air is by nature carried towards the centre of the earth and on the contrary that fire or flame does naturally move upwards toward firmament Sometimes we understand by nature the established course of things as when we say that nature makes the night succeed the day nature hath made respiration necessary to the life of men Sometimes we take nature for an aggregate of powers belonging to a body especially a living one as when physicians say that nature is strong or weak or spent or that in such or such diseases nature left to herself will do the cure Sometimes we take nature for the universe or system of the corporeal works of God as when it is said of a phoenix or a chimera that there is no such thing in nature i e in the world And sometimes too and that most commonly we would express by nature a semi deity or other strange kind of being such as this discourse examines the notion of And besides these more absolute acceptions if I may so call them of the word nature it has divers others more relative as nature is wont to be set or in opposition or contradistinction to other things as when we say of a stone when it falls downwards that it does it by a natural motion but that if it be thrown upwards its motion that way is violent So chemists distinguish vitriol into natural and fictitious or made by art i e by the intervention of human power or skill so it is said that water kept suspended in a sucking pump is not in its natural place as that is which is stagnant in the well We say also that wicked men are still in the state of nature but the regenerate in a state of grace that cures wrought by medicines are natural operations but the miraculous ones wrought by Christ and his apostles were supernatural Robert Boyle A Free Enquiry into the Vulgarly Received Notion of Nature Nomological possibility is possibility under the actual laws of nature Most philosophers since David Hume have held that the laws of nature are metaphysically contingent that there could have been different natural laws than the ones that actually obtain If so then it would not be logically or metaphysically impossible for example for you to travel to Alpha Centauri in one day it would just have to be the case that you could travel faster than the speed of light But of course there is an important sense in which this is not nomologically possible given that the laws of nature are what they are In the philosophy of natural science impossibility assertions come to be widely accepted as overwhelmingly probable rather than considered proved to the point of being unchallengeable The basis for this strong acceptance is a combination of extensive evidence of something not occurring combined with an underlying scientific theory very successful in making predictions whose assumptions lead logically to the conclusion that something is impossible While an impossibility assertion in natural science can never be absolutely proved it could be refuted by the observation of a single counterexample Such a counterexample would require that the assumptions underlying the theory that implied the impossibility be re examined Some philosophers such as Sydney Shoemaker have argued that the laws of nature are in fact necessary not contingent if so then nomological possibility is equivalent to metaphysical possibility The term supernatural is often used interchangeably with paranormal or preternatural the latter typically limited to an adjective for describing abilities which appear to exceed what is possible within the boundaries of the laws of physics Epistemologically the relationship between the supernatural and the natural is indistinct in terms of natural phenomena that ex hypothesi violate the laws of nature in so far as such laws are realistically accountable Parapsychologists use the term psi to refer to an assumed unitary force underlying the phenomena they study Psi is defined in the Journal of Parapsychology as personal factors or processes in nature which transcend accepted laws 1948 311 and which are non physical in nature 1962 310 and it is used to cover both extrasensory perception ESP an awareness of or response to an external event or influence not apprehended by sensory means 1962 309 or inferred from sensory knowledge and psychokinesis PK the direct influence exerted on a physical system by a subject without any known intermediate energy or instrumentation 1945 305 Michael Winkelman Current Anthropology Views on the supernatural vary for example it may be seen as indistinct from nature From this perspective some events occur according to the laws of nature and others occur according to a separate set of principles external to known nature For example in Scholasticism it was believed that God was capable of performing any miracle so long as it did not lead to a logical contradiction Some religions posit immanent deities however and do not have a tradition analogous to the supernatural some believe that everything anyone experiences occurs by the will occasionalism in the mind neoplatonism or as a part nondualism of a more fundamental divine reality platonism incorrect human attribution In this view all events have natural and only natural causes They believe that human beings ascribe supernatural attributes to purely natural events such as lightning rainbows floods and the origin of life Cross cultural studiesAnthropological studies across cultures indicate that people do not hold or use natural and supernatural explanations in a mutually exclusive or dichotomous fashion Instead the reconciliation of natural and supernatural explanations is normal and pervasive across cultures Cross cultural studies indicate that there is coexistence of natural and supernatural explanations in both adults and children for explaining numerous things about the world such as illness death and origins Context and cultural input play a large role in determining when and how individuals incorporate natural and supernatural explanations The coexistence of natural and supernatural explanations in individuals may be the outcomes two distinct cognitive domains one concerned with the physical mechanical relations and another with social relations Studies on indigenous groups have allowed for insights on how such coexistence of explanations may function Supernatural conceptsDeity A deity ˈ d iː e t i or ˈ d eɪ e t i is a supernatural being considered divine or sacred The Oxford Dictionary of English defines deity as a god or goddess in a polytheistic religion or anything revered as divine C Scott Littleton defines a deity as a being with powers greater than those of ordinary humans but who interacts with humans positively or negatively in ways that carry humans to new levels of consciousness beyond the grounded preoccupations of ordinary life A male deity is a god while a female deity is a goddess Religions can be categorized by how many deities they worship Monotheistic religions accept only one deity predominantly referred to as God polytheistic religions accept multiple deities Henotheistic religions accept one supreme deity without denying other deities considering them as equivalent aspects of the same divine principle and nontheistic religions deny any supreme eternal creator deity but accept a pantheon of deities which live die and are reborn just like any other being 35 37 357 358 Various cultures have conceptualized a deity differently than a monotheistic God A deity need not be omnipotent omnipresent omniscient omnibenevolent or eternal The monotheistic God however does have these attributes Monotheistic religions typically refer to God in masculine terms 96 while other religions refer to their deities in a variety of ways masculine feminine androgynous and gender neutral Historically many ancient cultures such as Ancient India Ancient Iraq Ancient Egyptian Ancient Greek Ancient Roman Nordic and Asian culture personified natural phenomena variously as either their conscious causes or simply their effects respectively Some Avestan and Vedic deities were viewed as ethical concepts In Indian religions deities have been envisioned as manifesting within the temple of every living being s body as sensory organs and mind Deities have also been envisioned as a form of existence Saṃsara after rebirth for human beings who gain merit through an ethical life where they become guardian deities and live blissfully in heaven but are also subject to death when their merit runs out 35 38 356 359 Angel The Archangel Michael wears a late Roman military cloak and cuirass in this 17th century depiction by Guido Reni Schutzengel English Guardian Angel by Bernhard Plockhorst depicts a guardian angel watching over two children An angel is generally a supernatural being found in various religions and mythologies In Abrahamic religions and Zoroastrianism angels are often depicted as benevolent celestial beings who act as intermediaries between God or Heaven and Earth Other roles of angels include protecting and guiding human beings and carrying out God s tasks Within Abrahamic religions angels are often organized into hierarchies although such rankings may vary between sects in each religion and are given specific names or titles such as Gabriel or Destroying angel The term angel has also been expanded to various notions of spirits or figures found in other religious traditions The theological study of angels is known as angelology In fine art angels are usually depicted as having the shape of human beings of extraordinary beauty they are often identified using the symbols of bird wings halos and light Prophecy Prophecy involves a process in which messages are communicated by a god to a prophet Such messages typically involve inspiration interpretation or revelation of divine will concerning the prophet s social world and events to come compare divine knowledge Prophecy is not limited to any one culture It is a common property to all known ancient societies around the world some more than others Many systems and rules about prophecy have been proposed over several millennia Revelation In religion and theology revelation is the revealing or disclosing of some form of truth or knowledge through communication with a deity or other supernatural entity or entities Some religions have religious texts which they view as divinely or supernaturally revealed or inspired For instance Orthodox Jews Christians and Muslims believe that the Torah was received from Yahweh on biblical Mount Sinai Most Christians believe that both the Old Testament and the New Testament were inspired by God Muslims believe the Quran was revealed by God to Muhammad word by word through the angel Gabriel Jibril In Hinduism some Vedas are considered apauruṣeya not human compositions and are supposed to have been directly revealed and thus are called sruti what is heard Aleister Crowley stated that The Book of the Law had been revealed to him through a higher being that called itself Aiwass A revelation communicated by a supernatural entity reported as being present during the event is called a vision Direct conversations between the recipient and the supernatural entity or physical marks such as stigmata have been reported In rare cases such as that of Saint Juan Diego physical artifacts accompany the revelation The Roman Catholic concept of interior locution includes just an inner voice heard by the recipient In the Abrahamic religions the term is used to refer to the process by which God reveals knowledge of himself his will and his divine providence to the world of human beings In secondary usage revelation refers to the resulting human knowledge about God prophecy and other divine things Revelation from a supernatural source plays a less important role in some other religious traditions such as Buddhism Confucianism and Taoism Reincarnation In Jainism a soul travels to any one of the four states of existence after death depending on its karmas Reincarnation is the philosophical or religious concept that an aspect of a living being starts a new life in a different physical body or form after each biological death It is also called rebirth or transmigration and is a part of the Saṃsara doctrine of cyclic existence It is a central tenet of all major Indian religions namely Jainism Hinduism Buddhism and Sikhism The idea of reincarnation is found in many ancient cultures and a belief in rebirth metempsychosis was held by Greek historic figures such as Pythagoras Socrates and Plato It is also a common belief of various ancient and modern religions such as Spiritism Theosophy and Eckankar and as an esoteric belief in many streams of Orthodox Judaism It is found as well in many tribal societies around the world in places such as Australia East Asia Siberia and South America Although the majority of denominations within Christianity and Islam do not believe that individuals reincarnate particular groups within these religions do refer to reincarnation these groups include the mainstream historical and contemporary followers of Cathars Alawites the Druze and the Rosicrucians The historical relations between these sects and the beliefs about reincarnation that were characteristic of Neoplatonism Orphism Hermeticism Manicheanism and Gnosticism of the Roman era as well as the Indian religions have been the subject of recent scholarly research Unity Church and its founder Charles Fillmore teaches reincarnation In recent decades many Europeans and North Americans have developed an interest in reincarnation and many contemporary works mention it Karma Karma ˈ k ɑːr m e Sanskrit कर म romanized karma IPA ˈkɐɽmɐ Pali kamma means action work or deed it also refers to the spiritual principle of cause and effect where intent and actions of an individual cause influence the future of that individual effect Good intent and good deeds contribute to good karma and future happiness while bad intent and bad deeds contribute to bad karma and future suffering With origins in ancient India s Vedic civilization the philosophy of karma is closely associated with the idea of rebirth in many schools of Indian religions particularly Hinduism Buddhism Jainism and Sikhism as well as Taoism In these schools karma in the present affects one s future in the current life as well as the nature and quality of future lives one s saṃsara Christian theology The patron saint of air travelers aviators astronauts people with a mental handicap test takers and poor students is Saint Joseph of Cupertino who is said to have been gifted with supernatural flight In Catholic theology the supernatural order is according to New Advent defined as the ensemble of effects exceeding the powers of the created universe and gratuitously produced by God for the purpose of raising the rational creature above its native sphere to a God like life and destiny The Modern Catholic Dictionary defines it as the sum total of heavenly destiny and all the divinely established means of reaching that destiny which surpass the mere powers and capacities of human nature Process theology Process theology is a school of thought influenced by the metaphysical process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead 1861 1947 and further developed by Charles Hartshorne 1897 2000 It is not possible in process metaphysics to conceive divine activity as a supernatural intervention into the natural order of events Process theists usually regard the distinction between the supernatural and the natural as a by product of the doctrine of creation ex nihilo In process thought there is no such thing as a realm of the natural in contrast to that which is supernatural On the other hand if the natural is defined more neutrally as what is in the nature of things then process metaphysics characterizes the natural as the creative activity of actual entities In Whitehead s words It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity Whitehead 1978 21 It is tempting to emphasize process theism s denial of the supernatural and thereby highlight that the processed God cannot do in comparison what the traditional God could do that is to bring something from nothing In fairness however equal stress should be placed on process theism s denial of the natural as traditionally conceived so that one may highlight what the creatures cannot do in traditional theism in comparison to what they can do in process metaphysics that is to be part creators of the world with God Donald Viney Process Theism in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Heaven Heaven or the heavens is a common religious cosmological or transcendent place where beings such as gods angels spirits saints or venerated ancestors are said to originate be enthroned or live According to the beliefs of some religions heavenly beings can descend to Earth or incarnate and earthly beings can ascend to heaven in the afterlife or in exceptional cases enter heaven alive Heaven is often described as a higher place the holiest place a Paradise in contrast to hell or the Underworld or the low places and universally or conditionally accessible by earthly beings according to various standards of divinity goodness piety faith or other virtues or right beliefs or simply the will of God Some believe in the possibility of a heaven on Earth in a world to come Another belief is in an axis mundi or world tree which connects the heavens the terrestrial world and the underworld In Indian religions heaven is considered as Svarga loka and the soul is again subjected to rebirth in different living forms according to its karma This cycle can be broken after a soul achieves Moksha or Nirvana Any place of existence either of humans souls or deities outside the tangible world Heaven Hell or other is referred to as otherworld Underworld The underworld is the supernatural world of the dead in various religious traditions located below the world of the living Chthonic is the technical adjective for things of the underworld The concept of an underworld is found in almost every civilization and may be as old as humanity itself Common features of underworld myths are accounts of living people making journeys to the underworld often for some heroic purpose Other myths reinforce traditions that entrance of souls to the underworld requires a proper observation of ceremony such as the ancient Greek story of the recently dead Patroclus haunting Achilles until his body could be properly buried for this purpose Persons having social status were dressed and equipped in order to better navigate the underworld A number of mythologies incorporate the concept of the soul of the deceased making its own journey to the underworld with the dead needing to be taken across a defining obstacle such as a lake or a river to reach this destination Imagery of such journeys can be found in both ancient and modern art The descent to the underworld has been described as the single most important myth for Modernist authors Spirit Theodor von Holst Bertalda Assailed by Spirits c 1830 A spirit is a supernatural being often but not exclusively a non physical entity such as a ghost fairy jinn or angel The concepts of a person s spirit and soul often also overlap as both are either contrasted with or given ontological priority over the body and both are believed to survive bodily death in some religions and spirit can also have the sense of ghost i e a manifestation of the spirit of a deceased person In English Bibles the Spirit with a capital S specifically denotes the Holy Spirit Spirit is often used metaphysically to refer to the consciousness or personality Historically it was also used to refer to a subtle as opposed to gross material substance as in the famous last paragraph of Sir Isaac Newton s Principia Mathematica Demon Bronze statuette of the Assyro Babylonian demon king Pazuzu c 800 BC c 700 BC Louvre A demon from Koine Greek daimonion daimonion is a supernatural and often malevolent being prevalent in religion occultism literature fiction mythology and folklore In Ancient Near Eastern religions as well as in the Abrahamic traditions including ancient and medieval Christian demonology a demon is considered a harmful spiritual entity below the heavenly planes which may cause demonic possession calling for an exorcism In Western occultism and Renaissance magic which grew out of an amalgamation of Greco Roman magic Jewish Aggadah and Christian demonology a demon is believed to be a spiritual entity that may be conjured and controlled Magic Magic or sorcery is the use of rituals symbols actions gestures or language with the aim of utilizing supernatural forces 6 7 24 Belief in and practice of magic has been present since the earliest human cultures and continues to have an important spiritual religious and medicinal role in many cultures today The term magic has a variety of meanings and there is no widely agreed upon definition of what it is Scholars of religion have defined magic in different ways One approach associated with the anthropologists Edward Tylor and James G Frazer suggests that magic and science are opposites An alternative approach associated with the sociologists Marcel Mauss and Emile Durkheim argues that magic takes place in private while religion is a communal and organised activity Many scholars of religion have rejected the utility of the term magic and it has become increasingly unpopular within scholarship since the 1990s citation needed The term magic comes from the Old Persian magu a word that applied to a form of religious functionary about which little is known During the late sixth and early fifth centuries BC this term was adopted into Ancient Greek where it was used with negative connotations to apply to religious rites that were regarded as fraudulent unconventional and dangerous This meaning of the term was then adopted by Latin in the first century BC The concept was then incorporated into Christian theology during the first century AD where magic was associated with demons and thus defined against religion This concept was pervasive throughout the Middle Ages although in the early modern period Italian humanists reinterpreted the term in a positive sense to establish the idea of natural magic Both negative and positive understandings of the term were retained in Western culture over the following centuries with the former largely influencing early academic usages of the word Throughout history there have been examples of individuals who practiced magic and referred to themselves as magicians This trend has proliferated in the modern period with a growing number of magicians appearing within the esoteric milieu not verified in body British esotericist Aleister Crowley described magic as the art of effecting change in accordance with will Divination Divination from Latin divinare to foresee to be inspired by a god related to divinus divine is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic standardized process or ritual Used in various forms throughout history diviners ascertain their interpretations of how a querent should proceed by reading signs events or omens or through alleged contact with a supernatural agency Divination can be seen as a systematic method with which to organize what appear to be disjointed random facets of existence such that they provide insight into a problem at hand If a distinction is to be made between divination and fortune telling divination has a more formal or ritualistic element and often contains a more social character usually in a religious context as seen in traditional African medicine Fortune telling on the other hand is a more everyday practice for personal purposes Particular divination methods vary by culture and religion Divination is dismissed by the scientific community and skeptics as being superstition In the 2nd century Lucian devoted a witty essay to the career of a charlatan Alexander the false prophet trained by one of those who advertise enchantments miraculous incantations charms for your love affairs visitations for your enemies disclosures of buried treasure and successions to estates Witchcraft Witches by Hans Baldung Woodcut 1508 Witchcraft or witchery broadly means the practice of and belief in magical skills and abilities exercised by solitary practitioners and groups Witchcraft is a broad term that varies culturally and societally and thus can be difficult to define with precision and cross cultural assumptions about the meaning or significance of the term should be applied with caution Witchcraft often occupies a religious divinatory or medicinal role and is often present within societies and groups whose cultural framework includes a magical world view Miracle A miracle is an event not explicable by natural or scientific laws Such an event may be attributed to a supernatural being a deity a miracle worker a saint or a religious leader Informally the word miracle is often used to characterise any beneficial event that is statistically unlikely but not contrary to the laws of nature such as surviving a natural disaster or simply a wonderful occurrence regardless of likelihood such as a birth Other such miracles might be survival of an illness diagnosed as terminal escaping a life threatening situation or beating the odds Some coincidences may be seen as miracles A true miracle would by definition be a non natural phenomenon leading many rational and scientific thinkers to dismiss them as physically impossible that is requiring violation of established laws of physics within their domain of validity or impossible to confirm by their nature because all possible physical mechanisms can never be ruled out The former position is expressed for instance by Thomas Jefferson and the latter by David Hume Theologians typically say that with divine providence God regularly works through nature yet as a creator is free to work without above or against it as well The possibility and probability of miracles are then equal to the possibility and probability of the existence of God SkepticismSkepticism American English or scepticism British English see spelling differences is generally any questioning attitude or doubt towards one or more items of putative knowledge or belief It is often directed at domains such as the supernatural morality moral skepticism religion skepticism about the existence of God or knowledge skepticism about the possibility of knowledge or of certainty In fiction and popular cultureSupernatural entities and powers are common in various works of fantasy Examples include the television shows Supernatural and The X Files the magic of the Harry Potter series The Lord of the Rings series The Wheel of Time series and A Song of Ice and Fire series See alsoLook up supernatural in Wiktionary the free dictionary Wikiquote has quotations related to Supernatural Journal of Parapsychology Liberal naturalism Magical thinking Paranormal Parapsychology Religious naturalism Romanticism Spirit photography Spirit world Spiritualism Transcendence religion References Definition of SUPERNATURAL Archived from the original on 2020 02 07 Retrieved 2019 12 11 Bartlett Robert 14 March 2008 1 The Boundaries of the Supernatural The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages Cambridge University Press pp 1 34 ISBN 978 0521702553 Supernatural Online A Concise Companion to the Jewish Religion Oxford Reference Online Oxford University Press The ancients had no word for the supernatural any more than they had for nature Pasulka Diana Kripal Jeffrey 23 November 2014 Religion and the Paranormal Oxford University Press blog Oxford University Press Archived from the original 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1743 2200 S2CID 73665747 Yau Julianna 2002 Witchcraft and Magic In Michael Shermer The Skeptic Encyclopedia of Pseudoscience ABC CLIO pp 278 282 ISBN 1 57607 654 7 Regal Brian 2009 Pseudoscience A Critical Encyclopedia Greenwood p 55 ISBN 978 0 313 35507 3 Lucian of Samosata Alexander the False Prophet tertullian org Archived from the original on 2017 11 09 Retrieved 2019 01 19 Witchcraft in the Middle Ages Archived 2023 07 31 at the Wayback Machine Jeffrey Russell p 4 10 Bengt Ankarloo amp Stuart Clark Witchcraft and Magic in Europe Biblical and Pagan Societies University of Philadelphia Press 2001 Miracle Halbersam Yitta 1890 Small Miracles Adams Media Corp ISBN 978 1 55850 646 6 Miracles Archived 2019 11 22 at the Wayback Machine on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Popkin R H The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Descartes rev ed 1968 C L Stough Greek Skepticism 1969 M Burnyeat ed The Skeptical Tradition 1983 B Stroud The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism 1984 Encyclopedia2 thefreedictionary com Archived from the original on 2012 07 13 Retrieved 2018 01 13 Philosophical views are typically classed as skeptical when they involve advancing some degree of doubt regarding claims that are elsewhere taken for granted utm edu Archived 2009 01 13 at the Wayback Machine Greco John 2008 The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism Oxford University Press US ISBN 9780195183214 Further readingEconomic Production and the Spread of Supernatural Beliefs Daniel Araujo PDF January 7 2022 Bouvet R Bonnefon J F 2015 Non Reflective Thinkers Are Predisposed to Attribute Supernatural Causation to Uncanny Experiences Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 41 7 955 61 doi 10 1177 0146167215585728 PMID 25948700 S2CID 33570482 McNamara P Bulkeley K 2015 Dreams as a Source of Supernatural Agent Concepts Frontiers in Psychology 6 283 doi 10 3389 fpsyg 2015 00283 PMC 4365543 PMID 25852602 Riekki T Lindeman M Raij T T 2014 Supernatural Believers Attribute More Intentions to Random Movement than Skeptics An fMRI Study Social Neuroscience 9 4 400 411 doi 10 1080 17470919 2014 906366 PMID 24720663 S2CID 33940568 a href wiki Template Cite journal title Template Cite journal cite journal a CS1 maint multiple names authors list link Purzycki Benjamin G 2013 The Minds of Gods A Comparative Study of Supernatural Agency Cognition 129 1 163 179 doi 10 1016 j cognition 2013 06 010 PMID 23891826 S2CID 23554738 Thomson P Jaque S V 2014 Unresolved Mourning Supernatural Beliefs and Dissociation A Mediation Analysis Attachment and Human Development 16 5 499 514 doi 10 1080 14616734 2014 926945 PMID 24913392 S2CID 10290610 Vail K E Arndt J Addollahi A 2012 Exploring the Existential Function of Religion and Supernatural Agent Beliefs Among Christians Muslims Atheists and Agnostics Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 38 10 1288 1300 doi 10 1177 0146167212449361 PMID 22700240 S2CID 2019266 a href wiki Template Cite journal title Template Cite journal cite journal a CS1 maint multiple names authors list link