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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

People often assume that a spiritual experience is by-definition somehow supernatural, but it makes sense to me that it would need to functionally have a wiring system in order to actually work.

In other words, even if you assume that the vision of God/feeling of divine presence/etc. is valid, there are two methods of implementation: either it’s done in a supernatural way that defies physics and logic; or it’s done in a way that accords with the structure of reality (as in, chemically.)

The latter seems a lot more elegant to me, IMO.

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The entire premise of supernatural is wrong. Anything that occurs in this world is, by definition, natural.

Other definitions of supernatural really fail to be complete or useful. One definition is 'not predictable' , but by that metric, every moment of a newborns first few moments of life is supernatural.

Of course, there's another definition, which is experiences that do not take place in this world and unobservable to us. In which case, sure but then we cannot experience them here on earth. The moment such a thing is experienced by a human, it becomes natural

I honestly challenge people to explain what they mean when they say 'supernatural'.

I’m a Christian and here’s my perspective.

There’s a physical realm we exist in defined by space and time. Everything outside of that is the supernatural.

God is not bound by time and His true nature is not something we can fully understand. He is in our world, but not from it.

The Bible makes references to angels and demons, entities that cannot be seen or measured unless they choose to make themselves known. They can affect still affect the natural world. These effects can be observed, but it would be difficult to reproduce any experiments because they are an unknown variable.

Science has trouble differentiating between an effect without a cause (a miracle basically) and an effect with a mechanism we haven’t accounted for.

I'm a Christian too and while I agree with everything you said, any time anything outside our 'world' interacts with our world, the phenomenon we see is... Natural.

> there are two methods of implementation: either it's done in a supernatural way that defies physics and logic; or it's done in a way that accords with the structure of reality (as in, chemically.)

Why not both?

Everyone agrees that brain chemistry-stuff happens when you have a supernatural experience, just as brain chemistry-stuff happens when you eat a steak. The disagreement is whether that's all that's happening. Pointing to the existence of brain chemistry-stuff as an argument against the existence of the supernatural is like pointing to it as an argument against the existence of the steak.

Also, the 'supernatural' does not defy physics or logic; it is perfectly logical, and outside the scope of physics.

My own view is an idealist style one, where I think God impresses experiences upon us, and the experiences we have are determined by physical states. On this view, it's impossible to have a religious experience without there being appropriate physical states in place. In other words, agreeing with your conclusion.

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