Who Were the Sea Peoples?

"The second point [Eliade gets wrong] is that the gods are designated as 'supernatural Beings.' That, of course, is impermissible. The term supernatural , as opposed to an natural , is Scholastic terminology very commonly used by Thomas Aquinas. From Scholasticism, as part of dogma, it entered into the dogmatism of the Enlightenment in the 18th-century." -- Eric Voegelin, "The Drama of Humanity" I swear I had not read this before making a similar point myself a couple of months ago.

In Medieval natural philosophy, the supernatural made perfect sense: things had their own natures, that caused them to act as they do. But a force other than their nature could intervene and cause them to act otherwise. So bread naturally (per its nature) nourishes us, but a supernatural act can cause it to become the body of Christ. However the scientific revolution did away with these "natures." There was brute matter, whose only nature was occupy space, and then there were laws imposed on this brute matter by God: in a sense, all of nature only "worked" because of divine commandment. The fact that these were divine commands to nature was why they were called laws ! Attempts to explain natural phenomena by "natures" were mocked; see Moliere's parody of medieval natural philosophy where the doctoral student explains that opium causes sleep because of its "dormitive powers." But many later scientists, under the sway of 19th-century i...

When I noted a while back that as usually viewed by scientists, the laws of physics fit the definition of "the supernatural" quite well. This produced a bunch of sputtering and muttering, but no real counter-arguments, except that "naturalists don't think of these laws as supernatural!" Yes, well, that was my point: despite not consciously thinking of them as such, many scientists (and other naturalists) treat them as such.  And here is physicist Paul Davies, making the same point: "The orthodox view of the nature of the laws of physics contains a long list of tacitly assumed properties. The laws are regarded, for example, as immutable, eternal, infinitely precise mathematical relationships that transcend the physical universe... In addition, it is assumed that the physical world is affected by the laws, but the laws are completely impervious to what happens in the universe... It is not hard to discover where this picture of physical laws comes fr...