Should we stop using the word 'supernatural'?

[Jay313 (Jay Johnson)]

@Daniel_Fisher

I struggle to understand what you’re getting at. They of course recognized (as I do) that larger reality, taken as a whole, had elements that we today would call “natural” and “supernatural.

Sorry to keep crossing over, but I can’t keep up with two threads at once:

@Jay313

The Bible doesn’t speak of anything as supernatural . In the Scripture, the division is not between natural/supernatural, but between seen/unseen. (Probably the closest parallel in our language is material/spiritual.) The very category of “supernatural” would have had no meaning prior to the Middle Ages. For the ancients, existence enveloped both the seen and the unseen – two sides of the same coin. Where moderns see an effect and attribute it solely to a physical cause, the ancients could see that same effect and attribute it to a physical and spiritual cause simultaneously. Jesus, for instance, could declare that God provides the ravens with food and sends his rain upon the evil and good alike, all the while knowing that plants produce the seeds eaten by birds and clouds produce the rain that falls upon the ground. For him, the fact that an observable physical cause provided a sufficient explanation did not exclude the active involvement of God in the process. The same could be said of evolution and of the continuing scientific quest for answers. Even when a “sufficient” physical cause is found, God is not excluded as “first cause.” Both are true in the Biblical worldview

Edit: Speaking for myself, I don’t object to anything you posted from Lewis regarding miracles or the supernatural. It’s just that those categories are extra-biblical and, thus, often don’t fit the biblical data or the worldview of the ancient audience. If we seek to let the Bible shape our worldview, we should recognize the biblical categories, not the philosophical ones.