The Caulk of Arrogance: Nature and Supernature

In the universe of shifting lines and of concepts which are neither arbitrary nor predetermined or absolute, where is the line between the natural and the supernatural? Where does it get drawn?

It gets drawn at the border of human sense and understanding. We’ve pushed it back considerably as our understanding as grown and as our senses have been mechanically extended, but the principle by which it is drawn remains the same: what we know or can know is the place of the border.
What’s changed is that we by and large no longer believe there is anything outside that border. Yes there are things we don’t yet know—what so called “dark” matter and dark energy are, how the universe reconciles general and specific relativity that defy our math. But the belief is that these things are in principle knowable. They are not supernatural. We may never know them due to the limitations of our brains or our senses. But they are natural.

There’s no point in arguing that they are not.

Nonetheless there seems to be a strange and frankly unscientific and unphilosophical arrogance to the idea that the natural coincides with us. We still seem to be believe we are at the center of the universe, of being itself. We know of no other creature whose apprehensions are adequate to its reality. And ours have not been so until very recently, a fact that this has led this historically new sensibility to conclude that what has always been called the supernatural is nothing more than the part of being we could not bring into concert with our understanding. The God of the gaps, the caulk of our ignorance.

It seems to me this is unlikely. I do not presume to know what else is part of being. I likewise do not presume that there is no access to being which lies outside of what we call science. Conspicuous religious practice is clearly a sham, however sincere the practitioner may be. And most of any religion is at best contaminated, a sooted fresco. But there are actually few people on earth that believe all spiritual practice is a waste of time. Nor is it certain that what good spiritual practice manages to access is not some part of being that will never be subject to science.