God not Supernatural, says Father

It must have been a year or two ago when my dad and I were talking about the difficulty with using the words "natural" and "supernatural". I myself prefered at the time to use a word I learned in my sociology of religion class - supra-empirical. A supra-empirical postulate is an assumption you can't test. These days I don't use the word supra-empirical to describe "supernatural" stuff because the supra-empirical also includes moral premises, and I don't think belief in gods and ghosts is the same kind of belief as belief in the right to live.

Anyway, back to the discussion. At that time I didn't like "supernatural" because I didn't believe there was such a thing as nature. No ecosystem that includes animals is a pristine, untouched wildland. A lot of the forces that shape "nature" are the actions of beings who are appropriating resources to meet their own needs. A gang of beavers making their dam doesn't seem that categorically different to me from human beings making a house. And so, the "natural" and "artificial" distinction didn't make much sense to me.

This went beyond my doubt about the difference between "Nature's deeds" and "Man's deeds", and brought in doubt about the difference between "Nature's and Man's deeds" and "God's and angels' and demons' deeds". What are supernatural phenomena supposed to be, but the actions of unseen beings who are appropriating resources to meet their needs and desires? And how is that categorically different from animals' appropriation of their natural environment?

The supposed difference is that the actions of some beings are determined by "natural" processes while the actions of other beings aren't. But I don't know any compelling reason to suppose that human actions and states of mind aren't determined by physical processes. And if God and angels and demons are motivated to want things and do things, and to react in the world to things that occur in the world, then I don't see why they aren't affected by "natural" processes, either. And if they are affected by "natural" processes, then that pretty much means that an aspect of their being is determined by "natural" processes. (I must say that I probably didn't go into this much detail about it in my conversation with my dad.)

My dad, too, was uncomfortable with the word "supernatural", especially when used to describe God. If God is eternal, then He had no beginning, and no one could have made Him. And if He is unchanging, then no one could alter Him. In the sense of "pristine untouched wildland", God as traditionally conceived is the very definition of natural.

Now, my dad isn't exactly a Calvinist in theology. He does believe that God can be motivated to act, and that God as a "person" isn't an unmovable rock or a "pristine untouched wildland". My dad thinks of sovereignty as the ability to change, and if God isn't moved by prayer, then God is not soveriegn. (Calvinists believe that prayer's value is not its efficacy in moving God, that prayer probably doesn't change God's mind anyway, and that God's answers to prayer occur because of predestination, or because of foreknowlege, or something like that.)

I'm going to have to end here, because if I don't I'll ramble on forever. I'll just conclude with one thing. The word "natural" has several different meanings, two of which look like complete opposites of each other. On the one hand, "natural" can mean pristine, untouched, not tampered with, unaffected. On the other, "natural" means affected, altered, and determined by surounding factors.