Currently, it is normal to distinguish between natural and supernatural events: the former are governed by laws that we know, the latter seem to escape them. However, this distinction is relatively recent, and when it occurred it constituted an intellectual revolution.
This revolution took place because the realm of what was between the natural and the supernatural was abolished, the realm of the preternatural: ghosts, witches and monsters.
The advent of science and experiments
With the intention of transforming strange facts into vulgar facts, more and more philosophers of the 17th century insisted that any rare or unusual fact could be reproduced, and then find its causes, its explanation, removing the cloak of mysticism. In this way, the supposedly supernatural was becoming something natural.
Galileo, thus, insisted that the mountains on the Moon were the same as the mountains on Earth. Or that Jupiter's moons were the same as our moons. Or that the phases of Venus were the same as the phases of our moon. As it explains David Wootton in his book The invention of science: "At every step he took the strangest facts and made them as vulgar as possible." The difficulty lay, then, in knowing how and when to distinguish between natural philosophy and theology:
The Logic of Port-Royal outlines what could go wrong when describing people who are overly gullible when it comes to miracles. They swallow, he says, a strange fact, and when they encounter objections to it they change their story to accommodate them; The strange fact can survive only if it is made more natural, which in this case means, to begin with, moving further and further away from any truth that may have existed in it.
Simon Stevin, a Dutch mathematician, military and hydraulic engineer, builder of mills and fortifications, semiotician, accountant and mayor abounds in this, in the mid-1600s, in his motto "The wonder is not a wonder":
In philosophy, we must always proceed from wonder to non-wonder, that is, we must continue the research carried out until what was thought strange no longer seems strange to us; But in theology, we must proceed from non-wonder to wonder, that is, we must study the Scriptures until what does not seem strange to us seems so to us, and everything is wonderful.
For the first time, then, some thinkers begin to face phenomena carefully, trusting more in experiments, evidence, tests, He knows how to explain the concatenation of events that produce a phenomenon, rather than subjectively, in revelation, the fallacy of authority or ad hominem. Above all, it consists of a disenchantment of the world: the assumption that everything can be explained, no matter how complex it may be, and that one should not simply add empty words to describe the world such as "magic," "god," or "supernatural."
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The news
The day when the natural began to be distinguished from the supernatural
was originally published in
Xataka Science
by
Sergio Parra
.
