Ouros wrote:
Hello everyone.
You all certainly heard about the naturalist meta-narrative of history:
Our ancestors were a bunch of superstitious people who put supernatural being and substance beyond every natural phenomen. But with the progress of science/philosophy/whatever fields, we now know that it's false.
So, by extending this idea, we can be sure that everything that can't be explained in natural ways now, will be in some future.
What about that?
Is there some truth in that, or is it more like a distorted view of history?
Our ancestors were indeed superstitious, but not in the sense of only assuming supernatural being and substance beyond natural phenomenon. What these days is called supernatural, was part of natural order back then. There was no such difference or distinction between natural and supernatural as there is now.
As to the second sentence, with all the progress of science and philosophy, we do not know at all that the supernatural is false or not there. We know that there are undesirable aspects to superstitious attitude, yes, but shouldn't it be obvious that people are like that because it actually works? And there are people who are above it because that works too? So, these days we make a distinction between natural and supernatural, we have reoriented our metaphysical perspective - and, by and large, that's all we know. Who has shown that the supernatural is false or not there?
Since the second sentence is dubious, no point to extend or extrapolate it into a universality.