There is a meta-argument against supernatural phenomena based on the idea that if they are real, then they are natural. Sometimes this is used to rule them out on ontological grounds, sometimes it is more focused on the implications of the term. Then there are the more specific objections to specific supernatural phenomena based on, generally, current science. I'd like to tease apart these two objections - not as a demonstration of the reality of supernatural phenomena - and create a model for dealing with the meta or perhaps it might be better called the general issue...

One take on the possible ways to look at this: Let's say you have a simulation, a computer simulation within which there is a reality. A very good computer game is all we need to think of, not some complete virtual reality. Something online. In it there is a game world that has rules. If you hit X with Y, Z happens. One can do [set X] actions. One cannot do [set Y] actions, unless conditions....and so on. So a set of natural laws, ones that players experience. Supernatural or anomolous events can have a couple of possible sources for players:

a) There are exceptions and factors they have not previously encountered - player B has found a ring that allows him to.... b) the admistrators of the site intrude and create anomolies - perhaps this is random 'grace'. Perhaps they do this with underdogs - though this might over time become a kind of extra natural law if the [gods] are consistant.

b parallels the original idea of supernatural as something that came from God. It is often argued that there cannot be supernatural stuff, since this means it is either natural or not possible, but not supernatural.. But if we use the gaming situation as a model we can see that there is a game world, with rules, and they are rules, but there are entities outside who have special powers and can create anomolies.

If we go back to my a and b sources:

a) Here, limited knowledge is the factor. It seems like elephants cannot possibly communicate over long distances. We do not hear their calls - at least we did not up until the 80s or whenever it was - at these distances and knew of no possible mechanism. Hence someone might have said, to natives who thought elephants communicated over large distances, that they were making supernatural claims - oh, those ignorant savages.

But, lo! Later we find that the elephants are communicating via ultrasound. Here 'we' made a call based on current scientific models, what was known and what we could test.

Any and all claims about anomalies that often get labeled supernatural may fall into this category- the category of limited models, knowledge, interpretation of models and experience. It will turn out that it was not supernatural, though real. It turns out that a new natural phenomenon has been found or has not yet been confirmed. Humility places us in an agnostic position to many phenomena that get labeled here incorrectly as supernatural.

b) Now these are actual rule breakers, where there is external intervention by outside forces, need not be paradoxical. We can experience this now, with our own, no doubt limited compared to where it will be in a thousand years, should we survive, and we have no idea what entities, deities there are out there - transcendent to our world, at least. Our universe could be analogous to a simulation - or even is one.

I'd like to also suggest that a third grey category is here. In fact any phenomenon here would fall into a, but given the paradigmatic shift necessary to get this category into natural, it is a special subset of A. If there are phenomena, for example relying on quantum processes, then people thinking in a newtonian way about the universe might take certain phenomena and precluded due to their model. Before we discovered that elephants could communicate over large distances, we had known about ultrasound for a while. The discovery relied more on application than any paradigmatic shift. But with some phenomena it has and may yet require paradigmatic shifts to 'naturalize' so to speak a phenomenon.