this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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There’s a term for this idea, “preternatural”. It means a phenomenon that is the result of the natural world, not magic or divine, but still unexplainable with our current understanding.
James Randi’s prize didn’t require proof of the supernatural, it was open to preternatural phenomena as well. Someone just had to prove it was a REAL phenomenon and not a hoax or random chance.
So anything actually proven to exist would be "preternatural" then. Even it turned out to be the result of magic or the devine, it's still something that exists in the natural world that we just don't understand yet.
Sort of, assuming you don’t believe that God or magic are real. If I had premonitions of the future, and could demonstrate through testing that they come true, I’d be proving a phenomenon exists but not necessarily anything about the origins. They could be visions from God, making me a prophet. They could be something with a natural origin, like an energy or invisible spirits.
It’s a term used by occultists, ghost hunters, and other people who want to discuss / legitimize spooky shit without the religious baggage of the word “supernatural”.