Supernatural Agency

I have no response to the supernatural. That is, my response policy toward things outside of nature includes the firm rule that I avoid a response from non-material agents. This empirical stance results from a life time which does not include the supernatural in any network of causation. The things that go bump in the night are same things which go bump in the daylight - only real things make real noise. A non-thing has no agency and if it had agency it ceases to be non-real.

The supernatural is known by revealed truth. The zoology of things mysterious that bump springs not from reasonable reactions to events but from folk intuitions about the kinds of things that affect the kinds of things like me. Before astronomy, astrology had interesting answers about the heavens. After Galileo the stars no longer carved the sky into houses or impelled nature to respond. Stars stayed put as the earth rotated and planets moved around the sun while moons revolved around planets.

Science diminishes religion and religion diminishes science. These two construals of the set of reasonable responses oppose each other. Religion - a revealed cosmology - cannot adjust to newer and better facts. A religion is by nature static and unchanging. There are no new editions of holy books updated with recent discoveries. There is no theory of gods which predict how, why or when a god will get up off her throne and act. Only material agents act. That is, only material agents have a response policy since only material agents possess the teleological imperative - only material agents have ends or purposes visible as behavior in the natural world. What motivates a god if a god can choose to respond out of dire predicaments. An eternal god is a lifeless god with no urgent need to love. The need to love is the need to help another and the only other to a god is another god which might upset homeostasis and therefore existence.

Only existential behavior affects homeostasis. A god has no need to maintain homeostasis and therefore no existential imperative to behave one way as opposed to another way.