What grounds do we have to say that there is something more than the natural world?

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Question is in the title.

How do we have grounds to say that there is something more than the natural world?
 
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“Natural” is usually taken to mean anything that can be measured or sensed. That realm has grown with the help of technology. But revelation would be the grounds for anything beyond that.
 
Revelation, experience, miracles, authority of the Catholic Church, etc
 
I’ve never personally found the distinction between “natural” and “supernatural” to be terribly illuminating. If there were a fourth dimension “cutting through” our three dimensions, we might call that a “supernature”. But we also call things like angels and gods supernatural, and we call the “paranormal” supernatural. It just seems like a bunch of very different things to lump into the same category.

But I think your question, Joe, is getting at the question of whether there is anything immaterial. I believe that the best argument for that is a really simple one: the argument from subjective experience. Consider the taste of chocolate. If everything is material, then this taste must be something material, right? But what material is it? It’s not the chocolate itself, because the chocolate doesn’t experience anything. So is it some clump of atoms in your brain? That’s puzzling, because it’s completely unobservable. A scientist who claims that it is the clump of atoms has to explain why sometimes that same clump is not the taste of chocolate, and moreover needs to explain why we should believe something without any sort of observation to confirm it.

I guess that may not be supernatural, but it is supermaterial, if I might coin that word. And I think all the best things in life are supermaterial in that way: joy, humor, friendship, love, art, those things of things. They all center around the capacity for subjective experience.

But I’ve just answered a question that you may not have been asking. Are you asking about evidence for immaterial things in general, or for things like angels or God? The evidence for these latter things is of a different sorts.
 
Prodigal_Son said:
I guess that may not be supernatural, but it is supermaterial, if I might coin that word. And I think all the best things in life are supermaterial in that way: joy, humor, friendship, love, art, those things of things. They all center around the capacity for subjective experience.
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I used to discuss all this with atheists and their stance is that anything that can be experienced is material. So “supermaterial” is beyond experience. Joy, humor and such are brain chemistry and therefore material.

Of course, that is their materialist perspective. In a way I am kind of with them except that i think the material/supermaterial distinction is an arbitrary limit of our perception we set and reset with our evolving science.
 
Have a sleep paralysis episode and your learn real quick that there is more then this world
 
Shakuhachi said:
I used to discuss all this with atheists and their stance is that anything that can be experienced is material.
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That claim is ambiguous between

(1) The things that are experienced are all material things.

and

(2) The experiences are material things.

I don’t think all atheists distinguish these two claims. #1 is more plausible to me than #2. It is even somewhat plausible to me, as a Catholic, that it is impossible to experience any immaterial thing – since our God is incarnate, and capable of manifesting in matter.

But #2 is utterly unprovable, and doesn’t seem plausible to me. Why not say that experience is a different thing entirely than matter? We don’t even need to posit immaterial souls to make that claim. All we need to say is that materials are never identical to experiences.
 
Prodigal_Son said:
But I’ve just answered a question that you may not have been asking. Are you asking about evidence for immaterial things in general, or for things like angels or God? The evidence for these latter things is of a different sorts.
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I guess I would have to say that the natural world or material world could not possibly be the only thing out there because there are more things out there than what we can sense?
 
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You just denied the role of Philosophy, which like science, is also based on reason.

The Church has always taught that the existence of the spiritual can be proven outside of revelation.
The secular world and science denies this. You just sided with the secular world!
 
Free will!

If there is nothing besides the material world, then your mind is ultimately only dependent on the neurons in your brain. The neurons in turn would only be dependent on physics, and they would have to follow the laws of physics and chemistry. There would be no room for free will. In other words a materialistic universe necessarily exclude free will.
We have free will.
Ergo: there is more then the material world!
 
The Catechism for a good start:
31 Created in God’s image and called to know and love him, the person who seeks God discovers certain ways of coming to know him. These are also called proofs for the existence of God, not in the sense of proofs in the natural sciences, but rather in the sense of “converging and convincing arguments”, which allow us to attain certainty about the truth. These “ways” of approaching God from creation have a twofold point of departure: the physical world, and the human person.
32 The world: starting from movement, becoming, contingency, and the world’s order and beauty, one can come to a knowledge of God as the origin and the end of the universe.
As St. Paul says of the Gentiles: For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. [7]

35 Man’s faculties [reason] make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God.

36 “Our holy mother, the Church, holds and teaches that God, the first principle and last end of all things, can be known with certainty from the created world by the natural light of human reason.” [11] Without this capacity, man would not be able to welcome God’s revelation. Man has this capacity because he is created “in the image of God”. [12]
 
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Its a subtle point alright, I was surprised to find out myself 10 years ago.
Makes perfect sense. The stamp of the Creator is not totally lost even by the Fall nor by lack of access to Revelation. A great mercy.
(Though most sinners will likely need revelation to overcome the darkness of sin that obscures the natural light of reason even further].
 
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Joe1 said:
I guess I would have to say that the natural world or material world could not possibly be the only thing out there because there are more things out there than what we can sense?
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Well, this is certainly true, but as an argument what you’ve said commits a fallacy called “begging the question”. The argument seems to be this:
  1. There are more things out there than we can sense.
  2. Therefore, the world of sense cannot be the only thing that exists.
Imagine you’re a materialistic atheist looking at that argument. You won’t accept premise #1, will you? Of course you won’t, because if you did, then you would already agree with the conclusion (#2). That’s why we call this “begging the question”, or (sometimes) “arguing in a circle”.

The argument I would support looks more like this:
  1. There are facts that cannot be explained well by the hypothesis that only material things exist.
  2. These facts are easier to explain under the hypothesis that there are some immaterial things.
  3. Therefore, there are immaterial things.
It’s not a deductive argument, but it’s a start.
 
33 The human person: with his openness to truth and beauty, his sense of moral goodness, his freedom and the voice of his conscience, with his longings for the infinite and for happiness, man questions himself about God’s existence. In all this he discerns signs of his spiritual soul. The soul, the “seed of eternity we bear in ourselves, irreducible to the merely material”,9 can have its origin only in God.

34 The world, and man, attest that they contain within themselves neither their first principle nor their final end, but rather that they participate in Being itself, which alone is without origin or end. Thus, in different ways, man can come to know that there exists a reality which is the first cause and final end of all things, a reality “that everyone calls God”.10

35 Man’s faculties make him capable of coming to a knowledge of the existence of a personal God. But for man to be able to enter into real intimacy with him, God willed both to reveal himself to man and to give him the grace of being able to welcome this revelation in faith. The proofs of God’s existence, however, can predispose one to faith and help one to see that faith is not opposed to reason.
 
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