Words such as religion, supernatural, and paranormal refer to transcendental realities, beings, and forces. These terms are very imprecise, and the boundaries of the purported phenomena which they denote are fuzzy. The first question to ask is, What makes something religious rather than supernatural or paranormal? Consider the following: Why is a late-night visitation by an androgynous being with wings, that is, an angel, deemed to belong to the realm of religion, while a similar nocturnal appearance by another androgynous but wingless creature, the occupant of an extraterrestrial spacecraft, considered to belong to the domain of the paranormal? Are beliefs in the existence of ghosts or souls part of religion or the supernatural? Alternatively, are they paranormal? Some conceptual clarification is necessary before we can proceed further.

What Is the Supernatural?

The term “supernatural” comes from the Latin supernaturalis that was in use during the Middle Ages to describe the miracles of God mentioned in the Bible and the prodigies associated with the Christian cult of saints (Bartlett 2008: 9– 17, 2013: 3– 26). This concept was brought into theological discourse by the great Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas during the thirteenth century. It was juxtaposed with the ideas of natura and naturalis, “nature” or “natural,” and was an aspect of the theological discussions of the time about the world of people and the spirit world. As the theistic philosopher William Shea (1984: 308) has pointed out, understandings of supernatural are framed in relation to “nature” and “natural,” so that the meaning of one term is “dialectically coupled” with the comprehension of the other term. However, medieval thinkers concerned with the supernatural and natural struggled with the distinctions between these concepts. As the historian Robert Bartlett (2008: 26) has put it, “the categories and definitions used for discussing the natural and the supernatural were fluid, potentially contradictory, and often indeed unexamined.”