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Article Title:	Sir David Attenborough - "Why I Don't Mention God"
Author of reported comment:	Ray Ingles
Comment Date:	16:04 on Jan 24 2008
Comment:	The essential difference between the 'supernatural' and the 'natural' is that the 'supernatural' is defined to be 'unknowable' - something forever beyond human ken. Once something is explained, nobody considers it supernatural anymore - look up the history of lightning rods. But there's a problem with the idea of the 'unknowable'. How can we, in practice, distinguish between something 'currently unknown but comprehensible' and something 'forever unknowable'? From a practical perspective, the only way to tell which category something falls into is to try to understand it; if you succeed, then it was knowable. The problem is, if you fail, you can't conclude that it's unknowable. It might be... but it also might be the case that you just didn't happen to figure out something knowable, and you or someone else might have better luck on a subsequent attempt. Science doesn't accept the 'unknowable' in principle (hardly surprising - the word itself is based on 'scientia', Latin for 'knowledge'). It hasn't proved to be a useful concept in the past. Neil Tyson points out the difference between Newton and Laplace (http://research.amnh.org/~tyson/PerimeterOfIgnorance.php) and we might add J. S. Haldane, who asserted that no 'mechanistic' theory could ever account for cellular division and reproduction, just a few decades before the structure of DNA was discovered. Scientists are human, and do indeed have a long history of invoking the divine when reaching the current limits of understanding... until someone comes along and figures out another 'unknowable' feature of the universe.

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