It's amusing to picture you and ↪180 Proof celebrating & high-fiving & thumbs-uping your victorious vanquishing of a mythical dragon. Unfortunately, that supernatural serpent exists only in your imagination. Yet, it emerged into your fanciful personal reality (worldview) due to your misinterpretation of my use of the “G*D” label to describe the hypothetical ultimate source of natural Reality*1. As a moderate skeptic myself, I understand & appreciate your stance against religious “Supernaturalism”. But, other than "preternatural", I didn't have an official dictionary word to describe the nature of a Hypothetical entity. So, I made-up a neologism, based on its role in traditional cultures.
Just today though, I came across the high-tech philosophical term : “Manifest Image”*2 , in which “G*D” is a semantic device (artefact), not a physical thing subject to empirical proof or disproof --- a conceptual gap filler*3. In The Logic of Information, professional philosopher Floridi says “the normative and semantic environment – the manifest image of the world – is built by our minds, but it is no less real. . . . it is the contribution that the mind makes to the world.” MI is human imagination, not perception, yet it is how we know (cognize) reality (Kant). So, due to your "encouragement", I have learned a technical term that is above my amateur pay-grade.
Such mental images are integral parts of our worldviews, but they are Cultural instead of Natural. Hence, they cannot be proven or disproven by scientific methodology. Semantic MI, such as quantum wave-particles, become useful elements of our Kantian reality. But their normative existence is meta-physical, not physical. In Sellars' sense, they are non-natural (cultural ; mental), but not super-natural (spiritual). Consequently, they are detected, not by what they are (material), but by what they do (role).
Floridi says that the “explanatory gap” is due to the “artefactual nature of the natural”. That's because “we know, semanticize, and explain reality through the construction, expansion, and refinement of our semantic artefacts . . .” For example, “we know there is no God's-eye perspective”, but Cosmologists & Philosophers feel free to construct “manifest images” to represent such an outside-in worldview. He goes on to conclude that, for homo sapiens, “the non-natural is our first nature, and the natural is our second nature". Therefore, we humans don't just perceive physical nature, we conceive Nature meta-physically, in terms of Manifest Images.
I don't expect this semantic excursion to change your mind. It's merely an attempt to express the G*D concept in terms less likely to be interpreted based on the historical prejudicial antipathic antimony of religion vs science, where the same word can have opposite meanings.
*1. Science and Ultimate Reality : Quantum Theory, Cosmology, and Complexity
This volume provides a fascinating preview of the future of physics. It comprises contributions from leading thinkers in the field, inspired by the pioneering work of John Wheeler.
https://www.amazon.com/Science-Ultimate ... 052183113X
*2. Manifest Image (Wilfred Sellars) :
“his development of a coherentist epistemology and functional role/inferentialist semantics, for his distinction between the “manifest image” and the “scientific image” of the world, for his proposal that psychological concepts are like theoretical concepts, and for a tough-minded scientific realism” . . . . The scientific image grows out of and is methodologically posterior to the manifest image, which provides the initial framework in which science is nurtured,
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/
*3. The manifest image contrasts with the scientific image, which deals in the behaviour of conglomerates of the physical particles postulated by scientific theory. What Sellars called the ‘perennial philosophy’ from Plato onwards accepts the reality of the elements and features of the manifest image, but it is also a perennial problem to compare and reconcile its claims with that of the scientific image, which is in reality the arbiter ‘of what is, that it is, and of what is not that it is not’.
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display ... 8550B5341A