What Makes Something Supernatural?

A dragon, yeti, or kraken would not be by default more supernatural than a common ant or dog—unless it has some genuinely supernatural ability or underpinning to it.  What makes something supernatural is its immateriality, or the lack of any physical substance.  A variety of immaterial things exist by logical necessity and can be proven; they tend to be ignored or conflated with some irrelevant metaphysical thing, however.  The laws of logic themselves are among them, neither mind nor matter, although mind itself is immaterial because a thought, unlike a neuron, is intangible and is what animates the bodies of conscious beings.  Reason metaphysically confines all other things with its intrinsic truths (reason being false would require that it is still true), including physical objects, but it is independent of all of them.  The space that holds matter would by necessity likewise not be made of matter itself.

There is also the uncaused cause that created the cosmos or at least initiated the causal chain that led to the creation of matter, and time, which is not only nonphysical, but it is also required for material events to occur and it is logically possible for it to exist without the universe.  A mere dragon or yeti is not like these things: while some conceptions of such creatures would have explicitly supernatural origins, such as in many tales of fiction, they would just be animals.  A unique power such as breathing fire, a physical substance, would even be hypothetically compatible with scientific laws as they are popularly presented today, though it is consistency with logically necessary truths that really makes something possible or impossible in an ultimate sense.  Some people would still think of dragons and such as supernatural despite there being nothing about this that would have to be true.

Ironically, these people might deny the immateriality and therefore supernatural nature of these existents which can be proven.  They might at least reject that any of this is knowable.  Though the following is subject to the unverifiability of sensory perceptions or hearsay, a host of science-adjacent phenomena like photons are also supposed to be immaterial, yet this is not the typical way that the word supernatural is brought up.  In its somewhat accurate but more colloquial usage, it is either used to simply refer to anything subjectively abnormal (a very erroneous meaning of the word) or specifically to theological/spiritual beings like God or demons or even pagan entities like the Olympians, the Aesir and Vanir, and most of the Enneads, although they are not uncaused causes and are partially physical beings with superhuman abilities (like the true Biblical Jesus).

Of the Egyptian Enneads, only Atum is closer to a true god, but since he created himself, he cannot have been an uncaused cause and his proposed nature is not even logically possible, as something would have to exist before it existed to engage in self-creation.  He would nonetheless be supernatural as a being that came about without a material cause and that has powers that transcend the cosmos—the notion of him creating himself is just an inherent impossibility!  Calling this supernatural is still conceptually accurate because anything that is distinct from the physical universe would be separate from or above nature.  Would this have to be true of some unusual creature like the Loch Ness Monster, commonly thought of as a plesiosaur?  Not at all if it is just an animal!

This is why I said something like this would be no more supernatural than a familiar animal like a dog.  Yes, any animal mind that exists, as a consciousness, would have to be immaterial whether or not it is metaphysically brought into existence by a certain arrangement of matter, as emergent naturalism in this regard would hold.  The body of any creature, of course, would be and could only be physical.  Cryptozoological entities, wholly separate from whether or not any of the individual examples actually exist/existed, would not be supernatural just because they would be elusive or featured in fiction or perhaps very strange compared to the animals one might be regularly exposed to.  The idea that they would be supernatural because they are mythical or because evidence has not been found for them is asinine.  Supernatural does not mean bizarre or exotic.  It means something is immaterial and therefore not made of physical matter.