Do ‘Spirit’ and ‘Supernatural Agency’ Explain Anything?

In #religion

Been a while since I've written here, so getting back into it with a short observation.

I notice that some theists critique naturalists by claiming that the latter believe nothing exists in the universe except “matter and energy.” Yet even physicists include in their models entities that cannot be classified as either matter or energy; the quantum wave-function is a clear example. History also records many entities that were ultimately discarded—vis viva (life force), phlogiston (heat fluid), and celestial versus terrestrial matter. Scientists are not dogmatically opposed to such notions; they simply abandon them when those notions fail to explain or predict phenomena, or when simpler, more direct alternatives emerge. We once invoked agency to account for planetary motion, but we no longer need to.

Other entities remain in today’s models as placeholders for the unknown—dark matter is the obvious case. No one seriously believes that merely naming the gravitational effects seen in galaxy-rotation curves “dark matter” constitutes understanding. The label is provisional until we discover what dark matter actually is—neutrinos, black holes, a modification of gravity on large scales, and so on.

Against this backdrop, what explanatory or predictive power do the terms “spirit” and “supernatural agency” still possess? Can we point to anything that we understand better by including them than by omitting them? What direct observations make these entities useful in any model of the universe, other than as placeholders for the unknown?