George H. Smith - The Supernatural.

[T]he supernatural cannot be grasped by man’s consciousness. When the theist posits a supernatural being, he is not merely positing the presently unknown that may be grasped with a greater degree of knowledge. The theist is positing the unknowable, that which is beyond man’s comprehension, that which man will never be able to understand regardless of his degree of knowledge. Since the supernatural must remain forever outside the context of man’s knowledge, a “supernatural explanation” is a contradiction in terms. One cannot explain the unknown with reference to the unknowable.

The theist initially constructs a gap between the universe and man’s knowledge by claiming that the universe requires an explanation. Then, by stipulating that this explanation cannot be given in terms of natural (i.e., knowable) phenomena, he proclaims that this gap can never be bridged, that any attempt to account for the universe within the context of man’s knowledge is doomed to failure. Therefore, he argues, we must turn to the supernatural and the unknowable.

The supernatural, however, does not build a conceptual bridge from the unknown to the known; it sabotages not only the bridge, but the very possibility of ever constructing such a bridge. According to the theist, we can never link that which requires an explanation (the universe or some natural phenomenon) to the context of knowledge available to man. To say that god is responsible for the universe is to say that the explanation of the universe is unknowable to man—or, in other words, that no explanation is possible. To posit the supernatural explains nothing; it merely asserts the futility of explanation.