You snipped out the context of my post. The OP I was responding to created the sharp delineation. He was using a false premise, I simply pointed it out.
"Suppose we created artificial life in a computer. Our position would be in some sense "supernatural" with respect to the universe of that electronic life form, in much the same way that God is "supernatural" to us.
Good point. However if this life is unable to communicate directly with us and unable to run tests on our reality it would hardly consider us part of its 'natural' environment.
Our ability to test is limited to those events and objects that follow the laws of physics in a consistent way. If we lose that consistency because some cause is 'above' those laws we loose the ability to test.
In the case of our little computer friends, if we set up their environment with consistent rules and reactions and avoid interfering, they could fully investigate their environment without relying on our environment or our input. Our existence becomes unimportant to their investigation of their own environment. If we instead play with their tests by overcoming the 'laws' of their environment, they will be unable to differentiate between what is a consistent law and what is, in their view, supernatural. They will never be able to trust their tests.
If communication between our creations and ourselves is common place, then the situation would be different. In fact they would not need to investigate their environment because they could just ask us. We would no longer be supernatural, because their environment would be a subset of our environment.
The former case is the situation we find ourselves in, we do not know and can not communicate with anything in the environmental superset we are a subset of, if it indeed exists. What we do know is the consistency we experience in our efforts to examine our environment. It allows us to trust the outcome of our tests.
It is true that the sharp line between natural and supernatural we observe in our own lives may break down and be blurred in the quantum microcosm.
Funny thing is, the more physical phenomena we find we can test, the more inclusive and larger the natural environment becomes. However, the supernatural stays the supernatural, simply because it is definitional. What is included in the category may change, because of our abilities, but the categories will not change.
That's enough of my rambling. If I say too much more I may not be able to understand what I said. :)
I will add that this 'supernatural influence problem' really isn't all that is wrong with the current incarnation of ID, especially the version pushed by Behe and Dembski. That version has major problems with methodology and the prevalence of false positives and false negatives. Dembski's 'complexity' has major problems as well.
I understood that. I was trying to stay within the context of your comment ... my apologies if I slipped beyond it.
Not enough time to fully digest your post -- looks like some interesting thoughts. I'll try to respond later.