Is the spiritual world smaller these days?

Conventional wisdom:
All we do not understand scientifically, as yet, is open to spiritual assumptions. So beyond the horizon of what we can see, there may be God.

But:
Is not God near and ever constant? Can we grapple things away from God in understanding them? Is God not God of natural and supernatural alike?

Quite obviously, the distinction between natural and supernatural is one of human understanding, not one of what is God´s doing and what is other than God. There is a certain sense of Christians fearing and shying away from scientific explanations of the world. I would say that that stems from a confusion between spiritual and supernatural, which is not really something you can blame the Bible for. Admittedly, there are supernatural miracles in the Bible, I believe them, but they are spiritual interventions, not the real length, breadth and depth of the spiritual as such. The spiritual reality is a cornerstone of the Christian faith: eternal life, judgement and the rest of the package is an eschatological realm apart from earthly existence. The last things, truly beyond any and all horizons. There can be no gradual process of getting there and moving closer to it, when it comes it will be like a thief in the night. Without it, we Christians are indeed the most pitiable creatures upon this earth.

Once more he visited Cana in Galilee, where he had turned the water into wine. And there was a certain royal official whose son lay sick at Capernaum. When this man heard that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea, he went to him and begged him to come and heal his son, who was close to death.
"Unless you people see miraculous signs and wonders," Jesus told him, "you will never believe."
The royal official said, "Sir, come down before my child dies."
Jesus replied, "You may go. Your son will live."
The man took Jesus at his word and departed.
John 4:46-50

Leo Tolstoy (I think...) once said of miracles, that Christ has radiance without them. Indeed he does. Jesus often remarks, in something that strikes me as a sad note, that unless we see action and miracles we don´t believe. But it could also be argued that it´s a matter-of-fact observation, that unless we see action and miracles, we don´t believe. They are vital for us to understand that for God all things are possible, that the spiritual realm has dominion over the natural. The sadness in Jesus voice is there, confronted with our constant blindness to see him for what he is, the Son of God. That our eyes are, not blind, but turned away from his radiance.

So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground."
Genesis 1:27-28

Superstition is the belief in spiritual explanations for phenomena in the natural world. The Bible is not too concerned with explaining the natural world, but is all about revealing the spiritual world, namely the Kingdom of God, and putting a piece of that spiritual reality into the lives of people who are in this natural world, we know as described by scientists and human experience. Now the one piece of the Bible which lends itself to allegations of superstition is the description of the creation of the world in Genesis 1, which could be taken either literally or metaphorically. Both ways the revelation of God always has a purpose and intent. To be truthful, we must acknowledge both literal and metaphorical elements in Genesis. The descriptions of the creation of plants and animals hardly refers to anything other than plants and animals. But as for “there was evening, and there was morning”; these two are created no sooner than day four along with the sun and moon (logically correct), which would lead us to say that the seven days timeline is, and was intended as, metaphorical. We have a naïve tendency to imagine people were uncapable of logical thinking in ancient times and just accepted extraordinary events uncritically. So in my humble opinion the creation of the universe is God´s supreme doing, but Genesis shouldn´t be read as a science book, but as always for the purpose of salvation and instruction.

Just some pointers to interesting things in Genesis: The “be fruitful”-command is repeated twice, first to the animals, secondly to the human, but with an important addition. We know ourselves to be biologically programmed to survive and multiply, as well as the animals, in that there is no difference, but God adds: rule over all this that I´ve created. It is ours. Because we are created in the image of God, and hence worthy and capable to rule over it as in his place. This is the basic pre-condition to human existence on earth, a blessed existence if there ever was one, however things eventually go horribly wrong. Let´s remember that all is allowed, there are no rules or laws, no, we humans are our own rulers and are doing a fine job of it. But there is one possibility of spite, to disobey God, and the knowledge and possibity of good and evil comes into the human existence, and it is taken. The material grace of creation is rejected and corrupted, but the giver of grace remains. And the last things will be far better even than the first.

But let´s not preoccupy us with material and spiritual overly, for God it is a trivial distinction. The difference was trivial before the origin of sin when corrupted was separated from incorruptible, and it will once again become trivial when Christ returns. What we can say is that there are material and spiritual “senses”, the material ( for example scientific exploration) will show you the world in its present glory and corruption, aiming for the outer world´s representation; the spiritual “sense”, prayer and praise, will show you the glory of God, aiming for the inner man´s redemption.

Jesus declared, "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.
John 4:21-24