What isn't natural?

rob wrote in Message 3: What isn't natural? Even artificial things like nukes, pop-tarts, and robots are natural. "God" is natural, too”no less natural than soap suds or Shakespearean sonnets. Another expression for God is ”Fear Of Death.’ That’s natural enough. The fact that humans have made an extra-big fuss over God doesn’t mean that such fearful fussing is unnatural.Rob, you believe in the supernatural, I suppose. Well, you're not alone. But the God meme is natural enough. Look at the vast studies of historical cultures across the world, primitive or otherwise; they all have supernatural beliefs and God memes. They all fear death. So they are natural, aren't they? What isn’t natural? Can your attitude against nature be justified by invoking the God-Is-Above-Nature principle?The God meme has proven to be ubiquitous across cultures and geographies. The human is like any other animal, we’re all hard-wired to fear death. Some animals take up arms races to counter what they fear, such as the porcupine. Humans do something like that, too, and they also take up religions. That’s natural enough: when humans are so fearful of natural death they naturally invent belief systems to comfort them and lower your stress levels. That’s natural.But you, rob, want to see humans as a special creation. And how do you measure the difference? You invoke the scientific meme of complexity: I suppose you assume godliness is part of human complexity. If anything, why wouldn't that make us a lesser beast in forest? If complexity is the measure you desire, you ought to check out the cuttlefish.”HM

Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

I disagree. Living things are aversive to aversive stimulus. I don't think an ameoba fears death but it will move away from an acidic solution. Incorrect:Fear had nothing to do with it. You are assigning an affective drive to evolution. This pains me, it really pains me; but I have to go with Rob here with a caveat.Humans are special but it is becuase of the complexity of our brains not special creation. It is possible that other non human animals may fear death but I would argue the level of abstraction we can.Humans fear death on a level of cognitive recognition. So we can conlude that the god assumption is just another overvalued idea in the human mind and therfore quite natural.

This is an interesting topic---What isn't natural? (Of course my altar-ego promoted it! Odd fellow, that.)Hoot Mon, in order to shape this topic up as a debate and a discussion, you and I are going to have to work out the rough spots and hammer out some premise so that the topic doesn't die.First of all, you seem stuck of Dawkins pet word, meme which is summarized by Wiki as being a "unit of cultural information" which can propagate from one mind to another in a manner analogous to genes (i.e., the units of genetic information). This indicates to me that you must favor biological evolutionary ideas for how every characteristic of humanity came about. A creationist will assert that God created us in some way as special. You yourself seem to believe that humanity imagined God and spread about the definition of Him(or whichever god one chooses) as a legendary bit of cultural information.IOW:Evolution-believes that humans evolved from less complex unthinking animals or lifeforms and thus evolved into one day being able to conclude certain religious meme-plexes which were then spread to others in our ilk.Biblical Creationism- God created Adam and Eve as special creation which He breathed life into and then foreknew the offspring of Abraham on an individual level, as many as grains of sand on a seashore.Theistic Evolutionists and other self proclaimed creationists who believe that God originally set Creation (of matter, ideas, and natural law) into motion would not be as easily swayed by Dawkins meme theory, seeing as how it is a convenient substitute for the beliefs themselves. (Unless they were Deists.) There is no evidence, biologically speaking, that we are any better than the rest of the animals.Whether or not God exists outside the natural world that we live in is a subject unto itself. It is also more of a Faith based topic, so I will leave it alone. Edited by Phat, : fixed quote

The word natural has a number of definitions, but there are two that are most relevant to the debate here.One definition refers to those parts of the universe not affected or influenced by humans. In this definition, natural and artificial are opposites.The other definition is more science-related. In this definition everything in the universe is natural, including humans, and the supernatural encompasses everything else.You can argue that during a discussion one should not switch back and forth between these two definitions, but one cannot argue that one definition is wrong and the other right. They are both accepted definitions.--Percy

You can't discuss what is 'unnatural' unless you first establish what 'nature' is. Few words in the English language are more flexible than this one--especially since the eighteenth century made it a buzzword.Percy has done this discussion a service by noting the plurality of meanings. The two definitions he provides definitely have to be taken into account in a discussion like this.Neither are those two meanings exhaustive.In popular usage 'natural' often means 'that which is achieved by the most economic and elegant means.' The opposite of 'natural' in this case is 'contrived.' (It takes its cue from the 'natural/artificial' dichotomy but this one can refer entirely to the work of human beings: The speech writer sought language that sounded natural.)A teleological use of the word 'natural' is based on the 'form follows function' principle. It means 'as nature intended' or 'as God intended.' In this usage, it is natural to use your mouth to eat. You need need to eat in order to survive; of all your anatomical parts your mouth is uniquely qualified for the job of eating. It is less obvious, and thus 'less natural' by this definition, to use your mouth to breathe, talk, sing, kiss, practice oral sex, or pull the cap off a bottle of ale. If the speaker finds any of these 'less natural' uses personally revolting, he or she may move the slider over into the red zone and call it 'unnatural.'A widespread Industrial Age romanticism toward nature has brought us the popular idea too that 'natural' means 'beneficial.' This connotation is assumed, profitably, by the purveyors of health and health food products. To speak of 'natural ingredients' is to speak automatically, it is thought, of ingredients that are good for you.But gas gangrene is natural. Blood flukes are natural. Tapeworms are natural. The idea of 'natural' as 'beneficial' is thus not... well, natural._____Edited by Archer Opterix, : trying for more natural prose.

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ArcherAll species are transitional.

Larni wrote: I use "fear" in metaphorical context, as meaning any animated avoidance of "danger," which also carries meaning as an emotional metaphor. It is natural for life to "fear" death, isn't it? And it is natural to bicker over metaphors. No "affective drive to evolution" to it”no evolutionary cowboys that herd us along to the higher complexity. Careful with your "pains," which amount to a sensory-emotional metaphor. By what measure do you claim a human brain is more complex than, say, the brain of a cuttlefish? My point here is that we speak of natural "complexity" as if it has anthropocentric meaning, and we use the term carelessly without having any relevant measure of its importance.”HM

Percy wrote: I would agree. However, the first definition, albeit valid, is a just bit too anthropocentric for me. It carries a sense of human arrogance. (This may be more my problem than anything else.)”HM

It really pains me to say this, but I'd have to agree with Hoot on this because he wasn't using the word "fear" literally. Survival, or maintaining one's continued existence, is hardwired into every living organism. Even the species that purposely take some actions to die to give their offsprings a chance at life, like some spiders that feed their young with their own bodily fluids, are doing it to maintain the continued existence of their genes. Again, he was speaking figuratively here. The porcupine's ancestors didn't consciously say, "ok, let's evolve to develope bad-ass armor piercing spears to protect ourselves..." Nonetheless, they did develop a very effective mean to defend themselves, and Hoot Mon was only referring to it as an arms race as a figurative referrence to what human civilizations do. Well, if you want to say that we are special because of our brain and our cognitive abilities, might as well say penguins are special because of their special adaptation to one of the harshest environments on earth. Penguins must be god's chosen "people" then.

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Disclaimer:

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Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style.

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He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!

I think the problem here, which I think is so bleedingly obvious that noone has actually thought much of it, is our unintentional use of the fallacy of division and fallacy of composition. For example, Hoot Mon seemed to have argued that everything is natural because pretty much everything is made of things that are found out there without any human meddling. Every part of my printer is "natural" because every atom in it is suppose to be naturally occuring atoms. However, I would argue that the printer itself is not natural because it's not like I can start digging and find a canon color printer.

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Disclaimer:

​

Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style.

​

He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!

I can't tell if you're arguing against my point in Message 5 or just ignoring it.--Percy

TD wrote: No fun at all. Animals with complicated life cycles, like gastrointestinal parasites and rotifers, seem a lot more complex to me than humans or penguins. It all depends on the parameters.”HM

TD wrote: By your reasoning, then, the stone house of the caddisfly larva is not natural. Nor is the honeycomb, nor the cultured fungus farms of leafcutter ants...”HM

Isn't this interesting? It is now boiling down to is life natural at all?Honestly, this is giving me a headache, so I'm gonna just walk away with my hands covering my ears.

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Disclaimer:

​

Occasionally, owing to the deficiency of the English language, I have used he/him/his meaning he or she/him or her/his or her in order to avoid awkwardness of style.

​

He, him, and his are not intended as exclusively masculine pronouns. They may refer to either sex or to both sexes!

'Natural' is an ambiguous term; the answer to the question of this thread is different depending on the definition of the word. It seems like most of the arguments in this thread and elsewhere are simply due to different people taking 'natural' to mean different things.If 'natural' is taken to mean 'everything which is either not human, not created by humans, or not affected by humans', then the separation is obvious.If 'natural' is taken to mean 'everything which does not violate the known laws of physics', then the line of separation is less clear. If the existence of anything outside the laws of physics is denied categorically, then everything known to man, including man, is natural. If humans (or human self-awareness) are a result of a violation of the laws of physics, by God or otherwise, then humans are unnatural.I believe the question of the naturalness of humanity is ultimately a distraction; either it's simply a matter of definition, or the real question is about whether or not humans were a result of nothing but the laws of physics, or whether the laws were broken to create humans. Which is one way of looking at the entire creation vs evolution debate. Answering the question raised in this thread would require answering the question raised by this entire message board. (of course, every person posting here has already made up their minds about the answer to that, so there is little point to it all...)However, that is also a false dichotomy. Humanity can be a result of, and compatible with, the laws of physics, AND God can have created humanity. After all, if God is in fact perfect, He could have a created a universe which created exactly the kind of being he wanted due to the very nature of the material it was composed of. Which is theistic evolution.