Stephen Law has a very good list of general humanist traits. I can go with this:
1. Secular humanists place particular emphasis on the role of science and reason.
2. Humanists are atheists. They do not sign up to belief in a god or gods.
3. Humanists suppose that this is very probably the only life we have.
4. Humanists usually believe in the existence and importance of moral value.
5. Humanists emphasize our individual moral autonomy and responsibility.
6. Humanists are secularists in the sense that they favour an open, democratic society and believe the State should take neutral stance on religion.
7. Humanists believe that we can enjoy significant, meaningful lives even if there is no is a God, and whether or not we happen to be religious.
But then he raises an objection I wouldn’t have even considered:
Now some readers may be thinking, ‘But hang on, you haven’t mentioned naturalism. Surely secular humanists also sign up to naturalism, right? They reject belief in the supernatural. So why no mention of naturalism here?
Really, I wasn’t at all worried about it — to the point I was baffled why we even needed to discuss the fine points of naturalism. Then he explained that it was a significant issue among philosophers.
…note that naturalism is pretty controversial even amongst atheists. Take the professional philosophical community. The 2009 Philpapers survey of the opinions of professional philosophers and graduate students revealed that less than 15% of professional philosophers and graduate students are theists. Yet only a little less than half of them sign up to naturalism. That leaves around 35% who are neither theists nor naturalists. Why bar them all entry to the secular humanist club, particularly when many of them will be fully in agreement with points 1-7 above (which are, it seems to me, the points that really matter)?
I confess, my first thought was “silly philosophers, fussing over the precise meaning of words…”, and thinking that the scientific community rarely seems to do surveys of what scientists believe about metaphysics. But then…I realized that most scientists have a nice little dogma about that very issue. We don’t wrestle with the concept because we already know what to think, which is not a good state of affairs. Maybe we should listen to philosophers more.
Here’s our dogma, which has been recited at my more times than I care to remember, usually by people making excuses for religion: “A scientist has to be a methodological naturalist, but not a philosophical naturalist.” The former is a practical approach to what you do in the lab, the latter is about what you believe about the nature of the universe. You hear it a lot from the NCSE, as a rhetorical tool to reconcile religion and science.
It’s always bugged me. Here we are, making hair-splitting decisions about delicate distinctions in the philosophy of science, and we reduce them to a nice pat dichotomy, two buzzwords that we can use to place people’s beliefs into two specific categories, usually to say that we can ignore one perspective. Yet when I’ve actually thought about the two categories, I have to say that my position is messier. Short answer: I guess I’m a philosophical naturalist, because I don’t believe there is any non-natural processes working in the world. But what would be an unnatural process? If a supernatural cause has an effect on the natural world, doesn’t that mean it is now amenable to scientific study? I don’t exclude the operation of different laws outside my universe, only that they’re going to have to accept a kind of natural straitjacket to impinge on us here. Maybe I’m a kind of utilitarian naturalist? I don’t know. Maybe I should study more philosophy.
Law makes the point that naturalism is a murky mess, and I have to agree with him.
Philosophical doubts about naturalism tend to spring, first, from concerns about whether naturalism is a well-defined concept. What is naturalism (or metaphysical naturalism, to be precise)? A sceptic’s usual first port of call is to say that naturalism consists in the rejection of belief in the supernatural. But what is the supernatural? Why, it’s that which isn’t natural, of course! But now notice that these explanations of naturalism and supernaturalism are, as they stand, entirely circular and uninformative. So far, no significant meaning has been attached to either term. It’s harder to define ‘naturalism’ than you might think (though note I don’t say it can’t be done).
I’ve used that “methodological naturalism” excuse in the past, and I do bring it up in my classes, but I’m increasingly reluctant to trot it out in any kind of argument. It seems to me to be a dangerous rhetorical trap for scientists: by accepting it, you’ve moved the battleground from an area where you have expertise, the physical and logical evidence for evolution, to the area of the philosophy of science, and most of us (me included) are totally unqualified to discuss it. A smart creationist or theist could spin you up, down, and all around, leave you confused and staggering, and get a technical K.O. against you.
If you want to argue this stuff, it’s essential to know where your strengths lie…but also your weaknesses.
There’s a mildly obscure term in the god debate: Ignostic. It is agnosticism, but it is agnosticism specifically because the God debate is ill-defined. Sloppy definitions, fuzzy ideas. You can’t really have a position for or against an idea that isn’t coherent, can you? I’m guessing that is similar to your position on naturalism vs. whatever the alternative to naturalism is.
Philosophical doubts about naturalism tend to spring, first, from concerns about whether naturalism is a well-defined concept. What is naturalism (or metaphysical naturalism, to be precise)? A sceptic’s usual first port of call is to say that naturalism consists in the rejection of belief in the supernatural. But what is the supernatural? Why, it’s that which isn’t natural, of course!
That’s a strawman version of naturalism; my suspicions are immediately aroused by the somewhat grassy smell of yon naturalist, and the bundle of golden wheat that comprises his neck.
I wouldn’t imagine a philosopher worth a bucket of shit (except maybe Sam Harris) would attempt a circular ‘definition’ like that. How about:
Naturalism is the position that, lacking evidence to the contrary, the universe we observe and interact with is all that there is. Naturalism, further, embraces new observations and incorporates them into its universal view, once there is acceptable evidence supporting the things that are observed.”
There are always a few philosophers who’ll enthusiastically spout edgy hypotheticals (like Bostrom’s ‘simulationism’ or string theory) but that was what Popper was trying to head off with his idea of falsifiability – if you can’t conceive of an experiment that would disprove your theory, it’s arguing in effect that what you are theorizing is outside of the natural world, i.e.: it’s supernatural (AKA imaginary)
There is no more need to explicitly profess naturalism than there is to explicitly pledge your allegiance to round-earth-ism. It all follows from point 1. There is no need to rule out the supernatural beforehand. Just let science do its work and if there is no supernatural, then its nonexistence will come out as a result on the other end of the scientific process.
So it is nothing but a debate over semantics?
I’ve had arguments with people claiming to be like me – a secular humanist – telling me there are other ways of knowing and blah blah the universe is god… blah blah. It is always a way to shoe horn new agey Chopra type crap into Humanism.
There are people who believe in naturalism who aren’t atheists. Of course I ask what’s the point.
If one agrees with points 1-7 then there shouldn’t be a debate over naturalism – it is just another label for points 1 – 7.
“Supernaturalism” is no more coherently defined than is “god.” The question “Does the supernatural exist?” is a bad question. It’s incoherent and undefined; “supernatural” is a perpetually plastic concept that promoters twist to evade evaluation. If the whole question is nebulous noise, how can any answer be acceptable? The only way to win is by not playing the game.
Just let science do its work and if there is no supernatural, then its nonexistence will come out as a result on the other end of the scientific process.
This!
Cisko’s “without miracles” takes a great stab at dealing with this problem, which is, ultimately, pyrrhonian skepticism; refutation of our ability to make any claim of knowledge at all. As soon as the naturalist makes a claim “the supernatural doesn’t exist” they have adopted a dogmatic position and can be attacked on their epistemology (“How then do you know the supernatural doesn’t exist?”) Like the pyrhhonians, claims of knowledge are avoided, though the naturalist uses experiment and observation where Sextus Empiricus would say “It appears to me now, that…”
What would testable, observable non-naturalism consist of?
You can’t really have a position for or against an idea that isn’t coherent, can you?
I’m not sure. :)
In any practical sense, I feel like Naturalism is the controversial position that real things are real, and not-real things are not real.
Naturalism vs. supernaturalism implies a dualistic conception of the universe. Going back to Plato and Aristotle, they believed that there were things that were made up of a combination of matter (‘stuff’ — not the same as our conception of matter) and form (an overall pattern). A horse was the form of a horse given instantiation in matter.
The question then becomes, are there things that are pure form and have no substance? Plato’s answer was yes. The traditional concept of the soul is such a thing.
Now, can a thing without matter have effects on the natural world (the world of matter)? Ancient philosophers said yes. In fact, material things (matter + form) could not exist without the preexistence of the form. In short, the forms create the universe. The forms themselves come from other immaterial things, going back, if you are a Neoplatonist, to The One, the generating principle of all things, material and immaterial.
So the presumption that certain things are immaterial was no barrier to their systematic study, to ancient and medieval philosophers.
This traditional version of natural vs. supernatural is reasonably coherent, but it doesn’t mesh well with our modern scientific notions of matter, fields, and spacetime. Is a photon material, or immaterial? The opinion of an ancient philosopher is useless here. I think the reason scientists have problems with the notion is that the debate is taking place orthogonally to the way that scientists view the universe.
I agree with the philosophers: it’s not a well-defined distinction. What science requires isn’t some methodological attachment to naturalism, but a demand for empirical evidence. That doesn’t limit speculation about things for which there isn’t yet evidence — consider the history of the Higgs boson!
But that speaks not at all to the issue of naturalism.
Like many other posters on this thread, I am struck by how similar the following passage;
Sounds to the demands we sometimes get on some Pharyngula threads from theist to define ‘god’ and then prove the negative of its non-existence. I think our response should also be the same – Russel’s teapot applies. As it does not fall to atheists to define the concept of god, but rather the onus is on theists to define their god concept and provide credible scientific evidence to support their claims before atheists can be expected to provide evidence to counter their assertions, so equally it does not fall to naturalists to define the supernatural, but rather the proponents of supernaturalism must first define their terms and then back up their extraordinary claim that forces not amendable to scientific analysis underpin reality in some demonstarable fashion – simply claiming that it is the case is not sufficient, and neither is constructing a conveniently non-falsifiable definition.
Only if they can actually do that (something that I find highly doubtful), would it become reasonable to ask naturalists to provide evidence to refute their contention.
All I have seen thus far is what might be called a ‘supernaturalism of the gaps’; the idea that the supernatural always conveniently exists just beyond the horizon of our scientific understanding, and always retreats that much further into the unknown as our knowledge advances, an excuse wheeled out everytime yet another attempt to invoke supernaturalism to explain a phenomenon gets comprehensively debunked. I don’t find that argument persuasive when applied to god(s), and I see no reason why it should be considered any more credible when applied to such a fuzzy term as the supernatural.
It is also worth bearing in mind that this very imagined ambiguity when it comes to drawing the line between naturalism and the supernatural is exactly the thing that conartists like mediums, faith healers, and those horrible ghost hunter shows trade upon in order to get away with making scientifically ludicrous claims and promises in order to bilk the vulnerable (or clog up the airways with the worst example of the already degenerate breed of ‘reality television’). Whenever a humanist who accepts the supernatural – however well intentioned or otherwise onboard with progressive values – argues against the reasonable presumption of naturalistic explanations for phenomena, they are creating cover for charlatans to prey upon the desperate.
It is worth bearing in mind that this is not a consequence free or morally neutral stance, but can cause real harm to real people, even if indirectly. That should be of concern to any humanist, whatever their background with regard to skepticism and naturalism.
Richard Carrier has a long but good discussion on Naturalism and defining the Supernatural.
Basically, Natural stuff is mindless. So on Naturalism, any minds that exist are composed of non-mind stuff.
But the supernatural would be stuff that is mind, as a brute fact, not resulting from the mindless substance of nature.
“…the supernatural would be stuff that is mind, as a brute fact, not resulting from the mindless substance of nature.”
Which would make vampires… which?
Well, I know I’m not going to die on a supernatural hill….
No, that NCSE-style crap is a confused mess. Cleaning it up takes some work, but it doesn’t need to be especially messy.
Yeah, well, probably everyone should.
When we’re talking about ontology/metaphysics (what there is), naturalism is basically the claim that mental entities do not exist apart from non-mental entities. If in all of existence there is a mind (or a deity, a dead ancestor, a purposeful Force like SW, or anything of the sort), then there is some (non-mental) physical system which produces that mind. In our case, those are brains — interacting with their physical environments, obviously. In an alien’s case, who knows what kind of organs they might have, but it will be some part of a physical body of some sort, interacting with other physical bodies. In a computer’s case (if any of them had minds, and yes, I’m deliberately stretching this well beyond anything we actually have evidence for right now), it would be the physical hardware components of the computer. Likewise, all non-mental things also have as their causes/instantiations/origins other non-mental things. (That means, for example, that a “deist” whose supernatural god is needed just to get the ball rolling is not a naturalist, even if that god never does anything else — which may or may not be “detectable,” because it’s fucking lazy or whatever. They do not get an easy escape clause, buried somewhere deep in the fine print.) And so forth. The point is that all things are, at bottom, fundamentally not mental, which means they’re not intelligent nor are they aware/conscious, purposeful/intentional, or anything else that is distinctively “mental.”
If any of that is not the case, naturalism is false and supernaturalism is true. Maybe there really are magic-wielding alien spirits in the Small Magellanic Cloud, which itself might have a mind or a cosmic purpose of its own — who the fuck actually has any evidence one way or another? Nobody. But the point is that if that’s the case, naturalism is not true. That’s what you’re buying into, just like it says right on the box, not anything in particular about epistemology or science or scientific methodology or whatever other bullshit people like to talk about instead of the issue of whether or not gods, souls, afterlives, psychic/magic powers, etc., actually do exist. That’s what it means. If you think those things don’t exist, you’re a naturalist. If you very specifically don’t believe in gods, but do believe (for whatever silly reason) in other supernatural entities/powers/processes/whatever-the-fuck, you’re an atheist but not a naturalist.
But do not even attempt to put it into terms of best practices, methodology, epistemology, “observations,” “detectability,” “evidence,” what is “amenable to scientific study,” or any of that other crap. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200, etc. That’s not useful here. Because we’re not doing an exercise in epistemology, not right now. This isn’t hair-splitting nor is it terribly hard to get — just answer the question “What is there?”
So to answer some of the questions in PZ’s post:
It would be any process that is not the result of mindless stuff. So that means the internal process of a supernatural mind I guess? It also means the non-mechanistic causation on the natural world such minds would need in order to affect anything in the natural world. So I think there wouldn’t really be much actual process if they affected the natural world. I guess it would simply be a brute fact that effects occur when such minds will them to happen, or whatever.
Yes indeed, as Carrier argues. Also, if you want a technical science paper on the subject, someone wrote one, here is a pdf.
Fictional. Neither.
But tell us about them and their properties. What is a vampire? Are they immortal and how does that work, or are they just something that drinks blood? How did they become vampires? Keep going until you’ve actually defined them, not just mentioned a word. You’d probably have to settle on which fictional representations of them are supposed to be “canonical” in some sense. Do they sparkle, for example? I’ll go out on a limb here and say that the sparkly ones aren’t real.
I’m tempted to ask, what is a “professional philosopher”? And what do they do other than make shit up?
Good question. Both natural and supernatural varieties of vampire have been written about in fiction, I think.
Being able to will their own transformation into bats is usually depicted as supernatural, similar to their weakness to holy objects. Even their dependance on blood is something that I don’t think is depicted as simply nutritional, otherwise why would they need to depend upon that specific source of nutrition? Instead, these all have an element of direct causation, and are based on concepts and meaning (which are mental), not physics (which is non-mental).
Not that I’m very familiar with stories or conceptions of vampires.
I’ll also note that the naturalism/supernaturalism divide is largely a fiction the religionists and wooters fall back to when they’re defending their position. Because there isn’t any way for us to gain knowledge about anything, other than through natural means — somehow, somewhere, some photon’s got to hit a cone cell, or some vibration has to reach an eardrum, or something like that. The supernatural is just a great big scam that was concocted in order to dodge the question, “if your XXX is so real, why can’t I see it, or its effects?” There is a severe skeptical challenge that can be applied against all claims of knowledge, but supernaturalism ain’t it – supernaturalism is a way for one player to keep their king off the chessboard so it can’t be checkmated. But the problem is that they still make claims that presuppose the king is there: god (or orgone, or whatever) still affects the real world — but they skip the part when they explain how that works. I love asking the religious how the hand of god avoids violating any conservation laws, or where prayers fall on the electromagnetic spectrum (and why a scientist praying doesn’t throw experiments off) etc.
The supernatural isn’t the opposite of the natural, it’s just a conversational dodge. It’s not even philosophy.
Being able to will their own transformation into bats is usually depicted as supernatural
Doesn’t that violate all kinds of conservation laws? Or are they very very hot bats that are emitting a fuckton of radiation?
Marcus, please just go back to writing code or whatever you do. At the very least stop being a presumptuous ass.
Same to you, Doubting Thomas.
Yup. It’s fuckn magic.
Maybe so. Set up all the initial conditions just right, something that is fantastically improbable no doubt, and they’ll fly away from it without a scratch.
Marcus, please just go back to writing code or whatever you do. At the very least stop being a presumptuous ass.
Uh, wow. Kiss my ass.
CR @ 17:
Jim C. Hines has a lot of fun with this in his book Libriomancer. The sparkly ones are known as Sanguinarius Meyerii.
Law’s critical thinking books for kids (and everybody else) are excellent. The Philosophy Gym, Philosophy Files 1 and 2, and Believing Bullshit. Great introduction to logic, fallacies and seeing the holes in arguments such as religious ones (among others).
R Johnston @5:
I clicked your link and read PZ’s old post (I wasn’t reading when Pharyngula was at Scienceblogs), but was disappointed that there were no comments to read* (despite PZ mentioning people disagreeing with him in the comments). Any idea what happened?
*it feels strange to say that I was looking forward to reading comments, given how often one hears “don’t read the comments!”
Tony @ 28:
Yeah, NatGeo happened. When they took over, they were supposed to restore the comments, but cited ‘problems’ and haven’t bothered with most of them. (NatGeo also didn’t want people being mean or cussy in comments, which is one reason for the move here.)
This seems to be a popular idea among philosophical humanists, and I have despised it for many years now. I first developed a distaste for it when Jaques Monod called it “the postulate of objectivity”, in his book Chance and Necessity (1970). (I liked that book in general, except for his sense of gloom at concluding that there was no God to give us a helping hand).
It is a false dichotomy. My own concept of naturalism (being the working hypothesis that nothing like mind needs to be postulated as a precursor to the order we discover in the physical and biological world in which we find ourselves) is quite adequately supported by science, and is quite likely the most tested hypothesis in all of science. It is certainly not a “methodology,” (like the difference between in vitro and in vivo studies, or radio versus optical telescopes) and can’t be left hung alongside the lab coat at the end of the day. Neither is it a philosophical axiom (or postulate) that must be taken on faith or as a foundational assumption. The question: “is the universe aware — Does it, or even can it, have a plan?” is a fair one, and is subject to scientific inquiry. The conjecture, that it can and does, has proved to be an unfruitful hypothesis, and without scientific merit. In religion, on the other hand, where it is unconstrained by the necessity for its practitioners to try hard not to lie to or fool themselves and others, it has done quite well.
For anyone who would say that they endorse the idea of naturalism as being either “methodological” or “philosophical”, as opposed to theoretical, I would ask if their acceptance and understanding of the theories of evolution, relativity, quantum mechanics.. all the way to anthropogenic global warming.. are these also either “methodological” and/or “philosophical”? If so, which one? And if neither, why not?
I personally don’t have a problem with defining ‘the natural’ as ‘that which exists’ that is, the cosmos. If someone wants to give me a coherent definition of ‘the supernatural’ that manages to somehow be ‘not natural’ but ‘exists anyway’, I’m all ears.
In other words, I have yet to find a functional definition of ‘supernatural’ that differs significantly from the definition of ‘utter bullshit’. I guess certain philosophers feel silly when they call what they’re arguing for by the latter name, I guess.
I see no reason to give them that comfort, though.
Tony, Iyéska:
Yeah, it’s sad that the comments to those old posts have been lost. In fact scienceblogs post pages seem to have been stripped out of the Internet Archive sometime in mid-2012 (at least for Pharyngula and a small random sample I checked), so that the only archived pages available are from after comments were lost.
It’s a problem because that’s utterly vacuous.
Let’s suppose you call yourself a naturalist. Given your past comments, I think you are.
So, do you think gods with magical superpowers exist? No, right?
What if, in five minutes, we find that there is in fact a god with magical superpowers?
Will you maintain that you were right all along, because “natural” means “that which exists,” or you at least going to act just a little tiny bit surprised, if not admit openly that you were wrong about what kinds of things there are?
Read the thread.
I’d ask PZ to do that too, because this issue has come up numerous times, but somehow he never manages to pay attention in these threads … or maybe he just forgets it all.
I think you are just going round the same old bend labeling the things you think about differently. It isn’t a bad practice but it doesn’t get you anywhere new.
It is logical to simplify debates by limiting the number of categories. Eliminating empty sets is basic. The word God really has no place in debate because God cannot be shown to exist. The word God has become a placeholder for all the stuff people have trouble explaining. It is interesting to watch the procession through time of items offered as proofs of God that end up as proofs of naturalism. As this trend is observed the tendency is to assume that eventually there will remain nothing left unexplained and the classic ‘God of the gaps’ argument will finally disappear as the gaps disappear.
Except that the universe is huge and the things to be learned, as well as human stupidity, are nearly limitless. So The concept of God, as a name for that which we don’t understand yet, isn’t going anywhere because we don’t, and may never know, it all.
Similarly the term supernatural has no place in debate other than as a placeholder and label for items not yet explicitly determined to be natural. We watch the trend of seemingly irrefutable arguments for the supernatural falling and assume the concept itself will collapse. But, here again, the number of items seem just this side of infinite. Until each and every one is examined we cannot close the notional category even as we note the mind numbing repetition and concatenation of perfect failures to durably show anything as supernatural.
There is a jar on the shelf with a label. I look inside to find the item on the label and don’t see it, but find the inside of the jar to be the size of the universe with only a small part observable. What am I to think? Is the jar mislabeled? Empty? Or is the item at some far corner where I haven’t detected it yet?
One assumes that because an item has a name it must exist, or have existed. But perhaps not. Does zero exist as anything other than a useful notional construct? Does infinity exist? Certain empty sets seem to have utility.
If we take a great leap and assume that God and the supernatural are empty sets, do they still have utility unique in and of themselves, or can we simply cross out the names on the jars and relabel them as ‘Unknown’. It has certain attractive aspects. History is full of examples of armies marching and inhumanities committed in the name of God, or some form of supernaturalism. As far as I can tell nobody has ever marched off to war in the name of ‘Unknown’.
The “Science is just methodological naturalism but you don’t HAVE to be a REAL naturalist” bit is basically NOMA. An excuse for knowing scientific methodology and knowing the power of evidence, while still holding onto nonsense beliefs that are quite decidely non-scientific and unevidence. A “Get out of Cognitive Dissonance Free” card. A paper thin excuse to ensure that Christians don’t run away from science, screaming and crying and gnashing their teeth.
Brian Pansky: “…the supernatural would be stuff that is mind, as a brute fact, not resulting from the mindless substance of nature.”
Let me paint a far-fetched possibility. We discover that consciousness as we know it depends on some as-yet-undiscovered basic element of physics. I won’t even speculate as to particle, field, or something else entirely. Physicists are able to model it mathematically, and physicist and biologists are able to show how it generates consciousness as we know it, without which neither animals nor humans would have quite the awareness they have. It is, in short, elementary “mindstuff,” that somehow gets configured or coalesced or propagated as part of animal development.
Yes, yes, very far fetched.
Would that make this a supernatural universe? Would we then be supernatural beings?
There’s no way to answer it, if you’re going to insist on this: “I won’t even speculate as to particle, field, or something else entirely.”
If it’s both an element of physics, while also not being something like a particle or a field, and it is itself a mental entity, I have a hard time picturing how this is even a coherent hypothetical entity. Sounds like at least one contradiction already, if not several. What exactly is this thing you’re talking about? Sort that out first, then we could get started on categorizing it as “natural” or “supernatural” afterward. Or maybe it needs a brand new category, because it doesn’t fit in either — but why assume anything yet if we’ve got nothing to work with?
consciousness razor @ 33:
I’m saying that until and unless someone can tell me why something that exists is in some was not a part of the natural universe, why we need terms like ‘magical’ or ‘superpowers’ or ‘supernatural’ to exist outside of fiction.
My flabber would be totally and utterly gasted.
So what? I’m far from a genius, and I’m amazed by the things that exist all the time. The fact that I am amazed by something has no bearing on if it exists, or what category we should put it in (except for ‘things that amaze Anri’).
Now, would you insist that I was wrong, and that somehow this magical god isn’t natural?
In other words, how do we distinguish between supernatural real things and natural real things?
Sign me up as a secular humanist. I’d add that I think it’s possible for government to work for the betterment of humanity. And that humanists have a guiding respect for the environment, and have a mature, responsible sense of stewardship of the resources of the natural world.
But our society is still in the place where we subsidize the oil companies etc. who profit massively off of finite resources while polluting and cheating to maintain their unfair market advantage. We’ve got to raise our standards.
Already done.
A question. It’s a little bit loaded, but I don’t know how else to explain this phenomenon to myself. Do you think you just somehow know, prior to any experience of the world whatsoever, that minds must come from brains (etc.), that there is no other logical possibility (except in fiction, as you say, where anything goes)? If so, what makes you think you have such knowledge? Why not look around at the world and find out what it’s like first, in sufficient detail, before making your pompous declarations about the very nature of existence itself?
Exactly as I described in #15. Brian Pansky also linked in #13 to Richard Carrier’s essay explaining it in more in detail, as well as another paper in #16 that’s definitely worth checking out.
You could keep asking the same rhetorical question, I guess, or if it’s not just meant to be rhetorical bullshit, you could actually try responding to the answers that were already given.
From where I sit, God, psi, and the supernatural in general are all in the same situation.
We’ve learned a lot about the universe so far. As it currently stands, there is exactly zero evidence for any of the above. As long as that is the case, my position is that it is entirely unjustified to argue about this stuff – as far as we know, it does not exist.
Call me if we ever find actual evidence for any of it. Until then, I’ll laugh at these claims.
Or in other words, supernaturalism is an utterly unjustified assumption about the world.
As for being based on mind-stuff or non-mind-stuff, we’ve found lots of evidence for one, and again zero evidence of the latter. See above.
I don’t doubt you can spend a lot of time wanking about how this stuff would work if it were real, if you cared to. I’ve even done a bit of that myself. But I was never in doubt that it was fantasy, not real.
Let’s turn the problem around. What is “god” or “magic”?
Most people will answer on the line of “things that can’t be explained by science”, which is a normal God of the Gaps and very familiar ground for most metaphysical naturalists.
In short: Naturalism is the position that ill-defined phenomena unsupported by evidence are as unlikely to exist as it gets.
No, I’m saying that a mind that operates without interacting with anything else through any sort of force is indistinguishable from one that does not exist.
And that if it does interact with the world through some kind of force, that force exists and is therefore not ‘supernatural’, regardless of our understanding (or lack thereof) of it.
I’m making the ‘pompous declaration’ that things that exist can be said to be natural, and things that don’t exist aren’t.
Let me put it to you this way – until you can show me a mind that is not an emergent property of objects or forces, I have no good reason to either assume that they exist or include them in any sort of definition of reality. I am (as the expression goes) dismissing with no evidence that which has been presented with no evidence.
Please feel free to believe in your
goddisembodied mind of the gaps as much as you like, just don’t expect it to be persuasive.And if you don’t actually believe that such a thing exists, how is that different from it being indistinguishable from non-existence?
I have thought about this very question a lot over the years and have come up with the following opinion:
As a person trained in a scientific discipline I view “naturalism” as a kind of tautological, useless position that is trivial for any atheist to espouse. Given that the only things we have reason to believe exist are things we have direct or indirect evidence for, if we had evidence for the existence of something like telekinesis or ghosts, these traditionally “supernatural” phenomena would forevermore be known as “natural” and could be studied as such and eventually explained and incorporated into a scientific theory (maybe quantum theory or its successor). Thus nothing that exists is not natural, be it form, mind, spirit, soul, god(s), elves, magic, etc. If a god could, at a whim, break the laws governing the universe that it exists in, then it would merely be expanding our understanding of what is natural to include an exception to the rules we have figured out.
The only thing I might be prepared to remove from my conception of “natural” detailed above are things that actually do exist but, for whatever reason, have no causal effect on this universe. Since they, by definition, cannot be studied, they cannot be distinguished from things that people claim exist (but actually do not) which also have no causal effect on this universe. In this way, “supernatural” becomes kind of a placeholder, an acknowledgement that something might very well exist with the caveat that since it never affects anything or anyone, ever, there is no reason to believe it exists.
Finally, if a real phenomena is causally connected to our universe but we just have not found the evidence yet, I would not place it in either category. This makes “natural” an anthropocentric construct only, something I’m cool with.
Like consciousness razor (who is exactly right @15 and subsequently), I find it very frustrating that those who want to make “naturalism” an empty term keep on asking the same rhetorical question, and ignoring or misunderstand the answer, which is really very simple.
This appears to imply that minds are distinct from anything physical, but I assume you did not intend that. But supernaturalism is quite obviously not about minds that do not interact with the physical world: gods, ghosts, demons all supposedly interact with the physical world but do not depend on it for their existence. Metaphysical naturalism is, as CR says, the claim that there are no minds or aspects of mentality that have this independence of the physical world.
Anri, how on earth could you possibly reach the conclusion that consciousness razor believes in any such thing?
Read what I said. It’s not about whether they do or don’t interact with anything else.
Suppose I said “there’s a god, and it’s Pure Love.” (or try inserting whatever feelings/intentions/ideas/etc. that you want here).
You (rightly) ask, “what the fuck does that even mean?”
“I mean it’s not made of particles or fields or any of that nasty physical stuff, which makes me feel icky and not terribly special/important/immortal. It transcends space and time, and it exemplifies the emotion of love. It is the very nature and essence of Love itself, nothing else. I call it ‘Bob.'”
So now you say, “Alright, that’s a pretty wild idea you’ve got there. But Bob doesn’t interact with anything, which is indistinguishable from not existing. So, on that basis, I’m going to claim Bob doesn’t exist, since even according to you it won’t matter if I’m wrong about that.”
“Oh, no, you’re incorrect.” I reply. “It does interact with physical stuff, like here for example: [specifies what it supposedly does and provides the evidence]. It just isn’t made of physical stuff.”
Does that make it clearer to you? We’re talking about what the thing is, full stop, not how we know about it, or whether we can play a fucking game where we avoid being shown that we’re wrong — and playing right into the theist’s own fucking hand — because it’s supposedly undetectable (or indistinguishable from nonexistence). If it doesn’t exist, if it isn’t anything, then we’re still saying it’s that thing which doesn’t exist.
It isn’t just an empty statement that we’re making. And we aren’t just assuming to always be right no matter what (like the theist), by saying something hopelessly vague to the effect of “I believe in things that exist, not things which don’t exist.”
This is again just assuming your circular definition that “natural = exists.” That’s not what it means, and as I already pointed out, it doesn’t get you anywhere.
Maybe it’s not meant to be pompous. Maybe you’re just quoting Yahweh (or Popeye?) and saying “I am what I am.” Or “it is what it is.” Or “everything is everything.” In any case, that’s not interesting.
Are you incapable of reading, or are you being dishonest? Get this through your thick skull: I don’t think there are gods or disembodied minds or any such thing. That’s exactly the fucking point of spelling it all out, instead of just chanting your useless, fallacious, meaningless dogma over and over.
consciousness razor#33
Both. If it turns out that beings with superpowers (whether similar or not similar to those attributed to gods) do, in fact, exist, what that means is that our current conception of nature/the universe is flawed and needs updating. That doesn’t mean that the powers they have can meaningfully be described as ‘supernatural’, it just means that the laws of nature aren’t what we previously thought that they were.
rturpin#36
No, and no, as outlined above.
Looking at the Wiki definition of metaphysics, it is so broad as to be essentially useless:
The what is ultimately there? question is what makes the term meaningless, unless backed by evidence, or it is nothing but fiction. A huge amount of bullshit was presented back during the the counter-cultural days of the ‘Nam War protests as being “metaphysical” (and still is under “New Age” fuckwittery, which rhymes with sewage), which became a synonym for “I don’t have evidence, but believe in the claim anyway, just to piss you off”.
Which is why when I hear “metaphysical”, I hold on to both my wallet and by brains.
consciousness razor#46
Blithering about the supernatural doesn’t really get you anywhere either, since, as people have persistently pointed out, it doesn’t meaningfully describe anything.
Very technically, I suppose that if one hypothesizes that a) there are multiple universes/dimensions/whatever you want to call them, and b) that these universes are nested in some fashion, such that, e.g., there is a ‘super-universe’ which contains our own and also other things, and that c) the natural laws of this super-universe are both different to ours and override ours when they come into contact, that hypothetical entities from that superuniverse could reasonably be described as supernatural relative to our universe, since their set of natural laws overrides ours, but the thing is that a) in relation to their universe, they’re still natural beings bound by natural laws, and b) proponents of supernaturalism never actually frame things that way when they try to defend or define their ideas of the supernatural, and c) there’s still not a shred of fucking evidence that any such universe or entities from same actually exist, anymore than there is for all the other ‘supernatural’ bullshit that so many people are so fond of going on about.
Nick Gotts @45:
Well good on you. Then why don’t you try proposing a definition of “supernatural” that:
1) allows us to readily distinguish between the natural and the supernatural;
2) allows for the existence of the supernatural;
3) classifies various specific phenomena such as gods, ghosts, transfiguation, etc. that are generally seen as supernatural to be supernatural should they turn out to exist contrary to expectation;
4) doesn’t classify any natural phenomena as supernatural; and
5) doesn’t just mean “shit we don’t understand yet” or some subset thereof.
The reason that “natural world” is taken to refer to “everything that actually exists” is because there is no useful definition of “supernatural.” Go ahead and give one if you’d like–Richard Carrier’s example, described in this thread is a terrible answer that doesn’t make any sense–as pointed out by Anri @43, if we can detect a mind then in no meaningful sense does it not arise out of natural forces, and if we can’t detect it then in no meaningful sense does it exist–so do better.
consciousness razor @ 46:
I don’t intend to grant your hypothetical about Bob, because of this bit right here:
Because every single time anyone does the bolded bit, it turns out to be a natural thing.
What, IMHO, plays into the theists hands, is when we bow to the idea that there’s some useful reality beyond what can, even in theory, be measured. When we agree to the notion that there’s stuff that’s stuff, but there also might be (just behind that rock over there, you know) stuff that isn’t really stuff, that doesn’t have the properties of stuffiness and is therefore superstuff. Maybe it’s Bob, maybe it’s Celestia, maybe it’s gawd, but we’d better not dismiss the existence of not-stuff stuff, because it’s real real important.
Let me see if I can clarify something for myself:
So, you do not believe the supernatural exists, then?
(I’m sure we’re talking past one another here, am I’m trying to pick up on just where.)
PZ:
Going by the comments, apparently so.
I think this is actually a good term. Its like the mention someone makes about string theory. Yeah, “most” of the stuff out of that may be “outside our world”, which is to say, it doesn’t do jack yet. But, at the same time, it is a framework in which one can examine “possible” worlds, and, at minimum, even if it never describes ours, it can at least tell us what our world isn’t. The utility of an idea, or even a theory, doesn’t have to be in whether or not it has practical application, or accurately describes reality. It is in whether or not one can derive something from it, even if all that is derived is a negation of its relevance to our reality, and often, it can have some limited relevance to “some” aspects of our thinking, or imagination, or ideas, even if the idea/theory/philosophical point is, in aggregate, total nonsense. The problem that arises is, invariably, a willingness of some people to demand, desire, or try to shoe horn into relevance, all, or part, of something that isn’t real, as part of reality. This is the supernatural in a nut shell – theory that doesn’t work, hypothesis based on wishful thinking, etc., all of it applied to describing the “world”, when its only actual relevance is to, at best, culture, and at minimum, our thought processes. There is “some” utility to using such in stories, or examining how and why we think such things, etc. There is *no* utility in trying to use them to describe the world as it actually works (unless your trying to do so via metaphors, and you are dang careful to make sure everyone knows it, which.. makes it a sort of bad idea to do, given the number of people that won’t get that its metaphorical).
But, yeah, I think, with the right definition, “utilitarian naturalism” sounds like a really good concept.
From what I gather, something is considered supernatural if the mind itself is the cause or if there are entities that are essentially purely mind. Of course, the issue then becomes defining what a mind actually is, and determining how we could know whether something was pure mind, caused purely by the mind and no non-mind natural forces, etc. But honestly, that is the supernaturalist’s problem. I’m a naturalist for the same reason that I am an atheist. I don’t believe in the supernatural for the same reason I don’t believe in god. You can go back and forth on the specific definitions all day, all night, for months, for years, for centuries, but just like god, supernatural has a folk definition that you can kind of guess at and you can definitely see that it is wrong. Or at very least, unevidenced. So I don’t feel any strong desire to nail that particular jello to the wall.
Another way of putting that is that there is a distinction between our current conception and the updated version. What is the distinction, in so many words? It’s the one that I laid out in #15.
But if you’re going to say you were right all along, you’re just plain dishonest. I don’t care that you happen to be right that gods don’t exist. It’s dishonest. If there were a god, and I had convincing evidence of it, I’d personally admit whatever mistake I must have made in coming to the opposite conclusion. Because I did in fact come to the opposite conclusion, and because that’s what honest people do. Think about what you’re actually saying here. Don’t recite some fucking children’s tale about how “science is always constantly self-correcting” or any of your science-defending apologetics, because I don’t need to hear it.
Nerd, it’s not the boogeyman that was presented to you back in the ’60s. The positivists lost, and so did that horseshit, thank fuck. It’s about what there is, plain and simple. You engage in it quite a bit yourself.
Still, hold onto your wallet and all that. Couldn’t hurt.
There isn’t. I’m saying the supernatural doesn’t exist. That’s what a naturalist does and what naturalism means. How many different fucking ways does that need to be said before it sinks in?
Consciousness Razor @#46
So now you say, “Alright, that’s a pretty wild idea you’ve got there. But Bob doesn’t interact with anything, which is indistinguishable from not existing. So, on that basis, I’m going to claim Bob doesn’t exist, since even according to you it won’t matter if I’m wrong about that.”
Nice straw-skeptic you made there. But wouldn’t a skeptic say they were withholding judgement about ‘Bob’ and that if someone wanted to convince me ‘Bob’ was real, it’s up to them?
Continues with…
“Oh, no, you’re incorrect.” I reply. “It does interact with physical stuff, like here for example: [specifies what it supposedly does and provides the evidence]. It just isn’t made of physical stuff.”
What kind of interaction? Gravity? Does Bob have mass? Does Bob absorb and release photons? Does Bob interact with physical stuff in a new way that has never been observed before?
NIck Gotts: Like consciousness razor (who is exactly right @15 and subsequently), I find it very frustrating that those who want to make “naturalism” an empty term keep on asking the same rhetorical question, and ignoring or misunderstand the answer, which is really very simple.
Consciousness Razor: Are you incapable of reading, or are you being dishonest?
It could be the explanations suck. Pointing people to Carrier’s book is going to cure their insomnia but they might come out the other side (as I have) still, apparently not understanding things. Assuming arrogance or bad faith when someone really genuinely does not understand may simply be that you suck at explaining things.
@Nick, if it’s so easy to explain, can you lay it out in a couple of sentences?
Maybe the straw-skeptic would do that. I don’t really know what they would or would not do. If so, they would not be addressing the ontological status of Bob.
Much like the straw-skeptic I used in that little dialogue. Which is a big part of the point. Dodging the issue isn’t getting you anywhere (or if it does, it apparently lands you pretty naturally into a lot of dishonesty and stupidity).
Since they don’t exist, there aren’t any examples. (Note: that’s a far cry from being “meaningless” or “incoherent” or “impossible.”)
That kind of puts us at a bit of an impasse, if we were interested in believing in supernatural stuff. I’m not thus interested, nor is it my job to act like a supernaturalist in this thread when I’m not one, so … are we done yet?
All of this is a bit beyond my thinky meats, so I’m probably getting it wrong, but what I take away from consciousness razor’s #15 is that naturalism is a belief claim, just as atheism is a belief claim. Everyone arguing with him seem to be making truth claims. Just as you can be an atheist for poor reasons, you can also be a naturalist for poor reasons, the truth of the naturalist position has nothing to do with applying the label to oneself. Naturalist is the label one uses for oneself if one doesn’t believe that non-physically attached minds exist, full stop. The truth of that position is a separate matter. Or so it seems to me.
We do? OK. I don’t think morals exist.
consciousness razor @ 56:
Okay, then I guess I’m uncertain as to why we seem to be wrangling with my contention that the supernatural is indistinguishable in reality from the non-existent. Since, according to both of us, it is non-existent.
All I’ve been (possibly quite poorly) saying is that natural = exists. Not-natural (including ‘supernatural’) = not-exists.
I’m saying the term ‘supernatural’ is often used as a way to make a case for bullshit that sounds better than outright stating that one is making a case for bullshit. There are types of bullshit that aren’t supernatural, but no types of supernatural that aren’t bullshit.
Anri, the reason why that definition frustrates consciousness razor is because it is question-begging or tautological (it is explicitly assuming from the outset that the supernatural CANNOT exist). Or at least I think that was one complaint. I can’t say for sure, my brain is still sore from enduring this week.
The thing is that it used to be that even the leading lights of science would often believe that things classified as supernatural somehow existed. “Naturalism” meant something back when people of learning were still trying to explain celestial mechanics and basic biology with appeals to god. “Naturalism” was defined by the rejection of the supernatural as an explanation for observed events, by the belief that the universe operates according to a set of rules that can’t be violated by any entity’s act of will.
Today, that’s the minimum we expect from someone who’s labeled as a scientist. “Naturialism” is a pretty damn empty term. Trying to fill it up is just muddled thinking. It’s the same kind of thinking that leads IDiots to use the term “evolutionist” in an attempt to distinguish types of biologists; all biologists are evolutionists, and the term “evolutionist” is completely empty.
Why do so many people (whether theists or, apparently, atheists) think that merely understanding and describing an idea means that you believe the idea is true or the thing described is real and has evidence for it?
It’s like those weird people who phone the Atheist experience who get really confused and don’t understand how Matt can simultaneously:
1) accurately describe what they, the christian, believe,
2) and yet Matt doesn’t believe christianity is true.
For some reason this really confuses those weird theists. They think there is a contradiction between the two. But there is none.
P.Z. – “Short answer: I guess I’m a philosophical naturalist, because I don’t believe there is any non-natural processes working in the world.”
This definitely shows that you are totally missing the point about what philosophers are talking about. Philosopher’s don’t reject naturalism because they believe in some mysterious non-natural processes (well except theist philosophers I guess).
They are usually concerned with things like mathematical facts, normative facts and modal facts. There are naturalist accounts available for all of these but by no means has the issue been decided in these areas. For example, it might surprise you that mathematical platonism – a non-naturalist view of mathematical entities- is more common among mathematicians than philosophers.
Of course you could just decide to call this kind of view naturalist but then yes you fall right into the problem of ‘naturalism’ just applying to anything and being completely uninformative.
None of this has anything to do with supernatural forces or processes acting in the world, at all. It’s getting kind of frustrating reading your shots at philosophers and their ignorance when you’re not even close to understanding what they’re saying. At least you admit it this time.
CR, how does expecting those who claim metaphysical ideas trump evidence are closer to truth have anything to do with the concept of “metaphysical” whatever essentially being a meaningless term? If metaphysical amounts to anything you believe without a reality check, it is meaningless. Why don’t you show otherwise with evidence, not philosophy…..
Mathematics logic =/= scientific logic. So category error….
you’re so incredibly wrong that your arrogance is hilarious
actually wow, my bad, what you said is right but totally irrelevant
I don’t see how it makes any sense to construe abstract objects as being “mental” or “mind-like.” The number five is not mind-like, for fuck’s sake. It doesn’t think or feel or intend or have experiences or memories or anything of the sort. Indeed, it doesn’t have any physical effects at all! And that’s not what mathematical Platonism means either. (However, I’m sure there are some truly bizarre ones out there who do have views close to that, but that’s not anywhere close to the standard meaning of the term). Now maybe a number does exist or it doesn’t — but naturalism, as defined above, has nothing in particular to say about that. You could say they’re not physical/material objects, or that they don’t exist, or be a nominalist, or a Platonist, or apparently do any old fucking thing you want. Because it’s a very, very different subject.
That’s what irks me the most about Stephen Law’s article. I think he’s right about the main thrust of the article: secular humanists need not be naturalists. However, Law being a “non-naturalist” in some sense (I don’t know exactly what else he thinks there is) is wildly different from a person who believes in ghosts and psychic powers and cosmic justice and such. Presumably, that is, unless he’s had a major revelation/personality change/found Jesus/whatever, since I last checked. Even so, as I see it, secular humanism is a kind of moral philosophy. If they can manage to keep their other views consistent with that, what’s supposed to be the problem? I don’t know of anybody who actually wants to exclude them, for not being naturalists, and “die on that hill” as Law is warning us. That’s just ridiculous.
Nerd: that’s a lot of senseless verbiage and presuppositions, packed into a tight little ball. If you want to play semantic games, then you win. The word means exactly what you want it to mean, no more and no less. And fuck all those people who actually know what they’re talking about. Your prize is in the mail.
That kind of puts us at a bit of an impasse, if we were interested in believing in supernatural stuff.
We’re violently in agreement, and have been so all along. I don’t think the supernatural can exist because “existing” is interacting with the rest of the natural universe and nonexistent things don’t do that. I don’t understand what you’re so upset about.
Since they don’t exist, there aren’t any examples
Right. That’s what I meant when I said that things that exist are knowable because they interact with other things (have mass, absorb and release photons, etc) and that someone claiming there is a supernatural is claiming something they have no way of knowing. If someone wanted to claim there was a supernatural something they’d have to explain how it would be able to interact with the natural world enough for them to believe it was there, then to convince everyone else.
Anri writes:
then I guess I’m uncertain as to why we seem to be wrangling with my contention that the supernatural is indistinguishable in reality from the non-existent. Since, according to both of us, it is non-existent.
You also appear to be violently in agreement with Consciousness Razor; there appear to be several of us in that position. That’s why, uh, CR’s so irritated, or something.
Humanists usually believe in the existence and importance of moral value.
I’m unconvinced that’s true, because I consider myself to be a humanist but I don’t think morals are anything but opinions. As such, they “exist” in the way ideas and opinions exist in our individual brains, but that’s it. So perhaps I am “No true humanist” in which case someone needs to have the humanist pope send me a letter anathematizing me.
Thanks for telling me you and philosophers are full of bullshit. Either ground your ideas in reality, or expect them to be dismissed on sight. That is the reality check that causes any truly thinking individual from accepting anything pure philosophy says at face value. The argument without evidence is the thing to philosophers, not the reality of what you argue about….
@razor
While it would be nice if people usually discussed and defined supernatural the way you do, that is unfortunately not true. Ranum is right, the way most of the time supernaturalism is invoked it is to dismiss the need for evidence for their claim. You needlessly called him presumptuous ass.
Nerd
You are arguing with straw philosophers.
mikemcd @68,69:
Who are your comments directed at?
I’m not really upset, but it is frustrating to see people confuse themselves, by making it more complicated than it needs to be and playing pointless word games with themselves as if they had any actual significance. (Then, of course, some of them have the gall to blame philosophers for doing exactly that kind of shit. That part’s actually pretty amusing, not upsetting, but I can see how ridiculing it can come across as anger. This just gets filed into my dumpster with the usual, petty, ignorant trashing-talking of philosophy that occasionally surfaces here and there.)
Look, you’re relying a whole lot on the accident that supernatural stuff doesn’t exist. Yeah, we do agree that it doesn’t exist (which is good, because that’s the truth). However, “doesn’t” and ‘can’t” have very different meanings. Pay attention to when you’re using those words and why you’re doing it.
You claim to know that the supernatural “can’t” interact with the physical world. Well, as we already noted, nothing supernatural exists, so you have no prior experience on which to base this claim. So where’d you get that idea? Are you basing this on a purely logical analysis from first principles that it “must” be so, based on what you’ve heard other people claim about it, or what else is there? If it were something that exists, how do you know what would be the case? (Other than the existence of the kinds of things, like gods and ghosts so forth, that I described in various comments above, obviously.) I don’t know of any a priori way of determining what a nonexistent thing (in particular supernatural one) is capable or incapable of doing, except the obvious limitation of not being in contradiction with itself. If it could interact physically, great. So you’re telling me there’s a chance! I really don’t care and have no stake in this either way. But that’s clearly an empirical question. It’s not something you can just deduce by sitting and thinking for a long time in your armchair while drinking some brandy.
At least I don’t think it is, anyway. Give me the brandy, as well as your argument that it’s logically impossible or physically impossible. Or I guess one really desperate option would be if the laws of physics and conditions were such that they would somehow conspire to make it never happen, anywhere, even on accident — despite the fact that supernatural stuff does exist and could (otherwise) interact, so that it isn’t literally impossible but simply never occurs. But if you can’t demonstrate something like that, I’ll just get my own brandy, if I feel like it, because you don’t have the argument at your disposal that you apparently think you do.
AS far as I can tell, consciousness razor had the same reaction I did to mikemcd’s comment about mathematics being “supernatural” (or supernatural adjacent, or non natural or something). Because that particular talking point grates my nerves for some reason. It’s common in fundie circles to reify mathematics or really any abstract concept at all into some sort of non-tangible object that exists out in the aether or something. (Therefore Jesus, obviously). Similar semantic games occur involving “natural laws” being some sort of magical objects as well. Apparently it is some very compelling form of thought and I just don’t get how. It falls apart it if you think about with even the tiniest amount of scrutiny. Nineteen, love, gravity, modus ponens, or sportsmanship exist in one sense, are definitely not existing in the same sense as an apple, a baseball, a school, a child, or an oak tree, but that doesn’t mean they fit in the category of psychics, gods, spirits, or spells either. It strikes me as similar to the ontological argument: trying to win on a cheap technicality.
Yeah, this one loses me. Mathematics pretty much consists of a) stacking blocks of a known size up in a row, and counting how many of them you have, and b) using arbitrarily defined place holders, called variables, to stand in for those blocks you don’t yet know the size of, and c) rearranging the bloody things until you come up with something familiar enough that you can go, “Ah ha! I know what to do with the blocks!” Its entirely possible to a) create arbitrary entities (i.e., blocks), of b) arbitrary, or even imaginary sizes, and c) rearrange these things, as long as the same rules that apply to real world math are applied to them, such that you can manipulate the results into seemingly meaningful results. Sometimes this is even useful. It doesn’t make the result “non-naturalistic”. And, the only other context I can think this applies to is some sort of metaphysical goblity gook, in which its implied that math somehow exists independent of what is being measure with it, which is just bug nutty. Ah, well, seeing the post that just came up before posting this.. I guess this might be the version the seems to have been suggested.. Yeesh…
And I am about to make anyone who is reading the comments a little bit crazy…..as a theist who has, from time to time, appropriated the methodological/philosophical naturalism distinction, I have come to the conclusion that theism does NOT imply supernaturalism….that there are versions of theism that are compatible with some versions of naturalism, and that….contrary to the received view in almost all quarters….the Bible provides no warrant for supernaturalism, even if you are determined to interpret it with obtuse, inflexible, knuckle-dragging literalism. Let the brickbats begin.
scotthatfield @79:
Scott! Haven’t seen you around for ages. Hope all is well.
scotthatfield @ 79;
Doesn’t the bible describe a superconsciousness that seemingly exist without a physical substrate and created the universe (or known universe of the period) within seven days by what essentially amounts to magic?
Doesn’t it describe that same entity judging the ‘souls’ of the living after they die, implying a necessary supernatural component inherent in the dualistic notion that the mind/soul and brain are separate and distinct things, and that the consciousness of an individual is capable of a free existence entirely independent of any physical substrate?
What about the resurrection? Restoring life to someone who was allegedly dead and decomposing for days by non-technological seems to fall into the category of the supernatural to me, and then we get claims of the other local dead rising at the same time during what seems to be some kind of zombie uprising.
Then there are things like the plagues of Egypt, with the death of the firstborn allegedly enacted by the angel of death, which appears to fall firmly within the category of a supernarural being that requires a blood magic ritual to avoid killing the ‘wrong’ people.
Instantly converting Lot’s wife to a pillar of salt for glancing over her shoulder at the wrong time doesn’t sound like a natural process either.
You could dismiss all this as some kind of allegory, but allegory for what? And the fact remains that most theists do believe that at least some of these clearly supernatural events happened pretty much exactly as described in the bible. The vast majority of christians, and indeed theist of most stripes, take their religious texts pretty seriously, and accept at least some of their non-naturalistic claims as having actually happened pretty much as described – theirs is an explicitly supernaturalist worldview, at least when it comes to the notional powers and character of their deities.
I really don’t see how it is possible to argue otherwise without grossly misrepresenting both what the religious texts themselves say and what the faithful of those religions say they believe.
Interesting discussion. For myself, I call myself a naturalist for much the same reason I call myself an atheist — it’s a label that helps identify me as someone who rejects the claims of theists and supernaturalists. I understand that defining god/gods or the supernatural is a tricky business, but I’m pretty sure that the god described in the Bible doesn’t exist, and neither does Zeus or Krishna or Asmodeus. Similarly I don’t believe in ghosts, Tarot readings, past lives, etc., except of course as psychological experiences.
Like which versions, of each? I’m sure you’d like to have an argument to support that, which has got to count for something. Is there a reason why you’re keeping it from us?
That’s just plainly false, as Gregory Greenwood already pointed out. You should drop the part about “obtuse, inflexible, knuckle-dragging literalism” at the very least, because that gets you a whole lot that you probably don’t want.
Wait, hold on — you say it “provides no warrant.” What does that mean? I might actually agree with it. Some ancient books full of myths make a terrible justification for believing any of it, that much is true. (If that’s what you mean, why say it to a bunch of atheists, as if to disagree with them?) But the Bible does directly and unambiguously describe supernaturalism in various forms: god(s), souls, heaven, hell, angels, demons, magic powers, prophesies, resurrections — it’s absolutely riddled with that shit.
Of course, I don’t expect that a nondescript “theist” must believe a single word of the Bible, so I guess we’re back to where we started.
@theist
Theostoa was already described in the link I provided, and was conceviable from the discussion of vampires. But thanks for trying to contribute something novel to the conversation by making unusual claims about the bible, that’s cool I guess.
To get the most reaction out of people for the lowest effort.
I really can’t fathom reading the Bible as completely and utterly non-supernatural unless you have a very strange definition of “natural” or you are the most ridiculous of the “It’s All A Metaphor” brigade.
If anyone is having difficulty understanding the discussion in this thread re: the definition of natural or supernatural (a position I found myself in), brianpansky’s link @13 might be beneficial. It’s a long post by Carrier, but he elaborates in ways that I found helpful. I still don’t completely grasp everything, but perhaps upon rereading it, I’ll come to a better understanding.
In case it hasn’t already been mentioned, one of Carrier’s links in the article referenced by brianpansky doesn’t work. This is the one in which Carrier explains his definition of nature “in elaborate detail”. The correct link is Defending Naturalism as a Worldview.
I’ve always just pretty much figured that since methodological naturalism not only works, but works a million times better than every thing else put together (assuming those things can be said to work at all and we’re not multiplying by zero) that it can’t be a coincidence. If naturalism is wrong, it still has to be damned close to right. Right enough for me, any way.
I’m glad to see the topic discussed. I simply reject “supernatural” as an incoherent junk drawer category. The only time the word has meaning to me is in fantasy settings. If it has a meaning in discussions about the real world, I won’t simply continue a conversation pretending or implying I know what it means. If it’s at all relevant to a topic, I want that relevance explained.
If someone wants to convince me their pet “supernatural” hypothesis is true, they’ll have to do the science as usual. In addition, I’d want them to define the “supernatural” category and demonstrate the utility of using that category as descriptive language before accepting the label’s applicability to the hypothesized entity.
I think handling issues that way cuts out a lot of superfluous baggage and potentially derails scripted arguments. I reject numerous hypothetical entities because they lack evidence, lack mechanisms of action, lack predictive power, are defined in a self-contradictory fashion, and so on. I do not categorically reject “supernatural” entities. If anything, it’s the reverse; a lot of entities are arbitrarily categorized as “supernatural” because people much like me have previously rejected them on similar grounds. I call bullshit on that arbitrary categorization method and attempts to create straw men around it.
It’s funny how this works. I also expect people to describe what they’re talking about (including atheists/naturalists). But lots of people on this thread (and many others in the past) seem to believe it’s something like “an incoherent junk drawer category,” which simply isn’t true. People do actually use it a few specific ways to mean specific kinds of things. Of course true believers try to hide it from scrutiny by claiming it’s “undetectable” or works “mysteriously” or what have you.
The thing is, that generally comes after they’ve talked about it in some detail, implying (knowingly or not) all manner of things about what it supposedly is and isn’t, what it does and doesn’t do. And we have thousands of years of historical records to consider here. Your typical supernaturalist doesn’t just pop out of the womb and invent some brand new entity out of whole cloth, simply uttering that it exists while saying nothing else about it. Because that’s fucking preposterous. They tend to belong to a religion of some sort, or they’re part of some other kind of cult that believes in magic, psychics, teleological notions about the world, etc. Those things all have traditions of communicating what it is that this particular institution is actually about. People disagree about all kinds of doctrines, but they nevertheless describe these things, what they do, experiences they’ve had of them, make predictions concerning them, and so on.
Likewise, you, as a skeptic, don’t start out with a clean slate (every time you talk with a new supernaturalist) not knowing a fucking thing about what religions/cults/etc. are in general about. You know well enough that they have lots of things in common, which has been described/linked/documented at length in this thread and many others in the past. And that’s pretty much the point: by recognizing what these things have in common (at least most of the time), along with what’s objectionable about them, you can specify what it is that you’re rejecting about them. (You can also argue with their methods, but that cannot sensibly be described as the thing itself which you think [possibly/probably/necessarily/etc.] doesn’t exist.) Yeah, they do need to do the work themselves of getting evidence (which I don’t think will ever happen) and laying out their own cards on the table (also unlikely in most cases). But it’s exceedingly disingenuous on your part to say you literally have no idea whatsoever what the “supernatural” is about in general. You can recognize a mere description of it in “fantasy settings” somehow, so you’d recognize the same things in the real world if you had actual, convincing evidence sitting right in front of you.
So far as I’ve ever been able to tell, “the supernatural” is equivalent to “the unknowable”, something humans cannot understand. A quote from the Roger Zelazny novel “Lord of Light”:
“Then the one called Raltariki is really a demon?” asked Tak.
“Yes—and no,” said Yama, “If by ‘demon’ you mean a malefic, supernatural creature, possessed of great powers, life span and the ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape—then the answer is no. This is the generally accepted definition, but it is untrue in one respect.”
“Oh? And what may that be?”
“It is not a supernatural creature.”
“But it is all those other things?”
“Yes.”
“Then I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not—so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will.”
“Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy—it is a matter of essence. The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable.”
(The ‘demons’ are energy-based creatures, in the novel. Yama goes on to develop demon-repellent.)
That’s kind of why I do the ‘blank slate’ thing you’re talking about: Strip the idea of “supernatural” down to a core definition so that they’re forced to think about what they’re actually saying instead of using vague culturally accepted intuitions of what is or is not supernatural. It challenges thought-stopping cliches like “science can’t study the supernatural” because it doesn’t buy such excuses. The idea is that a proponent of the supernatural has to take the scenic route, rather than take the shortcuts he or she has taken for granted.
It’s true that “supernatural” claims have many common reasons for rejecting them. While skeptics can use it as shorthand for claims that can be dismissed, it often ends up reinforcing the narrative that we closedmindedly reject a category of entities a priori, rather than because of the problems that are clear to us but commonly unexamined by proponents.
Are you really sure I recognize the supernatural in fiction so easily, and based solely on the story events themselves? Literary conventions mean that people who are aware of the author’s cultural preconceptions of the supernatural can make predictions about the author’s intent. I do not have that luxury in the real world. I wouldn’t go into jury duty and deliver a verdict based primarily on crime drama genre savviness.
In many cases, “supernatural” entities in fiction behave according to fictional natural laws and can be studied scientifically. In the more practical sense, it often means it stops working in anti-magic fields or requires a person in a robe and pointy hat to regularly charge its power supply. I’ve roleplayed spellcasters who view magic the same way an electrician looks at electromagnetism.
There are also some settings where it’s vague, often intentionally so. My favorite episode of The Twilight Zone can be interpreted as a story about a demonic penny fortune telling device trying to take active control of a person’s life with ominous hints of a bad future, or it could be interpreted as William Shatner’s character taking a mindless inanimate toy, vague messages, and a few minor coincidences far too superstitiously.
In real life, how would I tell the difference between stage magic and real magic if I didn’t already know that there are performers who do sleight of hand, optical illusions, and such as a form of entertainment?
In Fallen London, I’ve gotten Embroiled in a War of Illusion. “Glass” is a secret organization of stage magicians who I’ve read ‘cheat’ by using real magic in their acts. Their adversaries, “Shroud” is an organization of mediums and spiritualists who fool people into thinking they can contact the dead by using the natural forces of Theosophistical science.
You said it “has meaning to you” in those contexts (but only then). Those were your own words, and that suffices for me (but not for you, when you’re calling it “incoherent”). I didn’t say it was easy or based solely on what it’s “in” the story itself.
Why not? People don’t have cultural preconceptions and intentions in the real world?
This makes no sense. This is about the claims real-world people are actually making in reality. I’m not basing it at all on stuff that’s understood as fiction. We’re talking about an actual person walking up to you on the street and saying things like that they believe Jesus is a god and is offering you salvation. There’s a lot of fucking content there already, and you barely need to dig further, because the shit just keeps spewing out of them a lot of the time, if you stick around to listen.
The predilections and assumptions and confusions of people who write fiction, knowing it’s fiction, don’t concern me in the slightest. I just don’t care at all what sci-fi/fantasy writers think or do or write about, or what their characters/settings are like, because as hardly needs to be said, that’s not a reliable guide to reality.
I’m finding this thread interesting because I never saw “naturalism” defined in terms of “disembodied mind” before — I was always told that naturalism was the proposition that, so to speak, there is a single set of rules which everything, everywhere obeys at all times. A thing would be “supernatural”, in this definition, if it could break the rules (meaning, essentially, physics).
When confronted by an apparent breach of the rules, a naturalist would assume one of two things:
1. We have incomplete or incorrect information about the phenomenon, and if we knew all the details, we would find that the phenomenon does not actually break any rules we know about.
2. The version of the rules we know is is a simplification of a more comprehensive set of rules which, under ordinary circumstances, simplifies to the rules we know, and which permits the phenomenon in question under extraordinary circumstances.
The former is more common, which is why naturalism necessarily involves skepticism of radical claims, but the latter has also actually happened, the transition from newtonian to quantum physics being one example. (The world really does obey quantum rules — but at the scales of the “macro” world, quantum discreteness is indistinguishable from continuity and uncertainty is too diminished to be directly observable.)
Someone who believes in the supernatural, however, when presented with an apparent breach in the rules, can choose a third option:
3. This is a supernatural phenomenon, and therefore the ordinary rules of the universe do not apply. (Energy is not conserved, causality may be casually violated, etc.)
(Incidentally: why is it always “super-” natural. Why do we never hear about “sub-” natural phenomena?)
Yeah, it does obviously break the laws of physics (because physics is natural). Of course, you’d actually have to flesh out what those rules are in advance, not just casually mention them in a comment like you did, because vague handwaving about some kind of “rules” or “information” that we supposedly “know” could mean just about anything.
Anyway, that doesn’t track what most people mean by it, nor is it what actual philosophers mean by the philosophical position known as “naturalism.” Like it or not, that is simply a fact. It is physicalism (another bit of jargon, which may not help) about the mind, extending it to anything mental or mind-like whatsoever (which includes things like teleology) instead of being so focused only on human minds specifically. So there’s that. Having your own private definition of the word and your own personal “take” on it, divorced from the entire history of thought on the subject all the way back to the ancient Greeks, is just not terribly interesting or relevant to the subject of this thread, even though it might otherwise be worth considering.
And yours doesn’t work because the established views in the sciences do change over time (not natural laws themselves, of course), so something like quantum mechanics or general relativity would be “supernatural” one day and not the next. Which is silly. After all, what is it that actually changes from one day to the next, when this happens? Certainly not the elementary particles/fields themselves, or the properties of spacetime. What changes is our knowledge. But we’re talking about the universe here, not what’s in the confines of our own heads. (Those are two different things, because we’re not solipsists.)
The idea is that, whether or not any of it exists or is detectable or whatever, there is a salient and meaningful and helpful distinction to be made between the two categories in terms of the properties of those things themselves (not what we know or how we can fit them with other things we think we know). They are, by their very nature (excuse the term), different sorts of stuff. We’re not discussing different ways/levels of understanding we might have of that stuff, or how we do or don’t make it congruent with the “established” stuff that we’re supposed to take as a given.
This is always the line some apparently positivist-influenced people (in the atheoskeptisphere) like to take, because it excuses them from dealing with the substantive issues and lets them pretend that they can somehow “not do metaphysics, ever.” Because they were apparently taught it’s a naughty word that shouldn’t be used in polite company. But in this case, like it or not, we are talking about the stuff itself: there’s this kind of stuff, and there’s also that kind of stuff. You don’t just get to sneer at it from the sidelines, without committing to anything at all — if you’re actually going to play this game, you have to get your hands dirty and be willing to risk that you might be wrong.
Because it’s “beyond” nature, or it’s “above” it (either literally, as in “the sky = heaven,” or in a more metaphorical sense). Supernaturalists think it’s important, so the “above” idea conveys a sense that it has a “higher” ranking in the order of things, or it takes precedence to nature or can “override” it in some way.
@95, consciousness razor:
I am willing to defer to your knowledge of what philosophers mean by “naturalism” because I have no idea what philosophers mean by anything, and, frankly, I don’t care. If you don’t believe in the supernatural, and think the mind is an emergent phenomenon of matter, then 95% of what philosophers say is indistinguishable from nonsense, derived by playing wordgames and pretending to ignorance, and very little of the rest is more than trivia.
But what you say in the sections I quoted above? You’re wrong about what I said. The whole point of naturalism-as-defined-by-me-earlier is not what the rules are, but rather that you believe there are no deviations from them. To take your quantum example: a naturalist-as-defined-by-me who is confronted by quantum behavior does not say “ach, supernatural activity!” but rather “either these observations are wrong or we have to rethink everything we thought we knew about physics”. As I said, that is exactly what separates a naturalist from a supernaturalist. You don’t have to know all the rules to believe that a set of rules is in force. You could possibly even have a primitive naturalist who believed in intangible beings who were in control of things, although if such a hypothetical being were really honest about it, their worldview wouldn’t last very long.
Me:
Razor:
True, but why should I make statements about the nature of reality based on those cultural preconceptions instead of science? Is objective reality defined by cultural convention like a literary work is?
If I discover a tiny woman with insect wings in a garden, am I going to use the cultural lore about fairies to make conclusions about her because she resembles one, or am I going to put aside those preconceptions and examine her like a scientist would? Am I supposed to retrieve my Monster Manual to shoehorn her into preconceived categories like “pixie,” “sylph,” or whatever to figure out what magical powers she has or how she will behave? Or am I supposed to observe her actual abilities and behaviors to create a new definition based on her inherent features?
“Supernatural” is defined more by cultural associations and by the mistakes proponents typically make when defending things thus categorized. I’d rather have categories defined by inherent properties shared by their members, rather than external factors.
What the fuck are you talking about?
You mean, like, examining whether there’s a brain which is responsible for making this tiny woman with insect wings think and behave the way it’s thinking and behaving? Like a scientist would do?
That’s what I’m saying: something with a mind has a brain. I could not possibly have made that any clearer, repeatedly throughout this thread. Does that sound like a fucking “cultural convention” or a “preconception” to you?
Who are you arguing with? Somebody like The Vicar? He thinks it’s somehow more reasonable to talk about what kind of believing and assuming different people do, not facts about the world.
Or maybe you’re arguing with yourself. You say it’s defined a certain way (according to you), yet you’d rather have a different kind of category…. So do you have that definition/category or not? Why insist that your own category must be just plain useless? What’s stopping you from actually using the one that a lot of philosophers (and me, a lots of people implicitly) are already using? What’s the motivation for objecting to it?
Because I’ve never gotten a useful answer as to what that meaning is from someone who believes it’s a non-empty set.
There is a skeptical definition I know, but I don’t use it because its convenience often obscures the reasons we should be illuminating. I also think it’s bad form for a naturalist/materialist/whatever to define the supernatural for the same reason I don’t think atheists should get to define gods. It’s uncharitable to take self-defeating definitions from hostile sources, even if I agree with those hostile sources’ conclusions.
As I see it, I’m not trying to redefine the term, I’ve just come to realize I never understood it. I just went through the motions in my youth, pretending I understood it. I later went through the trouble of trying to pin down the meaning of the word and couldn’t come up with a useful definition. I no longer see the point in using the word myself or letting other people use it to sneak in strange, unstated premises. I suspect other people use it out of similar force of habit, and getting them to talk it out might break that habit. If I’m wrong and there is a useful definition I’m not yet aware of, it’s still an invitation for supernaturalists to explain it to me.
You don’t have to think about this negatively at all. There are people, who have minds, so they have brains. Those are facts about real stuff. To deny some or all of those sorts of facts means you’re implying that this “set” that you’re so focused on isn’t empty. “Denying” that sort of thing is the only negative bit that you need to get the opposite claim about supernaturalism — and people do deny such things, so all you need is access to all of those facts. And you have that already. So WTF?
But to deal directly with your other concerns…. We don’t need any more detail, according to this believer or that believer or the other one, about how exactly souls (or whatever) are supposed to work in the absence of brains — it’s not needed simply to make the claim that things don’t work that way at all. Being more specific than that is utterly pointless. They don’t work X way without brains, and they don’t work Y way without brains, or Z way, or any which way. If a theist comes up with X or Y or Z or P or D or Q, and any of it actually is right, then it doesn’t matter which particular one it turns out to be — naturalism would be wrong on any of those accounts.
Do you call yourself an atheist? I’m under the impression that you do. What’s the difference? Atheism is just naturalism limited to a particular subset of “supernatural” things (namely, gods). I mean, look, if there’s some particular sacred cow that you think is being threatened here, just fucking say what it is already. Otherwise… I just don’t get it, and I don’t know what else to tell you, which isn’t completely obvious.
Uh, both? Seriously, if you put “robot” into that, and mentioned attributes of robots, you would be equally wrong, if it turned out to be a cyborg, or an android, or, on the most improbable end of the spectrum, some sort of shape shifter that picked the image out of a popular mechanics magazine to mimic. No one is suggesting you stay with the original definition, just that, as short hand, there is some value, how ever limited, to use of the cultural definition. Heck, if I ran into a werewolf like thing, there are at least a dozen “versions” of that I could pick, only one of, or none of which, would apply, including the thing from Dr. Who, which was actually some sort of alien. That what the thing is is not what ever easily comes to mind doesn’t change the utility of the initial definition. The only major risk is when some idiot decides to start tacking on attributes, such as, for example, deciding that their “werewolf” is going to eat them, or attack pets, instead of being a nice friendly individual you might invite over for tea.
I thought naturalism meant playing volleyball naked at the beach. And I’m all for it!
The hypernaturalism phobia is palpable by its neglect here http://ronmurp.net/2012/06/29/supernatural-v-natural/
The amount of invincible ignorance proudly displayed here – I’m looking particularly at you, Nerd, Vicar, Marcus, and Bronze Dog – is really fucking depressing. The peremptory dismissal of philosophy by people who quite clearly know zilch about it, and the blank refusal to understand consciousness razor’s clearly expressed point, is startlingly akin to the denialist dismissal of climate science.