Atheist VS Naturalist - the latter sounds more appealing to me...

[vulcanlogician]

It's incredibly rare to find anyone in the us who isn't a secular humanist.  

They might not realize that the term accurately describes their position, and they may even be insulted at being accurately categorized as much, granted, lol.

What about all the fundies? It seems like they are AT LEAST a good fifth of the population. Then you have the Evangelicals. Maybe a portion of them (upon close examination of their ideology) are pretty much humanists. But many are not.

[The Grand Nudger]

What about them? Being fundies doesn't immediately disqualify them as secular humanists. Secular humanism was constructed by what anyone here would call a fundy.

Ask them what they think about sharia.

[vulcanlogician]

What about them?  Being fundies doesn't immediately disqualify them as secular humanists.  Secular humanism was constructed by what anyone here would call a fundy.

Ask them what they think about sharia.

Does having issues with Sharia automatically make one a secular humanist? What makes you think that Christian fundies wouldn't enact their own form of Sharia if they had the societal power to do so and get away with it?

[The Grand Nudger]

It's just one demonstration of how a person who we might not normally imagine to be a secular hum,anist suddenly becvomes one when the subject is some other god and some other gods law than the one that they've privileged. Ultimately, no believer genuinely believes that the law is what it is merely because god says so. They believe that the things god says are good for human beings.

Or, if you prefer...that the proper way to govern human society is by reference to what benefits human society - not what might benefit some god.

[vulcanlogician]

It's just one demonstration of how a person who we might not normally imagine to be a secular hum,anist suddenly becvomes one when the subject is some other god and some other gods law than the one that they've privileged.  Ultimately, no believer genuinely believes that the law is what it is merely because god says so.  They believe that the things god says are good for human beings.

Or, if you prefer...that the proper way to govern human society is by reference to what benefits human society - not what might benefit some god.

Unfortunately, I think a great many do believe in a society that benefits "some god" rather than a society that benefits society. A society where you only ought to only bake a cake for some people, because that benefits God-- that's the society many believers crave. Fuck the fact that you are discriminating against a great many people who have a lot of good to do for that society. They offend "some god." That's reason enough not to bake a cake.

This position is real for some people. And it isn't humanism. It's an irrational departure from humanism. And it's done for the sake of "some god."

Christians are civil because we eventually forced them to be civil. They only accept humanist values because we made them.

This doesn't apply to all Christians, of course, but to a great many, it does apply. This "great many" aren't secular humanists. And they exist. And they're numerous.

[The Grand Nudger]

I think that this may be a fundamental disagreement between us.

I see that the faithful are using the same process...supplanting it, simply, with different contents to the same end. Since I see secular humanism as a process rather than the contents thereof...

I think that we can both be right about what each of us are, respectively, considering.

[GrandizerII]

Even if we couldn't come up with a clear definition of natural vs supernatural, I do believe there is nevertheless a general imprecise intuition shared by many of us regarding the boundary between what's natural and what's supernatural. If there are gods involved that spin fire out of "nothing" and mysteriously make frogs sing Italian songs randomly and unpredictably, I think we're more likely to intuit that as supernatural rather than simply an unexpected instance of the natural. It's a bit weird to me when people seem to be equating naturalism to something  that could be aptly labeled "possibilism".

I disagree with this. If you went back 200 years, many of the things we do on a daily basis would have been considered 'magical' or 'supernatural'. We communicate instantly with people across the world, we can remotely control machinery, we can bring up moving pictures of events, we can cure diseases, etc.

Much of the modern world would have been considered to be supernatural not all that long ago. The only reason we don't consider it so today is because it is part of the technology we use and we feel we understand it.

I have yet to see a coherent definition of the term 'natural' that takes into consideration the actual methods of science and the possibility of scientific revolution that can lead to significantly different technologies.

As Clark said, 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic'.

I get what you're saying. Just because we think something is impossible/magical now doesn't mean it actually is. We might think it's impossible to go past the speed of light given our current scientific knowledge, but maybe one day a major unexpected flaw will be exposed in our understanding of physics and reveal that we can indeed do so. But I think this is besides the point. Whatever it is we observe in this reality, as naturalists, we expect a pattern happening that we can potentially make use of to make solid predictions because, as naturalists, we expect things to operate in line with the laws of nature (if you don't like this wording, we expect regularities not violations of these regularities). And whatever shocking observations we find, we expect (or hope) to eventually find some explanation grounded in our background scientific understanding.

On the other hand, going back to the singing frog example, if after continually making observations and analyzing frogs all around the world, you keep failing to see a clear pattern you can go by and there's basically no plausible explanation you can think of that would explain what's going on with the singing frogs, and other things start to happen where all of a sudden we're seeing fairies and pixies and white-bearded divine-looking figures wielding lightning bolts or whatever, and this is being witnessed by heaps of people and such, wouldn't your credence in how you currently perceive the world as a purely naturalistic realm decrease (if just slightly)? Is your credence in what could be aptly considered "supernatural" exactly 0?

[Belacqua]

If you went back 200 years, many of the things we do on a daily basis would have been considered 'magical' or 'supernatural'. We communicate instantly with people across the world, we can remotely control machinery, we can bring up moving pictures of events, we can cure diseases, etc.

Much of the modern world would have been considered to be supernatural not all that long ago. The only reason we don't consider it so today is because it is part of the technology we use and we feel we understand it.

There are two difficulties I can see with this argument.

First, a lot of the wrong beliefs in the past were wrong, but not supernatural. 

For example, humoral theory and astrology were both attempts to explain cause-and-effect outcomes by the actions of natural substances and forces. There was even empirical evidence that parts of this were correct: when Porphyry was depressed, Plotinus told him that depression was caused by an abundance of cold and dry humors, so the treatment was to go spend a couple of years in a hot wet climate. After two years on Mediterranean beaches, Porphyry felt a lot better. I think a few years on Mediterranean beaches would help me out, also. We now consider the explanation to be false, but if it worked in enough cases that's what we call evidence. 

Some things were explained by what we would today call "supernatural" causes -- for example the wrath of God. But even that isn't as divorced from the natural as the way it may appear to us now. If God is the Good and sin is misdirection away from the Good, then the wrath of God is what you get when you do what's bad for yourself and your society. You get sick, you get riots in the streets, etc. God doesn't have emotions the way people do, so when Dante says "God's wrath" he just means that you're getting the bad result you were aiming for. 

As for technological advances, I'm not sure why that's relevant. People have theories of what works, they test the theories, the theories get better. To say that in every case advancement came by discarding supernatural explanations and adopting natural ones is far too simple. 

Galileo rejected the idea of the moon affecting the tides because he didn't believe in "action at a distance," a concept which was considered non-natural at the time. Newton was religious and an alchemist, so he was willing to accept action at a distance, renamed it gravity, and got it right. Then we decided gravity is natural. 

More importantly for the argument on this thread, your argument here is not logically sound. If you're claiming that because some things in the past which were seen as supernatural turned out to have natural explanations, that's not sound proof.

"It happened before in some cases, therefore it will always happen the same way in the future," isn't logic. You could certainly say you believe it will always happen that way. You could risk an argument from personal incredulity and say that you don't see how it could be any other way. But those are opinions, not proof.

[The Grand Nudger]

-and after all of that, you have yet to offer a definition of the supernatural that allows for the mere logical possibility of the supernatural.

[Belacqua]

I have yet to see a coherent definition of the term 'natural' that takes into consideration the actual methods of science and the possibility of scientific revolution that can lead to significantly different technologies.

Here's a definition of "natural" which takes into consideration the methods of science and tech. 

I mentioned it earlier. It's a version of the definition used in the mystical tradition, without necessarily accepting all of their conclusions. 

The natural is that part of the world which can be known by humans. Or to adapt it to your polymathic monomania, we could say that the natural is that part of the world which can be analyzed by science. 

The point is that just because there is a part of the world that can be analyzed by science, that's not proof that there's lots of other parts that can't. 

Consider our friends the earthworms. The range of what they can consider is different from our own. They don't know math, physics, or meteorology. They are indifferent to music and art. They don't know the history of civilizations. People know all that stuff, but it all falls entirely outside what an earthworm can conceive of. 

Why should I believe that human beings are able to know all of the world, when earthworms can't? In the evil old days of religion, people thought that the mind is a portion of the divine Logos, the principles and logic of the universe, and therefore our minds are constructed so as to know the world. But we scientific type people scoff at all that. People evolved to pass on their genes, just as earthworms did, and we know what we need to know for that. 

So let's imagine that "nature" is the range of things people can know. That would make the supernatural all the realm of things we can't know. How much is there? We can't answer that, because by definition we can't know it. 

At this point the normal objection is that if something is unknowable to us then it makes no difference, it "might as well" not exist. I think that's silly. An earthworm doesn't know anything about neoliberal economic policy, but such policies are still going to cause climate change and habitat loss that will significantly affect worm life. So the supernatural could be affecting us all the time, and we just wouldn't know it. 

This is different from the definition I was using earlier. In that usage, the part of the world we don't understand might be acting according to its nature, and would thus be hidden but natural. In this other definition, anything which is knowable to science is natural and anything which isn't knowable is supernatural.