(March 12, 2013 at 2:05 pm)apophenia Wrote: I recently conducted a poll on this very forum aimed at addressing this specific topic. The results of the poll seemed to indicate, among the self-selected atheist respondents, only 15-20% considered that atheism required the complete rejection of the supernatural.
Really? I want to know how people are defining "the supernatural". I don't recall the poll, but of course the question you asked wasn't whether atheists embraced anything supernatural. Rather you just wanted to know whether atheists thought the rejection of the supernatural was definitionally an aspect of atheism. I would have answered the same way.
What troubles me is what could possibly count as supernatural. If a god did exist, what about it would make its existence supernatural? Mercury at room temperature is pretty unusual but we don't call it supernatural. A real hermaphrodite would be rare, but again not supernatural. Do supernatural thingies have to be made of something other than standard matter?
I find that category hard to understand.
