RE: Atheist VS Naturalist - the latter sounds more appealing to me...
May 15, 2020 at 8:14 am
(This post was last modified: May 15, 2020 at 8:18 am by Belacqua.)
(May 15, 2020 at 2:41 am)Simon Moon Wrote: Being an atheist does not preclude someone of having other, non god related, supernatural beliefs.
Some sects of Buddhism do not have God beliefs (thus are atheistic), but scores if other supernatural beliefs.
As far as I know, the habit of categorizing things as binary -- natural or supernatural -- is fairly modern. It may in fact not be very helpful. In part because the word "supernatural" is surprisingly hard to define.
In the Renaissance, people like Ficino who wrote about magic and astral influences used the word "occult." I actually prefer this, since it just means "hidden." They thought that there are real powers and beings in the world which are hidden from us, but that theories about them might help to explain things. Since in those days lots of things were still hidden -- not yet revealed by science -- they didn't need to talk about the supernatural. Only things that might one day be revealed. It's the more modern people who have categorized some of the things that were then hidden as natural and some as not.
As an example, alchemists theorized about an occult force called "action at a distance." They couldn't explain it but they thought it must be real. Galileo, holding to a mechanistic view of things, in which motion must be caused by one thing physically pushing another, rejected action at a distance. He ignored massive amounts of data indicating that the moon influences the tides, for example, because he didn't see how something so far away could move water. Newton, more sympathetic to alchemy, described action at a distance and called it "gravity." So now it is not occult any more, and considered natural.
