Topics Environment

Question To what extent can anything be unnatural if every substance initially came from the earth to begin with? Wouldn't that make all things natural? A colleague of mine reminded me that there are ways to alter different things, but does that make it unnatural if the process by which we have altered a substance is natural? Such alterations exist via heat (natural), combining with another substance (which is also natural) to cause a reaction, and so on... But what makes something (a product of a reaction, perhaps) unnatural? Say reactant A, which is natural, is combined with reactant "B", which is also natural, to create a product which we would call unnatural. How can we call the product of two natural substances unnatural? To make a long question short, what is the difference between natural and unnatural? Keeping in mind that all things are naturally found on earth. What makes something "artificial"?

Accepted:
May 12, 2009

Comments

If "natural" means "part of nature broadly conceived," then it's hard to see what's uncontroversially not natural. But what this really shows is that there is mre than one meaning of "natural" and more than one contrast that someone might make.

Someone who believes that the material world was made by an immaterial creator would contrast the natural with the supernatural. On that usage, more or less everything in space and time would count as natural.

But someone might also have the distinction between natural and artifactual in mind, and if that's what they mean, then my computer is not natural, but the flower on my windowsill is. No contradiction here; just a different distinction. As for what makes something an artifact, that's not easy to say with real precision. But it's easy to come up with a wealth of examples that more or less everyone will agree to. (The fact that we can't articulate a distinction doesn't show that we can't make a distinction.)

There's another notion of "natural" that's broadly teleological. It makes most sense, perhaps, if we assume that there is a designer who made the world according to a providential plan. On that way of lookng at things, we and various other parts of the world were endowed with natures that, when working properly, contribute to the providential order. On such "natural law" views, what distinguishes humans from animals is that we can choose to act contrary to our natures. Thus, a natural law theorist might say that we were endowed with reason, and that to ignore our reason is to act contrary to our providentially-ordered nature.

There are non-theological analogues of this distinction that appeal to something like biological function. Unfortunately, the moral weight of theological notions of divine order sometimes gets carried over into the non-theological context, and leads people to say that, for example, homosexuality is wrong simply because homosexual sex is "unnatural" by virtue of not serving reproduction.

Someone might also say that a biological process gone awry is not natural. And in fact, it's interesting to note that we can all think of examples of what we'd count as "biological processes gone awry." Whatever weight we put on the associated notion of "natural," it doesn't seem merely to be empty.

So there's no one thing people mean when they use the word "natural." And so whether something counts as natural will depend, among other things, on what notion of "natural" is at issue.