Yes, but there is a difference between discussion and dismissal. I am willing to discuss my thoughts; I am less willing to have them dismissed out of hand because you don't agree how I come to an opinion.
WTF is "cold iron", and why's it so special?
Zubatcarteira
Now you're infected by the Musical Doodle
Is anything even natural in a D&D world, with most things being created deliberately by some wizard/god?
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
If he sharpens it on a rock to make it artificial in some way, yes. If it's just a broken stick, then it's a natural tool, much like picking up and throwing a rock at someone in self-defense is using a natural tool.
Bill Zebub
“It’s probably Matt Mercer’s fault.”
If the ape's stick has a USB port, it's unnatural.
More seriously, it seems that some folks who are arguing for a clear distinction between "natural" and "unnatural" are...based on their examples...really just describing "man-made" vs "not man-made". In which case I wonder why that existing, clear terminology is insufficient.
Isn't the contrast natural vs artificial? And artificial means, more-or-less, being an artefact or being artefactual in character. And an artefact is, at least roughly, something made by a person for a purpose.
Mannahnin
Scion of Murgen (He/Him)
"sharpens it on a rock to make it artificial". "Just a broken stick".
These are arbitrary, entirely subjective places to draw the line.
Breaking off a side branch to, say, allow it to fit down an ant hole more easily is still altering it for a purpose.
Max is saying it doesn't have to be a person. Honeycombs made by the bees, beaver dams, etc.
Whether we consider a beaver's dam, or a bee's honeycomb, to be an artefact or not seems a little arbitrary - or, perhaps, it seems like something where we could go one way or the other depending on what feature of being an artefact that we want to foreground. If we want to emphasise the dam or comb's constructed nature, we might liken it to an artefact by calling it one, or by contrasting it with (say) a natural obstruction of a river flow. If we want to contrast the dam or comb's nature with something built by humans, we might contrast it with a human-built dam by calling it natural.
It seems a little pointless to insist that there is a truth here one way or the other.
AnotherGuy
Hero
There are some great many ideas posited in this thread to create some interesting roleplaying discussions betwixt various academics NPCs and PCs if that is your jam. We have a player who has an artificer academic who excels in these kinds of social encounter waffling much to the amusement and curiosity of all at the table. So threads like these are pretty useful for me as a DM to mine for stuff like that. 
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CleverNickName
Limit Break Dancing
In my line of work, we use the term "engineered material" for things that have been selectively modified to outperform their naturally-occurring counterparts. So for me and my colleagues:
Iron is considered a naturally-occurring material, even though it must be mined, smelted, and refined into a useful form. Cold-rolled steel (ASTM 1008), however, is an engineered material, because it has been chemically and physically modified with additives at very specific temperatures to have very specific properties (corrosion resistance, hardness, tensile strength, etc.)
I don't know if it helps this particular argument, but that's how my brain has been trained. "Cold iron," in D&D terms, is iron that has been magically engineered to have specific anti-fey, anti-fiend properties.
Iron is considered a naturally-occurring material, even though it must be mined, smelted, and refined into a useful form. Cold-rolled steel (ASTM 1008), however, is an engineered material, because it has been chemically and physically modified with additives at very specific temperatures to have very specific properties (corrosion resistance, hardness, tensile strength, etc.)
I don't know if it helps this particular argument, but that's how my brain has been trained. "Cold iron," in D&D terms, is iron that has been magically engineered to have specific anti-fey, anti-fiend properties.
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