Metaphysical naturalism
Encyclopedia
Metaphysical naturalism, also called ontological naturalism and philosophical naturalism, or just naturalism, is a philosophical worldview and belief system that holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences, i.e., those required to understand our physical environment by mathematical modeling. Methodological naturalism however, refers exclusively to the methodology of science, for which metaphysical naturalism provides only one possible ontological foundation.
Metaphysical naturalism holds that all properties related to consciousness
and the mind
are reducible to, or supervene upon, nature. Broadly, the corresponding theological perspective is religious naturalism
or spiritual naturalism. More specifically, it rejects the supernatural
concepts and explanations that are part of many religions.
Naturalism
is therefore a metaphysical
philosophy opposed primarily by Biblical creationism."
Philosophers view naturalism as a positive term so few dare to announce themselves as non-naturalists. The religiously inclined philosophers tend to be indifferent toward metaphysical naturalism. Philosophers who are more apathetic toward metaphysical naturalism prefer to understand it in a nonrestrictive way in order not to disqualify themselves as naturalists. Those who are keen on metaphysical naturalist doctrines are happy to set the bar for naturalism higher.
Metaphysical naturalism is a philosophy "wherein worship is replaced with curiosity, devotion with diligence, holiness with sincerity, ritual with study, and scripture with the whole world and the whole of human learning," and it is the naturalist’s duty "to question all things and have a well grounded faith in what is well-investigated and well-proved, rather than what is merely well-asserted or well-liked." "It is presumably not a religion. In one very important respect, however, it resembles religion: it can be said to perform the cognitive function of a religion. There is that range of deep human questions to which a religion typically provides an answer: ... Like a typical religion, naturalism gives a set of answers to these and similar questions."
Metaphysical naturalism is an approach to metaphysics
or ontology
, which deals with existence per se. It should not be confused with methodological naturalism
, which sees empiricism
as the basis for the scientific method. Immaterial entities can occur in a rational worldview
(such as that of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Newton or Darwin) which are deduced from empirical data and seen as integral to a complete understanding of natural operations.
Metaphysical naturalism regards nature as all that exists or can exist, and assumes that events in nature are explainable by empirically observable causes. However, various abstractions, such as numbers, are considered to be immaterial for practical purposes. (See Mathematical Platonism).
. However, other fields besides science (e.g., history) sometimes find acceptance with metaphysical naturalists.
Metaphysical naturalism is an approach to metaphysics
or ontology
. These subjects deal with existence per se.
Metaphysical naturalism is sometimes confused with methodological naturalism.
with or without fully accepting or believing it ... science is not metaphysical and does not depend on the ultimate truth of any metaphysics for its success (although science does have metaphysical implications), but methodological naturalism must be adopted as a strategy or working hypothesis for science to succeed. We may therefore be agnostic about the ultimate truth of naturalism, but must nevertheless adopt it and investigate nature as if nature is all that there is." Metaphysical naturalism provides basic philosophical assumptions required to do the scientific method - namely, that reality is objective and consistent, that humans have the capacity to perceive reality accurately, and that rational explanations exist for elements of the real world. Variously known as background independence
, the cosmological principle
, the principle of universality, the principle of uniformity, or uniformitarianism
, these are important philosophical assumptions derived from naturalism and natural processes across time and space--are needed for scientists to extrapolate into the unobservable past.
, from which everything derives and upon which everything depends, are fundamentally mindless. So if any variety of metaphysical naturalism is true, any mental properties that exist (hence any mental powers or beings) are causally
derived from, and ontologically
dependent on, systems of nonmental properties, powers, or things. This means metaphysical naturalism would be false if any distinctly mental property, power, or entity exists that is not ontologically dependent on some arrangement of nonmental things, or that is not causally derived from some arrangement of nonmental things, or that has causal effects without the involvement of any arrangement of nonmental things that is already causally sufficient to produce that effect.
has either always existed or had a purely natural origin, being neither created nor designed. It has been asserted that the Big Bang
cosmology was developed within this assumption, proposing that the observable universe had a beginning, unfolding from a process of natural laws. In fact, it was championed by a Belgian Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître
and criticized by naturalists for being "too Biblical." Some naturalists propose a multiverse theory
, where it is thought that the observable universe is only part of a much larger whole. Citing the first law of thermodynamics, other naturalists propose that matter has always existed; matter, not the universe in its current state, exists eternally.
. Its measurement is conceived in billions of earth years. As an indispensable part of the Cosmos, deep time is an accepted fact, not a hypothesis. "By recognizing the vastness of Earth history compared to human history, we internalize what John McPhee has termed Deep Time"
(life arising from inorganic compounds through natural causes) must have happened. There are several current hypotheses about how abiogenesis happened, none of which question if it happened. As the preconditions of abiogenesis currently appear to be statistically rare in the universe, some naturalists argue that humanity's existence is therefore seen as lucky rather than planned or intended.
by natural selection
or other means is a fact. Naturalists hypothesize about how, not if evolution happened. They maintain that humanity's existence as rational animal
s is not by intelligent design
but rather a natural process of emergence
. Whereas naturalists do not interpret evolution as purpose driven, many see no compelling argument against ethical naturalism
. (See Value of society below).
or spirit
which constitutes the mind
. If one's mind, and hence one's identity and existence as a person
, is entirely the product of a physical process, three conclusions follow. First, all mental contents (such as idea
s, theories, emotions, moral and personal values, or beauty
and ugliness) exist solely as computational constructions of a brain, and not as things that exist independently of conscious thought. Second, damage to the brain (from disease, drugs, malnutrition, or injury) frequently entails damage to the self and therefore should be of great concern. Third, the death or destruction of one's brain cannot be survived, and therefore all humans are mortal. Stace, however, holds that work on ecstatic mysticism calls into question the underlying assumption of this argument, that awareness is not possible without data processing.
is the refinement and improvement of naturally evolved faculties, through discovering, then learning, and then employing methods and procedures that are found to increase the frequency with which one arrives at true conclusions and correct information about oneself and the universe. The certitude of deductive logic remains unexplained by this essentially probabilistic view (see philosopher Alvin Plantinga
's evolutionary argument against naturalism
), leading many mathematicians to espouse some from of Platonist
idealism
. Nevertheless, naturalists believe that reason is superior to all the other tools available in ascertaining the truth, so anyone who wishes to have more beliefs that are true than are false should seek to perfect and consistently employ their reason in testing and forming beliefs. One outcome of this principle has been the discovery that empirical methods (especially those of proven use in the sciences) are unsurpassed for discovering the facts of reality, while methods of pure reason
alone can securely discover only truths inherent in concepts and systems of ideas.
and civilization
, and now in fact depends on them. This means that even in the neutral terms of differential reproductive success, humanity's future as a species depends on developing and maintaining a healthy and productive culture and civilization. Any behavior contrary to that end threatens humanity's survival and the survival of one's neighbors, kin, and descendants. Naturalists believe this means humans have been "designed" by blind natural forces to require a healthy society in order to flourish and feel happy and content. Therefore the pursuit of human happiness requires the pursuit of a healthy society
so people can live in it, interact with it, and benefit from it.
, Anaxagoras
or especially the atomist
Democritus
, were labeled by their peers and successors "the physikoi" (from the Greek
φυσικός or physikos, meaning "natural philosopher," borrowing on the word φύσις or physis, meaning "nature") because they investigated natural causes, often excluding any role for gods in the creation or operation of the world. This eventually led to fully developed systems such as Epicureanism
, which sought to explain everything that exists as the product of atoms falling and swerving in a void.
In their definition of nature, the ancient Greeks distinguished "nature" from "artifice." Anything that resulted from the innate properties of a thing was regarded as having a natural cause, regardless of whether those properties themselves were intelligently arranged or not, while anything that resulted from human action was regarded as having an artificial cause. Thus, natural causes were distinguished from human intelligent causes. It was often assumed that some intelligent causes were primary causes and not solely the product of natural properties, but not everyone agreed. Following the physikoi and their successors, some ancients denied the existence of any intelligent causes that were not entirely the product of natural causes (thus reducing all intelligent causes to natural causes), and they are the earliest metaphysical naturalists. However, only a few Greek and Romans embraced such a view. Of these Epicurus
and Strato of Lampsacus
were the most famous.
Metaphysical naturalism is most notably a Western phenomenon, but an equivalent idea has long existed in the East. Though unnamed and never articulated into a coherent system, one tradition within Confucian philosophy embraced a view that can be called metaphysical naturalism, dating back at least to Wang Chong
in the 1st century, if not earlier. But this tradition arose independently and had little influence on the development of modern naturalist philosophy or on Eastern or Western culture.
in the West and the later spread of Islam
, metaphysical naturalism was generally abandoned by intellectuals. Thus, there is little evidence for it in the Middle Ages
. The reintroduction of Aristotle's empirical epistemology as well as previously lost treatises by Greco-Roman natural philosophers during the Renaissance
contributed to Scientific Revolution
which was begun by the medieval Scholastics
without resulting in any noticeable increase in commitment to naturalism. It was not until the early modern era and Age of Enlightenment
that naturalism, like that of Benedict Spinoza, David Hume
, Denis Diderot
, Julien La Mettrie, and Baron d'Holbach
, among others, started to emerge again in the 17th and 18th centuries.
In this period, some metaphysical naturalists adhered to a distinct doctrine, materialism
, which became the only category of metaphysical naturalism widely defended until the 20th century, when advances in physics resulted in widespread abandonment of prior formulations of materialism. 19th century physics added electromagnetic force fields, and in the 20th century matter
was found to be a form of energy
and therefore not fundamental as materialists had assumed. (See History of physics
.) In philosophy
, renewed attention to the problem of universals
, philosophy of mathematics
, the development of mathematical logic
, and the post-positivist
revival of metaphysics
and the philosophy of religion
, initially by way of Wittgensteinian
linguistic philosophy
, further called the naturalistic paradigm into question. Developments such as these, along with those within science and the philosophy of science
brought new advancements and revisions of naturalistic doctrines by naturalistic philosophers into metaphysics, ethics
, the philosophy of language
, the philosophy of mind
, epistemology, etc., the products of which include physicalism
and eliminative materialism
, supervenience
, causal theories of reference
, anomalous monism
, naturalized epistemology
(e.g. reliabilism
), internalism and externalism
, ethical naturalism
, and property dualism
, for example.
Current naturalism derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. Naturalists John Dewey
, Ernest Nagel
, Sidney Hook
, and Roy Wood Sellars
worked to ally philosophy more closely with science. They promoted the ideas that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural’ and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality.
Currently, metaphysical naturalism is more widely embraced than in previous centuries, especially but not exclusively in the natural science
s and the Anglo-American, analytic philosophical
communities. While the vast majority of the population of the world remains firmly committed to non-naturalistic worldviews, prominent contemporary defenders of naturalism and/or naturalistic theses and doctrines today include J. J. C. Smart
, David Malet Armstrong
, David Papineau
, Paul Kurtz
, Brian Leiter
, Daniel Dennett
, Michael Devitt
, Fred Dretske
, Paul
and Patricia Churchland
, Mario Bunge
, Jonathan Schaffer
, Hilary Kornblith
, Quentin Smith
, Paul Draper
, Michael Martin
, among many other academic philosophers.
in the 19th century and Randian
Objectivism in the 20th century. Marxism is an expression of communist
or socialist
idealism within a naturalistic framework, while Objectivism extols the virtues of liberal individualism, an expression of capitalist
idealism within a naturalist framework. Most proponents of metaphysical naturalism in First World
countries, however, are neither Marxists nor Objectivists, and instead embrace the more moderate political ideals of secular humanism
or cultural moral relativism
.
as a whole, that we should presume any new phenomenon obeys known laws of physics until we have empirically proven otherwise. Hence we should presume that any unexplained fact has a natural explanation until we have empirically proven otherwise. Therefore, since we have not found empirical proof of anything supernatural, and since we have abundant reason from past precedent to expect that natural explanations underlie everything, metaphysical naturalism is most probably true.
There are two unanswered objections to this argument. The first is that empirical methods restrict human experience to what is external and measurable without showing that only what is external and measurable exists. The argument is thus founded on an anti-empirical, a priori rejection of entire areas of human experience. The second is that in past applications of physics, what was to be explained was empirically measurable, whereas what naturalists claim can be explained by physics (intentions, awareness as opposed or data processing, God) are not empirically measurable and physics has never claimed that it is applicable to them. It must be recalled that physics uses abstractions, and that abstractions necessarily abstract from some data in order to focus on other data. Methods are not automatically applicable until empirically proven otherwise, but have conditions of applicability which must be met in advance of applying them. For example, no amount of empirical data will ever show that 2 + 2 = 4 always and everywhere.
This argument assumes that the hypothetico-deductive method is the only way to truth. Furthermore, this argument does draw an equivalence between methodological naturalism which focuses on epistemology with ontological naturalism which focuses on metaphysics. Whilst methodological naturalism has produced great success in explaining observed phenomena by testing hypotheses according to natural laws, this does not preclude on a priori grounds the possibility of supernatural phenomena existing within the universe. In addition, if something purported to be "supernatural" was confirmed by scientific observations, naturalists would discount these as anomalies or unexplained natural events. Empiricists place experience above theory, but naturalists reject whole classes of data based on an a priori ontological theory. Natural philosophers, from Aristotle on, have claimed that the facts of experience are adequate to deduce the existence of the metaphysical
, not as hypothesis
, but as a rational certainty entailed by observable facts. Regarding theology
, a subject that Aristotle considered to be within the scope of Natural science
or Physics
, he observed that merely requiring one of something is, in general, a more parsimonious explanation than requiring many. However, not unlike later physicists
, he was trying to explain the eternal circular motion of the planets and stars by reason of one or more instances of an unchanging principle. In a more recognizably theological argument, Thomas Aquinas
reasoned deductively for additional properties that characterized a creator God.
This argument is met by the case built by theists such as Aristotle
, Ibn Sina, and Aquinas that the entire natural world is an effect of and evidence for the Existence of God
. If this argument is to be made, it should include a refutation of arguments purporting to show that all of nature is evidence.
correspond to the functions and activities of the human brain
, which is constructed from different interacting physical systems
that evolved over time through the animal kingdom. Our brains are now the most complex machines found anywhere in nature, and our minds appear limited to our brain's physical needs and capabilities. We have discovered no clear evidence of any other kind of mind, no clear evidence that our minds can exceed the limitations of our physical brain, and no clear evidence that all of the structures and functions of the brain did not slowly evolve through billions of years of undirected mutation and indifferent natural selection. This is the only way we would observe the facts to be if naturalism were true (since there is no other way to have a mind on naturalism except as the product of a slowly evolved, highly complex physical system like our brain), but if supernatural entities or processes exist (and some minds or mental content exist independently of a physical machine, like our brain), then what we observe is not the only way things could be (since by now we could have and likely would have observed some supernatural elements of our own or other minds or observed mental powers in other objects). Since this observation is less probable if supernaturalism is true, metaphysical naturalism is more likely to be true.
This argument presupposes that the mind consists of data processing only, which is what has been investigated and shown to be possible in physical systems such as computers. However, we know that most data processing in the brain occurs absent awareness, so it is fallacious to assume that awareness is a side effect of data processing. Since the primary function of the mind is to know, and knowing requires awareness of the known contents, naturalism has not provided an explanation of mind, but only of its data processing subsystem. If that subsystem is traumatized, what we are aware of may be defective, but that does not show that the existence of subjective awareness is a consequent of data processing.
, a contemporary philosopher of epistemology at Notre Dame
, has argued that anyone who holds to the truth of both metaphysical naturalism and evolution
is inherently irrational in doing so. His argument relies on establishing that the probability that unguided evolution would have produced reliable cognitive faculties is either low or inscrutable. For example, imagine a hunter who very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely that the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief. If this argument holds, one who holds both naturalism and evolution acquires a “defeater” for every belief he holds, including the beliefs associated with naturalism and evolution.
Since its inception, Plantinga's argument has been criticized by many naturalist philosophers. Mental philosopher
Daniel Dennett
and historian Richard Carrier
have attacked it on the grounds of misunderstanding natural selection. They argue in their respective works that nature selects the genes of organisms that survive longer. Since pattern seeking in any multitude offer a substantial survival advantage, nature can effectively breed a cognitive apparatus for truth-finding. For example, primitive men that understood fertilizing plants and that flint makes fire would live longer because of their reasoning skills. This would allow them to pass reasoning abilities to their offspring. Out of this second generation, the offspring with the best rational faculties would live the longest because they discovered even more true patterns. Thus natural selection would continue to fine-tune man's truth seeking skills over time.
. This argument suggests that certain biological instances (the favorite example being the eye) could not have occurred gradually, but must have come to be instantaneously. This is referred to as the argument from irreducible complexity
.
A cosmologically-based argument, fine-tuning
, states that the fundamental constants of physics and laws of nature appear so finely tuned to permit life that only the existence of a supernatural designer could explain them.
However, this has been asserted by many naturalists, like Victor Stenger, to be a god of the gaps
argument because it creates a problem, says it is unanswerable, then fills in God as the solution. He also accuses fine-tuning as being a statistics fallacy, because it asserts after the fact what the chances were before the big bang. This fallacy makes it appear as though it was purposeful, because humans observe the after effect when it was just as likely to have any other combination that did not permit life.
It is also argued by Lawrence Krauss and Neil DeGrasse Tyson
that the universe is not fine-tuned and is very unfriendly to life with only a small percentage of the universe being habitable. They argue life evolves to the conditions of the universe through natural selection, not the other way around.
A related approach which is consistent with existing science is that of physicist-philosopher Dennis Polis. He grants all of the science advanced by naturalists to support their case and shows it entails both the existence of God and a teleological view of nature. Naturalist simply project data into a solely mechanistic conceptual space, when the same data can be more adequately represented by a conceptual space in which mechanism and teleology are seen as complimentary.
and its elements, commonly called qualia
, some argue that naturalism is therefore refuted or should not be believed (see hard problem of consciousness
). Proponents of this argument suggest that naturalism's lack of a satisfying explanation on this matter is not a result of a simple lack of research (which would indicate that science may one day explain qualia), but that naturalism cannot explain qualia because no valid physical explanation exists in principle. One response by naturalists is to maintain that, while conscious experience exists, qualia do not. Yet another is to claim that this denial of a possible physical explanation has not been rationally demonstrated or factually grounded, but is an argument from personal incredulity and there is no reason to think that the mystery of consciousness is inherently unsolvable, that the apparent gulf between objectivity and subjectivity is unbridgeable, and that no sufficient reductionistic
explanation can be offered.
A more decisive, semiotic
argument is that naturalistic accounts of mind rely on the notion of instrumental signs, which are different in nature from the formal signs used in the mind, and furthermore, that instrumental signs require formal signs to operate as signs at all.
Metaphysical naturalism holds that all properties related to consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
and the mind
Mind
The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
are reducible to, or supervene upon, nature. Broadly, the corresponding theological perspective is religious naturalism
Religious naturalism
Religious naturalism is an approach to spirituality that is devoid of supernaturalism. The focus is on the religious attributes of the universe/Nature, the understanding of it and our response to it . These provide for the development of an eco-morality...
or spiritual naturalism. More specifically, it rejects the supernatural
Supernatural
The supernatural or is that which is not subject to the laws of nature, or more figuratively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature...
concepts and explanations that are part of many religions.
Definition
Metaphysical naturalism is a philosophy that maintains that:- Nature encompasses all that existsExistenceIn common usage, existence is the world we are aware of through our senses, and that persists independently without them. In academic philosophy the word has a more specialized meaning, being contrasted with essence, which specifies different forms of existence as well as different identity...
throughout space and timeSpacetimeIn physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. Spacetime is usually interpreted with space as being three-dimensional and time playing the role of a fourth dimension that is of a different sort from the spatial dimensions...
. - Nature (the universeUniverseThe Universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists, including all matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space. Definitions and usage vary and similar terms include the cosmos, the world and nature...
or cosmosCosmosIn the general sense, a cosmos is an orderly or harmonious system. It originates from the Greek term κόσμος , meaning "order" or "ornament" and is antithetical to the concept of chaos. Today, the word is generally used as a synonym of the word Universe . The word cosmos originates from the same root...
) consists only of natural elements, that is, of spatiotemporal physicalPhysical propertyA physical property is any property that is measurable whose value describes a physical system's state. The changes in the physical properties of a system can be used to describe its transformations ....
substance—massMassMass can be defined as a quantitive measure of the resistance an object has to change in its velocity.In physics, mass commonly refers to any of the following three properties of matter, which have been shown experimentally to be equivalent:...
–energyEnergyIn physics, energy is an indirectly observed quantity. It is often understood as the ability a physical system has to do work on other physical systems...
. Non-physical or quasi-physical substance, such as informationInformationInformation in its most restricted technical sense is a message or collection of messages that consists of an ordered sequence of symbols, or it is the meaning that can be interpreted from such a message or collection of messages. Information can be recorded or transmitted. It can be recorded as...
, ideaIdeaIn the most narrow sense, an idea is just whatever is before the mind when one thinks. Very often, ideas are construed as representational images; i.e. images of some object. In other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear as images...
s, values, logicLogicIn philosophy, Logic is the formal systematic study of the principles of valid inference and correct reasoning. Logic is used in most intellectual activities, but is studied primarily in the disciplines of philosophy, mathematics, semantics, and computer science...
, mathematicsMathematicsMathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
, intellectIntellectIntellect is a term used in studies of the human mind, and refers to the ability of the mind to come to correct conclusions about what is true or real, and about how to solve problems...
, and other emergent phenomenaEmergentismIn philosophy, emergentism is the belief in emergence, particularly as it involves consciousness and the philosophy of mind, and as it contrasts with reductionism. A property of a system is said to be emergent if it is in some sense more than the "sum" of the properties of the system's parts...
, either superveneSupervenienceIn philosophy, supervenience is a kind of dependency relationship. For example, mental states might depend on physical brain states. This dependency is typically held to obtain between sets of properties. A classic example is that mental states of pain supervene on 'C-fibers firing'...
upon the physical or can be reducedEliminative materialismEliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist...
to a physical account. - Nature operates by the laws of physicsPhysicsPhysics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
. Science is the primary means of discovering these laws. - The supernaturalSupernaturalThe supernatural or is that which is not subject to the laws of nature, or more figuratively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature...
does not exist, i.e., only nature is realRealityIn philosophy, reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined. In a wider definition, reality includes everything that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible...
.
Naturalism
Naturalism (philosophy)
Naturalism commonly refers to the philosophical viewpoint that the natural universe and its natural laws and forces operate in the universe, and that nothing exists beyond the natural universe or, if it does, it does not affect the natural universe that we know...
is therefore a metaphysical
Metaphysical
Metaphysical may refer to:*Metaphysics, a branch of philosophy dealing with aspects of existence and the theory of knowledge*The supernatural...
philosophy opposed primarily by Biblical creationism."
Philosophers view naturalism as a positive term so few dare to announce themselves as non-naturalists. The religiously inclined philosophers tend to be indifferent toward metaphysical naturalism. Philosophers who are more apathetic toward metaphysical naturalism prefer to understand it in a nonrestrictive way in order not to disqualify themselves as naturalists. Those who are keen on metaphysical naturalist doctrines are happy to set the bar for naturalism higher.
Metaphysical naturalism is a philosophy "wherein worship is replaced with curiosity, devotion with diligence, holiness with sincerity, ritual with study, and scripture with the whole world and the whole of human learning," and it is the naturalist’s duty "to question all things and have a well grounded faith in what is well-investigated and well-proved, rather than what is merely well-asserted or well-liked." "It is presumably not a religion. In one very important respect, however, it resembles religion: it can be said to perform the cognitive function of a religion. There is that range of deep human questions to which a religion typically provides an answer: ... Like a typical religion, naturalism gives a set of answers to these and similar questions."
Metaphysical naturalism is an approach to metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
or ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
, which deals with existence per se. It should not be confused with methodological naturalism
Naturalized epistemology
Naturalized epistemology is a collection of philosophic views concerned with the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. This shared emphasis on scientific methods of studying knowledge shifts focus to the empirical processes of knowledge acquisition and away from...
, which sees empiricism
Empiricism
Empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge comes only or primarily via sensory experience. One of several views of epistemology, the study of human knowledge, along with rationalism, idealism and historicism, empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence,...
as the basis for the scientific method. Immaterial entities can occur in a rational worldview
World view
A comprehensive world view is the fundamental cognitive orientation of an individual or society encompassing the entirety of the individual or society's knowledge and point-of-view, including natural philosophy; fundamental, existential, and normative postulates; or themes, values, emotions, and...
(such as that of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Newton or Darwin) which are deduced from empirical data and seen as integral to a complete understanding of natural operations.
Metaphysical naturalism regards nature as all that exists or can exist, and assumes that events in nature are explainable by empirically observable causes. However, various abstractions, such as numbers, are considered to be immaterial for practical purposes. (See Mathematical Platonism).
Epistemology
Some have charged that this focus on science is really a form of scientismScientism
Scientism refers to a belief in the universal applicability of the systematic methods and approach of science, especially the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning to the exclusion of other viewpoints...
. However, other fields besides science (e.g., history) sometimes find acceptance with metaphysical naturalists.
Metaphysical naturalism is an approach to metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
or ontology
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
. These subjects deal with existence per se.
Metaphysical naturalism is sometimes confused with methodological naturalism.
Science and metaphysical naturalism
The philosophy of naturalism is necessary for science to take place. Methodological naturalism is "the adoption or assumption of philosophical naturalism within scientific methodScientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
with or without fully accepting or believing it ... science is not metaphysical and does not depend on the ultimate truth of any metaphysics for its success (although science does have metaphysical implications), but methodological naturalism must be adopted as a strategy or working hypothesis for science to succeed. We may therefore be agnostic about the ultimate truth of naturalism, but must nevertheless adopt it and investigate nature as if nature is all that there is." Metaphysical naturalism provides basic philosophical assumptions required to do the scientific method - namely, that reality is objective and consistent, that humans have the capacity to perceive reality accurately, and that rational explanations exist for elements of the real world. Variously known as background independence
Background independence
Background independence, also called universality, is the concept or assumption, fundamental to all physical sciences, that the nature of reality is consistent throughout all of space and time...
, the cosmological principle
Cosmological Principle
In modern physical cosmology, the cosmological principle is the working assumption that observers on Earth do not occupy an unusual or privileged location within the universe as a whole, judged as observers of the physical phenomena produced by uniform and universal laws of physics...
, the principle of universality, the principle of uniformity, or uniformitarianism
Uniformitarianism
In the philosophy of naturalism, the uniformitarianism assumption is that the same natural laws and processes that operate in the universe now, have always operated in the universe in the past and apply everywhere in the universe. It has included the gradualistic concept that "the present is the...
, these are important philosophical assumptions derived from naturalism and natural processes across time and space--are needed for scientists to extrapolate into the unobservable past.
The mind is caused by natural phenomena
What all metaphysical naturalists agree on, however, is that the fundamental constituents of realityReality
In philosophy, reality is the state of things as they actually exist, rather than as they may appear or might be imagined. In a wider definition, reality includes everything that is and has been, whether or not it is observable or comprehensible...
, from which everything derives and upon which everything depends, are fundamentally mindless. So if any variety of metaphysical naturalism is true, any mental properties that exist (hence any mental powers or beings) are causally
Causality
Causality is the relationship between an event and a second event , where the second event is understood as a consequence of the first....
derived from, and ontologically
Ontology
Ontology is the philosophical study of the nature of being, existence or reality as such, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations...
dependent on, systems of nonmental properties, powers, or things. This means metaphysical naturalism would be false if any distinctly mental property, power, or entity exists that is not ontologically dependent on some arrangement of nonmental things, or that is not causally derived from some arrangement of nonmental things, or that has causal effects without the involvement of any arrangement of nonmental things that is already causally sufficient to produce that effect.
Absolute vs. Contingent methodological naturalism
The relationship between metaphysical and methodological naturalism varies among thinkers. To understand, two varieties of methodological naturalism should be distinguished. Absolute methodological naturalism is the view that it is in some sense impossible for any empirical method to discover supernatural facts, even if there are some. [This is compatible with (but does not entail) the view that something other than empirical methods might be able to discover supernatural facts.] Contingent methodological naturalism entails the belief that, judging from past experience, empirical methods are far more likely to uncover natural facts than supernatural ones. It is generally counterproductive, but not impossible, to pursue supernatural hypotheses empirically. Thus not all methodological naturalists are metaphysical naturalists. It is also possible to be a methodological naturalist in natural science, but hold that other rational methods can demonstrate spiritual realities such as God or souls.Common beliefs
Contemporary naturalists possess a wide diversity of beliefs and engage each other in healthy debate and disagreement on many issues. However, besides the basic beliefs already described above, most if not all contemporary naturalists believe the following as the logical consequences of the core beliefs of naturalism. These form the basis for the naturalistic interpretation of science.Undesigned universe
Naturalists argue that the universeUniverse
The Universe is commonly defined as the totality of everything that exists, including all matter and energy, the planets, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space. Definitions and usage vary and similar terms include the cosmos, the world and nature...
has either always existed or had a purely natural origin, being neither created nor designed. It has been asserted that the Big Bang
Big Bang
The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model that explains the early development of the Universe. According to the Big Bang theory, the Universe was once in an extremely hot and dense state which expanded rapidly. This rapid expansion caused the young Universe to cool and resulted in...
cosmology was developed within this assumption, proposing that the observable universe had a beginning, unfolding from a process of natural laws. In fact, it was championed by a Belgian Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître
Georges Lemaître
Monsignor Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître was a Belgian priest, astronomer and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Louvain. He was the first person to propose the theory of the expansion of the Universe, widely misattributed to Edwin Hubble...
and criticized by naturalists for being "too Biblical." Some naturalists propose a multiverse theory
Multiverse (science)
The multiverse is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes that together comprise everything that exists and can exist: the entirety of space, time, matter, and energy as well as the physical laws and constants that describe them...
, where it is thought that the observable universe is only part of a much larger whole. Citing the first law of thermodynamics, other naturalists propose that matter has always existed; matter, not the universe in its current state, exists eternally.
Deep Time
The concept of time as associated with the existence of a universe or universes is known as Deep TimeDeep time
Deep time is the concept that the Geologic time scale is vast because the Earth is very old. The modern philosophical concept was developed in the 18th century by Scottish geologist James Hutton...
. Its measurement is conceived in billions of earth years. As an indispensable part of the Cosmos, deep time is an accepted fact, not a hypothesis. "By recognizing the vastness of Earth history compared to human history, we internalize what John McPhee has termed Deep Time"
Abiogenesis
Since matter is all there is, and since there was once no life and now there is, and since there are no creative gods, then abiogenesisAbiogenesis
Abiogenesis or biopoesis is the study of how biological life arises from inorganic matter through natural processes, and the method by which life on Earth arose...
(life arising from inorganic compounds through natural causes) must have happened. There are several current hypotheses about how abiogenesis happened, none of which question if it happened. As the preconditions of abiogenesis currently appear to be statistically rare in the universe, some naturalists argue that humanity's existence is therefore seen as lucky rather than planned or intended.
Evolution
Since there were once only simple life forms and now there is a rich diversity of life on Earth and since there are no supernatural gods, evolutionEvolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
by natural selection
Natural selection
Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....
or other means is a fact. Naturalists hypothesize about how, not if evolution happened. They maintain that humanity's existence as rational animal
Rational Animal
Rational animal is a classical definition of man. Though it is often attributed to first appearing as a definition in Aristotle's Metaphysics, Aristotle does not define it here...
s is not by intelligent design
Intelligent design
Intelligent design is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...
but rather a natural process of emergence
Emergence
In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence is the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theories of integrative levels and of complex systems....
. Whereas naturalists do not interpret evolution as purpose driven, many see no compelling argument against ethical naturalism
Ethical naturalism
Ethical naturalism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences express propositions.# Some such propositions are true....
. (See Value of society below).
Mind as brain
Metaphysical naturalists believe there exists no soulSoul
A soul in certain spiritual, philosophical, and psychological traditions is the incorporeal essence of a person or living thing or object. Many philosophical and spiritual systems teach that humans have souls, and others teach that all living things and even inanimate objects have souls. The...
or spirit
Spirit
The English word spirit has many differing meanings and connotations, most of them relating to a non-corporeal substance contrasted with the material body.The spirit of a living thing usually refers to or explains its consciousness.The notions of a person's "spirit" and "soul" often also overlap,...
which constitutes the mind
Mind
The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
. If one's mind, and hence one's identity and existence as a person
Person
A person is a human being, or an entity that has certain capacities or attributes strongly associated with being human , for example in a particular moral or legal context...
, is entirely the product of a physical process, three conclusions follow. First, all mental contents (such as idea
Idea
In the most narrow sense, an idea is just whatever is before the mind when one thinks. Very often, ideas are construed as representational images; i.e. images of some object. In other contexts, ideas are taken to be concepts, although abstract concepts do not necessarily appear as images...
s, theories, emotions, moral and personal values, or beauty
Beauty
Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology, and culture...
and ugliness) exist solely as computational constructions of a brain, and not as things that exist independently of conscious thought. Second, damage to the brain (from disease, drugs, malnutrition, or injury) frequently entails damage to the self and therefore should be of great concern. Third, the death or destruction of one's brain cannot be survived, and therefore all humans are mortal. Stace, however, holds that work on ecstatic mysticism calls into question the underlying assumption of this argument, that awareness is not possible without data processing.
Utility of reason
Metaphysical naturalists hold that reasonReason
Reason is a term that refers to the capacity human beings have to make sense of things, to establish and verify facts, and to change or justify practices, institutions, and beliefs. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, language, ...
is the refinement and improvement of naturally evolved faculties, through discovering, then learning, and then employing methods and procedures that are found to increase the frequency with which one arrives at true conclusions and correct information about oneself and the universe. The certitude of deductive logic remains unexplained by this essentially probabilistic view (see philosopher Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Carl Plantinga is an American analytic philosopher and the emeritus John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is known for his work in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics, and Christian apologetics...
's evolutionary argument against naturalism
Evolutionary argument against naturalism
The evolutionary argument against naturalism is a philosophical argument regarding a perceived tension between biological evolutionary theory and philosophical naturalism — the belief that there are no supernatural entities or processes...
), leading many mathematicians to espouse some from of Platonist
Platonism
Platonism is the philosophy of Plato or the name of other philosophical systems considered closely derived from it. In a narrower sense the term might indicate the doctrine of Platonic realism...
idealism
Idealism
In philosophy, idealism is the family of views which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial. Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing...
. Nevertheless, naturalists believe that reason is superior to all the other tools available in ascertaining the truth, so anyone who wishes to have more beliefs that are true than are false should seek to perfect and consistently employ their reason in testing and forming beliefs. One outcome of this principle has been the discovery that empirical methods (especially those of proven use in the sciences) are unsurpassed for discovering the facts of reality, while methods of pure reason
Speculative reason
Speculative reason or pure reason is theoretical thought , as opposed to practical thought...
alone can securely discover only truths inherent in concepts and systems of ideas.
Value of society
Humans evolved as social animals, which is the only reason humanity has developed cultureCulture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
and civilization
Civilization
Civilization is a sometimes controversial term that has been used in several related ways. Primarily, the term has been used to refer to the material and instrumental side of human cultures that are complex in terms of technology, science, and division of labor. Such civilizations are generally...
, and now in fact depends on them. This means that even in the neutral terms of differential reproductive success, humanity's future as a species depends on developing and maintaining a healthy and productive culture and civilization. Any behavior contrary to that end threatens humanity's survival and the survival of one's neighbors, kin, and descendants. Naturalists believe this means humans have been "designed" by blind natural forces to require a healthy society in order to flourish and feel happy and content. Therefore the pursuit of human happiness requires the pursuit of a healthy society
Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations...
so people can live in it, interact with it, and benefit from it.
Ancient period
Metaphysical naturalism appears to have originated in early Greek philosophy. The earliest presocratic philosophers, such as ThalesThales
Thales of Miletus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus in Asia Minor, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition...
, Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras was a Pre-Socratic Greek philosopher. Born in Clazomenae in Asia Minor, Anaxagoras was the first philosopher to bring philosophy from Ionia to Athens. He attempted to give a scientific account of eclipses, meteors, rainbows, and the sun, which he described as a fiery mass larger than...
or especially the atomist
Atomism
Atomism is a natural philosophy that developed in several ancient traditions. The atomists theorized that the natural world consists of two fundamental parts: indivisible atoms and empty void.According to Aristotle, atoms are indestructible and immutable and there are an infinite variety of shapes...
Democritus
Democritus
Democritus was an Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera, Thrace, Greece. He was an influential pre-Socratic philosopher and pupil of Leucippus, who formulated an atomic theory for the cosmos....
, were labeled by their peers and successors "the physikoi" (from the Greek
Greek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
φυσικός or physikos, meaning "natural philosopher," borrowing on the word φύσις or physis, meaning "nature") because they investigated natural causes, often excluding any role for gods in the creation or operation of the world. This eventually led to fully developed systems such as Epicureanism
Epicureanism
Epicureanism is a system of philosophy based upon the teachings of Epicurus, founded around 307 BC. Epicurus was an atomic materialist, following in the steps of Democritus. His materialism led him to a general attack on superstition and divine intervention. Following Aristippus—about whom...
, which sought to explain everything that exists as the product of atoms falling and swerving in a void.
In their definition of nature, the ancient Greeks distinguished "nature" from "artifice." Anything that resulted from the innate properties of a thing was regarded as having a natural cause, regardless of whether those properties themselves were intelligently arranged or not, while anything that resulted from human action was regarded as having an artificial cause. Thus, natural causes were distinguished from human intelligent causes. It was often assumed that some intelligent causes were primary causes and not solely the product of natural properties, but not everyone agreed. Following the physikoi and their successors, some ancients denied the existence of any intelligent causes that were not entirely the product of natural causes (thus reducing all intelligent causes to natural causes), and they are the earliest metaphysical naturalists. However, only a few Greek and Romans embraced such a view. Of these Epicurus
Epicurus
Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism.Only a few fragments and letters remain of Epicurus's 300 written works...
and Strato of Lampsacus
Strato of Lampsacus
Strato of Lampsacus was a Peripatetic philosopher, and the third director of the Lyceum after the death of Theophrastus...
were the most famous.
Metaphysical naturalism is most notably a Western phenomenon, but an equivalent idea has long existed in the East. Though unnamed and never articulated into a coherent system, one tradition within Confucian philosophy embraced a view that can be called metaphysical naturalism, dating back at least to Wang Chong
Wang Chong
Wang Chong , courtesy name Zhongren , was a Chinese philosopher active during the Han Dynasty. He developed a rational, secular, naturalistic and mechanistic account of the world and of human beings and gave a materialistic explanation of the origin of the universe. His main work was the Lùnhéng...
in the 1st century, if not earlier. But this tradition arose independently and had little influence on the development of modern naturalist philosophy or on Eastern or Western culture.
Middle ages to modernity
With the rise and dominance of ChristianityChristianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
in the West and the later spread of Islam
Islam
Islam . The most common are and . : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...
, metaphysical naturalism was generally abandoned by intellectuals. Thus, there is little evidence for it in the Middle Ages
Middle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
. The reintroduction of Aristotle's empirical epistemology as well as previously lost treatises by Greco-Roman natural philosophers during the Renaissance
Renaissance
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...
contributed to Scientific Revolution
Scientific revolution
The Scientific Revolution is an era associated primarily with the 16th and 17th centuries during which new ideas and knowledge in physics, astronomy, biology, medicine and chemistry transformed medieval and ancient views of nature and laid the foundations for modern science...
which was begun by the medieval Scholastics
Scholasticism
Scholasticism is a method of critical thought which dominated teaching by the academics of medieval universities in Europe from about 1100–1500, and a program of employing that method in articulating and defending orthodoxy in an increasingly pluralistic context...
without resulting in any noticeable increase in commitment to naturalism. It was not until the early modern era and Age of Enlightenment
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...
that naturalism, like that of Benedict Spinoza, David Hume
David Hume
David Hume was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and skepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment...
, Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....
, Julien La Mettrie, and Baron d'Holbach
Baron d'Holbach
Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach was a French-German author, philosopher, encyclopedist and a prominent figure in the French Enlightenment. He was born Paul Heinrich Dietrich in Edesheim, near Landau in the Rhenish Palatinate, but lived and worked mainly in Paris, where he kept a salon...
, among others, started to emerge again in the 17th and 18th centuries.
In this period, some metaphysical naturalists adhered to a distinct doctrine, materialism
Materialism
In philosophy, the theory of materialism holds that the only thing that exists is matter; that all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. In other words, matter is the only substance...
, which became the only category of metaphysical naturalism widely defended until the 20th century, when advances in physics resulted in widespread abandonment of prior formulations of materialism. 19th century physics added electromagnetic force fields, and in the 20th century matter
Matter
Matter is a general term for the substance of which all physical objects consist. Typically, matter includes atoms and other particles which have mass. A common way of defining matter is as anything that has mass and occupies volume...
was found to be a form of energy
Energy
In physics, energy is an indirectly observed quantity. It is often understood as the ability a physical system has to do work on other physical systems...
and therefore not fundamental as materialists had assumed. (See History of physics
History of physics
As forms of science historically developed out of philosophy, physics was originally referred to as natural philosophy, a term describing a field of study concerned with "the workings of nature".-Early history:...
.) In philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
, renewed attention to the problem of universals
Problem of universals
The problem of universals is an ancient problem in metaphysics about whether universals exist. Universals are general or abstract qualities, characteristics, properties, kinds or relations, such as being male/female, solid/liquid/gas or a certain colour, that can be predicated of individuals or...
, philosophy of mathematics
Philosophy of mathematics
The philosophy of mathematics is the branch of philosophy that studies the philosophical assumptions, foundations, and implications of mathematics. The aim of the philosophy of mathematics is to provide an account of the nature and methodology of mathematics and to understand the place of...
, the development of mathematical logic
Mathematical logic
Mathematical logic is a subfield of mathematics with close connections to foundations of mathematics, theoretical computer science and philosophical logic. The field includes both the mathematical study of logic and the applications of formal logic to other areas of mathematics...
, and the post-positivist
Logical positivism
Logical positivism is a philosophy that combines empiricism—the idea that observational evidence is indispensable for knowledge—with a version of rationalism incorporating mathematical and logico-linguistic constructs and deductions of epistemology.It may be considered as a type of analytic...
revival of metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
and the philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion
Philosophy of religion is a branch of philosophy concerned with questions regarding religion, including the nature and existence of God, the examination of religious experience, analysis of religious language and texts, and the relationship of religion and science...
, initially by way of Wittgensteinian
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austrian philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947...
linguistic philosophy
Linguistic philosophy
Linguistic philosophy describes the view that philosophical problems are problems which may be solved either by reforming language, or by understanding more about the language we presently use. The former position is that of ideal language philosophy, the latter the position of ordinary language...
, further called the naturalistic paradigm into question. Developments such as these, along with those within science and the philosophy of science
Philosophy of science
The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...
brought new advancements and revisions of naturalistic doctrines by naturalistic philosophers into metaphysics, ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...
, the philosophy of language
Philosophy of language
Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...
, the philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
, epistemology, etc., the products of which include physicalism
Physicalism
Physicalism is a philosophical position holding that everything which exists is no more extensive than its physical properties; that is, that there are no kinds of things other than physical things...
and eliminative materialism
Eliminative materialism
Eliminative materialism is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind. Its primary claim is that people's common-sense understanding of the mind is false and that certain classes of mental states that most people believe in do not exist...
, supervenience
Supervenience
In philosophy, supervenience is a kind of dependency relationship. For example, mental states might depend on physical brain states. This dependency is typically held to obtain between sets of properties. A classic example is that mental states of pain supervene on 'C-fibers firing'...
, causal theories of reference
Causal theory of reference
A causal theory of reference is a theory of how terms acquire specific referents. Such theories have been used to describe many referring terms, particularly logical terms, proper names, and natural kind terms...
, anomalous monism
Anomalous monism
Anomalous monism is a philosophical thesis about the mind-body relationship. It was first proposed by Donald Davidson in his 1970 paper Mental events. The theory is twofold and states that mental events are identical with physical events, and that the mental is anomalous, i.e. under their mental...
, naturalized epistemology
Naturalized epistemology
Naturalized epistemology is a collection of philosophic views concerned with the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. This shared emphasis on scientific methods of studying knowledge shifts focus to the empirical processes of knowledge acquisition and away from...
(e.g. reliabilism
Reliabilism
Reliabilism, a category of theories in the philosophical discipline of epistemology, has been advanced both as a theory of knowledge and of justified belief...
), internalism and externalism
Internalism and externalism
Internalism and externalism are two opposing ways of explaining various subjects in several areas of philosophy. These include human motivation, knowledge, justification, meaning and truth. The distinction arises in many areas of debate with similar but distinct meanings...
, ethical naturalism
Ethical naturalism
Ethical naturalism is the meta-ethical view which claims that:# Ethical sentences express propositions.# Some such propositions are true....
, and property dualism
Property dualism
Property dualism describes a category of positions in the philosophy of mind which hold that, although the world is constituted of just one kind of substance - the physical kind - there exist two distinct kinds of properties: physical properties and mental properties...
, for example.
Current naturalism derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. Naturalists John Dewey
John Dewey
John Dewey was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology...
, Ernest Nagel
Ernest Nagel
Ernest Nagel was a Czech-American philosopher of science. Along with Rudolf Carnap, Hans Reichenbach, and Carl Hempel, he is sometimes seen as one of the major figures of the logical positivist movement....
, Sidney Hook
Sidney Hook
Sidney Hook was an American pragmatic philosopher known for his contributions to public debates.A student of John Dewey, Hook continued to examine the philosophy of history, of education, politics, and of ethics. After embracing Marxism in his youth, Hook was known for his criticisms of...
, and Roy Wood Sellars
Roy Wood Sellars
Roy Wood Sellars was an American philosopher of critical realism and religious humanism, and a proponent of emergent evolution. His son was the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars...
worked to ally philosophy more closely with science. They promoted the ideas that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing ‘supernatural’ and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality.
Currently, metaphysical naturalism is more widely embraced than in previous centuries, especially but not exclusively in the natural science
Natural science
The natural sciences are branches of science that seek to elucidate the rules that govern the natural world by using empirical and scientific methods...
s and the Anglo-American, analytic philosophical
Analytic philosophy
Analytic philosophy is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century...
communities. While the vast majority of the population of the world remains firmly committed to non-naturalistic worldviews, prominent contemporary defenders of naturalism and/or naturalistic theses and doctrines today include J. J. C. Smart
J. J. C. Smart
John Jamieson Carswell "Jack" Smart AC is an Australian philosopher and academic who is currently Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, Australia...
, David Malet Armstrong
David Malet Armstrong
David Malet Armstrong , often D. M. Armstrong, is an Australian philosopher. He is well-known for his work on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and for his defence of a factualist ontology, a functionalist theory of the mind, an externalist epistemology, and a necessitarian conception of the...
, David Papineau
David Papineau
David Papineau is an academic philosopher. He works as Professor of Philosophy of Science at King's College London, having previously taught for several years at Cambridge University and been a fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge...
, Paul Kurtz
Paul Kurtz
Paul Kurtz is a prominent American skeptic and secular humanist. He has been called "the father of secular humanism." He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo, having previously also taught at Vassar, Trinity, and Union colleges, and the New School for...
, Brian Leiter
Brian Leiter
Brian Leiter is an American philosopher and legal scholar who is currently John Wilson Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School, and founder and Director of Chicago's new Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values and the editor of the Philosophical Gourmet Report. He taught from...
, Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...
, Michael Devitt
Michael Devitt
Michael Devitt is an Australian philosopher currently teaching at the City University of New York in New York City. His primary interests include philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology...
, Fred Dretske
Fred Dretske
Frederick Irwin Dretske is a philosopher noted for his contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of mind. His more recent work centers on conscious experience and self-knowledge. Additionally, he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize in 1994...
, Paul
Paul Churchland
Paul Churchland is a philosopher noted for his studies in neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. He is currently a Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he holds the Valtz Chair of Philosophy. Churchland holds a joint appointment with the Cognitive Science Faculty and...
and Patricia Churchland
Patricia Churchland
Patricia Smith Churchland is a Canadian-American philosopher noted for her contributions to neurophilosophy and the philosophy of mind. She has been a Professor at the University of California, San Diego since 1984...
, Mario Bunge
Mario Bunge
Mario Augusto Bunge is an Argentine philosopher and physicist mainly active in Canada.-Biography:Bunge began his studies at the National University of La Plata, graduating with a Ph.D. in physico-mathematical sciences in 1952. He was professor of theoretical physics and philosophy,...
, Jonathan Schaffer
Jonathan Schaffer
Jonathan Schaffer is an American philosopher specializing in Metaphysics and Epistemology.Since earning his PhD. from Rutgers in 1999, Schaffer has published 37 papers. He wrote his dissertation - "Causation and the Probabilities of Processes" - under Brian McLaughin. David Lewis served as...
, Hilary Kornblith
Hilary Kornblith
Hilary Kornblith is an American Professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA, and one of contemporary epistemology's most prominent proponents of naturalized epistemology. Kornblith received his B.A. from SUNY Buffalo in 1975 and his PhD from Cornell University in 1980,...
, Quentin Smith
Quentin Smith
Quentin Persifor Smith is an American contemporary philosopher, scholar and professor of philosophy at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He has worked in the philosophy of time, philosophy of language, philosophy of physics and philosophy of religion...
, Paul Draper
Paul Draper (philosopher)
Paul Draper is an American philosopher, most known for his work in the philosophy of religion. He is currently a professor at Purdue University.He studied at the University of California, graduating B.A. in 1979, M.A. in 1982 and Ph.D. in 1985...
, Michael Martin
Michael Martin (philosopher)
Michael L. Martin is an American philosopher and professor emeritus at Boston University. He obtained his PhD from Harvard University in 1962....
, among many other academic philosophers.
Marxism, Objectivism, and secular humanism
A number of politicized versions of naturalism have arisen in the Western world, most notably MarxismMarxism
Marxism is an economic and sociopolitical worldview and method of socioeconomic inquiry that centers upon a materialist interpretation of history, a dialectical view of social change, and an analysis and critique of the development of capitalism. Marxism was pioneered in the early to mid 19th...
in the 19th century and Randian
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism....
Objectivism in the 20th century. Marxism is an expression of communist
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...
or socialist
Socialism
Socialism is an economic system characterized by social ownership of the means of production and cooperative management of the economy; or a political philosophy advocating such a system. "Social ownership" may refer to any one of, or a combination of, the following: cooperative enterprises,...
idealism within a naturalistic framework, while Objectivism extols the virtues of liberal individualism, an expression of capitalist
Capitalism
Capitalism is an economic system that became dominant in the Western world following the demise of feudalism. There is no consensus on the precise definition nor on how the term should be used as a historical category...
idealism within a naturalist framework. Most proponents of metaphysical naturalism in First World
First World
The concept of the First World first originated during the Cold War, where it was used to describe countries that were aligned with the United States. These countries were democratic and capitalistic. After the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the term "First World" took on a...
countries, however, are neither Marxists nor Objectivists, and instead embrace the more moderate political ideals of secular humanism
Secular humanism
Secular Humanism, alternatively known as Humanism , is a secular philosophy that embraces human reason, ethics, justice, and the search for human fulfillment...
or cultural moral relativism
Moral relativism
Moral relativism may be any of several descriptive, meta-ethical, or normative positions. Each of them is concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures:...
.
Arguments for metaphysical naturalism
There are many arguments for belief in metaphysical naturalism. Only a few will be surveyed here, and only in brief. There are many others, but most involve refinements, variants or sub-arguments to the following.Argument from precedent
For over three hundred years empirical methods have consistently discovered only natural things and causes, even underlying many things once thought to be supernatural. Meanwhile, no other methods have produced any consistent conclusions about the substance or causes of anything, much less anything supernatural. The logical inference is that since countless past gaps in knowledge have been filled by naturalism, and by nothing else, probably all remaining gaps in knowledge will be filled by naturalism as well. This simply extends a principle fundamental to scienceScience
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe...
as a whole, that we should presume any new phenomenon obeys known laws of physics until we have empirically proven otherwise. Hence we should presume that any unexplained fact has a natural explanation until we have empirically proven otherwise. Therefore, since we have not found empirical proof of anything supernatural, and since we have abundant reason from past precedent to expect that natural explanations underlie everything, metaphysical naturalism is most probably true.
There are two unanswered objections to this argument. The first is that empirical methods restrict human experience to what is external and measurable without showing that only what is external and measurable exists. The argument is thus founded on an anti-empirical, a priori rejection of entire areas of human experience. The second is that in past applications of physics, what was to be explained was empirically measurable, whereas what naturalists claim can be explained by physics (intentions, awareness as opposed or data processing, God) are not empirically measurable and physics has never claimed that it is applicable to them. It must be recalled that physics uses abstractions, and that abstractions necessarily abstract from some data in order to focus on other data. Methods are not automatically applicable until empirically proven otherwise, but have conditions of applicability which must be met in advance of applying them. For example, no amount of empirical data will ever show that 2 + 2 = 4 always and everywhere.
Argument to naturalism as best explanation
Some naturalists argue that sound naturalist hypotheses about facts still scientifically unexplained outperform all other hypotheses in explanatory scope and power, relative to explanatory simplicity. If that's true, then metaphysical naturalism is the best explanation of everything we observe and experience, and is therefore probably true. This amounts to arguing that everything makes more sense if naturalism is true, many details about ourselves and the world are more probable if naturalism is true, and to explain even the most mysterious of facts naturalism has to resort to fewer ad hoc assumptions than any known alternative. For example, resorting to the supernatural as explanation typically requires an array of completely ad hoc assumptions about the abilities, nature, limitations, and desires of supernatural forces. Even so, much of what remains unexplained is then elucidated as simply the "mystery" of the enigmatic will of the supernatural or as beyond human ken. Naturalism, on the other hand, relies much more heavily on assumptions already scientifically established as precedents and principles, and makes more specific predictions about what the observed results would be if naturalism were true, which align very well with actual observations.This argument assumes that the hypothetico-deductive method is the only way to truth. Furthermore, this argument does draw an equivalence between methodological naturalism which focuses on epistemology with ontological naturalism which focuses on metaphysics. Whilst methodological naturalism has produced great success in explaining observed phenomena by testing hypotheses according to natural laws, this does not preclude on a priori grounds the possibility of supernatural phenomena existing within the universe. In addition, if something purported to be "supernatural" was confirmed by scientific observations, naturalists would discount these as anomalies or unexplained natural events. Empiricists place experience above theory, but naturalists reject whole classes of data based on an a priori ontological theory. Natural philosophers, from Aristotle on, have claimed that the facts of experience are adequate to deduce the existence of the metaphysical
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
, not as hypothesis
Hypothesis
A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. The term derives from the Greek, ὑποτιθέναι – hypotithenai meaning "to put under" or "to suppose". For a hypothesis to be put forward as a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it...
, but as a rational certainty entailed by observable facts. Regarding theology
Theology
Theology is the systematic and rational study of religion and its influences and of the nature of religious truths, or the learned profession acquired by completing specialized training in religious studies, usually at a university or school of divinity or seminary.-Definition:Augustine of Hippo...
, a subject that Aristotle considered to be within the scope of Natural science
Natural science
The natural sciences are branches of science that seek to elucidate the rules that govern the natural world by using empirical and scientific methods...
or Physics
Physics (Aristotle)
The Physics of Aristotle is one of the foundational books of Western science and philosophy...
, he observed that merely requiring one of something is, in general, a more parsimonious explanation than requiring many. However, not unlike later physicists
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
, he was trying to explain the eternal circular motion of the planets and stars by reason of one or more instances of an unchanging principle. In a more recognizably theological argument, Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. , also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis...
reasoned deductively for additional properties that characterized a creator God.
Argument from absence
One major way in which naturalism is claimed to explain things better than alternatives is that if the supernatural exists (whether as gods, powers, or spirits), it is so silent and inert that its effects are almost never observed, despite vast and extensive searching. Even the relatively few alleged observations take place only under dubious conditions lacking in sound empirical controls or tests, and on those occasions when they are subsequently subjected to sound controls or tests, they turn out to be false. Our inability to uncover clear evidence of anything supernatural is somewhat improbable if anything supernatural exists, but very probable if nothing supernatural exists, and therefore metaphysical naturalism is probably true.This argument is met by the case built by theists such as Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
, Ibn Sina, and Aquinas that the entire natural world is an effect of and evidence for the Existence of God
Existence of God
Arguments for and against the existence of God have been proposed by philosophers, theologians, scientists, and others. In philosophical terms, arguments for and against the existence of God involve primarily the sub-disciplines of epistemology and ontology , but also of the theory of value, since...
. If this argument is to be made, it should include a refutation of arguments purporting to show that all of nature is evidence.
Argument from physical minds
Neuroscientists have accumulated vast evidence that the functions and activities of the human mindMind
The concept of mind is understood in many different ways by many different traditions, ranging from panpsychism and animism to traditional and organized religious views, as well as secular and materialist philosophies. Most agree that minds are constituted by conscious experience and intelligent...
correspond to the functions and activities of the human brain
Brain
The brain is the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals—only a few primitive invertebrates such as sponges, jellyfish, sea squirts and starfishes do not have one. It is located in the head, usually close to primary sensory apparatus such as vision, hearing,...
, which is constructed from different interacting physical systems
Cognitive science
Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...
that evolved over time through the animal kingdom. Our brains are now the most complex machines found anywhere in nature, and our minds appear limited to our brain's physical needs and capabilities. We have discovered no clear evidence of any other kind of mind, no clear evidence that our minds can exceed the limitations of our physical brain, and no clear evidence that all of the structures and functions of the brain did not slowly evolve through billions of years of undirected mutation and indifferent natural selection. This is the only way we would observe the facts to be if naturalism were true (since there is no other way to have a mind on naturalism except as the product of a slowly evolved, highly complex physical system like our brain), but if supernatural entities or processes exist (and some minds or mental content exist independently of a physical machine, like our brain), then what we observe is not the only way things could be (since by now we could have and likely would have observed some supernatural elements of our own or other minds or observed mental powers in other objects). Since this observation is less probable if supernaturalism is true, metaphysical naturalism is more likely to be true.
This argument presupposes that the mind consists of data processing only, which is what has been investigated and shown to be possible in physical systems such as computers. However, we know that most data processing in the brain occurs absent awareness, so it is fallacious to assume that awareness is a side effect of data processing. Since the primary function of the mind is to know, and knowing requires awareness of the known contents, naturalism has not provided an explanation of mind, but only of its data processing subsystem. If that subsystem is traumatized, what we are aware of may be defective, but that does not show that the existence of subjective awareness is a consequent of data processing.
Cosmological argument for naturalism
If naturalism is true, then the formation of intelligent life via natural processes in any one given small corner of a young universe is unlikely. Therefore, the only way we would observe life to exist if naturalism were true, is if the universe were old enough and of sufficient size that events of such an improbability would be very rare but still likely to occur. We observe the universe to be immensely old and large with life that is, as far as our observations allow, very rare. In addition, the universe is almost entirely lethal to life. By far most of what exists is a deadly radiation-filled vacuum, and by far most matter in the cosmos composes lethal environments like stars and black holes. Insofar as supernaturalism allows other possible arrangements for us to observe, such as universes more universally hospitable to life, universes far too young or small to produce life by mechanical accident, or universes in which life is far more common, what we observe to be the case is less probable given supernaturalism than given naturalism; therefore, metaphysical naturalism is more likely to be true.Criticisms
It seems difficult to see how this argument supports naturalism. Naturalism does not, in itself, predict that the universe is old, nor does theism necessarily predict that it is young. If the laws of nature and the initial conditions of the universe were such that intelligent life evolved quickly, naturalists would still explain that observation by laws of nature and assume that those laws are independent of a deity. Similarly, theists can argue that the plan of their deity(ies) is such that our existence be a consequence of the actual laws and initial conditions.Arguments against metaphysical naturalism
Metaphysical naturalism has been criticized by many, particularly by specific religious communities. Some arguments against metaphysical naturalism are surveyed below.Evolutionary argument against metaphysical naturalism
Alvin PlantingaAlvin Plantinga
Alvin Carl Plantinga is an American analytic philosopher and the emeritus John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He is known for his work in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics, and Christian apologetics...
, a contemporary philosopher of epistemology at Notre Dame
University of Notre Dame
The University of Notre Dame du Lac is a Catholic research university located in Notre Dame, an unincorporated community north of the city of South Bend, in St. Joseph County, Indiana, United States...
, has argued that anyone who holds to the truth of both metaphysical naturalism and evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
is inherently irrational in doing so. His argument relies on establishing that the probability that unguided evolution would have produced reliable cognitive faculties is either low or inscrutable. For example, imagine a hunter who very much likes the idea of being eaten, but when he sees a tiger, always runs off looking for a better prospect, because he thinks it unlikely that the tiger he sees will eat him. This will get his body parts in the right place so far as survival is concerned, without involving much by way of true belief. If this argument holds, one who holds both naturalism and evolution acquires a “defeater” for every belief he holds, including the beliefs associated with naturalism and evolution.
Since its inception, Plantinga's argument has been criticized by many naturalist philosophers. Mental philosopher
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...
and historian Richard Carrier
Richard Carrier
Richard Cevantis Carrier is an American historian. He is best known for his writings on Internet Infidels, otherwise known as the Secular Web, where he served as Editor-in-Chief for several years....
have attacked it on the grounds of misunderstanding natural selection. They argue in their respective works that nature selects the genes of organisms that survive longer. Since pattern seeking in any multitude offer a substantial survival advantage, nature can effectively breed a cognitive apparatus for truth-finding. For example, primitive men that understood fertilizing plants and that flint makes fire would live longer because of their reasoning skills. This would allow them to pass reasoning abilities to their offspring. Out of this second generation, the offspring with the best rational faculties would live the longest because they discovered even more true patterns. Thus natural selection would continue to fine-tune man's truth seeking skills over time.
Argument from design
Recently popular is the claim that certain structures in evolved organisms are too complex to have evolved by natural selection and can only be explained as the result of intelligent designIntelligent design
Intelligent design is the proposition that "certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection." It is a form of creationism and a contemporary adaptation of the traditional teleological argument for...
. This argument suggests that certain biological instances (the favorite example being the eye) could not have occurred gradually, but must have come to be instantaneously. This is referred to as the argument from irreducible complexity
Irreducible complexity
Irreducible complexity is an argument by proponents of intelligent design that certain biological systems are too complex to have evolved from simpler, or "less complete" predecessors, through natural selection acting upon a series of advantageous naturally occurring, chance mutations...
.
A cosmologically-based argument, fine-tuning
Fine-tuned universe
The fine-tuned universe is the proposition that the conditions that allow life in the Universe can only occur when certain universal fundamental physical constants lie within a very narrow range, so that if any of several fundamental constants were only slightly different the universe would be...
, states that the fundamental constants of physics and laws of nature appear so finely tuned to permit life that only the existence of a supernatural designer could explain them.
However, this has been asserted by many naturalists, like Victor Stenger, to be a god of the gaps
God of the gaps
God of the gaps is a type of theological fallacy in which gaps in scientific knowledge are taken to be evidence or proof of God's existence. The term was invented by Christian theologians not to discredit theism but rather to discourage reliance on teleological arguments for God's existence.-...
argument because it creates a problem, says it is unanswerable, then fills in God as the solution. He also accuses fine-tuning as being a statistics fallacy, because it asserts after the fact what the chances were before the big bang. This fallacy makes it appear as though it was purposeful, because humans observe the after effect when it was just as likely to have any other combination that did not permit life.
It is also argued by Lawrence Krauss and Neil DeGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an American astrophysicist, a science communicator, the Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space, and a Research Associate in the Department of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History...
that the universe is not fine-tuned and is very unfriendly to life with only a small percentage of the universe being habitable. They argue life evolves to the conditions of the universe through natural selection, not the other way around.
A related approach which is consistent with existing science is that of physicist-philosopher Dennis Polis. He grants all of the science advanced by naturalists to support their case and shows it entails both the existence of God and a teleological view of nature. Naturalist simply project data into a solely mechanistic conceptual space, when the same data can be more adequately represented by a conceptual space in which mechanism and teleology are seen as complimentary.
Argument from consciousness
Since neuroscience has yet to explain the qualitative nature of conscious experienceConsciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
and its elements, commonly called qualia
Qualia
Qualia , singular "quale" , from a Latin word meaning for "what sort" or "what kind," is a term used in philosophy to refer to subjective conscious experiences as 'raw feels'. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the...
, some argue that naturalism is therefore refuted or should not be believed (see hard problem of consciousness
Hard problem of consciousness
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how and why we have qualitative phenomenal experiences. David Chalmers contrasts this with the "easy problems" of explaining the ability to discriminate, integrate information, report mental states, focus attention, etc...
). Proponents of this argument suggest that naturalism's lack of a satisfying explanation on this matter is not a result of a simple lack of research (which would indicate that science may one day explain qualia), but that naturalism cannot explain qualia because no valid physical explanation exists in principle. One response by naturalists is to maintain that, while conscious experience exists, qualia do not. Yet another is to claim that this denial of a possible physical explanation has not been rationally demonstrated or factually grounded, but is an argument from personal incredulity and there is no reason to think that the mystery of consciousness is inherently unsolvable, that the apparent gulf between objectivity and subjectivity is unbridgeable, and that no sufficient reductionistic
Reductionism
Reductionism can mean either an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can...
explanation can be offered.
A more decisive, semiotic
Semiotics
Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes , indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication...
argument is that naturalistic accounts of mind rely on the notion of instrumental signs, which are different in nature from the formal signs used in the mind, and furthermore, that instrumental signs require formal signs to operate as signs at all.
See also
- AtheismAtheismAtheism is, in a broad sense, the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities...
- Nonduality
- PantheismPantheismPantheism is the view that the Universe and God are identical. Pantheists thus do not believe in a personal, anthropomorphic or creator god. The word derives from the Greek meaning "all" and the Greek meaning "God". As such, Pantheism denotes the idea that "God" is best seen as a process of...
- Religious naturalismReligious naturalismReligious naturalism is an approach to spirituality that is devoid of supernaturalism. The focus is on the religious attributes of the universe/Nature, the understanding of it and our response to it . These provide for the development of an eco-morality...
Historical overview
- Edward B. Davis and Robin CollinsRobin CollinsRobin Collins is an American philosopher. He currently serves as Professor of Philosophy at Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania. His main interests include issues in science and religion and theories of atonement.-Education:...
, "Scientific Naturalism." In Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, ed. Gary B. Ferngren, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, pp. 322–34.
Pro
- Gary DrescherGary DrescherGary L. Drescher is a scientist in the field of artificial intelligence , author of the book Made-Up Minds: A Constructivist Approach to Artificial Intelligence....
, Good and Real, The MIT Press, 2006. [ISBN 0-262-04233-9] - David Malet ArmstrongDavid Malet ArmstrongDavid Malet Armstrong , often D. M. Armstrong, is an Australian philosopher. He is well-known for his work on metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, and for his defence of a factualist ontology, a functionalist theory of the mind, an externalist epistemology, and a necessitarian conception of the...
, A World of States of Affairs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. [ISBN 0-521-58064-1] - Mario BungeMario BungeMario Augusto Bunge is an Argentine philosopher and physicist mainly active in Canada.-Biography:Bunge began his studies at the National University of La Plata, graduating with a Ph.D. in physico-mathematical sciences in 1952. He was professor of theoretical physics and philosophy,...
, 2006, Chasing Reality: Strife over Realism, University of Toronto Press. ISBN 0-8020-9075-3 and 2001, Scientific Realism: Selected Essays of Mario Bunge, Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-892-5 - Richard CarrierRichard CarrierRichard Cevantis Carrier is an American historian. He is best known for his writings on Internet Infidels, otherwise known as the Secular Web, where he served as Editor-in-Chief for several years....
, 2005, Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism, AuthorHouse. ISBN 1-4208-0293-3 - Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds), 2004. Naturalism in Question. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-01295-X
- Daniel DennettDaniel DennettDaniel Clement Dennett is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of...
, 2003, Freedom EvolvesFreedom EvolvesFreedom Evolves is a 2003 popular science and philosophy book by Daniel C. Dennett. Dennett describes the book as an installment of a life-long philosophical project, earlier parts of which were The Intentional Stance, Consciousness Explained and Elbow Room...
, Penguin. ISBN 0-14-200384-0 and 2006 - Andrew Melnyk, 2003, A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern Materialism, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-82711-6
- David Mills, 2004, Atheist Universe: Why God Didn't Have A Thing To Do With It, Xlibris. ISBN 1-4134-3481-9
- Jeffrey Poland, 1994, Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundations, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-824980-2
Con
- James Beilby, ed., 2002, Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, Cornell University Press. ISBN 0-8014-8763-3
- William Lane CraigWilliam Lane CraigWilliam Lane Craig is an American analytic philosopher, philosophical theologian, and Christian apologist. He is known for his work on the philosophy of time and the philosophy of religion, specifically the existence of God and the defense of Christian theism...
and J.P. Moreland, eds., 2000, Naturalism: A Critical Analysis, Routledge. ISBN 0-415-23524-3 - Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, 2008, Naturalism, Eerdmans Publishing. ISBN 978-0-8028-0768-7
- Phillip E. JohnsonPhillip E. JohnsonPhillip E. Johnson is a retired UC Berkeley law professor and author. He became a born-again Christian while a tenured professor and is considered the father of the intelligent design movement...
, 1998, Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law & Education, InterVarsity Press. ISBN 0-8308-1929-0 and 2002, The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism, InterVarsity Press. ISBN 0-8308-2395-6 - C.S. Lewis, ed., 1996, "Miracles", Harper Collins. ISBN 0-06-065301-9
- Michael Rea, 2004, World without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism, Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-924761-7
- Victor ReppertVictor ReppertDr. Victor Reppert is an American philosopher best known for his development of the Argument from Reason. He is the author of C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea and numerous academic papers in journals such as Christian Scholars' Review, International Journal for the Philosophy of Religion, Philo and...
, 2003, C.S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason, InterVarsity Press. ISBN 0-8308-2732-3 - Mark SteinerMark SteinerMark Steiner is a professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he specializes in the philosophy of mathematics and physics. He is best known for his book The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem, in which he attempted to explain the historical utility of...
, 2002, The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem, Harvard University Press. ISBN 0-674-00970-3
External links
- "Naturalism" in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- "Naturalism" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- "Naturalism in Legal Philosophy" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- "Naturalism in the Philosophy of Mathematics" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- "Moral Naturalism" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- "Physicalism" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- "Naturalism" in the Catholic Encyclopedia
- Center for Naturalism
- Naturalism entry in The Skeptic's Dictionary
- Naturalism Library at the Secular Web
- Naturalism as a Worldview resource page by Richard Carrier
- A Defense of Naturalism by Keith Augustine (2001)