The Poverty of Naturalism

Since the dawn of the enlightenment in the 18th Century, a prevailing metaphysics and worldview has shifted the intellectual landscape of the entire world. This worldview is one of seemingly rational and common sense presuppositions, and unless exposed to a religious or philosophical tradition, it is unlikely that you would naturally attain an opposing view, unless you were particularly inquisitive and began questioning certain assumptions - I am of course speaking of naturalism. This is the metaphysical view that all of reality is made up of solely the material, measurable and finite - that which the natural sciences can deduce. That is to imply then, that the supernatural has no basis in reality, it simply does not exist. For example, if you stood in the middle of a forest and confessed philosophical naturalism, you would assume that there exists nothing in addition to the natural order that you are currently experiencing - the tree, leaves, colours and shapes of these things, the cold air and rays of sunlight, the feeling of your shoes being in contact with the ground beneath you. As a byproduct of this worldview, a naturalist also assumes based on their sensory perceptions, that they are perceiving the world more or less correctly. Our brains may account for some slight colour differentiation in the perceptions between different people, and some may be more sensitive to cold than others for example, but what we perceive is all that there is. This is the basis for much of modern atheist thinking that seeks for the god of the clouds, which I argued against in my first post, 'Why Believe in God in a Secular World', if you're interested.

Naturalism is fast becoming the most predominant worldview of our age, at least in developed countries. You may think this is for good reason, after all, the natural sciences have 'proven' to us that the naturalist worldview is the correct one, and opposing metaphysics are the result of misguided religion and superstition. Also, as secularism takes hold in developed countries, the idea is that we are more intelligent, knowledgeable, more developed than those of the past and thus me must be correct. I shan't address that prejudice in this instance but it is certainly one to consider, and is related to my primary concern here. In the 21st century, you would be hard-pressed to find someone who would not confess a naturalist worldview even if they did not fully understand or express it in those terms. Common instances of this include comments such as, 'if there's no scientific proof for it, why would I believe in it', or 'the physical world is all that there is, how could there be anything outside of it?' If you find yourself in this camp, you're certainly not alone. However, as common sense as you may think this position is, it's actually quite a recent phenomenon. Prior to the enlightenment, people took the supernatural for granted, which I should point out as I did in my first post, is that which is outside of and above nature, and is ultimately the source of the natural world, rather than something stuck on alongside the natural world and in need of physical proof.

What then, are the problems with the naturalist worldview and its conclusions? There are several, and I shall work through them methodically, but let's start with the most basic issue - the fatuousness of invoking physical evidence against the non-physical, by which I mean, using the discoveries of the inner workings of physicals systems (the natural sciences) in order to disprove the non-physical. This is the reason I call naturalism a kind of scientific fundamentalism. We think of fundamentalism as an extremism of thought, for example taking the entire Bible completely literally, regardless of the text's purpose, writer, history and so on. Naturalism's adherents make a similar error, in that regardless of the nature of an enquiry or question, they appeal to the sciences for an answer, which I'm afraid to say in many areas of human life they simply will not receive. The question may be totally philosophical and abstract in nature, such as, (forgive the cliché) 'what is truth', and so to appeal to the sciences makes little sense. The best they could offer in response to an abstract question would certainly not be a direct or even relevant answer, but rather a backdrop of, for example, the psychological or anthropological reasons for why I may be asking the question in the first place.

This lack of awareness of the distinction between the physical and non-physical, and the scope of the sciences, implies something else also - the supremacy and universality of the natural sciences as the only meaningful way to engage with reality. The issue here is that you simply cannot make the jump from the methodology and findings of the sciences to an entire metaphysical worldview - there is a logical chasm between the two notions. This post-englightenment phenomenon of scientific fundamentalism renders itself absurd when formulated in the following way: the natural sciences can discover things about natural, physical phenomena, therefore all that exists is what the sciences can discover, and we know this because the sciences can discover things about all natural, physical phenomena - this is entirely circular. This is closely linked with my point in the previous paragraph, the issue here I hope is clear. We are intuitively quite aware of many examples of things, situations, and indeed abstract questions, that are quite outside of physical discovery - unconditional love, or the soul for example. You may suggest that an action such as getting up at 5am in order to get your children ready for school is a empirical example of unconditional love, however this is rather a consequence and manifestation of unconditional love, and really says nothing of the inner nature of love - it is only the backdrop.

There is quite clearly a logical chasm between declaring what the natural sciences can do - their scope of study, and then asserting that within this methodology is the potential of discovering all of reality. The next problem with naturalism (and this is harking back to themes of my first post) is the fact that nothing material, and therefore contingent, can exist without having come from the absolute, which by definition must be necessarily outside of the material, contingent order. You may immediately think this is an assumption thrown upon me by my religion, it is not - I would hold this belief were I Catholic or not. Again, this reinforces the narrow focus of this worldview, taking one aspect of enquiry and making it the whole. For there to be anything contingent, by definition, there must exist that which is absolute, independent of the contingent, and being in itself. This is the true meaning of the supernatural - that which is outside of, above, and the source of material nature. Without this logical foundation, we fall into a universe of absurdity. A contingent physical system that is there of its own accord, and the cause of itself.

We have come to a summation of naturalism's deep faults as a view of reality. My personal beliefs are implicit throughout this post, so I won't bore you with what I've discussed at length elsewhere, however I'd like to summarise the conclusions we've drawn. I find that at least in naturalism's most undeveloped and most popular form, people try to use the sciences to disprove that which by its nature is outside the enquiry of the sciences. Adherents of naturalism fall into the circular trap of beginning with the assumption that science is the answer to everything, applying this to all questions, and then when they don't find a satisfactory answer for the supernatural within science, they claim that's because it doesn't exist. Leading on from this, we looked at how naturalism is, at its root, a misguided trust in the sciences. That is not to suggest that the sciences shouldn't be trusted within their scope of study, but outside of this scope, as with any field attempting to answer questions outside of its arena, it will inevitably fall into error. Lastly, and perhaps most fundamentally, the natural order is caused by the absolute - the supernatural. I hope this brief critique of naturalist thought has been enlightening.

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