Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism
Dateline: May 31, 2000
Introduction & Definitions
What is naturalism? It is not really a philisophical system so much as a point of view or tendency common to a number of philosophical and religious systems. Rather than a well-defined set of doctrines, it is more an attitude or spirit pervading and influencing many doctrines.
Naturalism is the belief that all objects, events, and even values can be fully explained in terms of factual and/or causal claims about the natural world. Nature is regarded the one original and fundamental source of all that exists. The limits of nature are also the limits of existing reality and knowledge. A more specific form, Materialistic Naturalism, asserts that matter is the only reality and that all the laws of the universe are reducible to mechanical laws.
All forms of naturalism explicitly reject any reference to or reliance upon supernatural powers or authority.
What is supernaturalism? Just the opposite - the belief that events and values require supernatural powers or authority for their explanation. Natural explanations may be reliable on an immediate level, but they in turn must eventually require a supernatural cause. According to supernaturalism, a supernatural order is the original and fundamental source of all that exists. It is this supernatural order which defines the limits of what may be known.
The difference between these two positions is one of the fundamental differences between atheists and theists - it is a difference which tends to cause the most disagreement and most friction. Atheists tend to be naturalists - taking the perspective that this natural world is all there is, all there is to know, and does not require anything "supernatural" to explain it. Theists tend to be supernaturalists - assuming that a supernatural realm exists beyond what we see and is necessary in order to explain our universe.
These fundamental assumptions are mutually exclusive and incompatible. If one is true, the other cannot be.
But is one more reasonable than the other? Is it more reasonable to be a naturalist, or does the evidence support being a supernaturalist? That question is what this article is designed to address and answer.
Assumptions & Presuppositions
I have been debating religion, particularly Christianity, on the web for several years now. This activity has led me to investigate some problems of philosophy which discussions always seem to reduce to by simple necessity - regardless of the philosophical sophistication of whomever I am debating.
The problem is one of the fundamental problems of philosophy: that of epistemology, further refined with philosophical/linguistic analysis of presuppositions. You see, whenever we start to speak of what we "know," a legitimate question is just how it is we know it, and why it is that we think whatever method we used to arrive at that knowledge is reliable. That is the problem of epistemology.
Presuppositions enter when we carefully examine the statements we use in our discussions - including discussions of epistemology. By way of a simple example, suppose I am in the living room of my house and to one of my sons I say "Could you please go get me a soda from the refrigerator?"
That request presupposes (or contextually implies, but the philosophers have trouble with the distinction, so I will here ignore it) a number of things. That the child I'm speaking to will understand what I say, that he will follow the request, that he is capable of following the request, that there is a refrigerator, that there are sodas in the refrigerator. Indeed, communication by language would be quite impossible without a myriad of such presuppositions.
These presuppositions affect every statement we make, whether we're talking about evidence for electrons or the existence of historical figures. The problem then is how is it we can arrive at a rational philosophical basis for believing our physics, our history, our everyday world? And does that basis lead more naturally to a materialistic/physicalist interpretation of the world, or a supernatualistic/theistic interpretation of the world - or something else entirely?
Most theists which you might encounter will argue that our basic presuppositions lead first and foremost to supernaturalism, or that our basic presuppositions require that we first accept supernaturalism.
They do not view this as an added, "extra" assumption as naturalists will. Instead, they argue that the belief in their God as logically prior to our other beliefs about nature, history and logic. This means that naturalism, which presupposes just a natural world, is wrong.
Necessary Presuppositions
I have identified what I believe are basic, irreducible presuppositions that are philosophically necessary in any debate or discussion - whether you are a naturalist or a supernaturalist. "Necessary" means here that they cannot be denied without ending up in a self contradictory loop.
They are:
1. The validity of logic.
Logic is presupposed every time we make an utterance designed to urge acceptance of some proposition, even the acceptance or rejection of logic itself. What this means is that in order to make the statement "logic is not true" be a true statement, the contrary statement "logic is true" must be false.
But that is the law of non-contradiction - one of the "laws of logic." Thus for logic to be false, it must be true -a self contradiction. As such logic is a necessary truth.
2. The existence of other minds.
Else who are we trying to convince of anything?
3. The existence of a common mental/perceptual world.
In order for our utterances to convey any meaning or to transfer thoughts and ideas and facts we believe about the world, there must already be some common ground for understanding. We can call this methodological naturalism, although that term may already be preempted with its own definition.
But when we speak of gravity or water or clouds to another who seems to speak our own language we would be somewhat surprised if they didn't know what we were talking about. Common English (or French, or Swahili, but here we use English) words convey, where they convey information about the world, sufficiently similar ideas about that world; where they convey grammatical information about the sentence, sufficiently similar cues, etc. Else communication could not happen.
4. The stability of that common world.
It is necessary for any knowledge at all that we normally be able to trust both our memories and our expectations. That the past has always been like the present, or that the future will continue to be like the past cannot be proven, but that assumption is necessary in order to claim to be able to know anything at all. This was explored more in depth in my earlier article describing the contradiction between this necessary assumption and the assumption of historical miracles in Christian theology.
These are the presuppositions we ALL share whenever we attempt to communicate with anyone at all. But do they either require a prior god belief or logically necessitate a god belief?
Naturalism or Supernaturalism?
The theist may try to make a god responsible in some part for some or all of the presuppositions discussed above, but to get to the god in the first place, he must have already accepted the above presuppositions to have learned enough language and philosophy or religion to articulate his belief. Thus, these presuppositions actually come before his articulated god belief, rather than the other way around as some argue.
Let's make an example that doesn't rely on specific scientific or involved pure logic demonstrations, but rather draws more from daily life. To build our scenario, we'll propose a Chinese man, raised in the middle of China, far from any Christian church. He has a solid basic education in math, the sciences etc., but lacks much knowledge of the West at all, and peculiarly, much knowledge of even his own history. (the history teacher was purged a long time ago and never replaced).
Thus, we'll assume he is at least as ignorant of Western history as the average Westerner is of Chinese history and at least as ignorant of Western philosophy and religion as the average Westerner is of Chinese philosophy and religion. He is also pretty innocent of the very idea of history, the local committee not seeing fit to replace the history teacher and all. He has been raised as an austere Taoist, so he has no idea of Gods.
Our Chinese gentleman comes to the U.S., to your hometown, indeed in to your home. Your job is to teach him about the West, including about Christianity. Despite his education, among the things he doesn't know is how to speak English. He's not sure how to use western style furniture, flush toilets are a novelty, etc. So you have a lot of work to do.
But at least he is bright.
The object of this little experiment is to work through just what you're going to have to do if you wish to teach him about Christianity. Will your perspective have to be naturalistic, or supernaturalistic?
First, you need to teach him the language. You must presuppose that he can learn English, that his mind works similarly enough to yours that as you try to teach him the vocabulary and grammar of English that it will make sense to him.
That's the easy, and obvious part, but it is so obvious that it does bear separate mention simply because this unconscious presupposition does have profound influence and importance.
Next, how do you teach him the idea of history? Archeology? What do you presuppose the moment you endeavor to teach about history? At least one assumption must be that there -is- a history
Being bright, he catches on fairly quickly. Now, how do you teach him about the Bible? Having learned his history and archaeology, one of the first things he asks you is where are the source documents for the Bible, and in what state of preservation and how close the documents are to the time of supposed original composition?
So what do you tell him? How do you propose to convince the Taoist, who lacks any belief about the supernatural, or at least supernatural beings, that Christianity is true? How even do you convince him that there is enough evidence to accept the Bible as providing much in the way of history?
Without assuming naturalism and the continuity of the observable world - and that you both share much the same experience of that world - how can you possibly succeed? The answer is that you can't. That answer is that you do have to assume naturalism rather than supernaturalism.
In this way we see that naturalism is prior to theism of any kind. When that naturalism becomes self conscious, then you arrive at "physicalism" or "scientism" - a perspective often derided by some theologians and Christian apologists.
So it should be clear now that the assumption of supernaturalism, the idea of a supernatural world, is an "extra" assumption that simply isn't needed. It certainly isn't needed in order to make use of things like logic and it doesn't appear needed in order to explain things like history or the workings of our world.
In answer to the question of which is more reasonable, naturalism or supernaturalism, it looks like naturalism is the more reasonable perspective to adopt.
In closing I must wryly note that the "physicalists" have made massive progress with their world view and reached a nearly complete agreement on most of the fundamentals of their world view within the last approximately 400 years that that view has developed. This is something all the theists in all the world have not managed in the previous 10,000 years up to the present.
We have one physics, one biology, etc., while the number of theistic beliefs, despite the loss of some views, is at least as great now as ever-and increasing.
A decidedly odd position if naturalism is false while theism and supernaturalism are true.
-- Michael W. Fisher
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