Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism
Dateline: May 31, 2000
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.
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