Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism
Dateline: May 31, 2000
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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