Comment: Naturalism and God
Most naturalists see reality as an orderly and knowable place. Orderly in that things occur and reoccur in predictable ways. It is hard to imagine how life could evolve if things had been otherwise. Reality is also knowable, well at least in theory if not in practice. A naturalist rejects the idea of anything inherently ‘mysterious’ about our world, contrary to most religious traditions.
Our way of ‘knowing’ the world (with all due concerns about the word ‘knowing’) is through human perception supported by human reason, empiricism in philosophical terms. We have no other sources. Our perceptions can be from immediate senses or from recalled memories. However the bulk of human knowledge, our social knowledge, comes from the testimony of others from their perceptions and reasoning. Hence, not surprisingly, naturalists reject revelation as a genuine information source and are suspicious of any a priori claims to knowledge – knowledge without prior experience. Artificial, self-contained rule-based systems, such as mathematics and games, are well-known exceptions.
The unreliability of human perceptions is well-known. Seeking to confirm prior opinions, people’s wishful thinking and delusions block attempts to be truly objective. In recent years our empirically-based intellectual endeavours – natural sciences, social sciences, and historical research – have clearly been our best efforts at harnessing human perceptions while controlling human fallibilities. They have produced more reliable information about the world, than numerous religious proclamations over the years. One amusing example is the early Christian predictions, some 2000 years ago, of the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom through Jesus of Nazareth. Christian zealots, Gospel writers and Paul of Taurus, were quite clear about this, even though apologists since then have attempted to reinterpret these failures away.
And what about the belief in a god ? Almost automatically, a naturalist would reject the belief as accepting something so completely incomprehensible. The naturalist’s reality is one of mass and energy existing within time and space and that we are an intrinsic part of that world. Even though known reality expands and contracts with changes in our empirically-based knowledge, all ‘things’ are of the same ontological stuff. ‘God’ stands for something else entirely – different stuff, imperceptible and unfathomable by human reason (not surprisingly according to naturalists). Even the idea of such as thing, outside of that found in imaginative fiction, is amusing or perhaps even offensive to the sensibilities of a naturalist. When asked why, a believer simply declares it to be so, accepting faith over any contrary human perception and reason. Not coincidentally, the believer’s verbalisations are shaped by his or her own religious traditions. God is then explained by rewordings like ‘master’, ‘lord’, ‘shepherd’, ‘cosmic consciousness’, ‘essence’, and so on. This is the fine art of substituting one set of magical words for another.
Our lives are full of uncertainties with incomplete and changing understandings of the world. How we explain and accept these uncertainties separates naturalists from the religionists, like the evangelical Christians. For naturalists, this is a normal consequence for being part of a complicated physical world. Though acknowledging our inherent limitations, naturalists, like scientists, continue still to strive for full knowledge and understanding of the world, to overcome our limitations. By contrast religionists explain this uncertainty by imagining an unknowable consciousness called God, one who created the world and now maintains it. And, of course, this is done in ways we do not understand.
Unfortunately for religionists, the empirically-based sciences have effectively replaced religions as the major knowledge-makers in our secular society. Very little of today’s world understanding comes from religious traditions. 2000 to 3000 year-old explanations no longer hold credence and respect they once had.
So what are typical naturalists’ reactions to beliefs in God?
- Irrelevant: the naturalist sees no need for any God to explain his or her world or to find personal meaning;
- Incomprehensible: the idea of any existence outside of the physical world does not even make sense to a naturalist. It is more incredible that most Christians claim their God has consciousness and is even worthy of worship;
- Offensive: hopefully explanations are no longer of angels and demons. To naturalists, theologies are still rooted in those ancients beliefs with human styled non-physical beings. Religions are re-calling past superstitions, rather than seeing humans as an integral part of the physical world like all other living things. We need to acknowledge that we physical only, without an exclusive non-physical soul.
Alex McCullie
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