SUPERNATURALISM, NATURALISM AND EXTRA-NATURALISM

There is an assumption – prevalent among humanists and indeed many secular philosophers – that if we are not hand-crafted by God in His own image, we must be understood as the product of processes observed throughout nature. The claim is seductive given that naturalism, like humanism, is opposed to supernaturalism: since they have a common enemy, so the unspoken argument goes, humanism and naturalism must be allies.

As it turns out, naturalism proves to be a false friend. While it may have once liberated us from dogmatic religion and all the political and social powers that came with it, it is itself an alternative intellectual prison. Consistent naturalism leads to a denial of our agency: we are organisms acting out a biological script. In short, it is as anti-humanistic as religious belief. If the latter sees us as fallen, the former sees us as unrisen – which scarcely seems much of an improvement.

Clearly, we cannot proceed without specifying what is meant by “naturalism”. It is, as Barry Stroud has pointed out in his beautiful paper “The Charm of Naturalism”, a term with a range of meanings. A commitment to naturalism, like a commitment to world peace, is unlikely to meet much opposition until one gets down to terms and conditions.

At one extreme, there is the reductive, scientistic naturalism exemplified in D. M. Armstrong’s assertion that “the natural world contains nothing but the entities recognized by physics”. This is hard-headed indeed: the world is the natural world; the natural world boils down to the physical world; and the physical world is the world according to physicists – an exsanguinated realm of quantities and patterns described by laws and equations. Less austere, is the claim that the natural world is the world as revealed by the natural sciences. In the case of human beings, the most relevant sciences are the biological sciences: scientism takes the form of biologism, whose classic statement is by the nineteenth-century philosopher and physiologist Ludwig Buchner: “The researches and discoveries of modern times can no longer allow us to doubt that man, with all he has and possesses, be it mental or corporeal, is a natural product like all other organic beings”.