I’m glad that my previous post, The Faith of Naturalism, has sparked a discussion on this important topic. The discussion has continued over at Jewish Atheist’s blog under the post, This is Your Brain on God.
The main thing I wanted people to understand was that a naturalistic worldview is a faith-based worldview. Its starting point is a belief about the nature of ultimate reality, that everything is the result of physical processes. This is not and cannot be a result of science. The proposition that “physical material is all there is” is nowhere observable or testable. Science cannot test for the existence of God, spirits, or transcendent meaning and purpose. It doesn’t follow from that that those things don’t exist. Whether they do exist or not, it is outside the domain of science to discover them. Naturalism is a philosophical position that invites people to change their lives in response to it. That’s all I mean when I say that it is faith-based. It is faith-based in exactly the same way that people usually think of Christianity as being faith-based. Neither Christianity nor naturalism is “provable” in such a way that people are free from the risk of being wrong and what’s more, from having lived their lives wrongly because of their wrong beliefs.
In his comment on my previous post, Tom Clark says that “Naturalists make a commitment to science (and more broadly a commonsense empiricism) as their way of deciding what’s [the] case about reality because it yields reliable knowledge.” Indeed science does. The question at issue, however, is not whether science or empirical ways of knowing yield reliable knowledge but (a) whether they alone yield reliable knowledge and (b) whether they provide grounds to believe that there is no reality beyond what they can describe. Again, the proposition that “there exists a single, natural, physical world or universe in which we are completely included” (source) itself cannot be empirically known. I doubt that naturalists would be willing to concede that they cannot, therefore, reliably know that.
This leads into my astonishment at how readily naturalists relinquish what I take to be clues that we live in a world that cannot be described strictly in physical terms. They are prepared to radically reinterpret what for most people are cherished beliefs about themselves, others, and the world we live in. We naturally, I think, sense that there is meaning and purpose in life. We naturally sense that human life is in a class by itself (”sui generis“), and that people are completely different by nature than, say, laser printers. We naturally sense that when we say that something is beautiful, we are saying more than a shorthand description of some physical process that just occurred between us and it. Likewise with our experience of love.
Our sense of beauty, meaning, the dignity of human life–those aren’t things we can detect with our eyesight or sense of taste. It does not follow from that, however, that those aren’t genuine intuitions about the nature of ultimate reality. No results of science and no empirical observations require anyone to give up their commonplace beliefs about these things, so why are naturalists so willing to do so? Why do they categorically exclude at the outset such a vital part of their own human experience, which I have to assume they share with the rest of us?
A clarification is in order at this point. I do not want to misrepresent what naturalists actually believe. I am well aware that naturalism has an explanation for such things as beauty, love, and other such phenomena. I am not claiming that they don’t. What I am saying is that their explanation is radically different from how we actually think of them. They abandon the prima facie evidence of our own firmly-held native intuitions in favor of their materialist metaphysic. When our experience bumps up against the theory, the theory wins and remains unchanged. Our experience is reinterpreted to fit the theory. Whatever that may be, it is manifestly not commonsense empiricism.
Another option would be to take our senses as vital clues to understanding the nature of reality. Why not take those things as given, I wonder, and see where they lead. No scientific results suggest that the physical world is all there is, so why abandon this option so quickly? Jewish Atheist rightly points out that “It’s important to remember though that what we want to be true has no bearing on what is true. The ‘price’ of atheism or naturalism is irrelevant to the truth” (source). I am not suggesting that we stick to our cherished beliefs because we just prefer to hang onto them. I’m suggesting that we assign them some evidentiary weight. The reason they are so deeply and well nigh universally held just might be because we’re correctly detecting something about the real world.
I’ll be in Cambridge, MA for a few days, leaving tomorrow morning, so this will be my last word on the subject, at least until I get back. I look forward to reading what people have to say, but ultimately I doubt that this discussion will bear much fruit. Most of our experiences can be coherently interpreted within any of several competing worldviews. If something that I take to be as fundamental as the uniqueness of human personality is not enough to persuade, then I suspect that nothing else will either. Certainly a prolonged discussion about epistemology or metaphysics will not produce any real agreement.
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