NATURALISM AS PHILOSOPHY

NATURALISM AS PHILOSOPHY

The term “naturalism” has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. Its current usage derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. The self-proclaimed “naturalists” from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook and Roy Wood Sellars. These philosophers aimed to ally philosophy more closely with science. They urged that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”, and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the “human spirit” (Krikorian 1944; Kim 2003).

So understood, “naturalism” is not a particularly informative term as applied to contemporary philosophers. The great majority of contemporary philosophers would happily accept naturalism as just characterized—that is, they would both reject “supernatural” entities, and allow that science is a possible route (if not necessarily the only one) to important truths about the “human spirit”.

Even so, this entry will not aim to pin down any more informative definition of “naturalism”. It would be fruitless to try to adjudicate some official way of understanding the term. Different contemporary philosophers interpret “naturalism” differently. This disagreement about usage is no accident. For better or worse, “naturalism” is widely viewed as a positive term in philosophical circles—few active philosophers nowadays are happy to announce themselves as “non-naturalists”.[1] This inevitably leads to a divergence in understanding the requirements of “naturalism”. Those philosophers with relatively weak naturalist commitments are inclined to understand “naturalism” in a unrestrictive way, in order not to disqualify themselves as “naturalists”, while those who uphold stronger naturalist doctrines are happy to set the bar for “naturalism” higher.

NATURALISM AS A PHILOSOPHICAL DOCTRINE

In philosophy, naturalism is the “idea or belief that only natural (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces operate in the world.” Adherents of naturalism (i.e., naturalists) assert that natural laws are the rules that govern the structure and behavior of the natural universe, that the changing universe at every stage is a product of these laws.

“Naturalism can intuitively be separated into an ontological and a methodological component,” argues David Papineau. “Ontological” refers to the philosophical study of the nature of reality. Some philosophers equate naturalism with materialism. For example, philosopher Paul Kurtzargues that nature is best accounted for by reference to material principles. These principles include mass, energy, and other physical and chemical properties accepted by the scientific community. Further, this sense of naturalism holds that spirits, deities, and ghosts are not real and that there is no “purpose” in nature. Such an absolute belief in naturalism is commonly referred to as metaphysical naturalism.

With the exception of pantheists—who believe that Nature is identical with divinity while not recognizing a distinct personal anthropomorphic god—theists challenge the idea that nature contains all of reality. According to some theists, natural laws may be viewed as so-called secondary causes of God(s).

In the 20th century, Willard Van Orman Quine, George Santayana, and other philosophers argued that the success of naturalism in science meant that scientific methods should also be used in philosophy. Science and philosophy are said to form a continuum, according to this view.

TYPES OF NATURALISM

PHILOSOPHICAL NATURALISM

Philosophical naturalism (also known as metaphysical or ontological naturalism) is a belief system about the nature of the universe. The philosophy of naturalism is a gradient, but there are generally two different types.

Idealistic Naturalism – Idealistic naturalists believe that everything can be explained as a product of a combination of physical facts and physical laws. Everything is brought about by physical phenomenon, and nothing occurs that wasn’t pre-determined according to nature. There is no free will, purpose, soul, God, or emotion, and there is no enduring self beyond physical death. The concept of free will is simply a result of the chaos theory; we are bombarded daily with so many inputs that we only think we make choices when we are actually acting according to circumstances too many to process. Qualia, or the experiences of life such as pain, preference, desire, or emotion, also do not exist. They are merely physiological responses to outside stimuli. Idealistic naturalists also believe that everything we think we feel has a corresponding neurological basis that will one day be interpreted—mapped out on an MRI. The phenomenon we call consciousness is merely the complexity of our physical matter.

The most obvious argument against idealistic naturalism is the sense of self. Idealistic naturalists deny that we have an independent, subjective, first-person view of ourselves and our experiences. Idealistic naturalism cannot explain the perception that we feel pain and anger, or recognize beauty, why we respond to our own name or use the term “I.” This, in addition to the assertion that life has no meaning, makes idealistic naturalism a hard sell. And, ironically, the more idealistic naturalists push their view, the more they demonstrate their philosophy is a belief—something they deny exists. They turn the assertion that there is no supernatural into a religion.

Broad Naturalism – Broad naturalists also deny God and the human soul, but they admit that consciousness, mental thought, and value (both in preferences and morality) do exist. Such things do not belong in the spiritual realm; instead, they are emergent physical states of an extremely complex neurology. In response to the horrifying consideration that every action is pre-determined, broad naturalists rely on evolution. “Survival of the fittest” teaches that everything that has survived has done so because it was best able to survive. Similarly, values, ethics—even emotion and personal preferences—are all driven by our genes’ built-in impetus to survive and pass on genetic traits. There are adaptations; some naturalists believe the desire to pass on genes is rooted in a genetic people-group, not individual genes. Others see “survival of the fittest” as a wholly selfish mechanism that created the concept of ethics to justify any behavior, such as altruism and suicide, that contradicts the violence of survival.

Proponents of broad naturalism have yet to determine where this consciousness exists in the physical world or how even a complex physical mechanism could result in something as subjective as thought. And although they do allow for “purpose” in human interaction, purpose that is driven by the survival of our DNA is not truly free will.

METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISM

Methodological naturalism concerns itself with methods of learning what nature is. These methods are useful in the evaluation of claims about existence and knowledge and in identifying causal mechanisms responsible for the emergence of physical phenomena. It attempts to explain and test scientific endeavors, hypotheses, and events with reference to natural causes and events. This second sense of the term “naturalism” seeks to provide a framework within which to conduct the scientific study of the laws of nature. Methodological naturalism is a way of acquiring knowledge. It is a distinct system of thought concerned with a cognitive approach to reality, and is thus a philosophy of knowledge. Studies by sociologist Elaine Ecklund suggest that religious scientists in practice apply methodological naturalism. They report that their religious beliefs affect the way they think about the implications – often moral – of their work, but not the way they practice science.

In addition to naturalism as a philosophical worldview, it can also be a method of learning and exploration. Methodological naturalism is a system of scientific study wherein nature is assumed to have a natural basis. Divine intervention (miracles) is not taken into account in the investigation of natural phenomenon. Theistic scientists—who believe in God and the human soul—may be influenced by their theism in regard to ethics and priorities, but they still use the methodological naturalism of the scientific method in their practice of science. As the supernatural is beyond our abilities of description, explanation, and prediction, scientists believe the possibility of the supernatural should not influence the scientific work of description, explanation, and prediction.

CONCLUSION

According to Steven Schafersman, naturalism is a philosophy that maintains that;

1. Nature encompasses all thatexiststhroughout space and time;
2. Nature (theuniverseor cosmos) consists only of natural elements, that is, of spatiotemporal physical substance—mass–energy. Non-physical or quasi-physical substance, such as information, ideas, values, logic, mathematics, intellect, and other emergent phenomena, either supervene upon the physical or can be reduced to a physical account;
3. Nature operates by the laws ofphysicsand in principle, can be explained and understood by science and philosophy;
4. Thesupernaturaldoes not exist, i.e., only nature is real. Naturalism is therefore a metaphysicalphilosophy opposed primarily by Biblical creationism”.

Or, as Carl Sagan succinctly put it: “The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.”

In addition Arthur C. Danto states that Naturalism, in recent usage, is a species of philosophical monism according to which whatever exists or happens is natural in the sense of being susceptible to explanation through methods which, although paradigmatically exemplified in the natural sciences, are continuous from domain to domain of objects and events. Hence, naturalism is polemically defined as repudiating the view that there exists or could exist any entities which lie, in principle, beyond the scope of scientific explanation.

REFERENCE

Audi, Robert (1996). “Naturalism”. In Borchert, Donald M. The Encyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement. USA: Macmillan Reference. pp. 372–374.

Carrier, Richard (2005). Sense and Goodness without God: A defense of Metaphysical Naturalism. AuthorHouse. p. 444. ISBN 1-4208-0293-3.

Gould, Stephen J. (1984). “Toward the vindication of punctuational change in catastrophes and earth history”. In Bergren, W. A.; Van Couvering, J. A. Catastrophes and Earth History. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Gould, Stephen J. (1987). Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Cambridge, MA: