What is (Philisophical) Naturalism?

II): What is Naturalism?

If Naturalism is true, every finite thing or event must be (in principle) explicable in terms of the Total system. I say “explicable in principle” because we are not going to demand that naturalists, at any given moment, should have found the detailed explanation of every phenomenon. Obviously many things will only be explained when the sciences have made further progress. But if Naturalism is to be accepted we have a right to demand that every single thing should be such that we see, in general, how it could be explained in terms of the Total system. If any one thing exist which is of such a kind that we see in advance the impossibility of ever giving it that kind of explanation, the Naturalism would be in ruins. If necessities of thought force us to allow to any one thing any degree of independence from the Total System—if any one thing makes a good a claim to be on its own, to be something more than an expression of the character of Nature as a whole—then we have abandoned naturalism. For by Naturalism we mean the doctrine that only Nature—the whole interlocking system—exists. (CS Lewis, Miracles (The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism p 12)





2) What are some of the implications of Naturalism?:




Matter is the foundational reality. Matter as is eternal. (or not)

Man is material (but not eternal)

All transcendent claims are dead.



It was true, I had always realized it—I hadn’t any right to exist at all. I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant, and a microbe. I could feel nothing to myself but an inconsequential buzzing. I was thinking… that here we are eating and drinking, to preserve our precious existence, and that there’s nothing, nothing, absolutely no reason for existing. (Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea)



I see no reason for attributing to man a significance different in kind from that which belongs to a baboon or a grain of sand. Oliver Wendell Holmes.





In 1941, Harvard sociologist Pitirim A. Sorokin wrote a book entitled The Crisis of Our Age. In it Sorokin claimed that cultures come in two major types: sensate and ideational. A sensate culture is one in which people only believe in the reality of the physical world we experience with our five senses. A sensate culture is secular, this-worldly, and empirical. By contrast, an ideational culture embraces the physical world, but goes on to accept the notion that a non-physical, immaterial reality can be known as well, a reality consisting of God, the soul, immaterial beings, values, purposes, and various abstract objects like numbers and propositions. Sorokin claimed that a sensate culture will eventually disintegrate because it does not have the intellectual resources necessary to sustain a public and private life conducive to human flourishing. After all, if we can’t know anything about values, life after death, God, and so forth, where can we find solid guidance toward a life of wisdom and character?

by J. P. Moreland http://www.boundless.org/features/a0000872.html







Is naturalism always A-teleological.?

Can naturalism itself provide a foundation for the laws of science?

How can materialism itself justify the concept of “the uniformity of causes in a closed system?”