Naturalism

The philosophical view that everything we observe can be explained by the causes and effects of natural laws. Naturalism has no place for God or for His sustainance of the world. Proponents of naturalism often abuse the natural sciences in defence of their cause, denying the place of God and His workings. God's presence, however, is not something that natural science can deny; the claim of God's non-existence is a negative and reason cannot prove a negative.

The roots of naturalism may be traced to Aristotle, who founded an approach to philosophy that starts with observation and expreience prior to any abstract thinking about the subject. Naturalism received a boost in the 16th & 17th Cent when, first, Copernicus demonstrated that, contrary to the Ptolemaic view which the Catholic had held sacrosanct, the sun did not rotate revolve around the earth, and second, when Isaac Newton discovered his laws of motion and gravitation. These new insights into the workings of the natural world suggested to many that the world could be viewed as a machine whose workings many be understand purely by the laws of nature. Though both Copernicus and Newton were Christians who believed in divine providence, increasingly God was pushed to the periphery of scientific thinking. Charles Darwin's publication of his theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859 provided an explanation for the origin of species that made God unnecessary and redundant. Today naturalism is the dominant worldview of the academic-scientific community.

The chief, and fatal, weakness of naturalism lies within its fundamental assumption that everything can be explained by the causes and effects of natural laws without recourse to external provisions. This places the scientist—the observer and expounder—withing the system of nature itself. It is the most fundamental expression of "thinking within the box." The scientist may come up with an explanation that is consistent within the system, but she has no way of ascertaining whether it is 'true' or 'false' since she is part of the system. She has, e.g., no way of knowing if all her conclusion are not simply the product of the causes and effects of the close-box within which she works and lives. Objectivity—the ability to look at a situation without being part of it—is, therefore, a delusion in such a system. 'Naturalists' (not in the more common sense of being simply one who studies nature) have failed to heed the lesson of the Myth of the Cave that Plato had taught long ago. In line with this, Alvin Plantiga argues persuasively, in his book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion & Naturalism (Oxford University Press, 2011), while appears to be concord between science and naturalism, that concrod is superficial when the conflict between them is deep. Over against this, Plantiga argues that, whereas there is an apparent (and, therefore, superficial) conflict between theistic religion and science, the concord between relition and science is deep.