Why I’m not a Naturalist

Naturalism is the cultural dogma of the modern world. It’s a story that’s repeated so often, people accept it without questioning its truth.

The naturalist story says that as scientific knowledge advances, it’s proving beyond reasonable doubt there is no God, no eternal soul, no afterlife, and we live in an insentient and purposeless universe.

Naturalists present this story as the most rational world view, but in fact it’s based on a logical mistake. It confuses a method with a metaphysics, it mistakes scientific data for philosophical facts.

Science is a method for discovering facts about the world. It intentionally restricts its explanations to a limited range of properties. Only empirical and measurable properties are included in scientific explanations.

If we intentionally restrict our view of the world, it doesn’t mean the world is like our view of it. Wearing rose coloured glasses doesn’t make the world itself rose coloured.

Yet this is the same basic mistake people make when they believe science has shown nothing supernatural exists. The reason science hasn’t found anything supernatural is because it isn’t looking for it.

Science intentionally restricts its explanations to the natural world, and the natural world is understood to mean the things that can be investigated with science.

To interpret this to mean that only natural things exist is a vicious logical circle.

Anyone who doesn’t want to base their world-view on logical circles will investigate the reasons and evidence we have to think naturalism is true.

Many people are surprised to discover that when we critically analyse naturalism as a metaphysics, we find it’s an incoherent doctrine.

Naturalism can’t define the word natural

If we’re to judge the truth of the claim that “everything is natural,” the first thing we need to ask is: What does the word natural mean?

We’re told that nature is all that exists, but the word natural has no clear definition. And we find that when we try and define it, naturalism is false or trivial.

This problem was most famously expressed by the philosopher Carl Hempel and is known as Hempel’s dilemma.

Generally, people are motivated to accept naturalism because of the success of the natural sciences. Which means the word natural can be broadly understood to mean “the phenomena studied by the natural sciences.”

If this is our definition, then to demonstrate metaphysical naturalism is true, we must reduce all phenomena to the laws of physics. Now the naturalist has a problem.

If they define natural or physical based on the current laws of physics, then naturalism is false. After all, no one thinks that current physics is complete and mental properties stand stubbornly outside the realm of physics.

If we judge on some unknown future laws of physics we find naturalism is vacuous, because no one knows what that ideal physics consists of. The unknown future physics might include souls, gods, fairies and ghosts. Which makes this definition of natural meaningless.

When the naturalist tells us that everything is natural, even they don’t know what that means.

This problem of incoherence might not seem so pronounced if naturalism were offered as a provisional belief or humble suggestion. But it’s usually delivered with such confidence that anyone who disagrees is deemed guilty of science denial and irrational wishful thinking.

We’re offered a grand thesis about the truth of the entire reality that can’t even define its central term.

This incoherence isn’t surprising if you realise that naturalism isn’t a thesis that starts by observing the world and then logically constructing its metaphysics to explain those observations. Instead, naturalism starts with a method of investigating the world and then tries to squeeze reality to fit its chosen method.

Naturalism can’t define its central term because nature isn’t an observed category in the world, but a category created as a method to investigate the world. When we try to retro-fit the world to our preferred method, the incoherence of the procedure is revealed.

Naturalism can’t explain why the universe exists

Most people think science will one day explain why the universe exists. Popular science commentary often misleadingly suggests cosmology is working on that question.

But science can never explain why nature exists, it can only explain things that already exist. Science is limited to telling us why the different arrangements of existing stuff changes over time. Science can’t tell us why that stuff exists, or why we have this stuff rather than some other kind of stuff, or even no stuff at all.

Naturalism as a philosophy is in the same situation, it can’t go outside of nature to say what caused nature to exist. It can’t admit the explanatory need to go beyond nature to explain why it exists, because that is admitting that naturalism is false.

The question of cosmic origins can’t be answered by referring to physical properties, because if something possesses physical properties, by definition, it already exists. All physical events and causes are within the history of nature. But the question being asked is about the possibility of such a history in the first place.

The only explanatory option for the naturalist is to say there is no reason the universe exists, the universe is a brute fact. Brute fact isn’t saying there is a reason but we don’t know what it is, this is saying, there is no reason.

If there is any idea we should be sceptical of, surely it’s an uncaused universe. It’s not only extremely unlikely, it’s incoherent. An existent thing that has no reason why it exists means it has no feature that distinguishes it from non-existence. There can be no reason within it’s own nature, and no reason outside itself.

But obviously there is a distinction between a universe which exists and a universe which doesn’t, so we arrive at a logical contradiction. Which means the idea there is no reason or explanation for the existence of the universe is false.

Naturalism can’t explain why there are uniform and orderly laws of nature

Just as naturalism can’t explain why nature exists, it can’t explain why our universe has these particular laws of nature. The fact that the universe is governed by uniform and orderly laws must be taken for granted.

The only explanation available to naturalism is chance. It just happened to be the case. But chance is a euphemism for not only unknown, but unanswerable.

In both instances of explaining why nature exists and why it has the properties it does, we’re offered euphemisms (brute fact and chance) to disguise the fact these questions are unanswerable within the logical boundaries naturalism allows.

All these explanatory defects are the consequence of naturalism starting with its conclusion. This is why it can’t define its central term, can’t explain why nature exists or why nature is orderly and intelligible.

Naturalism can’t confirm the truth of its doctrine because doing that would require going beyond its self-imposed boundaries. It’s a “super” natural conclusion about the entire reality that logic can never confirm as true.

Naturalism can’t explain the conscious dimensions of reality

Naturalism can’t explain personal phenomena. The hard problem of consciousness is really an impossible problem for naturalism. Mental properties like conscious experience, intentions, purposes, meaning and values can’t be reduced to natural properties. Which means naturalism is false.

Naturalism can’t explain how these immaterial properties could arise from the interactions of insentient matter. All these immaterial properties fit uncomfortably in the naturalist world view and must be reduced to an illusion or hallucination. Our experiences are reduced to a mere appearance, not the “real” world, because reality must be something physical.

This is why many naturalists deny the most fundamental truths of our experience of ourselves and the world. We’re often told we have no free will, and morality consists of nothing more than the rules that allow societies to function. Some naturalists even say consciousness itself is an illusion.

Naturalism must deny our shared experience of ourselves and the world to make the world conform to its explanation. A good explanation does the opposite, the explanation conforms to the observed nature of the world.

The impression people have that naturalism is a viable explanation relies on the confusion that science proves the philosophy. But naturalism as a philosophy goes far beyond the scientific data to make claims about the entire reality. Claims that aren’t justified by either logic or experience.