In their new book, Hidden Worldviews: Eight Cultural Stories That Shape Our Lives
, Steve Wilkens and Mark Sanford examine cultural scripts that work against the gospel work in the Church. Our theme today: scientific naturalism.
The motto: "Only matter matters."
We are back to the world of RJS: Where do you draw the line with the empirical and the natural for explanations? Is there God? Is there Spirit? Are we more than our chemicals and matter?
Another worldview script shaping culture and church is the one that claims that only what is scientifically demonstrable is true knowledge, and all things important can be reduced to the natural. The supernatural is hereby excluded. All we have are the perceived laws of nature -- eternal, unchanging, and somewhat deterministic. But also this makes the world reasonable. Naturalism is salvific as it guides humans into the good life.
Naturalism helps us with seeing the value of science and of reason; it helps us see the unity of matter and the world and it is fundamental to resolving questions and problems.
But.... scientific naturalism is a quasi-religion. Thus, the problems:
1. Diminishes the value of humans. (That we are Eikons.)
2. Devalues the importance of morals. Can "matter" be moral?
3. It can undercut rationality because it makes all things chance or accident.
4. Cannot define progress or explain purpose (which was John Walton's major point).
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Ray Ingles (#18) I am in strong agreement with you in that we do not advance formal arguments for evaluative posits. In a similar vein, I can find no grounds to dismiss the abundant meaning to be found in our human existence, whether by people of implicit faith or no faith at all. Anthropology reveals, and no too few nontheistic friends of mine faithfully report to me, profound existential orientations to such values as truth, beauty, goodness and unity, even within their agnostic and atheistic interpretive stances.
That I take such existential orientations and interpret them also as transcendental imperatives in my theism is viewed by some as a needless multiplication of ontologies and a meaningless tautology. For their part, they inhabit a different tautology. Those believers, like myself, who view reality as radically incarnational and who do not buy into traditional views of atonement or see reality as morally depraved but as intrinsically good even if flawed, would expect that all humans would discover reality's goodness and realize, in varying degrees, reality's values.
So, I expect most people, for the most part, to report a mostly abundant life, once taking into account economic disparities and other senseless suffering (which doesn't undermine many people's fundamental trust in God, anyway). The only distinction I would offer is that I persist in faith in a particular tradition because FOR ME it seems to provide for a superabundance in my human value-realizations (including personal integrity) vis a vis other pathways and I would concede to others that this may be one of the reasons they choose their particular path.
It is perhaps too early on humankind's journey to successfully adjudicate between the propositional elements of these otherwise disparate interpretive positions and evaluative posits, the value of which gets cashed out in our practical lived experiences.
Sorry, all, #13 was me.
Ray, I'm not saying that those are the only take aways from naturalism. But I would say, if you ask that perspective "Tell me what a human being is" and "where does a human fit within the universe" and stick to what that perspective can offer, we're going to have by definition, an explanation that situates the human within the basic animal framework and story. At a minimum, the naturalist must state that other, older understandings of humanity as somehow made in the image of some divine being are mistaken, and that the various ethics that have their basis in those views of reality are in fact not connected to reality and make no sense to maintain. All plans, ethics and values, if they are to be based in the naturalist view of reality, must be based in the physical world alone and its story, which is essentially a story on a darwinian stage, in which the features I mentioned are central parts. Please understand, I'm not saying that the naturalist perspective makes those who hold it only feel or value what makes sense to feel within a darwinian/naturalist reality. (Christians daily feel and do things that are inconsistent with the tenets of the Christian faith.) Just that there are many who despair when they think about what it means to be what the naturalist view says they are and story they are in.
Ha! captcha'd again! (It erases my name for some reason.) Your Name is me.
T (Your Name?) wrote in #20: "At a minimum, the naturalist must state that other, older understandings of humanity as somehow made in the image of some divine being are mistaken, and that the various ethics that have their basis in those views of reality are in fact not connected to reality and make no sense to maintain. All plans, ethics and values, if they are to be based in the naturalist view of reality, must be based in the physical world alone and its story, which is essentially a story on a darwinian stage, in which the features I mentioned are central parts."
In the end, this ends up being an appeal - not to our Judaeo-Christian heritage, but - to a foundational epistemology (a method) and a robust moral realism (a conclusion). I am deep sympathy with a moral realism that is ultimately grounded in God, but adopt that interpretive stance as a basic presupposition, which is indispensable to my faith outlook but otherwise not required as a presupposition for knowledge, itself, a method, which is fallible and probabilistic and not foundational, providing us with apodictic certainty.
As it is, with so many different authorities (religious traditions) around, all appealing to diverse foundational sources (scriptures & traditions & natural laws) and no way to successfully adjudicate between them in a logically coercive way, appeals to a foundational epistemology coupled with an authoritarian deontology aren't going to take us very far, either meta-ethically or toward the articulation of a more global ethic.
At the same time, we can expect to reason successfully from an IS to an OUGHT, from the given to the normative, from the descriptive to the prescriptive, from a fact to a value, notwithstanding Hume's objections, and we can distinguish between apparent and real goods, lesser and higher goods, notwithstanding any so-called naturalistic fallacy. We can also recognize, with Sartre, that, since we are similarly-situated in this somewhat universal human condition, the prescriptions we devise for any human situation we describe are going to be remarkably consistent, for all practical purposes, even if the interpretations in which we ground them are otherwise very divergent (or even relativistic), theoretically speaking.
T/Your Name - you write, "At a minimum, the naturalist must state that other, older understandings of humanity as somehow made in the image of some divine being are mistaken, and that the various ethics that have their basis in those views of reality are in fact not connected to reality and make no sense to maintain."
I agree with part 1 ('older understandings mistaken') but disagree (mostly) with part 2 ('various ethics make no sense to maintain'). Consider that even NASA still uses Newtonian mechanics to pilot their interplanetary probes, with just a few Relativistic fudge factors. There are degrees of wrongness (as Isaac Asimov put it, "[W]hen people thought the earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the earth was [perfectly] spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.") And there's also 'being right for the wrong reason'.
An excerpt from a meditation on free will that I'm writing: "One of the most basic equations in physics - really, the fundamental equation - is "F=ma": force equals mass times acceleration. This expresses the relationship between four fundamental concepts: force, mass, distance, and time. (Acceleration itself is expressed in terms of distance and time.) But what units to use? You are only free to pick units for three of them - then F=ma means you define the last unit in terms of the other three. For example, in the Imperial (British) system, the unit of force is the pound, the unit of distance is the foot, and the unit of time is the second. From that, you derive the unit of mass - the slug. In effect, the British system expresses it as "m=F/a". The metric system, by contrast, assumes units for mass, distance, and time (kilogram, meter, and second) and derives the unit of force, the Newton, from those - it expresses things as "F=ma"."
It seems to me that the commonsense notions 'everyone' has about ethics and morals, and even the large majority of what careful thinkers have concluded about ethics and morals, can be true and expressed in more than just the 'classical', 'mystical' systems that have been pretty much the only game in town until quite recently. We have a lot of accumulated wisdom over the past 100,000 years or so of humanity's existence regarding how to get along. That's not to say that those systems are perfect; the case of 'revenge culture' is a glaring counterexample. But it does mean those systems in some senses "work", and not always for the obvious reason.
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