Naturalism

I've started reading the just-published book, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?, of John Lennox, whom I met at St. Ebbe's. It's good. I think I see the essence of the philosophical position of Naturalism now,Click here to read more

from page 29:

[T]here is nothing but nature. It is a closed system of cause and effect. ...There is no `outside'.

The notion is tricky because naturalism does not, I think, exactly mean that magic and gods do not exist. There is no essential difference between a witch who mixes a love potion and a scientist who mixes a cough remedy except that the love potion doesn't work. Both mixers intend to repeat an objective formula to generate predictable results, and both have obtained their formula rationally, by accepting authority, using observation, or plausible theorizing. In the same way, whether we call the force that makes things pull at each other the force Gravity or the god Gravity makes no difference.

I would be hard put to say whether primitive peoples believe in naturalism or not. Their gods and demons are close to being explanations--- but on the other hand, they are believed to be fairly mysterious explanations. I suppose the key is whether the savages think that if they only had time, they'd be able to come up with a comprehensive explanation that included explaining the gods.

I was going to say that Thomas Aquinas thought he had such a comprehensive explanation (a summa theologica), but he didn't. He clearly distinguished between what could be known by reason and what needed to be learned by revelation, and he recognized that revelation did not include all the mysteries we'd like to know about God.

Thus, a naturalistic god is one that can be fully understood by humans-- at least understood as well as we understand, say, lions. He is a god that is in the same order of nature as man. The Greek gods of myth are like that, and the Norse gods, but lurking behind them is the truly supernatural--- the Mysteries, the Forms, the Norns, Erda.