Naturalism

This page brings together my views on naturalism and its significance.

What Is Naturalism?

Naturalism is the view that there is nothing supernatural. Reality is the natural world, and it is through science and reason that we come to understand it.

This is a negative claim, in that it rejects gods, souls, miracles and other supernatural beliefs. But it is also a positive outlook: it encourages a simpler, more unified picture of the world. It takes away false hopes attached to the supernatural, but frees us from the fears that come with them. We lose supernatural stories, but in return we can better appreciate the real wonder of the natural world.

Naturalism matters because it is one of the deepest questions in a worldview. Whether reality includes anything supernatural affects how we think about the universe and our own place within it. Most people, through history and still today, have seen the world in supernatural ways. But reason increasingly points towards a naturalistic perspective, and naturalism is a growing way of looking at the world. It means jettisoning a baroque structure of mistaken ideas, allowing us better to see things as they are.

The Case For Naturalism

The case for naturalism is very strong.

First, progress in knowledge has repeatedly replaced supernatural thinking with natural explanation. Over time we have moved from a world filled with gods, spirits and cosmic purposes to one increasingly understood in natural terms. Again and again, phenomena once explained by divine agency or occult forces have come to be explained without them.

Second, there is no good evidence for anything supernatural. Such beliefs have often been widespread, culturally central and emotionally powerful, but that is not enough. When claims about miracles, souls, prayer, divine intervention or other supernatural realities are examined carefully, they do not stand up.

Third, our best scientific picture of the world stands on its own. All the evidence is that the physical world behaves lawfully and is causally closed. That leaves no place for miracles or other supernatural interruptions. Science presents the world as intelligible in natural terms.

The Range and Origins of Supernatural Thinking

Supernatural thinking has occupied a vast place in human life. It includes belief in gods, spirits, miracles and life after death, but also prayer, providence and fate. Its range is extraordinary, for example, extending into politics through ideas such as the divine right of kings, and into personal life through the thought that marriage and legitimacy have a special standing before God. In the past such ways of thinking were overwhelming, and even now they remain very widespread.

Why are humans drawn to such ideas? Many are instinctive. We naturally look for agency, purpose and hidden meaning in the world, and readily imagine ourselves as more than purely natural beings. We are drawn to stories of gods and spirits to fill gaps in our understanding, to give life meaning, and to soften the fear of death.

The Place of Purposes and Minds

One important implication of naturalism is that purposes and minds are not basic features of the universe. They are parochial features of life on earth which we instinctively project onto the wider universe.

Science presents a layered picture. At the base is a physical universe unfolding mechanically. On earth, life appears, bringing biological function and purpose. In some living beings, consciousness brings minds and subjective experience. In human life, this extends into knowledge, value and culture.

Naturalism suggests that we should not expect human life to come with a built-in cosmic purpose. The purposes that matter arise within life. Nor should we expect the universe itself to have been created for a purpose. It would be odd if purposes existed only at the start of the universe and then again on earth, but nowhere in between.

Consciousness, Souls, Free Will and Morality

Supernatural thinking can also place parts of human life outside nature. Even people who reject religion may still think that consciousness, souls, free will or morality belong to a different order of reality.

Much philosophy can be seen as trying to reconcile the scientific image with the manifest image. The manifest image is the world as it appears in ordinary human life. This picture is largely instinctive, but parts of it are incompatible with a naturalistic understanding of the world.

Naturalism asks us to revise those parts of the manifest image that are incompatible with science, while still making sense of consciousness, agency and morality as features of human life within nature. These are not intrusions from outside the natural world, but developments within it.

Naturalism, therefore, is not just about rejecting magical thinking. It also has a second side: revising the instinctive ideas that shape how the world seems to us but do not fit with science.

Rationality and Naturalism

This wider point connects naturalism with rationality more generally. My starting point is rationality: using the best available resources to work out what is true and what to do. Naturalism is downstream of this, but it is an important part of the rational picture. It reflects the fact that we are drawn by instinct to think in terms of gods, magic, purposes, minds and narratives, while reason points instead to a simpler picture of the world stripped of the supernatural.

My naturalism is stricter than atheism but less strict than physicalism. It rejects more than gods, but does not insist that everything must be reduced to the physical. My naturalism is also a humanist naturalism, because it includes the project of living by and helping build a secular ethics centred on welfare.

Implications

Naturalism has important implications. It encourages us to seek natural explanations, and to stop projecting human categories such as purpose and mind onto the universe as a whole. It places us more truthfully in reality: in a universe that is mostly indifferent, but in one small part of it life has given rise to consciousness, value and understanding.

This view takes away comforting stories, but it offers something better: a clearer and more truthful worldview. It clears away illusion while deepening our appreciation of the real wonder of life within the natural world.