Naturalism and Religion

A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation

Graham Oppy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429947209
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book guides readers through an investigation of religion from a naturalistic perspective and explores the very meaning of the term 'religious naturalism'. Oppy considers several widely disputed claims: that there cannot be naturalistic religion; that there is nothing in science that poses any problems for naturalism; that there is nothing in religion that poses any serious challenges to naturalism; and that there is a very strong case for thinking that naturalism defeats religion.

Naturalism and Religion: A Contemporary Philosophical Investigation is an ideal introduction for undergraduate and postgraduate students of religious studies and philosophy who want to gain an understanding of the key themes and claims of naturalism from a religious and philosophical perspective.

1 Introduction

Philosophical naturalism has consistently shown itself to be a non-scientific religious perspective that is adverse to impartial inquiry into the nature of reality according to the scientific principles of methodological naturalism. Its adherents and defenders have consistently shown by their writings and opinions a prejudicial intolerance of fundamentally human intuitive understandings of reality and an anti-intellectual rejection of compelling evidence, evidence that has proven acceptable to profound thinkers and researchers. It is not science, nor is it a scientific approach. Ipso facto, by its a priori rejection of the possibility of the supernatural … philosophical naturalism represents an approach that is militantly … and overtly hostile to religion and human culture.

(‘Philosophical Naturalism’ Conservapedia 21/08/17, 3:09 p.m., http://www.conservapedia.com/Philosophical_naturalism)

It takes no effort or searching skill to find criticisms of (philosophical) naturalism. The above quotation from the Conservapedia entry on philosophical naturalism serves as well as any. Among the commonly encountered criticisms of philosophical naturalism that are displayed in this quotation, there are at least the following:

1 Philosophical naturalism is a religion, or, at any rate, a religious perspective.

2 Philosophical naturalism is adverse to impartial inquiry.

3 Philosophical naturalism is anti-scientific, or, at any rate, non-scientific.

4 Philosophical naturalism is inherently prejudicial and intolerant of natural basic human beliefs.

5 Philosophical naturalism is an anti-intellectual rejection of compelling evidence.

6 Philosophical naturalism makes an a priori rejection of the supernatural.

7 Philosophical naturalism is militantly and overtly hostile to religion.

8 Philosophical naturalism is militantly and overtly hostile to human culture.

That’s quite a rap sheet. But can any of the charges be made to stick? I don’t think so, and I hope to get you to agree with me (if you do not already do so).

The rap sheet makes use of a number of difficult terms (or forms thereof): philosophy, religion, science, culture, evidence, and impartial inquiry. In all cases, the application of these terms is contested. In each case, there are many people who claim to be in favour of what the term denotes – philosophy, religion, science, culture, evidence, impartial inquiry – but there is heated disagreement about exactly what these things are. In this work, I’m particularly interested in getting clear about (philosophical) naturalism, philosophy, science, religion and the ways in which they are related to one another.

Naturalism is a claim: roughly, the conjunctive claim that (a) there are none but natural causal entities with none but natural causal powers and (b) well-established science is our touchstone for identifying natural causal entities and natural causal powers. There are many claims that are appropriately compared with naturalism. Consider, for example, theism: the claim that there is at least one god. It makes just as much sense to claim that naturalism is a religion as it does to claim that theism is a religion: none. There are many theistic religions: what makes a religion theistic is that the family of big pictures associated with that religion all entail that there is at least one god. Theism, per se, is not a religion: to think that is to conflate religions with big pictures. Nor is theism intrinsically linked to religion. There are religions whose associated big pictures do not entail that there is at least one god. Moreover, there are non-religious big pictures that entail that there is at least one god. But it is even more obvious that naturalism is not a religion than it is that theism is not a religion. After all, there is no religion whose associated big pictures entail (a) that there are none but natural causal entities with none but natural causal powers and (b) that well-established science is our touchstone for identifying natural causal entities and natural causal powers.

Given that naturalism entails that well-established science is our touchstone for identifying natural causal entities and natural causal powers, it is hard to see how naturalism per se could be either anti-scientific or non-scientific. Certainly, naturalism has another commitment: there are none but natural causal entities with none but natural causal powers. But (a) well-established science has not identified any non-natural causal entities or non-natural causal powers; and (b) well-established science has not embraced any methods that will identify non-natural causal entities or non-natural causal powers at some point in the future. Science is, roughly speaking, a collective enterprise of data-driven description, prediction and understanding in which universal expert agreement functions as regulative ideal. The only methods that science embraces are methods that are consonant with the regulative ideal of producing universal expert agreement. We are not currently in possession of even one method consonant with the production of universal expert consensus about the existence of non-natural entities or the exercise of non-natural causal powers.

The project of philosophical naturalism is the defence and elaboration of naturalistic big pictures. The ideal method that I propose for choosing between big pictures is utterly impartial. Roughly, if we follow this method, we develop all the big pictures in which we are interested with the same level of care to the same level of detail, and then we make an objective comparative assessment of their theoretical virtues relative to all of the available evidence. Among the big pictures that we are assessing, the best are those that do best in balancing the full range of theoretical virtues given all of the available evidence.

Given the ideal method that I propose, accusations of prejudice, intolerance, and anti-intellectual rejection of evidence are completely out of bounds. Everything on which all parties to big picture disputes agree counts as evidence; nothing on which all parties agree can be properly set aside. Anything on which the parties in dispute disagree is a theoretical difference; it gets weighed when we assess the theoretical virtues of the big pictures in question. Central theoretical virtues include: consistency, breadth and depth of explanation of evidence, fit with established science, and so on. (In the discussion in this work, I shall assume – with accompanying justification – that the evaluative and the normative are theoretically independent from the causal. So the theoretical virtues to which we appeal will be just those virtues that are appropriate to assessing theorising about the causal domain.)

Given my account of the philosophical assessment of big pictures, it is clear that (philosophical) naturalism does not involve an a priori rejection of the supernatural. What justifies (philosophical) naturalism – if, indeed, it is justified – is that the best big pictures are best naturalistic big pictures. And whether best naturalistic big pictures are the best big pictures depends upon which best big pictures win out at balancing theoretical virtues in the light of total evidence. It is true that naturalism is characterised – ‘defined’ – by its exclusive commitment to the natural. But that doesn’t mean that naturalists – those who endorse naturalistic big pictures – have an a priori commitment to naturalistic big pictures.

It is a controversial question how naturalism is related to religion. In part, this is because it is controversial exactly what counts as religion. On my account – taken from the work of Scott Atran – very roughly, religions are passionate communal displays of costly commitments resulting from evolutionary canalisation and convergence of (a) widespread beliefs in non-natural entities with non-natural causal powers, (b) mastery of people’s existential anxieties, and (c) ritualised coordination in communion and intimate fellowship. Given this account, it follows that naturalism and religion exclude one another: no one can be both a naturalist and a genuine follower of a religion. However, it does not follow from this that naturalists are militantly and overtly hostile towards religions and religious believers. Certainly, naturalists maintain that the supernatural beliefs of religious believers are false; but, equally, religious believers hold that the defining naturalistic beliefs of naturalists are false. Nothing further follows in either case about attitudes that members of the one group have towards members of the other group, either individually or collectively.

The claim that naturalism is militantly and overtly hostile to human culture is absurd on its face. So, too, is the claim that naturalistic worldviews are militantly and overly hostile to human culture. It is, I think, plausible to claim that naturalism runs counter to many ‘natural’ human beliefs. When we examine the full range of human cultures, we find non-naturalistic beliefs wherever we look. But those ‘natural’ non-naturalistic beliefs are never beliefs on which there is universal expert consensus; those ‘natural’ non-naturalistic beliefs typically divide people rather than bring them together. Everyone – no matter what else they believe – agrees that the vast majority of ‘natural’ non-naturalistic beliefs are false. That naturalists go a little further, and claim that all of these ‘natural’ non-naturalistic beliefs are false, does not make the beliefs of naturalists any more militantly and overtly hostile to human culture than are the beliefs of everyone else. If more argument is needed, it is worth noting that there is no reason to suppose that naturalists contribute less per capita than non-naturalists to the arts, humanities, and sciences, or to the political, business, and social spheres. On any measure, that’s not hostility to human culture.

While there may be legitimate criticisms of philosophical naturalism, I doubt that there is any major criticism of philosophical naturalism that is as easy as the Conservapedia entry suggests. For at least the past seventy years, naturalism has been enormously popular among professional philosophers. Of course, the naturalistic big pictures adopted by naturalistic philosophers have varied considerably, and some of those big pictures have been subject to relatively easy refutation. But naturalism itself is a much smaller target than many of its opponents imagine, and it is not threatened when even quite widely shared naturalistic big pictures fall. Part of the driving force behind the writing of this book is the ambition to set out and defend a small target naturalism that can nonetheless be put to useful work in serious philosophical arguments.

1. The plan

Here’s the plan for the book.

The second chapter – ‘What is naturalism?’ – is a discussion of some controversial questions about naturalism. The first section – ‘First pass’ – introduces my characterisation of naturalism and then briefly discusses a large range of issues on which naturalists disagree, including whether there are non-causal entities, whether all properties are causal powers, whether there are mental causal powers, whether to endorse physicalism, whether to endorse materialism, whether to endorse scientism, whether to endorse humanism, whether to eschew first philosophy, whether to endorse empiricism, and whether to hold that all causal entities have spatiotemporal location. The second section – ‘Natural and non-natural’ considers some issues raised by the characterisation of naturalism, including, in particular, the question of exactly what is involved in the distinction between the natural and the non-natural; here, I defend the view that, while completed science is the ultimate arbiter of what counts as natural and non-natural, current established science is an excellent guide to the verdicts of completed science on this question. The third section – ‘What might have been’ – takes up the question of whether naturalists should suppose that naturalism is necessarily true; while I argue that it is fine for naturalists to disagree in their responses to this question, I also provide a sketch of my preferred metaphysical view, on which naturalism turns out to be necessarily true. The fourth section – ‘Big pictures’ – gives a preliminary account of big pictures as, roughly, the best approximations that we have to philosophical theories of everything, and then introduces a couple of naturalistic supervenience claims that are controversial among naturalists. The fifth section – ‘Attitudes’ – takes up some questions about the kinds of doxastic attitudes that naturalists can have towards naturalism, considering this matter both from the standpoint that takes belief to be an all-or-nothing matter, and the standpoint that takes belief to involves assignments of probabilities. The sixth, and final, section – ‘Critics’ – notes that many critics of naturalism make extraordinarily uncharitable assumptions about what else, besides naturalism, might – or must – be part of naturalistic big pictures; in particular, it notes that the various papers in Craig and Moreland (2000a) are universally attacks on strawmen.

The third chapter – ‘What is religion?’ – is a discussion of some controversial questions about religion. The first section – ‘Data’ – is a summary of data about religions and religious affiliation that pays some attention to the methodological difficulties that arise for those engaged in demographic studies of religions. The second section – ‘Definition’ – briefly discusses the history of attempts to define ‘religion’, and settles on a working definition that is adapted from the stipulative definition adopted by Atran (2002). The third section – ‘Inside/Outside’ – responds to the objection, that the working definition fails to pay proper respect to ‘insider’ religious perspectives, (primarily) by explaining why there simply cannot be an ‘insider’ definition of religion. The fourth section – ‘Spirituality’ – responds to the suggestion, that it would be better to define religion in terms of religious spirituality, (primarily) by noting that the definition of ‘spirituality’ is in far worse shape than the definition of ‘religion’. The fifth section – ‘Is naturalism a religion?’ – explains why neither naturalism nor naturalistic big pictures are religions: while being a religious adherent requires not merely having a religious big picture but also engaging in the practices of a religion, being a naturalist requires no more than having a naturalistic big picture. The sixth section – ‘Is philosophy a religion?’ – explains why philosophy is not a religion: being a philosopher requires no more than being a participant in a particular theoretical discipline; being a philosopher does not require any kind of engagement in the types of practices that are characteristic of religions. The seventh section – ‘Theories of religion’ – provides a brief overview of various kinds of theories of religion, and notes that the adopted working definition fits well with contemporary cognitive evolutionary theories of religion while also preserving the grains of truth in earlier social and psychological theories of religion.

The fourth chapter – ‘Can there be naturalistic religion?’ – gives more detailed attention to the question of whether it is an unacceptable consequence of the working definition of ‘religion’ that it rules it impossible that there are naturalistic religions. The first section – ‘Pantheism’ – takes up the question whether there is reason to say that natural reality is divine, and argues that the claim that natural reality is divine contradicts the naturalistic claim that causal reality is just natural causal reality. The second section – ‘Panentheism’ – argues that panentheism is even more clearly ruled out by naturalism than is pantheism; this section includes a fairly careful discussion of the allegedly ‘naturalistic’ panentheism defended by Johnston (2009). The third section – ‘Religious naturalism’ – criticises the work of a bunch of theorists whose guiding ambition is to develop naturalistic big pictures that include beliefs and values often associated with religion, noting, in particular, that the characterisation of naturalism places very minimal constraints upon the evaluative, normative, and emotional commitments of naturalistic big pictures. The fourth section – ‘Naturalistic religion’ – criticises the claim that there are coherent big pictures that are both naturalistic and religious, with a particular focus on Bishop (2018), who claims to be both a naturalist and a believer in ‘the received Christian faith’. The fifth section – ‘Religion of humanity’ – considers and criticises the claims of those – such as Comte and Mill – who have called for the establishment of a morally credible naturalistic religion, noting, in particular, that no proposed ‘religion of humanity’ has included plausible mechanisms for mastering existential anxieties. The sixth section – ‘Religious humanism’ – considers and criticises proposals by humanist organisations to take on some of the trappings of religion in order to provide for mastery of some existential anxieties, including, perhaps, loneliness and alienation, noting that, while this would not make religious humanism a religion, it also would not allow religious humanism to play the role that religions currently play.

The fifth chapter – ‘Does science defeat naturalism?’ – provides a detailed discussion and analysis of the argument of Plantinga (2011), with the aim of showing that Plantinga fails to provide any support for the implausible claim that science defeats naturalism. The discussion begins by establishing some background (Section 1: ‘Background’ and Section 2: ‘Epistemology’), and then critically assesses Plantinga’s attempts to show that: (a) there is merely superficial conflict between, on the one hand, Christian theism, and, on the other hand, evolutionary psychology and higher Biblical criticism (Section 3: ‘Superficial conflict’); (b) there is merely apparent conflict between theism and evolutionary theory, and between natural science and theistic claims of special divine action in the world (Section 4: ‘Merely apparent conflict’); (c) ‘fine-tuning’ and ‘protein machine’ arguments offer slight support for theism over naturalism (Section 5: ‘Arguments for theism’); (d) ‘design discourse’ offers some – hard to quantify – support for theism over naturalism (Section 6: ‘Support for theism’); and (e) there is deep concord between theism and science (Section 7: ‘Deep concord’). My conclusion is that none of the arguments that Plantinga offers for these claims succeed (Section 8: ‘Interim conclusion’). Attention then turns to a careful discussion of Plantinga’s Evolutionary Arguments against Naturalism, EAAN and EAAN* (Section 9: EAAN*). After giving reasons for thinking that Plantinga’s argument cannot succeed, and noting that Plantinga’s assumptions about the reliability of our cognitive mechanisms are false (Section 10: ‘Reliability’), I set out the cases to which Plantinga appeals in attempting to justify his first premise, i.e. the claim that: the conditional probability that our cognitive mechanisms are reliable, given naturalism and evolutionary theory, is low (Section 11: ‘Cases’). I argue that Plantinga’s account of the cases stands to the truth pretty much as behaviourist accounts of human beings stand to the truth (Section 12: ‘Analysis’). I then argue that, while naturalists have good reason to suppose that our evolutionary and social history explains why established science is almost all true (Section 13: ‘Contra’), naturalists also have good reason to suppose that our positive philosophical and religious beliefs are mostly false (Section 14: ‘Truth’). After brief consideration of the second premise (Section 15: ‘Premise 2’), the third premise (Section 16: ‘Premise 3’), and the fourth premise (Section 17: ‘Premise 4’), of Plantinga’s argument, I conclude that Plantinga’s EAAN fails (Section 18: ‘Upshot’). I wind up the chapter by noting that, en passant, we have also shown that EAAN* fails (Section 19: ‘EAAN*’).

The sixth chapter – ‘Does religion defeat naturalism?’ – has two parts. The first section of the chapter provides a detailed discussion of the argument of Rea (2002) (Section 1: ‘Rea’s argument against naturalism’); the second section of the chapter provides discussion of a generic challenge posed by contemporary Thomism (Section 2: ‘The Thomist challenge to naturalism’).

After listing some controversial claims to which Rea commits himself, I begin with some discussion of relatively minor points of detail (Section 1.1 ‘Initial quibbles’), and then move on to critical discussion of more significant points of dispute (Section 1.2 ‘Dispositions, experience, and evidence’; Section 1.3 ‘Methodological dispositions’; Section 1.4 ‘Sources of basic belief’, and Section 1.5 ‘Big picture conflict’), setting the background for my criticism of Rea’s claim that there can be no substantive characterisation of naturalistic commitments. I argue against his claim that there can be no substantive characterisation of metaphysical naturalistic commitments – which he defends on the grounds that there is nothing informative that naturalists can say about the distinction between the natural and the non-natural – by arguing for the substantive role that current science plays in limiting the commitments of completed or ideal science (Section 1.6 ‘Metaphysical commit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 What is naturalism?
• 3 What is religion?
• 4 Can there be naturalistic religion?
• 5 Does science defeat naturalism?
• 6 Does religion defeat naturalism?
• 7 Does science defeat religion?
• 8 Does naturalism defeat religion?
• 9 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• back