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Naturalism: Sciences
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Naturalism is a worldview that relies upon experience, reason, and science to develop an understanding of reality and humanity's place within reality. Naturalism is hence a worldview that is heavily dependent on science for knowledge about reality. One's attitude towards science and "Scientific Method" will therefore control how one thinks about naturalism.
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Naturalism is now the dominant philosophical orientation in contemporary analytic philosophy. As with other broad philosophical orientations, there are many interpretations of what the orientation consists in. But perhaps a common denominator is the repudiation of (some or all of) the “first-philosophical” conception of the relationship between science and philosophy, according to which philosophical inquiry is both independent of and, in some sense, prior to scientific inquiry. The naturalist insists instead that philosophy is instead “continuous” with science. Behind this common commitment to the continuity of philosophy with science... lies a bewildering variety of naturalist positions. Indeed, there are as many naturalisms as there are philosophical issues: ontological naturalism, ethical naturalism, epistemological naturalism, mathematical naturalism, etc. But they realize two general expressions of the claim that philosophy and science are continuous: naturalism as a worldview, and naturalism as a methodology.
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Naturalism faces some significant hurdles. Recent discoveries (including galactic motion in astronomy and proton decay in physics) have led scholars to accept this certainty: the universe began at some point in time -- a singularity. Without the possibility of an eternal cosmos, there are only two feasible alternatives for the origin of the universe: either Someone made it, or it made itself. The observations of empirical science have put materialists in an awkward position -- they must identify a natural mechanism by which the universe could have created and developed itself without an Intelligent Director.
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Naturalism now rules, not only the natural sciences, but social sciences and humanities as well. Thus, the liberty to present the Bible as Truth has been removed from higher education. Bloom writes: "A teacher who treated the Bible naively, taking it at its word, or Word, would be accused of scientific incompetence and lack of sophistication. The best that can be done, it appears, is to teach 'The Bible as Literature,' as opposed to 'as Revelation,' which it claims to be." (Bloom p. 374). Bloom adds, "On the portal of the humanities is written in many ways and many tongues, 'There is no truth -- at least here.'" (Bloom p. 372)
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Naturalism does not deny the existence of God, either as transcendent or immanent. However, naturalism makes God an unnecessary hypothesis and essentially superfluous to scientific investigation. Reference to moral or divine purposes has no place in scientific explanations. On the other hand, the scope of science is limited to explanation of empirical phenomena without reference to forces, powers, or influences that are supernatural.
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Naturalism is, non-controversially, a subset of metaphysical realism. Naturalism is not an ethical system, although a variety--pragmatic naturalism, a synthesis of pragmatism and naturalism--does develop ethical positions. Philosophical naturalism is ... the key part of naturalistic humanism, without question the most important personal worldview or philosophy of life that exists as an alternative to the planet's many supernaturalistic, transcendental religions and religious philosophies. Humanism exists in two varieties, religious and secular, and as a dynamic, fulfilling, and intellectually compelling alternative to transcendental religion, humanism is a frequent subject of criticism by supernaturalists; indeed, part of the motivation for the attack on naturalism in science by creationists and intelligent design proponents is their explicit and long-founded antipathy to naturalistic humanism. Philosophical naturalism itself exists in two forms: (1) ontological or metaphysical naturalism and (2) methodological naturalism. The former is philosophical naturalism as described above; the latter is the tacit adoption or assumption of philosophical naturalism within scientific method with or without fully accepting or believing it. As will be exhaustively discussed below, science is not metaphysical and does not depend on the ultimate truth of any metaphysics for its success (although science does have metaphysical implications), but methodological naturalism must be adopted as a strategy or working hypothesis for science to succeed, since the various methods and necessary underlying epistemologies of science cannot operate in a supernaturalistic framework..
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