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Naturalism
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Naturalism, the idea that reality is formed solely by natural processes, consists solely of natural beings and objects, and governed solely by natural laws, is a philosophy that developed as science developed. Modern science did not, at first, rely upon naturalism. Galileo fully believed that the physical laws he discovered were created by God as part of the universe, and Isaac Newton could ascribe physical phenomena to supernatural control if a natural explanation was not known and could not be conceived. The origin and functioning of the universe, solar system, Earth, plant and animal species, and humans were routinely ascribed to supernatural processes by legitimate scientists well into the nineteenth century, as the histories of catastrophism and creationism clearly reveal. Following the examples of Galileo and Newton... scientists such as Laplace, Hutton, Lyell, Darwin, and Huxley slowly and sequentially attempted to explain the origin and functioning of these real objects and beings solely by natural explanations. Naturalism as a necessary part of science thus developed gradually as science developed gradually with the practice and understanding of scientists; appreciation of the hypothetico-deductive method and empirical testing of hypotheses requires naturalism, since supernatural claims cannot be tested.
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Because the focus of Naturalism is human nature, stories in this movement are character-driven rather than plot-driven. Although Naturalism was inspired by the work of the French writer Émile Zola, it reached the peak of its accomplishment in the United States. In France, Naturalism was strongest in the late 1870s and early 1880s, but it emerged in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century and extended up to the first world war.
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Naturalism has another problem. Even if scientists were to discover a method by which amino acid building blocks could be produced by random chemical processes, could life itself evolve randomly from inorganic matter? Not according to secular mathematicians. Eastman explains, "In the last 30 years a number of prominent scientists have attempted to calculate the odds that a free-living, single-celled organism, such as a bacterium, might result by the chance combining of pre-existent building blocks. Harold Morowitz calculated the odds as one chance in 10^100,000,000,000. Sir Fred Hoyle calculated the odds of only the proteins of an amoebae arising by chance as one chance in 10^40,000.
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Naturalism ... had an undeniable influence on the theatre. Numerous works of fiction, mainly by the Goncourt brothers and Zola, were dramatized and the stage adaptation of L'Assommoir (1879), in particular, had a considerable impact. But, in general, the best and most successful works for the stage were produced by writers not associated directly with the Naturalist movement (Becque, Les Corbeaux), or by professional men of the theatre who came later, like Antoine and the Théâtre Libre, or by foreign playwrights like Ibsen and Strindberg.
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The emergence of Naturalism does not mark a radical break with Realism, rather the new style is a logical extension of the old. The term was invented by Émile Zola partly because he was seeking for a striking platform from which to convince the reading public that it was getting something new and modern in his fiction. In fact, he inherited a good deal from his predecessors. Like Balzac and Flaubert, he created detailed settings meticulously researched, but tended to integrate them better into his narrative, avoiding the long set-piece descriptions so characteristic of earlier fiction. Again, like Balzac, he created a series of novels with linked characters and settings ("Les Rougon-Macquart: Histoire naturelle et sociale d'une famille sous le second Empire"--"The Rougon-Macquart: Natural and Social History of a Family During the Second Empire") which stretched to twenty novels. He tried to create a portrait of France in the 1880s to parallel the portrait Balzac had made of his own times in the Comédie humaine.
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Naturalism did not exist as a philosophy before the nineteenth century, but only as an occasionally adopted and non-rigorous method among natural philosophers. It is a unique philosophy in that it is not ancient or prior to science, and that it developed largely due to the influence of science. Naturalism begins with Galileo and Isaac Newton, who began to explain nature by theoretical and experimental descriptions of matter and their motions. Their correct and lasting discoveries were all made within a completely naturalistic methodology. The outstanding success of this method led others to emulate them, and a comprehensive understanding of the universe was initiated. Galileo and Newton were not ontological or metaphysical naturalists; they did not hesitate to attribute supernatural causes to things that they thought could not be explained by natural causes.
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