Do A Vast Majority of Naturalists Hold To Naturalism Dogmatically and Unreflectively?
On a forum called "The Student Room" the question above was posed four years ago, reflecting on the musings of several "mainstream" scholars. It received no comments. Perhaps it's time.
---------------------------Thomas Nagel caused quite a stir with his book attacking different types of naturalism and highlighted the significant problems that materialism in particular face. Nagel is an atheist. He is also, albeit a hazy one, a naturalist (though he is skeptical of materialism) he is not the first prominent naturalist to highlight the unreflective acceptance many have of materialism.
Tyler Burge opines that “materialism is not established, or even clearly supported, by science” and that its hold over his peers is analogous to that of a “political or religious ideology” (“Mind-Body Causation and Explanatory Practice,” in John Heil and Alfred Mele, eds., Mental Causation, 1993, p. 117).
John Searle tells us that “materialism is the religion of our time,” that “like more traditional religions, it is accepted without question and… provides the framework within which other questions can be posed, addressed, and answered,” and that “materialists are convinced, with a quasi-religious faith, that their view must be right” (Mind: A Brief Introduction, 2004, p. 48).
William Lycan admits, in what he himself calls “an uncharacteristic exercise in intellectual honesty,” that the arguments for materialism are no better than the arguments against it, that his “own faith in materialism is based on science-worship,” and that “we also always hold our opponents to higher standards of argumentation than we obey ourselves.” (“Giving Dualism its Due,” a paper presented at the 2007 Australasian Association of Philosophy conference at the University of New England).
The atheist philosopher of religion Quentin Smith maintains that “the great majority of naturalist philosophers have an unjustified belief that naturalism is true and an unjustified belief that theism (or supernaturalism) is false.” For their naturalism typically rests on nothing more than an ill-informed “hand waving dismissal of theism” which ignores “the erudite brilliance of theistic philosophizing today.” Smith continues:
If each naturalist who does not specialize in the philosophy of religion (i.e., over ninety-nine percent of naturalists) were locked in a room with theists who do specialize in the philosophy of religion, and if the ensuing debates were refereed by a naturalist who had a specialization in the philosophy of religion, the naturalist referee could at most hope the outcome would be that “no definite conclusion can be drawn regarding the rationality of faith,” although I expect the most probable outcome is that the naturalist, wanting to be a fair and objective referee, would have to conclude that the theists definitely had the upper hand in every single argument or debate.Due to the typical attitude of the contemporary naturalist… the vast majority of naturalist philosophers have come to hold (since the late 1960s) an unjustified belief in naturalism. Their justifications have been defeated by arguments developed by theistic philosophers, and now naturalist philosophers, for the most part, live in darkness about the justification for naturalism. They may have a true belief in naturalism, but they have no knowledge that naturalism is true since they do not have an undefeated justification for their belief. If naturalism is true, then their belief in naturalism is accidentally true. [“The Metaphilosophy of Naturalism,” Philo: A Journal of Philosophy (Fall-Winter 2001)]
Again, Nagel, Waldron, Burge, Searle, Lycan, and Smith are not apologists for religion. Apart from Smith, they aren’t even philosophers of religion. All of them are prominent, and all of them are “mainstream.” They have no motive for saying the things they do other than that that is the way things honestly strike them based on their knowledge of the field.
This is not supposed to be a thread on whether naturalism is false - but whether people who believe it is true have good reasons for doing so or, as a growing portion of their own number are saying, they do so dogmatically and unreflectively. Source.
---------------------------My Comments:
When it comes to Nagel's views the best review of his 2012 book is the one by John Dupre, a British philosopher of science. Go read it now, I'll wait. ;-) So much for Nagel.
What about Quentin Smith? Once again, see what John Dupre wrote, especially this: "A more sensible materialism goes no further than the rejection of spooky stuff: whatever kinds of stuff there may turn out to be and whatever they turn out to do, they are, as long as this turning out is empirically grounded, ipso facto not spooky."
Smith claims one must be able to justify naturalism/materialism before she can be an informed naturalist/materialist, and it's very clear this justification process must be a philosophical one. So Smith ends up being an elitist as a philosopher, something I wrote about in my book Unapologetic. All people should look to philosophers for the answers because, well, they are best suited to answer to unanswerable questions, and they are also the ones to say which questions are unanswerable, right? Not so fast.
Perhaps the reason why most naturalists might not be able to answer the fundamentalist theistic philosophers of religion is because of their obfuscations! They speak a different language, not the language of scientific reasoning, but the language of faith, of distortion and confusion, which I also wrote about in my book.
The truth is Smith's so-called "theist" or fundamentalist philosophers have in fact been answered since 2001, when Smith first wrote his essay. I'm especially fond of Dr. Hector Avalos (see the blog marquee above for his books) and Jaco Gericke's critique [pdf]. So people should stop quoting Smith on this. It's old news. There was a time the fundamentalist theistic philosophers took us off guard with new and different obfuscations (notable atheists who answered them were Antony Flew, William Rowe, Keith Parsons, and especially Michael Martin). That time is over. In the years that followed, the fundamentalist theistic philosophers have been trounced.
Smith wrote about theism as if we should know what this entails based on a concept of a perfect being. Not every theist agrees with the exact specific attributes of such a being with their derivations. More importantly, theists widely disagree with each other over which religion is the correct one, so there is no such thing as theism in the wild. It's only a few chosen set of abstracted beliefs adopted for the purpose of discussion, which do not reflect the whole religion from which they stem from. The fact is, only robust full-fledged religions exist, so there is no such thing as mere theism or mere Christianity, as I've argued here.
As commenter ephemerol aptly put it:
There is no such thing as "theism," in the same way as there's no parents with 2.4 children and you can't walk into a general store and purchase a nonspecific item.
Naturalism and the burden of proof question. If we treat robust or whole religions, rather than an abstracted/contrived theism, we are indeed justified in rejecting their spooky things, like miracles with resurrected zombies, and demonic beings. I edited a good book on miracles you should read, which explains why the burden of proof for extraordinary claims of miracles has not been met. The best explanations are going to be simpler ones, per Ockham's Razor. Furthermore, without any objective evidence reasonable people can simply dismiss these tales, per Hitchens' Razor. So the burden of proof for this kind of robust god, who additionally wants us to believe and be saved (II Peter 3:9), is doubly god's. It's god's alone, who must provide the needed objective evidence for reasonable belief, period. Until such time as it's presented every reasonable person is justified in unbelief, which is the most significant and important point, supportive of and consistent with naturalism/materialism.
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