While listening to an old Don Johnson Christian Debates podcast, he pointed out that his guest was presupposing naturalism. My gut response was “Well …duh.” If I see card trick, I would never consider the option that it was the result of actual magic; I would search for some natural explanation for it. Is this presupposing naturalism? That sounds so closed minded. Do you agree with how the phrase was used? Is it possible to presuppose, say, the laws of physics, or do they just exist?
It’s even worse than that. Science is based on a logical fallacy (affirming the consequent).
- If P, then Q.
- Q.
- Therefore, P.
Huh, that’s weird. My computer is acting funn–
All knowledge starts with a supposition. True knowledge comes from finding and testing that supposition.
In science, for example, naturalism works. So why use another concept?
What is even meant here by naturalism? Because I associate the word with late 19th C lit, and the idea that a person’s personality and destiny are determined by the apathetic environmental forces that work on them.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_%28philosophy%29
“Naturalism commonly refers to the philosophical belief that only natural laws and forces (as opposed to supernatural ones) operate in the world and that nothing exists beyond the natural world”
OP, your gut response was correct. Almost everything that one encounters on a day-to-day basis validates naturalism at first blush. Those things that are less obvious, like rainbows or the motion of the moon, or lightning, also turn out to be explained by, and so corroborate, naturalism. There are always shadows, where for some reason or other we have difficulty proving naturalism (“I swear I left my car keys in my pocket, but now they are on the table”). But of course it is a gross logical fallacy to take this as evidence against naturalism. Naturalism is clearly correct 99.999% of the time, and so the logical assumption should be that in the remaining 0.001% of the time is not supernatural unless there is evidence to the contrary (which there is not).
The important distinction is really not between naturalism and supernaturalism, since supernaturalism is a vague term - what’s supernatural anyway?
Really, the important distinction is between things that are observed vs. things that cannot be observed.
Naturalist philosophy in this context only consists of those things with can be observed (directly or indirectly - e.g. Dark Matter is observed via its gravitational effect on visible matter) hence it’s not really so much of a presupposition as working with what you have.
Depending on the religious philosophy, God may be construed as either observable or non-observable in various ways.
What really gets silly is the presupposition of supernaturalism, because supernatural entities can then be used to explain literally everything, including that which can simultaneously be explained by natural or observable causes (e.g., gravity pulls the water down the waterfall, but who’s to say the water nymphs don’t play a role as well?).
Just to be clear, it is logically valid to use the following reasoning:
- If P, then Q is more probable.
- Q.
- Therefore, P is more probable.
This reasoning is validated by the mathematical fact that prob(Q | P) > prob(Q) implies that prob(P | Q) > prob(P). This in turn is just a logical consequence of Bayes’s theorem:
prob(P | Q) / prob(P) = prob(Q | P) / prob(Q).
No, it’s using Occam’s Razor. The existence of nothing more than the known natural forces should be the presumption you run on unless and until something comes along that cannot be explained by only them.
Supernatural explanations are ones that invoke hypothetical beings that are not directly observable, that have powers that human beings do not have, but who can, at least potentially be communicated with and have their behavior influenced by the sorts of communicative means that we use to influence the behavior of other humans. That is, means such as talking to them, and asking, begging or flattering them into doing what you want (prayer), bribing or otherwise paying them (sacrifices), and (in the case of certain putatively less powerful supernatural entities) threatening them.
Naturalism is, pretty much, just the policy of avoiding supernatural explanations, and providing alternatives wherever possible. That it is a good policy *is *an unproven and unprovable assumption. However, it is an assumption that has shown itself to be very fruitful and productive of new insights over the past two and a half millennia (i.e., since it was first tried, by the early Greek presocratic philosophers), and even more so over the past four centuries or so (i.e., since the “scientific revolution”). Supernaturalism has never had anything like the same sort of record of success. Thus, the smart money (indeed, all but the wilfully dumb money) is on naturalism.
And naturalism isn’t a vague term? What is “nature,” the root word of both naturalism and supernaturalism?
Pretty much anything that can be directly or indirectly observed, as per my post above.
To elaborate a little on the above, the whole process of science has been to elucidate natural laws (hence naturalism.) If indeed God were detected and observed, as most commonly conceived in Western thought, God would be the source of such natural laws, and it would be very difficult for naturalism to not include God. What could be more natural than God if God existed?
However, it’s difficult to go the other way - I can’t think of anything that has been objectively observed and the conclusion* is that it is not natural but supernatural. That’s why naturalism is a less vague term than supernaturalism.
[sub]*Consensus conclusion, that is. The Catholic Church, for one example, uses a conclusion of supernaturalism of events surrounding persons to be given sainthood. Generally these conclusions are very rarely accepted, and the existence of the events themselves as reported are rarely accepted, outside the Catholic Church.[/sub]
EVERYONE presupposes naturalism. Even the most God-besotted fanatics use the evidence of their senses to navigate from the dinner table to the toilet. In fact, it’s hard to imagine how anyone could conduct the most basic functions of day-to-day life without assuming that the evidence provided by our eyes and ears correlates with reality in some meaningful way.
If someone wishes to propose that we should SOMETIMES abandon naturalism in favor of some alternate epistemology, the burden is upon them to explain why such an exception is justified.
I’ve been using a divining rod all my life. You mean everyone doesn’t do that? :eek:
To simplify further: Hear hoofbeats, expect horses, not zebras.
John, your weiner is not a divining rod. Probably.
I still swear there’s something occult and downright sinister at work, disappearing my socks.
The natural/supernatural distinction seems the basic fallacy to me.
- If something is observed, it is natural.
- If something observed is not explained in our current understanding, we should consider the possibility that our understanding is incomplete or erroneous.
- Keys teleport and time travel, and socks generate miniature short-lived black holes into which said socks disappear.
There is no supernatural, but our understanding is incomplete.
I hope nobody questions that the universe overwhelmingly follows stable laws. Controlled experiments are very powerful in predicting future events. Charles and Boyle worked out how gases generally behave. As we developed more precise measurements, we discovered small flaws in their laws. No it wasn’t Satan, but intermolecular forces.
We have never been able to reproduce unnatural exceptions to the laws of science. We continue to learn new things. It turns out the the classic description of noble gasses, not known to form compounds, was more accurate than the arrogant ‘‘inert gasses don’t form compounds’’ found in my textbooks. The chemical world yawned, said yeah, hybrid orbitals, and went on to more important things.
So there may be exceptions to naturalism, but they don’t lend themselves to science’s most powerful tool, the controlled expement. Even the other powerful tool, observation doesn’t work well on the very infrequent.
This. The correct response to a moron like the one mentioned in the OP is “You say that like it’s a bad thing”.
The difference between naturalism and Christianity is that we’ve seen untold numbers of things caused by natural causes, and none caused by his imaginary friend. It’s the same reason we presuppose that dogs exist: because there is nothing we know about the universe that suggests it isn’t true.