“You religious believers set up your postulates as truths, and we take you at your word. By definition, you render your beliefs unassailable and unavailable.” -Strahler [1]
It seems a little bit like divine providence to me that the final philosophy paper I read before graduating was related to a subject that lands so close to my heart. I could have been assigned some more Mill vs. Kant bullshit, some stuff about computers and intelligence, the intricacies of language, or the nature of knowledge. Instead, I was inspired and am sitting here writing about the difference between the only things we can know exist (natural) and this other category some people constantly refer to without ever giving a coherent explanation of what it is (the non-natural). This subject has been a source of confusion, frustration, and heated discussions throughout my college career, and I somehow usually ended up in my own corner defending naturalism while others talked about the non-natural and non-physical as if they are real things. Divine intervention would be a perfectly logical explanation for what is happening in my life right here, right now.
Some people might even be convinced that divine intervention or fate really is the explanation for why I am writing on this subject, and probably use similar logic every day to say all kinds of stuff that they cannot prove empirically. I can’t show they are wrong, because a naturalist like me is always at a disadvantage due to the logical impossibility of proving a universal negative. While people around us speak authoritatively on gods and multiverses, Platonic forms and consciousnesses beamed into human brains from who-knows-where, we must sit and wait for proof before we can speak up with an opinion. The thesis of this paper is that the divergence here lies mainly in the ratio of weights a person puts on evidence and logical possibility. For a naturalist, evidence is heavier than logic. To others, logical possibility weighs the same as, if not more than, empirical fact. This idea is explained best by Barbara Forrest in her Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism [1], and the following will be composed of commentary on this paper and how it helps explain how I have come to view naturalism and what kinds of things a philosophical naturalist can and cannot say about all things natural, both scientific and unscientific.
1. NATURAL AND NON-NATURAL THINGS
Question: what is a non-natural thing? This category is so broad it sometimes oversteps its bounds and even includes things that are obviously natural when we think about it for more than five seconds. Indeed, it is sometimes synonymous with "man-made," as if living a human life is inherently against the laws of nature. Vaccines, space travel, and information have all, from time to time, been labeled as non-natural by those who have ethical objections to them or a metaphysical ax to grind. The type of humans who try to distinguish between the natural and non-natural is at least three-fold. First, there are those who don't want to do or use non-natural things (I refuse to take vaccines, natural immunity is fine!), and second, those who deny natural explanations for human origins (Darwin was wrong, I didn’t evolve from a monkey!). The third are those logicians and mathematicians that wish for world to flow from order, instead of the other way around, and for humans to be the only things capable of receiving such sacred knowledge. Because of all this, the whole conflict between the natural and non-natural seems based firmly on human exceptionalism, asserting that humans are not only fundamentally separate from nature, but superior to it.
My personal definition for “non-natural” is simply that it is the word “natural” with the other word “non" in front of it and a hyphen between the two. It doesn’t have much meaning itself, because if there are non-natural things, we wouldn’t be able to access them. Natural things include, but are not limited to: Information, math, logic, trees, angler fish, the dwarf planet Pluto, humans, Black-capped Chickadees, alligator lizards, scissors, pillows, terrorists, and the religious delusions that cause them to blow up buildings (which are also natural). Natural processes output natural products, of which we are one and thus everything we ever made or thought. This is supported by literally all of the physical evidence collected over the history of humanity and its engagement in the scientific enterprise. This history of success of the methods of science is the grounding for not only my reasoning to call myself a naturalist but also for philosophical and methodological naturalism as described by Forrest. It is the key feature missing from all supernatural explanations that have been put forth over time and the reason why we can ignore them so long as they continue to call themselves supernatural.
2. METHODOLOGICAL AND PHILOSOPHICAL NATURALISM
Forrest’s paper talks about philosophical naturalism and methodological naturalism. Methodological naturalism is defined by:
“(1) the reliance on scientific method, grounded in empiricism, as the only reliable method of acquiring knowledge about the natural world, and (2) the inadmissibility of the supernatural or transcendent into its metaphysical scheme.” – pg 2 [1]
By using the scientific method as our sole method of finding causal explanations, we automatically preclude supernatural causes, which have no explanatory power, because they cannot be poked and prodded by the scientific method, by the definition usually given by those who believe in the supernatural. Naturalists did not sit down and decide that god was a dumb idea and shouldn't be taken seriously. The possibility remains logical, but the point is that bare logical possibilities (non-contradictory ideas) are a dime a dozen. Unicorn farts on Mars are logically possible. As far as our only acceptable method of inquiry (the scientific method) is concerned, supernatural explanations for a natural world make the job of the scientist harder, because they remove the requirement that all natural phenomenon have natural causes. Says Forrest:
“Introducing supernatural explanations into science would destroy its explanatory force since it would be required to incorporate as an operational principle the premise that literally anything which is logically possible can become an actuality, despite any and all scientific laws; the stability of science would consequently be destroyed.” – pg 4 [1]
Allowing the supernatural to hold an explanatory role in science, in effect, ruins science altogether.
Methodological naturalism is a sort of epistemology, which is empiricist in nature, and concerned with how we collect information in a way where we can learn something. It is a procedure that is performed and dependably produces results in the form of new knowledge. But this doesn’t mean it is the only logically possible way a human could come to know something: they could hear voices or hallucinate (hear or see god), which could cause them to believe that what they experienced has a supernatural origin. But there is no procedure to dig deeper within a naturalist methodology if they insist on a supernatural explanation. They disqualify themselves from the game, as Strahler states in the epigraph of this essay, by the very assertions they make about the supernatural, that it is inaccessible to science.
“The fact that there is no successful procedure for knowing the supernatural does not logically preclude its being known at all, i.e., through intuition or revelation. The problem is that there is no procedure for determining the legitimacy of intuition and revelation as ways of knowing, and no procedure for either confirming or disconfirming the supernatural content of intuitions or revelations.” – pg 10 [1]
Because of this, it is not the sciences that leave the supernatural out of the science game but the supernaturalists who choose to play a different one that keeps their assumptions forever intact.
Philosophical naturalism is the way one organizes their worldview under methodological naturalism. A philosophical naturalist's collage representing their worldview pulls from facts gained through methodological naturalism and would likely exclude anything supernatural. If it included them, they would have to be labelled as things we cannot know (truly supernatural) or have not yet found a way to measure. They would be things that are merely logically possible. The funny thing about logically possible explanations is that, as we probe the aspects about them that can be measured (physical effects inside brains, fossil records showing the evolution of life), we find that in many cases even the spookier subjects have good scientific explanations for them, all the way up to religion itself. EO Wilson (RIP) says in Forrest’s paper:
“Most importantly, we have come to the crucial stage in the history of biology when religion itself is subject to the explanations of the natural sciences . . . sociobiology can account for the very origin of mythology by the principle of natural selection acting on the genetically evolving material structure of the human brain.
If this interpretation is correct, the final, decisive edge enjoyed by scientific naturalism will come from its capacity to explain traditional religion, its chief competitor, as a wholly material phenomenon. . . .” - pg 11 [1]
Supernatural phenomena just become natural phenomena, and their mystical nature vanishes along with our ignorance of the subject.
The philosophical naturalist does not jump to conclusions about things that are not accessible to examination by their methodology. They don’t have to, because they can have a certain amount of confidence, gained purely through the success of the scientific method, that the method will continue to work. Whether or not any of us will be around to see how far it can go it is another question altogether, but the possibilities of a supernatural cause for anything we find important dwindles by the day. One can cry faith in science here if they want, but it is a faith that is backed up with a significant evidential down payment that has yet to be made in the name of supernaturalism.
The question asked in the philosophy course that inspired me to write this was “Does the scientific method, together with the success of the scientific project, warrant disbelief in anything non-natural?” and the answer to this is no, here in Forrest and also in my dumb brain. But it is a mistake to think that the boundaries of what a naturalist is comfortable believing in or not were drawn arbitrarily, in a naïve attempt to claim confidence that what science discovers constitutes all possible knowledge. If a supernaturalist is interested in justifying their views satisfactorily, we are all ears and await their proof and methodology. Unfortunately for them, they cannot use the scientific method because they define their subject as non-natural. If they did use the scientific method, they would get unrecognizable outputs, natural explanations in the form of neural spike chains, mental disorders, cultural evolution, and so forth. Strangely this would result in new knowledge for the naturalist, while at the same time, the supernaturalist would be scratching their head and going back to the drawing board to find a way to get a supernatural answer. They would, sadly, feel like they had learned nothing about their supernatural subject when in reality, they had learned all they ever needed to know.
Philosophical naturalists are not automatically required to take supernatural beliefs as a bad thing for people to have; it merely asserts that these things aren’t accessible to science. I aim only to defend science as the best way to obtain shareable knowledge about natural things, but I by no means think that it is the only way we obtain knowledge. Practicing hobbies, reading fiction, and instincts are all ways we can gain knowledge about the natural world, it is just that we cannot publish a paper or assign statistical significance to these things. My feelings are not fit for scientific investigation, so as the sole feeler of my feelings I must accept that the most important thing to me, my SELF, is not scientifically interesting. And as a philosophical naturalist, my “self” must hang in the previously mentioned category of natural things we don’t understand yet. Which is perfectly fine — that category dwarfs the categories that contain knowledge of the world by many orders of magnitude. Here, just as in countless other circumstances, I am not special.
3. CONCLUSION
While reading Methodological Naturalism and Philosophical Naturalism, I kept wondering to myself if something this obvious really had to be written on paper. This paper was one of the best explanations of naturalism and the difference between logical possibilities and empirical fact derived from scientific exploration I have read. Unfortunately, her argument is not likely to convince anyone who isn't already convinced of the usefulness of methodological and philosophical naturalism. The weight of the argument hangs on the shoulders of the reader, stuffed in a backpack full of books, and the reader most likely must be someone interested in science and understanding of its limits. Additionally, they must already have a view of themselves as a poorly understood natural thing, a product of natural causes like a diamond, rain storm, or tree frog. They must appreciate how easy it is to be wrong and how precious the scientific method is for giving us a way to be right, even if only for a few fleeting moments.
I must stress that all this argument means is something similar to what Feynman said in Six Easy Pieces [2], or maybe even Sellars in The Scientific Image of Man [3]: that investigation into the supernatural cannot be scientific. However, no one said that the unscientific could not be fun to learn about or worthwhile to dabble in. The scientific image of man as a pile of jiggling atoms has little to no effect on my daily life, besides the preaching of the benefits science education to my friends and kids. In the manifest image, I'm a dad, drummer, photographer, hunter, and husband. I am Santa Claus at the right time of year, and all of these things are insanely rewarding and fundamentally unscientific. But it is all still natural, and the scientific method only lets you learn about facts about some of the natural, not about what it is like to be in the natural. This will always have to be felt and will probably always remain, thankfully, unscientific.
Works Cited
[1]
B. Forrest, "METHODOLOGICAL NATURALISMAND PHILOSOPHICAL NATURALISM: CLARIFYING THE CONNECTION," vol. 3, no. 2, 2000.
[2]
R. Feynman, Six easy pieces: Essentials of physics explained by its most brilliant teacher, Addison-Wesley Puplishing, 1994.
[3]
W. Sellars, "HILOSOPHY AND THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGE OF MAN," in Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1963, pp. 35-78.