Табиғаттанушылық дүниетанымы және құдайсыздық

Philosophical worldview rejecting 'supernatural'
the worldview

Metaphysical naturalism (also called ontological naturalism, philosophical naturalism and antisupernaturalism) is a philosophical worldview which holds that there is nothing but natural elements, principles, and relations of the kind studied by the natural sciences. Methodological naturalism is a philosophical basis for science, for which metaphysical naturalism provides only one possible ontological foundation. Broadly, the corresponding theological perspective is religious naturalism or spiritual naturalism. More specifically, metaphysical naturalism rejects the supernatural concepts and explanations that are part of many religions.

In Carl Sagan’s words: "The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be." According to Arthur C. Danto, naturalism, in recent usage, is a species of philosophical monism according to which whatever exists or happens is natural in the sense of being susceptible to explanation through methods which, although paradigmatically exemplified in the natural sciences, are continuous from domain to domain of objects and events. Hence, naturalism is polemically defined as repudiating the view that there exists or could exist any entities which lie, in principle, beyond the scope of scientific explanation. Regarding the vagueness of the general term "naturalism", David Papineau traces the current usage to philosophers in early 20th century America such as John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook, and Roy Wood Sellars: "So understood, 'naturalism' is not a particularly informative term as applied to contemporary philosophers. The great majority of contemporary philosophers would happily accept naturalism as just characterized—that is, they would both reject 'supernatural' entities, and allow that science is a possible route (if not necessarily the only one) to important truths about the 'human spirit'." Papineau remarks that philosophers widely regard naturalism as a "positive" term, and "few active philosophers nowadays are happy to announce themselves as 'non naturalists'", while noting that "philosophers concerned with religion tend to be less enthusiastic about 'naturalism'" and that despite an "inevitable" divergence due to its popularity, if more narrowly construed, (to the chagrin of John McDowell, David Chalmers and Jennifer Hornsby, for example), those not so disqualified remain nonetheless content "to set the bar for 'naturalism' higher." Philosopher and theologian Alvin Plantinga, a well known critic of naturalism in general, comments: "Naturalism is presumably not a religion. In one very important respect, however, it resembles religion: it can be said to perform the cognitive function of a religion. There is that range of deep human questions to which a religion typically provides an answer Like a typical religion, naturalism gives a set of answers to these and similar questions".

Metaphysical naturalism is the philosophical basis of science as described by Kate and Vitaly (2000). "There are certain philosophical assumptions made at the base of the scientific method – namely, 1) that reality is objective and consistent, 2) that humans have the capacity to perceive reality accurately, and that 3) rational explanations exist for elements of the real world. These assumptions are the basis of naturalism, the philosophy on which science is grounded. Philosophy is at least implicitly at the core of every decision we make or position we take, it is obvious that correct philosophy is a necessity for scientific inquiry to take place." Steven Schafersman, agrees that methodological naturalism is "the adoption or assumption of philosophical naturalism within scientific method with or without fully accepting or believing it science is not metaphysical and does not depend on the ultimate truth of any metaphysics for its success, but methodological naturalism must be adopted as a strategy or working hypothesis for science to succeed. We may therefore be agnostic about the ultimate truth of naturalism, but must nevertheless adopt it and investigate nature as if nature is all that there is."

Contemporary naturalists possess a wide diversity of beliefs within metaphysical naturalism. Most metaphysical naturalists have adopted some form of materialism or physicalism.

According to metaphysical naturalism, if nature is all there is, just as natural cosmological processes, e. g. quantum fluctuations from a multiverse, led to the Big Bang, and stellar nucleosynthesis brought upon the earliest chemical elements throughout stellar evolution, the formation of the Solar System and the processes involved in abiogenesis arose from natural causes. Naturalists reason about how, not if evolution happened. They maintain that humanity's existence is not by intelligent design but rather a natural process of emergence. With the protoplanetary disk creating planetary bodies, including the Sun and moon, conditions for life to arise billions of years ago, along with the natural formation of plate tectonics, the atmosphere, land masses, and the origin of oceans would also contribute to the kickstarting of biological evolution to occur after the arrival of the earliest organisms, as evidenced throughout both the fossil record and the geological time scale.

Metaphysical naturalists do not believe in a soul or spirit, nor in ghosts, and when explaining what constitutes the mind they rarely appeal to substance dualism. If one's mind, or rather one's identity and existence as a person, is entirely the product of natural processes, three conclusions follow according to W. T. Stace. Cognitive sciences are able to provide accounts of how cultural and psychological phenomena, such as religion, morality, language, and more, evolved through natural processes. Consciousness itself would also be susceptible to the same evolutionary principles that select other traits.

Metaphysical naturalists hold that intelligence is the refinement and improvement of naturally evolved faculties. Naturalists believe anyone who wishes to have more beliefs that are true than are false should seek to perfect and consistently employ their reason in testing and forming beliefs. Empirical methods (especially those of proven use in the sciences) are unsurpassed for discovering the facts of reality, while methods of pure reason alone can securely discover logical errors.

According to metaphysical naturalism, immateriality being unprocedural and unembodiable, isn't differentiable from nothingness. The immaterial nothingness of the soul, being a non ontic state, isn't compartmentalizable nor attributable to different persons and different memories, it is non operational and it (nothingness) cannot be manifested in different states in order it represents information.

In the context of creation and evolution debates, Internet Infidels co founder Jeffery Jay Lowder argues against what he calls "the argument from bias", that a priori, the supernatural is merely ruled out due to an unexamined stipulation. Lowder believes "there are good empirical reasons for believing that metaphysical naturalism is true, and therefore a denial of the supernatural need not be based upon an a priori assumption". Lowder argues the correlation between mind and brain implies that supernatural souls do not exist because the theist position, according to Lowder, is that the mind depends upon this soul instead of the brain.

In contrast with the argument from reason or evolutionary argument against naturalism, it can be argued that cognitive biases are better explained by natural causes than as the work of God.

Arguments against metaphysical naturalism include the following examples.

Notre Dame philosophy of religion professor and Christian apologist Alvin Plantinga argues, in his evolutionary argument against naturalism, that the probability that evolution has produced humans with reliable true beliefs, is low or inscrutable, unless their evolution was guided, for example, by God. According to David Kahan of the University of Glasgow, in order to understand how beliefs are warranted, a justification must be found in the context of supernatural theism, as in Plantinga's epistemology. (See also Supernormal stimuli.) Plantinga argues that together, naturalism and evolution provide an insurmountable "defeater for the belief that our cognitive faculties are reliable", i. e., a skeptical argument along the lines of Descartes' evil demon or brain in a vat. blockquote|Take philosophical naturalism to be the belief that there aren't any supernatural entities—no such person as God, for example, but also no other supernatural entities, and nothing at all like God. My claim was that naturalism and contemporary evolutionary theory are at serious odds with one another—and this despite the fact that the latter is ordinarily thought to be one of the main pillars supporting the edifice of the former. (Of course I am not attacking the theory of evolution, or anything in that neighborhood; I am instead attacking the conjunction of naturalism with the view that human beings have evolved in that way. I see no similar problems with the conjunction of theism and the idea that human beings have evolved in the way contemporary evolutionary science suggests.) More particularly, I argued that the conjunction of naturalism with the belief that we human beings have evolved in conformity with current evolutionary doctrine is in a certain interesting way self defeating or self referentially incoherent. Plantinga's argument has also been criticized by philosopher Daniel Dennett and independent scholar Richard Carrier who argue that a cognitive apparatus for truth finding can result from natural selection.

Edward B. Davis and Robin Collins, "Scientific Naturalism". In Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction, ed. Gary B. Ferngren, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002, pp. 322–34.

Gary Drescher, Good and Real, The MIT Press, 2006. David Malet Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Mario Bunge, 2006, Chasing Reality: Strife over Realism, University of Toronto Press. and 2001, Scientific Realism: Selected Essays of Mario Bunge, Prometheus Books. Richard Carrier, 2005, Sense and Goodness without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism, AuthorHouse. Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds), 2004. Naturalism in Question. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Daniel Dennett, 2003, Freedom Evolves, Penguin. and 2006
Andrew Melnyk, 2003, A Physicalist Manifesto: Thoroughly Modern Materialism, Cambridge University Press. Jeffrey Poland, 1994, Physicalism: The Philosophical Foundations, Oxford University Press.

James Beilby, ed., 2002, Naturalism Defeated? Essays on Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism, Cornell University Press. William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, eds., 2000, Naturalism: A Critical Analysis, Routledge. Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, 2008, Naturalism, Eerdmans Publishing. Phillip E. Johnson, 1998, Reason in the Balance: The Case Against Naturalism in Science, Law & Education, InterVarsity Press. and 2002, The Wedge of Truth: Splitting the Foundations of Naturalism, InterVarsity Press. C. S. Lewis, ed., 1996, "Miracles", Harper Collins. Michael Rea, 2004, World without Design: The Ontological Consequences of Naturalism, Oxford University Press. Victor Reppert, 2003, C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason, InterVarsity Press. Mark Steiner, 2002, The Applicability of Mathematics as a Philosophical Problem, Harvard University Press.