The Inevitability of Naturalism
Supernaturalism is Inherently Impossible
I’ve long been interested in prebiology and chemical evolution and was recently watching a video where a scientist said “life is the most interesting natural phenomenon.” This got me to thinking about how life being a natural phenomenon is basically axiomatically true. It can’t not be a natural phenomenon. The idea that life is just absolutely different from non-life and that there is a clear division between living and non-living is almost absurd if you really think about it. Even upon theistic religious presuppositions, it doesn’t really make any sense.
The fields of chemical evolution and prebiology have discovered a grey area between living and non-living. By simply re-creating early Earth conditions in a laboratory setting and observing what happens, we can essentially create proto-lifeforms (i.e. chemicals that can reproduce, consume, and interact with one another in a lifelike way). I have discussed this in a post elsewhere. Religious people tend to be very scared of the idea that life can be explained entirely on naturalistic grounds but I think this fear is totally unwarranted.
To be clear, I do not believe in the existence of God. Nevertheless, something that stuck with me from the days when I was Eastern Orthodox was the notion in Orthodox Christianity that nothing is supernatural. The idea of something supernatural is just inherently incoherent. If God, angels, demons, and prophetic experiences are real, they aren’t supernatural phenomena but natural phenomena. In fact, I don’t think that a Christian believer ought to necessarily have a problem with the discovery that life emerged naturally from physical/chemical processes and then evolved into all of its higher forms. As I have pointed out elsewhere, to interpret the biblical creation narrative as literal historical fact is to miss the entire point of the story! If God created the universe by design and wrote the laws of physics/chemistry, why would it really pose a problem to believers to discover that life emerges from physics? If nature is designed by God and God values living things, why is it problematic to suppose that God wrote the laws of nature in such a way that would lead to the emergence of life? and why would it be a problem to suppose that God would design natural laws in a manner through which “primitive” spontaneously emerging lifeforms would eventually evolve into more complex and sophisticated beings?
A great many Christian theologians and intellectuals do believe in Darwinism. C. S. Lewis, Alvin Plantinga, and Kallistos Ware, for instance, see no conflict whatsoever between Darwinian evolution and Christian theism. The conflict between the Bible and Darwinism really only exists if you read the Bible in a literalist manner in which it was never intended to be interpreted in the first place. There must, of course, be a naturalist explanation for everything, even upon Christian presuppositions. Why? Because what the hell would a supernatural explanation even be? If God exists, then He exists naturally. If He created a world with angels, demons, and magic, then all of those things are really natural parts of the world.
In fact, I would go a little bit further. Assuming that God does exist and that He did design the universe, why should it matter if angels, demons, and magic are really real or merely psychological phenomena? Angels are a medium through which God communicates with man — why must these “angels” be really real rather than just “in our heads.” If God is all-knowing and all-powerful, then He could have designed our universe in a way that allows Him to communicate with mankind through hallucinations. The really real existence of angels, demons, prophetic visions, heaven, hell, magic, miracles, etc. is simply unnecessary. If all of these things are merely mental phenomena rather than substantial phenomena, how would that in any way subtract anything from the Christian faith? Christianity, interpreted in a certain way, becomes unfalsifiable — yet it also loses its explanatory value because the spontaneous emergence of life from prebiological processes and evolution through natural selection appears to be able to explain as much as religion can. God can be cited as an “explanation” for the existence of the universe but nothing could ever be posited as an explanation for the existence of God. The reason for the existence of God simply takes on the status of the new ultimate unanswerable and unfathomable mystery, a status once held by the question of the reason for the existence of the universe.
I don’t think that science and religion necessarily conflict here, so long as your interpretation of religious dogma isn’t overly literalist in nature. I do, however, think that theistic religions have a major problem insofar as there just can’t possibly be any convincing argument for why I ought to believe in any of them. But that is an argument for a different post.
