What is Naturalism?
The worldview of naturalism is excellently summarized by the Bible in the first sentence of Psalms 14: “The fool says in his heart ‘there is no God.” People who hold a naturalistic worldview believe that there is nothing else outside or beyond nature. In their view, reality is spatially contained in nature; there is no external agency in the form of a supernatural God. Those who accept the worldview of naturalism believe that only nature and human beings interact to produce all reality there is or that will ever be.

Intellectual deceptions of naturalism
Here are some of the more common intellectual deceptions that the worldview of naturalism projects into your courses, textbooks and lectures.

Naturalism denies order in existence
One of the most contradictory beliefs of naturalism is its denial of order in nature. What everybody sees as order by default, naturalism interprets as accidents of chaos. In what should be an embarrassing contradiction, adherents of naturalism expect you to think and behave orderly in learning and in everyday life. Naturalism has no convincing explanation of how it routinely makes intellectual and practical use of order given its fundamental belief in blind chaos.

Naturalism denies purpose and meaning
Naturalism sees no objective meaning in life since everything is a product of random chance. Basic routines of life have no inherent meaning or purpose if we follow the view of naturalism. Your process of thinking, the facts that you are in the university, and that you look for food when hungry— all have no purpose or meaning whatsoever if you accept naturalist viewpoints. If we follow naturalism logically, there is no purpose or meaning in intellectual activities. Naturalism is a straightforward route to practical pessimism and hopelessness.

Naturalism denies free will and responsibility
Naturalism doesn’t allow for free will in an individual. It holds that actions and behaviour of a person are determined by genetic and environmental factors. This is to say that people are not responsible for their actions as individuals. This belief runs contrary to basic human experiences. You only need to ask people with this worldview a simple set of questions, and observe how their belief system runs into trouble. How, in the first place, did they become believers in naturalism? Didn’t they decide that naturalism is true? If they did, was that process (of deciding to accept naturalism) not an exercise of their individual free will? How did blind chance determine that what learning means to you is the same as what it means to others?

Naturalism denies objective morality
One can’t believe in naturalism and objective right or wrong at the same time. Take naturalism seriously and you have no ground for defending any form of morality or human right. There is no way of explaining the jump from the primary assumptions of naturalism to practical morality that is the foundation of social existence of all humanity. If naturalism is true, we should expect its beliefs to generate patterns of relationship and morality that are consistent with its fundamental principles. On the contrary, the empirical evidence about morality points away from the tenets of naturalism. In personal and social relationships, we expect equity and fairness. We condemn greed and tyranny. We experience shame and guilt. We praise and blame others and ourselves. Surely, these enduring and universal moral characteristics of human beings could not have arisen from chaos and chance as naturalism would like us to believe.

Attractions of naturalism
Many scholars are attracted to naturalism for intellectual and ethical reasons. Intellectually, it presents the material reality as the only object and end of academic inquiry. Such reductionism promises to remove the burden of “beyond material” speculations from reason. But in so doing, naturalism arbitrarily caps our rational capacity before we have determined the true boundaries of reality.

Some thinkers use the slow progress of knowledge as an argument for this stunting pressure of naturalism on intellectual imagination. In their view, the sheer scale of the unknown in nature is a sufficient reason for not recognizing other non-natural dimensions in the pursuit of knowledge.

Others are attracted to the naturalistic worldview because it promises to make no fundamental moral demands on the intellect. This also is a false promise. Good scholarship goes with a moral base. The street of reality which you must walk as a scholar and as a functional social being is lined with moral barricades.

Conclusion
To take naturalism or postmodernism seriously means that you must necessarily reject essential biblical truths. Naturalism grounds itself in beliefs that are antithetical to the reality of human experiences. In an unavoidable attempt to adjust to practical reality, naturalism jumps from the premises of chaos and chance which it affirms, to order which it denies. It neither explains this jump nor concedes the implied contradiction.

Tom Th.

See related posts: Encountering non-Christian Worldviews in Your Courses:Part 2: Postmodernism

Studying from the Christian Worldview. Understanding the beginning of knowledge.