The Failure of Naturalism

“Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. So they are without excuse” (Rom 1:20).

First, lets defines two terms. The first term is materialism. Materialism is “the doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications” (OED). This term has gone out of favor with many others because it also means “a tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values.” And this latter definition is what people usually think of when they hear the word materialism.

The second word is naturalism. Naturalism is “the philosophical belief that everything arises from natural properties and causes, and supernatural or spiritual explanations are excluded or discounted” (OED). This has become the more common word for this belief system. Of course, they try to hide the fact that it is a belief system by adding the adjective scientific. The truth is that it is still a “philosophical belief.” Adjectives can’t change that.

I might mention another word, physicalism. Physicalism is similar to the previous two words. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains, “Physicalism is, in slogan form, the thesis that everything is physical.” It really doesn’t matter much whether everything is matter, natural, or physical. They all deny the “supernatural or spiritual.”

Since naturalism holds that the natural world is all that exists, there is no God, angels, or a supernatural of any kind. How do they know this? They don’t. It is a presupposition, it is something they assume to be true before they look at the evidence. And when they look at the universe, they see what they expect to see. It is called confirmation bias.

The fatal flaw of naturalism is that it cannon explain consciousness. In truth, we can only be certain of one thing, and that is consciousness. René Descartes said, “cogito, ergo sum,” which is Latin for, “I think, therefore I am.” For even in doubting this, we prove there is a doubter. Denying this proves there is a denier. René Descartes realized that this is the one thing that cannot be doubted. Everything else is less than certain.

So the one reality we can be certain of is consciousness. But physical science has no place for consciousness. And no matter how hard they try, cognitive scientists have never come up with a good theory on how the brain produces consciousness. And there is no evidence that the mind emerges from the brain, only that they are correlated somehow.

Instead of matter producing the mind, I think that Mind produces matter. I think consciousness is fundamental. Of course, I identify this Mind with God. The universe has a beginning, therefore it had a Beginner. The universe has design, that is because it has a Designer. DNA is called the book of life, and its Author is God. But don’t take my word for it.

Scientists are beginning to question the naturalist assumption. After summarizing the implications of quantum theory, Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, in their book Quantum Enigma, state, “Quantum theory thus denies the existence of a physically real world independent of its observation.” The urge to explain away consciousness will not go away. After all, they point out, “The encounter of physics with consciousness has troubled physicists since the inception of quantum theory more than eight decades ago.”

One deep insight is that cognition and consciousness are not the same things. Cognition is a computational system like a computer. A being is conscious only if there is “something that it is like” to be that creature. That is, in the words of Thomas Nagel, that there is “some subjective way the world seems or appears from the creature’s mental or experiential point of view.”

In mindfulness meditation you realize that consciousness is not thinking, it is an awareness that goes much deeper. It is the only reality we can be sure of. I am conscious, therefore consciousness exists. Physical reality has no existence outside of consciousness. If you were not conscious, nothing would exist.

Naturalism, therefore, cannot be right. It eliminates the one thing we are most certain of. Therefore, something more than nature, matter, and the physical exists. It is mind, consciousness, or spirit.

But I don’t think dualism is the answer. Rather, I see the physical as the visible outside and the spiritual as the invisible inside of consciousness. One reality, with two poles. Think of the implicate order and explicate order of theoretical physicist David Bohm.

The fact is, there is no evidence that the physical universe is all there is. It is an assumption based on the lack of evidence to the contrary. But that is only because we are looking in the wrong place and for the wrong thing. Why think that the “other” would be anything like the physical?

Consciousness is the key to this whole thing. It is a hard problem because it is not physical. It is what we can call spiritual. And it is the underlying reality of all things. At least this is how I see it.