Can Naturalness be Naturalized?

The role of self-knowledge in cosmology

Scientists explain things by naturalizing whatever they encounter. They feed the data into their methods and show that the patterns are all natural, meaning they’re not miraculous or supernatural.

What is it, more precisely, to be natural in that sense? Nature is generally the world beyond what’s directly under human control, so that what’s natural is distinguished from what’s artificial or intelligently selected. And nature is characterized by its intelligible, predictable order. Natural phenomena conform to regularities that can be understood with experiments and rational theories.

Even chaos, it turns out, is natural. What’s seems wholly disordered is subject to dynamics that can be modelled, as indicated by chaos theory. A theory of chaos might sound oxymoronic. Isn’t chaos supposed to be the antithesis of order? Yet Britannica points out that chaos theory is the mathematical study “of apparently random or unpredictable behaviour in systems governed by deterministic laws.”

If scientists find order or lawful patterns wherever they look, will these theorists be able to account for naturalness in general, for why there’s any such pattern rather than none? Or is scientific explanation endless because scientists explain one bit of nature only by positing another one, or by carving up the pie a little differently? Indeed, is science digging its grave because methodological naturalism — the pragmatic use of cognitive methods that process only natural patterns — effectively presupposes this property of naturalness, a property which scientists will never be able to illuminate by naturalizing it (since that would be circular)?

The paradox of naturalizing naturalness

Think of the problem this way: scientific progress consists in scientists’ unsurpassed ability to explain parts of nature in terms of other parts, all the while broadening our understanding of nature’s evident vastness. Scientists peered more deeply into outer and inner spaces, into other galaxies and into microstructures, and they uncovered the distant past, too, reaching back billions of years into the origins of the universe’s evolution.

Everywhere scientists found patterns, many of which are causal, meaning they’re regular, predictable, and productive, not capricious, or subject to anyone’s change of mind. A natural event happens because initial conditions and other contributing factors force it to happen or at least make the event’s occurrence probable.

Why does the rain fall? Because of gravity and the terrestrial water cycle. Why is the Sun very hot? Because of nuclear fusion. Why do organisms need to eat food? Because eating is an evolutionary strategy for overcoming entropy.

Either those patterns go on forever, one leading to the next (as in Roger Penrose’s cyclical cosmology), in which case the question of why there’s any such infinite series or system of levels is unanswerable, or they’ll end in some primordial source of nature which isn’t itself natural in the sense of being scientifically explainable or reducible to some yet further natural phenomenon. That latter source might include the Big Bang’s gravitational singularity or the roots of quantum mechanics. Either way, science seems unable to account for naturalness.

Compare this to the explanation of life. Suppose that Earth is the only home in the universe for life. We might think there would still be a general, even metaphysical characteristic of organisms that would underly the differences between the many kinds of life on the planet. But according to evolutionary theory, all terrestrial living things are united by a genetic continuum that stems from a single common ancestor. Therefore, explaining how nonliving processes gave rise to that ancestor would account for all the subsequent living things in one fell swoop.

Suppose, though, that life evolves on many other planets throughout the universe, including planets that aren’t like ours. In that case, there would be a broader characteristic of life, a vital palette which those many independent genetic tapestries would share, as it were, and explaining the origin of terrestrial life wouldn’t explain that broader pattern.

Similarly, there’s nature in the sense of the terrestrial wilderness, and there’s what our planet has in common with what we now know to be the universe at large, as in the intergalactic domain that’s united by its naturalness. What, then, accounts for that latter universality? In other words, why aren’t there miracles?

One way that scientists might try to explain naturalness is by positing an analogue of an evolving continuum of species, namely a landscape of universes that unfolds in some hyperspatial multiverse. Just as there might be many kinds of life on other planets, there might be many kinds of “universes.” Life would adapt to its various environments throughout the universe, and universes, too, would evolve, adapting to interstitial conditions supplied by a megaverse. Our universe would happen to be natural because the set of laws that prevails here happened to fulfill some hyperspatial niche.

That neo-Darwinian solution, however, sweeps the problem under the rug. The appeal here would be to an evolutionary mechanism, which might indeed account for the character of each universe — but not for the character of the megaverse in which those “universes” would evolve. The origin of our universe’s naturalness would be explained only by positing something else that’s natural enough in having an evolutionary order. Once again, then, scientists would be assuming methodological naturalism rather than explaining naturalness and the absence of miracles.

The growth of science into secular theology?

There are two other factors that should be considered.

First, in so far as naturalness depends on the aims of scientific methods, what counts as natural would change along with science. And it turns out that fundamental science, as in theoretical physics or cosmology is dissimilar from the special sciences in eschewing the concept of causality. Instead, as Bertrand Russell pointed out in 1912, fundamental physics posits mathematical structures. Indeed, the concept of causality in universal physics seems as misplaced as that of “law of nature.” Both are hangovers from religious intuitions.

The problem is that if we’re interested in sorting through cosmological hypotheses, decisive experiments are largely beyond our current capabilities. Thus, in relying more on mathematical elegance and coherence than on superhuman experiments that might supply relevant data, theoretical physicists already engage in an updated form of Neoplatonism, positing abstract structures that are as good as supernatural, compared to what we experience as material reality.

Is there, then, much of a functional difference between theologians and theoretical physicists? Both take for granted unfalsifiable, arcane claims about far-flung domains that dictate all perceivable reality. Of course, theologians naively personify that supernatural source, whereas scientists objectify it, meaning that theologians seek to socialize with the world while scientists support civilization’s ambition to domesticate (enslave) all wild (uncivilized) places and processes.

The point, then, is that “science” might account for naturalness only by splitting off into a theological discipline that camouflages its appeal to the supernatural by resorting to indecipherable math (instead of Latin, as in the Catholic Church’s case).

The sociological origin of naturalness

Second, the mystery of the source of naturalness might be deflated if we reflect on how “naturalness” must be partly a subjective concept, since there are no perfectly objective concepts. Again, what counts as natural depends on the aims and methods of science. Fundamentally, nature is physical, meaning it’s subject to perfect enslavement, being energetic and thus useful, but impersonal and thus rightless.

In that case, part of the explanation of naturalness should be sociological rather than just cosmological. Understanding the basis of naturalness requires self-knowledge, as in knowledge of the aims of science and of the ambitions of civilization and of our standard of progress. There may be nothing metaphysical to ground our positing of layer upon layer in an endless search for nature’s weak points. Instead, we can appreciate that however inexhaustible nature’s essence might be, we keep positing those layers, applying methodological naturalism, and explaining away apparent wonders because we’re ambitious primates with an imperial agenda.

Even if nature derived from supernature, as theists maintain, naturalists need never concede that that’s so because our progressive agenda, too, is inexhaustible. “Nature” could be redefined to include virtually supernatural mathematical abstractions like singularities and wavefunctions.

Just try to imagine a miracle that would prove the futility of methodological naturalism. Take the most bizarre event, such as the whisking away of our entire species and the depositing of us in a realm of clouds. Would that have been God sending us to Heaven or an all-powerful race of extraterrestrials toying with our minds in a virtual reality, as in an old Star Trek episode?

The point is that naturalism is based not just on how the facts have proved to be, but on modern secular hubris, on the human refusal to concede any ground to the wilderness (to the domain outside “developed” societies), even at the potential cost of our self-destruction (as evidenced by the environmental crisis).

That is, perhaps we can never explain naturalness by positing something else because that would vitiate the humanistic faith in our worthiness to dominate the planet and, by extension, everything else that’s inhuman, including all animal species and physical resources.