How Secularists Should Think of Metaphysics
Even an ironic, humble, pragmatic kind of ontology makes mincemeat out of theism
Most atheists are likely philosophical naturalists. But is naturalism as hard to defend as theism, for being metaphysical? How should secularists think metaphysically about what there is fundamentally, assuming there’s no personal deity?
Metaphysics is the philosophical study of first principles, especially ontology, the nature of being. But Western philosophy changed with the scientific revolution. Prior to that time, philosophers and theologians were more naïve about the scope of human reason. True, there were ancient and medieval skeptics, but skepticism predominated only with the rise of epistemology, as Western thinkers grappled with how to make sense of the newfound success of scientific methods of inquiry.
For instance, doubts about knowledge came to the fore with Rene Descartes’ search for philosophical foundations. And David Hume’s empiricism applied doubts not just to religious traditions but to scientific concepts, such as those of causality and inductive reasoning.
Metaphysics, then, isn’t what it used to be. Immanuel Kant noticed this already in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), when he said that whereas metaphysics was once hailed as “the queen of all the sciences,” “Now, in accordance with the fashion of the age, the queen proves despised on all sides.”
This isn’t to say it’s pointless to speculate about first principles. Just as we’re adept at finding faces in the clouds or in random shadows, we can apply our rational methods to any question, even if doing so is foolish because of the limits of reason and the vastness of possible subject matters. We won’t know those limits until we try to push them.
But just because we can talk at an ontological level doesn’t mean we should be naïve in trusting the results of such abstract inquiries. Instead, we should be pragmatic, skeptical, and even ironic about them, as befits our hypermodern zeitgeist.
For instance, suppose the atheist says that everything’s natural. In bygone centuries, the atheist might have arrived at this conclusion with a deductive argument, proudly holding up this reasoning as a “proof” that settles the issue for all time.
But after more than a century of analytic philosophy, we know that deductions depend on analyses of concepts, and that concepts are models, most of which are inherently practical. Abstract concepts that aren’t based on experience are essentially fictions and are therefore subject to aesthetic and moral criteria rather than just empirical ones. When we say there’s “truth” in fiction, we’re referring to something like wisdom, as the story might dramatize a moral lesson or clarify a psychological or social problem.
Moreover, naturalism is a generalization that’s based on the success of science, and yet science itself provides all sorts of reasons to be skeptical about armchair (“synthetic a priori”) reasoning. Indeed, the history of science is one of systematically undermining intuitions or dogmas. A concept or an assumption may feel natural or inevitable to us, but what science has shown repeatedly is that the facts needn’t support that habit.
Most infamously, it once seemed obvious that the Earth is physically central to nature. Likewise, Euclid regarded it as self-evident that parallel straight lines never intersect. And religions assumed that species were personally created for the purpose of using their traits. Copernicus, Einstein, and Darwin dashed all those presumptions.
How, then, should a late-modern atheist think of naturalism? She can say metaphysically that everything’s natural and that there are therefore no miracles or supernatural agents. But she shouldn’t think that this has been rationally proven. Instead, she should treat a metaphysical picture as being close to a myth. Naturalism is a story that celebrates the achievements of science, just as supernaturalism is effectively a story that celebrates human political arrangements, such as the way kings and aristocrats lord it over the lower classes.
When we think about things at this most general level, and we’re not doing theoretical physics or scientific cosmology, we’re attempting to crown our worldview with a catch-all narrative that’s distinguished perhaps by novel concepts. Naturalists say “nature” is the ultimate category, whereas supernaturalists say it’s “God.”
We can support these generalizations, to some extent, with reason and with conceptual analyses, but these won’t suffice to convince anyone. Secularists who believe there’s nothing beyond nature have no rational proof to justify that belief. Instead, the belief is partly faith-based and political. The naturalist repudiates the notion of supernature for being offensive to progressive civilization or for being politically dangerous or cliched and thus abhorrent on moral or aesthetic grounds.
We can call reasoning or mythmaking about being in general “metaphysical,” but in so far as metaphysics is informed by the scientific age, we needn’t credit this discipline’s traditional mystique. Metaphysics differs from religious myths in that the former are academic whereas the latter are folksy, and in the case of naturalism, the metaphysical generalizations deal with the exploits mainly of inanimate objects, whereas traditional myths are human-centered.
Does this ironic, skeptical analogy mean the naturalist has no grounds upon which to decisively expose supernaturalism and theism for being archaic embarrassments? Not at all because taste in art isn’t subjective in the pejorative sense of being perfectly arbitrary. There is such a thing as higher or lower taste.
For one thing, naturalism’s merit is found in its undeniable relevance to the period of absolute modernity. With the scientific institution in full swing, expanding the reach of our empirical knowledge every day, we need to incorporate that success into our worldview, assuming we aim to be intellectually responsible.
The relevance of supernaturalism is supposed to be that naturalists can’t explain such mysteries as consciousness or morality. This is the theist’s God-of-the-gaps strategy, and it’s dubious for several reasons. Earlier mysteries, too, were help up as impenetrable to scientific objectification, yet they were solved. In any case, the very natural universe that science is well on its way to charting is filled with mind-blowing wonders, such as the trillions of alien worlds swirling at fantastic speeds in outer space. Consciousness and morality are no more bizarre than black holes, dynamical chaos, quantum mechanics, or brains.
In what sense, then, might all these things be “natural”? If black holes and consciousness are natural, is “natural” as vacuous as “God”? Potentially, yes, in which case, as I said, naturalism clearly functions like an atheistic myth that helps motivate the secular humanistic ethos and consumer lifestyle. For me, though, we can make naturalism more meaningful by treating the category of “nature” instrumentally or pragmatically, so that it includes everything that’s explicable in scientific (strictly objective) or atheistic philosophical terms, and that’s therefore potentially exploitable by industries.
What would make consciousness, for example, supernatural is if consciousness were forever immune to being either scientifically objectified or explained atheistically as an emergent property of brains or as a naturally selected function. And at first, consciousness seems so immune because it’s inherently subjective. How can scientists who objectify speak to the essence of subjectivity? Likewise, how can physicists explain what’s inside a black hole when that interior is supposed to include the limit of space and time?
Here indeed science may require philosophy. In any case, even if science doesn’t directly address the hard problem of consciousness which is the nature of qualia, cognitive science has situated consciousness in the field of natural objects, namely in the brain and in the process of natural selection. Thus, consciousness isn’t a baffling mystery about which we know nothing at all and must throw up our hands or kneel in prayer, to testify to our ignorance. We know that consciousness is strongly correlated with neural states, and that’s a lot more than most religious folks have ever historically known about themselves.
As I’ve argued elsewhere, it makes more sense to affirm that living, conscious, and especially intelligent agents are anti-natural, not supernatural, and that that rivalry may be mistaken for the need to posit a second ontological substance.
Instead of being miraculous or wholly unnatural, life in general is anti-natural in being anti-entropic, which is possible because nature in its wildness destroys everything it creates. Moreover, organisms are deliberately discriminatory in their engagement with the environment, as directed by their genetic code, at least. And intelligent agents are prone to civilizing the entire wilderness, so they have recourse to humanistic, promethean cultures that might in the end prove either tragically heroic or foolishly self-destructive.
In any case, the concept of naturalism is much clearer than that of supernaturalism, so naturalism is poised to win by default, as it were, as “God,” “Heaven,” “miracle,” “divine revelation,” and the like come to nothing when met with even the least bit of philosophical or scientific scrutiny.
Supernaturalism and theism were once strong when they held the default position because they’re intuitive. When science undermined those intuitions, the metaphysical house of cards that was built on them collapsed. Naturalism is counterintuitive because godless nature is an absurd, amoral, inhuman monstrosity. Only such a humiliating ontology honours the upshot of scientific discoveries.
Supernaturalism fails because its personifications are too small-minded to be sustained in the late-modern period of rampant, richly deserved cultural irony. Theistic metaphysics trivializes ultimate reality by humanizing it in our imagination, whereas naturalism respects the cosmic reality by encouraging us to keep our outdated intuitions to ourselves, and by attempting to humanize nature in reality with technological applications of scientific theories.
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