Naturalism.org

Clarence Darrow

A Presentation by Ronald Pies, MD

Clearly, normativity is natural, in that ethical rules or norms are based in human biological needs and innate psychological dispositions, modulated by culture.  However, in evaluating the rightness of these norms, we can only use as criteria some subset of these very same norms.  If we are ethical naturalists, there isn’t a value-free Archimedean point outside them from which we can determine which moral rules we ought to subscribe to.

Irreconcilable differences

Commentary

In denying the existence of God, atheism gets half the story right about the supernatural. The other half is about us, not God, and to complete the story is to adopt a consistent, thorough-going naturalism, a worldview based on a commitment to rational explanation and evidence. Naturalism says there’s a single natural world, the one science shows us, not a world divided up into the categorically natural vs. supernatural. Most atheists consider themselves naturalists in this sense, and indeed atheism is an expression or offshoot of naturalism.

Pierre Laplace didn't do science any favors when he let Napoleon provoke him.

After reading the French mathematician's opus on celestial mechanics -- the movements of planets -- the emperor asked him why the treatise, unlike the work of Isaac Newton, made no mention of God. Laplace reportedly replied, in a huff, that he had no need of that hypothesis.

Key propositions

• Science generates the natural-supernatural distinction, it doesn’t presume it.
• The supernatural is just that which can’t play a role in scientific explanations.
• Kansas is powerless to change scientific practice to incorporate supernaturalism.