Posted: May 23, 2011 4:03 pm
People try to dress it up but I think that mostly (apart from idealists and a few other oddballs) when people say 'natural' they mean 'physical' and naturalism is just another way of saying physicalism.
Opponents of naturalism are invariably dualists. Religious people think that the physical cannot account for mind (they believe in absolute free will and that their self can plausibly survive after their bodily death). The same reasoning allows for dis-embodied minds (spirits, ghosts, gods) - if mind is distinct from matter then why wouldn't it be able to exist apart from it?
Miracles are similarly plausible for a dualist. God's mind directly causing effects in the physical world is not inherently more mysterious than my own mind causing my physical body to move.
So gods/immaterial minds are clearly not part of the physical (natural) world and this seems to ne to be the easiest way to understand the claims of the religious. They are simply dualists who believe there are divine as well as human minds.
We believe their non-naturalism is wrong for empirical reasons, the same empirical reasons that lead us to disbelieve in Cartesian dualism. Physical explanations seem sufficient to explain all human actions and all other natural phenomena. We don't see the kind of anomalies we would expect to see if there were either immaterial minds causing human actions or immaterial Gods interfering in nature.
Opponents of naturalism are invariably dualists. Religious people think that the physical cannot account for mind (they believe in absolute free will and that their self can plausibly survive after their bodily death). The same reasoning allows for dis-embodied minds (spirits, ghosts, gods) - if mind is distinct from matter then why wouldn't it be able to exist apart from it?
Miracles are similarly plausible for a dualist. God's mind directly causing effects in the physical world is not inherently more mysterious than my own mind causing my physical body to move.
So gods/immaterial minds are clearly not part of the physical (natural) world and this seems to ne to be the easiest way to understand the claims of the religious. They are simply dualists who believe there are divine as well as human minds.
We believe their non-naturalism is wrong for empirical reasons, the same empirical reasons that lead us to disbelieve in Cartesian dualism. Physical explanations seem sufficient to explain all human actions and all other natural phenomena. We don't see the kind of anomalies we would expect to see if there were either immaterial minds causing human actions or immaterial Gods interfering in nature.