The Incoherence of Naturalism

In philosophical circles “naturalism” is a shibboleth. Just about all academic philosophers and most self-described intellectuals in the West are quick to reassure each other that however strange their pet philosophical beliefs might sound to the common folk, the thinkers would never even consider abandoning the ship of naturalism. “Naturalist” is an honourific term so that if you admit to being a supernaturalist, you’re revealing that you haven’t thought things through, that at best you’ve studied theology rather than philosophy. Modern philosophy has helped drive the Age of Reason, but the engine has been science, and by definition science’s subject matter is nature. Whatever scientists discover that they can explain becomes part of the natural world. Both American and French-dominated philosophies take scientific knowledge for granted, although the latter is more pessimistic about science’s social impact.

However, if naturalism is supposed to be the philosophical upshot of the scientific world picture, the standard presentation of this philosophy turns out to be a nonstarter. There’s a difference between exoteric and esoteric naturalism, and as in the case of any comparable distinction such as that between vulgar (literalistic) and enlightened (mystical or cosmicist) theism, the exoteric variety is half-baked and rife with delusions. Instead of invoking the pertinent technicalities such as “supervenience,” “physicalism,” or “nomic relation,” which function as mantras and memetic incantations that mesmerize and distract professional philosophers, we should consider a more grounded, intuitive interpretation of what’s at issue. Naturalism is set against the idea that there’s anything supernatural or unnatural. In particular, naturalism is taken to be well-established on at least three grounds. Metaphysically, science is supposed to have established that everything is part of the material world. Epistemically or methodologically, science is supposed to engage in unifying causal explanations, leaving no room for anything outside science’s purview. And institutionally or culturally, science impresses with its practitioners’ intellectual virtues which far outshine the faith-based drivel of religion, the latter being science’s arch rival. On each of these grounds, however, naturalism is incoherent. Indeed, the one ground leads to the other as a defense, so that with the collapse of cultural naturalism, that is, of rationalism or skepticism, we must look elsewhere if we wish to supply content to this shibboleth.

Miracles in the Mechanical Cosmos

The metaphysical point about nature is that nature is composed of stuff that scientists can understand. If we think in analytical terms, cognitively dividing and conquering systems, as it were, breaking them down into their constituent parts to see how the mechanisms interlock, the world is supposed to cooperate with this approach. Indeed, the Scientific Revolution was progressive in so far as these cognitive methods were applied in spite of defeatist religious traditions, and the universe turned out to be largely material and mechanical. The heavens were demystified and depersonalized, the divinities having been reduced to stars and planets. Organic design turned out not to be divinely intended, but the product of blind processes such as natural selection. And so naturalism entails, in short, that there are no miracles.

But having discovered discontinuities in the world, scientists themselves showed the limits of their analytical methods. Gödel’s Theorem showed that mathematical descriptions are necessarily incomplete, while Bell’s Theorem confirmed the direst suspicions of quantum physicists, that at the quantum level the world isn’t mechanical at all. At that level, one thing doesn’t impact another by locally pushing or pulling it, as it were. There is what Einstein mockingly called “spooky action at a distance,” when particles become entangled and affect each other irrespective of the distance between them. Moreover, singularities were discovered in black holes and at the universe’s point of origin, in which the natural laws break down. 

Finally, however much biologists have demonstrated that our species is part of the continuum of animal life, there remains a neo-Cartesian divide between the natural and the artificial. Homo sapiens are as anomalous as a black hole singularity. There is in fact a prior divide between nonlife and life so that only the nonliving portion of the universe is best understood in mechanistic terms, whereas living things operate teleologically since they have beliefs and desires. But our species is like the top tenth of the top one percent of Americans who have taken a vastly disproportionate share of that nation’s wealth: as strangely out of place as are organisms in general in the lifeless universe, the species of so-called wise apes adds discontinuity to discontinuity like a black hole inside a black hole. For example, as Yuval Harari points out in Sapiens, our species is by far the deadliest ever to have evolved on this planet. Whereas other species reach equilibrium with their neighbours, we cut down branches from the Tree of Life with cancerous indiscriminateness, like madmen with chainsaws. Whereas other species occupy a niche within a natural environment, we’re defined by our quest to undermine all such niches by undoing all non-anthropocentric environments. We replace the natural wilderness with artificial habitats which extend our weird madness, testifying to our satanic creativity. Artificiality is unnatural, and we’re the lords of artificiality; we’re thus ironically the miracle-wielding gods we’ve been worshipping all this time since the births of culture. The abyss between the natural and the artificial or the teleological is due to the fact that nature is undead, not the intended product of any intelligence. Naturalistic explanation ends by positing nonliving matter at the root of all things. Material bodies are thus zombielike in that their animation is an abominable simulation that mocks purpose-driven creatures at every turn.

There’s a temptation to bridge the divide between nonlife and life, by likening energy and force to mentality. Indeed, the scientific positing of natural forces or factors that affect the ability of material things to work proceeds from intuitions that are at home only in the world of living things. Just as we deliberately recreate our surroundings, the whole world was traditionally thought to be created by an external, sovereign deity so that every event would have been an outcome of God’s plan. Modern scientists eliminated the deity but not the forces or energies, so that natural forces became physical in the sense of being irrationally violent, merely pushing or pulling things with no forethought or purpose, and energy became likewise purely physical power. The temptation in question, then, must be merely tantalizing, because the intuitive meaning of the scientific narrative rests on truncated anthropomorphism. Whatever the intuitive origin of scientific terms like “energy” or “force,” the naturalist is committed to abolishing all anthropomorphisms, that is, all animistic projections of organic or personal qualities onto nonliving nature. As a result, nonlife must be fundamentally as mysterious as an undead walking nightmare: the naturalist is stuck with obsolete and misleading terms inherited from the deistic infancy of early modern science, so that everything she explains naturalistically is thereby effectively deemed only half alive.

Pragmatism and Our Jumbled Road Maps

On the contrary, says the naturalist, there need be no such discontinuities, because scientists are busy building bridges with causal explanations that show how the world can be united in a single cognitive framework, a so-called Theory of Everything. If Quantum Theory isn’t yet united with Relativity, the progressive history of science indicates that some causal explanation unifying the phenomena will be forthcoming. String Theory is the current consensus as to how to begin laying out the all-embracing theory of nature. In any case, just as chemical processes emerge from physical ones, biological processes must emerge from chemical ones and likewise consciousness and other higher mental functions must derive from lower-level biological ones, so that although nature evolves layers of complexity, the layers are connected by intermediary, stages: you get from here to there only by some mechanism, that is, by a series of causes and effects, not by a magical leap into woo.

As is now well-known, however, String Theory has come in for criticism not merely on technical grounds of quibbles over details, but on the meta-ground that string theorists irresponsibly rewrite what it means to be doing science. In a nutshell, String Theory makes mathematics rather than observation central to justifying its world picture. Moreover, this theory takes away with one hand what it gives with the other: it unifies the world only by positing many ways (between 10¹⁰ and 10¹⁰⁰) in which its parameters can be configured, giving rise, in fact, to a panoply of string theories and to the problem of how the theoretical constants are fine-tuned. One of the leading solutions is the multiverse interpretation, according to which the landscape of possible string theories corresponds to the actualization of all the universes made possible by fluctuations of the quantum vacuum.

Be this as it may, this development is devastating to philosophical naturalism. First of all, if we combine Smolin’s explanation of what Wigner called the “unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics,” which is that mathematical entities are evoked like characters in a shared fictional universe, with Harari’s point about the evolutionary role of fictions and collective delusions in maintaining the cohesion of massive human populations, we should infer that the mathematical turn in physics prevents naturalists from dismissing nonscientific fictions, including religious or foreign political ones. Second, there is no unity in the multiverse, so a Theory of Everything that subscribes to the multiverse interpretation is oxymoronic. The theory amounts to saying that just about anything can and does happen, that even the natural laws vary from universe to universe. Calling the whole multiverse or megaverse “natural” would be utterly vacuous.

Moreover, math-centered physics ignores the evident pragmatic conditions of modern science. Although there may well be lone scientific geniuses who solve equations for the love of pure knowledge with no thought spared for the reward, the institutions of science are merged with industries. Most scientists explore hypotheses without much concern for how they all hang together, which is why it’s impossible for anyone to comprehend all of the relatively recent empirical findings: modern knowledge has drastically fragmented, not been stitched up in a unified conception. Indeed, instead of thinking of scientists as being in the business of discovering natural laws or ultimately general patterns in the world, there’s increasing recognition that the practice is the much more practical and tentative one of proposing models which are tested against observations. A model is like a map of some terrain in that you can choose which part to focus on in your map, ignoring some parts or zooming in on others. Whether one map can be read alongside another is almost an accident, considering the enormous number of potential theoretical frameworks which needn’t be commensurate with each other.

Note that maps of the artificial world are more easily combined in a meaningful synoptic view, since that world happens to be pre-united by human intentions and ideals. For example, you can smoothly transition from reading a subway map to reading a bus route, because the relations between those terrains are pre-planned: the buses and streetcars work in tandem with the subways. But all that need unite one scientific field with another is the scientists’ interest in usefully charting some terrains. Whether the terrains themselves flow comprehensibly or “naturally” into each other needn’t be presupposed. At any rate, even when they do so flow, the causal connections are largely subjective, as David Hume showed. That is, the notion of a natural order depends on the implicit prescriptions of the scientific models’ idealizations of the terrain. Whether the terrains “obey” the maps is up to mad Azathoth: the universe’s structure could radically alter itself in an instant and nothing will have gone wrong, our primitive, parochial expectations notwithstanding. Methodological naturalism is pragmatic in that scientists are obviously interested in understanding how the world works, because that knowledge is prized—but the world needn’t cooperate. Our intellectual elites stretch their cognitive powers to the limit, attempting to fathom the mind-bending ways of nature, but whether even their endeavours will prove adequate to the cosmic facts is dubious, given precisely what cognitive scientists have shown with respect to the animal basis of reason. As godlike as we may be in our creative and destructive capacities, we may be intellectually and morally childlike; indeed, as is often said, progress in social values hasn’t proceeded apace with advances in our technological power.

In fact, the very notion of objective truth doesn’t make sense without the pragmatic background. The relation of truth, of a set of symbols’ “agreement” with some facts, is as fictional as gods or human rights. At least, if symbols can magically reach out and mirror objects at a spooky distance, this is further evidence against naturalism, meaning that the nonpragmatic, realistic conception of science presupposes a Cartesian rupture in the universe that’s akin to the one between the quantum and relativistic domains. By contrast, the pragmatic view is that knowledge is a means of acquiring power to participate in some larger process. Scientific models and their ceteris paribus, context-sensitive rather than perfectly general “laws” usefully distort the real world, analyzing it indeed by way of dividing and conquering its parts. The windows we thereby open onto the world are tools that may or may not work well together. Either way, the world is indifferent and it evidently contains both continuities and mechanical orders, on the one hand, and strange, miraculous discontinuities and unnatural (artificial) transformations on the other.

The Myths of Secular Humanism

The naturalist’s final retreat is to the refuge of modern culture in general. Perhaps philosophical naturalism doesn’t prove the world is metaphysically united, after all, nor does it show that strictly rational methods of inquiry are likely to generate a complete, coherent world picture. Still, naturalists join ranks against antimodern cultures such as those that are faith-based. The battle may not be between rationalists and the amoral, impersonal cosmos, but between rational and irrational cultures. Naturalism wouldn’t be so much a defense of science, since science needs no philosophical defense; instead, it would be a barricade around the precious Light of Reason which barbaric irrationalists would snuff at the earliest opportunity. This is the refrain of Carl Sagan whose torch was passed to Sir Neil deGrasse Tyson, to the noble New Atheists and to liberal comedic culture warriors such as Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher.

Unfortunately, the secular culture in question has been undermined—once again—by science itself. The neoliberal social order can withstand the flailing of bitter and crazed omegas such as the militant jihadists. But the danger isn’t that the proverbial barbarians are battering the Roman imperial door; the threat, rather, is the dark revelation of the hollowness of modern institutions that are supposed to substitute for the openly theocratic ones which served for thousands of years. The problem, you see, is that scientists discovered we’re not what Enlightenment rationalists flatteringly called us: austere masters of our passions, rational conquerors of our base nature, liberated by awakened consciousness and by skepticism and scientific inquiry. Some of us are more influenced by those ideals and methods than others, but it turns out, as postmodernists have shown since the 1960s, that this is a modern metanarrative, a myth that’s just as gratuitous in light of the facts as the stale theistic stories. The facts in this case are sociobiological. As Daniel Dennett shows in Breaking the Spell, theism arises from our predilection for detecting social patterns. We overextend this talent and project these patterns onto inanimate nature, as though there were ghosts around every corner. And as I said, fictions in general evolved to enable humans to live in large groups. Prior to fictions such as religious or political myths, we could keep social order just by passing along rumours, but that depended on us living in small bands in which we could keep track of a limited number of personal details. In a large group we must function alongside thousands or millions of strangers. Memory alone won’t suffice to direct members to where they belong in the dominance hierarchy, so higher-order ideas step in, keeping everyone on the same page through faith in some ideal, that is, through faith in what is strictly speaking a fiction.

The relevance of this is that modern secular culture doesn’t escape from these sources of rank irrationality. The naturalist wants to say there’s an enlightened culture that doesn’t fall back on mass delusions, but cognitive scientists have shown that we all have an inherent weakness for committing a range of fallacies throughout the day. Objectivity itself is unnatural and it functions only under antisocial conditions, when we isolate ourselves, set aside our emotions and think logically about a situation or when we don our lab coat and follow strict institutional protocols. The lifeblood of culture is far removed from any such borderland activity. Culture is shaped by the fictions that motivate us to act, not by truths that compel us to think. The more we think, the more introverted we become and thus the more removed from the social interactions that are regulated by cultural ideals. This is why moderns deluded themselves when they assumed they could progress by transcending the childlike behaviours of ancient animists and theists. Whereas the ancients naively presupposed that the universe revolves around their affairs and that their happiness is of cosmic importance, moderns conclude on the basis of careful observation and analysis, that most of the universe is natural (undead) rather than artificial. But the philosophical ramifications of that grand truth of naturalism were largely ignored because a modern culture sprang up which substituted one form of anthropocentric myths for another: instead of animism or theism, there’s secular humanism; instead of being central to a spirit world, we’re crucial to the artificial worlds we create to flatter our grandiose self-image; instead of being God’s children, Reason dictates that we have rights due merely to the existence of our human nature; instead of passing on to heaven after death, we strive to emulate the top one percent of power elites who allegedly carve out a terrestrial paradise for themselves.

Secular humanists are sustained by irrational myths at almost every turn: from the economic myths of the “free market” to the liberal and feminist myths of equality, freedom, and reason, to the political myth that democracies are meritocratic and peaceful, to the myth that social progress is entailed by the technological kind, to the new atheistic myth that liberal atheists are irreligious, lacking blind faith in anything. Modern mass culture is awash with delusions, as is every other such culture. We require delusions, myths, or fictions to function in mass societies. That obvious fact has been scientifically confirmed and so even this third, most tenuous formulation of philosophical naturalism is incoherent. Respect for science ironically leads to the downfall of the culture that’s been put in place of the medieval mores which science made quaint. This approaching downfall is glimpsed in every facet of postmodern relativism, nihilism, and apathy. Disenchantment with the modern metanarrative began with Sade’s and Nietzsche’s radical atheistic speculations, along with Freud’s model of the unconscious and Marx’s critique of capitalism. Now popular culture features the desperate attempt to avoid the embarrassment of our downfall, by relying on irony to insulate us against uncomfortable self-discoveries. Instead of being self-consistent naturalists who understand that our animal nature makes us mostly ridiculous and unwise, we play the role of the class clown who feigns humility by being the first to poke fun at himself—as if comedy could keep an authentic nihilist from committing suicide. We pretend to be hyper-self-aware, never committing to any belief, always speaking as if this or that were true, as if the modern enterprise were sustainable and respectable instead of being a catastrophe for life in general.      

Just to dwell on a couple of examples of how we turn vices into virtues to avoid facing our cultural decline, notice that we treasure personal liberty without appreciating that this liberty wasn’t earned as a victory in the name of Progress, but was incurred as a result of the Enlightenment’s repudiation of all the great myths that sustained collective undertakings. You’re freest when you don’t know what to do because you’re perfectly uninspired. Then you could indeed go either way; you seem to hover over the available choices, waiting for the wind to blow you in either direction. By contrast, when you’re strongly motivated, because you’re captivated by ideals enshrined in some revered metanarrative, you don’t construe free, that is, uncaused choice, as a virtue; instead, you pity those who miss out on the ecstasy of belonging to something greater than themselves, who cherish their independence, since you surmise that most folks who consider themselves free are merely isolated so that they’re easily exploited by more driven individuals. In fact, this ideology of individualism was originally fit only for “persons,” defined as white, property-holding and thus financially independent males, that is, as the naturally more psychopathic individuals at the apex of the early modern dominance hierarchies. This is why classic liberals could rationalize their subjugation of women and Africans, because their stand-in “humanistic” faith was a transparently infantile way of flattering themselves. After all, myths succeed when they resonate with our irrational, childish longings. And so today we think we’re free because we can go wherever we want, say whatever we want, and buy whatever we want. But because we don’t care much about anything at all, suffering as we do from the unsustainability of the modern project of rebuilding the ancient Greco-Roman secular world, we take those liberties for granted since they’re rendered meaningless and we lack the insight that such “liberties” are in any case signs of systemic failure. Note the oxymoron of the United States’ informal title, “Leader of the Free World.” That title displays our ambivalence about our personal freedoms: we don’t want anyone forcing us to do anything, but we want to be led, because when left to our personal devices we’re pitifully clueless creatures.

Or take the comical delusions of liberal atheists such as that conservative values are less rational than liberal ones, that theists are generally less rational than atheists, and that all religions ought to end. On the contrary, all values are irrational and faith-based. Reason tells us which propositions are true and thus which facts obtain in the world of ascertained processes, but values derive from faith in fictions which inspire us to change those facts, to make them adequate to our ideals. Conservative and liberal values are equally asinine and counterfactual, equally ludicrous in view of the cosmicist upshot of modernity. According to conservatives, we should bury our head in the sand, pretend the Scientific Revolution never happened, and go on mouthing bits of archaic foolishness about a spirit world, all by way of rationalizing theocratic dominance hierarchies which prove our evolutionary rather than divine origin. According to liberals, we should take pride in voting and pleasure in consuming products in spite of the gross deficiencies of democracy currently on display in America’s farcical, demagogic politics, and in spite of consumerism’s being antithetical to life and to human dignity in particular. These values are equally faith-based and foolish. There is no rational defense of either of them, only rationalizations that perpetuate our hubris by preventing us from confronting the humiliating existential truth. Atheism is indeed more rational than theism, since theism is palpably false and atheism itself is just the denial of that set of preposterous beliefs. But liberal secular humanism or Atheism+ is more than that denial, since these atheists subscribe to alternative myths, having just as little self-awareness as their theistic counterparts. Finally, religions will end only when we lose all our creativity, when we’re enraptured by our personal freedom which amounts to our stupefaction, such as when our machines will relieve us of the burden of caring about anything by performing all our tasks for us, allowing us to bask in our glorious independence from the world until we decay as vestiges.   

Naturalism as Cosmicism

So much for naturalism as it’s commonly conceived. This arch-philosophy is incoherent, meaning that despite its being nominally science-centered, science undermines this philosophy’s triumphalism. Of course, science is only the messenger: naturalism is defeated by nature itself, by its indifference to our calls for metaphysical and epistemic unity and to our pride in occupying our particular time and place. The universe is colossally discontinuous, popping out of and into existence at each moment at the quantum level, whole galaxies being swallowed into monstrously unnatural (lawless) black holes, and tool-using primates scurrying all across the earth bent on wholesale satanic replacement of the wilderness with worlds made in their image. Instead of absolute theories, we have models or fragmentary, utilitarian maps that empower us in part by simplifying the data, allowing weak animals like us to under-stand the undead cosmos by likewise reducing it to the level of our limited cognitive powers. Finally, modern secular societies are absurd in their upholding of anti-myth myths. 

Should we then discard naturalism as a piece of nonsense? The semantic issue of whether we prefer to call some hip philosophy “naturalistic” isn’t as important as that of the philosophical implications of science and technology. We should reconcile our naïve intuitions with scientific discoveries, but we shouldn’t do so by pretending that modernity isn’t enormously subversive: science devours not only the prescientific delusions but the humanistic ones that are supposed to be able to live alongside it. The humanist’s optimism is at odds with the content of scientific explanations, which is why naturalism is incoherent. Thus, coherent naturalism must be pessimistic. In fact, we can begin to define naturalism simply by calling attention to the above three facts which undermine what we might think of as popular or exoteric naturalism: the universe is discontinuous, science is pragmatic, and because we’re animals we’re driven largely by irrational desires including the quest to rebuild nature according to our myth-laden vision of how the undead phenomena should have been. Taken together, these imply that naturalism is, in short, Lovecraftian cosmicism. Cosmicism, in other words, is the most important philosophical point to emerge from the Scientific Revolution: the world ranges beyond our comprehension, our attempts to understand nature are ultimately pitiful, and a culture that takes these facts to heart should be steeped in humility rather than hubris. As godlike as our recreation of the world might seem, the enterprise mitigates our latent disgust with nature’s undeadness and is orchestrated not by divine wisdom but by irrational leaps of faith.