Ideas matter. And it’s important to “reality test” worldviews because too much is at stake. How does Naturalism fare?
Scientific naturalism is the view that the physical universe is all there is, was, and ever will be. Only material stuff exists, and science is the only source of reliable knowledge concerning the world; everything else is mere conjecture.
What Tools Are Available In The Naturalist’s Tool Box?
Physics, chemistry, biology, and genetics are the naturalist’s only explanatory tools. One obvious implication of this worldview is that there can be no human soul or immaterial persons like angels or God because, by definition, the supernatural is excluded. Furthermore, there is no spiritual reality in this world or the next; religious faith is delusional; objective moral duties and values are illusory; the grave is all there is.
Consider this candid summary of naturalism by the famous twentieth-century atheist Bertrand Russell:
“That man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; that his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocation of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling, can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labors of the age, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins — all these things, if not quite beyond dispute, are yet so nearly certain that no philosophy which rejects them can hope to stand . . .Brief and powerless is man’s life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless way; for man, condemned today to lose his dearest, tomorrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day.”
Wow, that’s depressing. Twenty-first-century atheist Richard Dawkins adds more naturalistic cheer by explaining what you can expect from evolutionary and naturalistic accounts of reality:
“In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at the bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no other good. Nothing but blind pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.”
If the universe is all there is, was, and ever will be—then the gospel of Russell and Dawkins is all one can expect.
The rest of life amounts to nothing more than a trivial illusion of your own creation. Naturalism fails the reality test as a worldview.
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Christianity on the other hand, makes sense of reality. Most importantly hope.
For a more detailed case for Christianity, see this resource.