Currents in Naturalism

July-August 2008

~ The Poverty of Supernatural Explanations - review of Naturalism by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro.

~ The Open Interrogation of Faith - review essay on The Secular Conscience by Austin Dacey.

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Heads Up

~ Emergence: Nature's Mode of Creativity - the Human Dimension at Star Island, NH, July 26-August 2. Speakers will include Terence Deacon, U. California Berkeley; Philip Clayton, Claremont University; and Ursula Goodenough, Washington University St. Louis.

~ Atheist Alliance International Convention, September 25-28, Long Beach, CA.

~ More freethought events, courtesy of the Secular Web.

~ A paper on Naturalizing Ethics starts out with a good overview of naturalism; by Duke University naturalists including CFN advisor Owen Flanagan.

~ Is Belief in Free Will Universal? - cross-cultural research suggests that the intuition we're causal exceptions to nature is widespread, but why? More research needed...

~ Free will may not be as free as previously thought, says Kathy Wagnild of Fergus Falls, MN; true, but seeing this might be an enlightenment.

~ Harold Fromm, ally of naturalism, reviews recent books by Steven Pinker and Mark Johnson on the embodied mind, from the Hudson Review.

~ Aristotle, Augustine and Addiction - part 2 of Dr. Cynthia Geppert's thoughts on substance use, self-control and responsibility; part 1 is here.

~ Panel Discussion: The Law and Neuroscience, October 9, 2007, hosted by the MacAurthur Foundation's Project on Neuroscience and the Law (first audio link at the top, 1 hr 41 min).

~ Unequal America, in Harvard Magazine - belief that poverty is a personal failing helps justify economic inequality.

~ Books of note:

Naturalism, by Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, reviewed here.

The Secular Conscience: Why Belief Belongs in Public Life by Austin Dacey, review essay here.

The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality by Andre Comte-Sponville, brief review below.

Understanding Naturalism, by Jack Ritchie, paperback edition available here.

The Nature of Being Human: From Environmentalism to Consciousness, forthcoming by Harold Fromm, ally of naturalism and regular contributor to the Hudson Review.

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Memeing Naturalism

The Case for Naturalistic Spirituality

Because most folks are dualists, the idea of naturalistic spirituality still seems a contradiction in terms. Spirituality is generally thought to involve "higher planes," souls, spirits, and other supernatural phenomena. How can naturalists, including atheists, take spirituality seriously without violating a core tenet of their worldview, that no separate supernatural realm exists? Very easily, as Andre Comte-Sponville artfully argues in The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality. Spirituality properly understood has nothing essentially to do with the supernatural, and is far too important a matter to leave to religionists and new-agers. To do so would have naturalists ignore central questions of life’s meaning and purpose, of how we can best live together given the ultimate nature of things, and what our relation to that nature is. None of this requires or implies god.

This book is a delight and inspiration, without the least condescension or self-seriousness, beautifully direct, personal, touching, and profound. Comte-Sponville writes with the ease and assurance of someone who has thought deeply on these matters, and indeed he’s been writing and speaking for years on godless spirituality. The Little Book is the distillation of his wisdom, which is heir to both West (Spinoza, Pascal, Nietzsche, Sartre, Wittgenstein and some modern French philosophers unknown to most American readers) and East (Buddhism, Zen, Taoism, Vedanta). Although he has no animus against faith, so long as it’s not imposed, his primary objectives in the book’s three chapters are to show that 1) we don’t need theistic religion for a viable ethics or community, 2) there are good reasons to believe god, traditionally conceived, doesn’t exist, and 3) spiritual experience is a naturalistically valid mirror of basic existential truths. We are embedded in an impersonal, self-subsistent, untranscendable and value-less reality – Spinoza’s Nature, the All – therefore values and meaning are human-relative affairs. But under-standing and feeling that we are rooted in an ultimately mysterious non-human absolute can, by temporarily stripping away the self, afford us the peak spiritual experience of immanent unity. Naturalistic spirituality shows us that our lives, finite, conditioned and purposeful, open into the eternal, unconditioned and purposeless.

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The New Identity Crisis and the Law

Tom Wolfe, cultural knockabout, discovered the neuroscientific revolution and its apparently dire implications for our self-image some years ago, and wrote it up with typical flair in "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died." His recent conversation with neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga at Seed gets into the same territory, what Seed calls the new identity crisis: if there's no ghost in the machine (and it seems there isn't), what the bleep are we, anyway?! Worries about genetic and environmental determinism are now joined by neural angst in suggesting that you're basically a biological choice-making machine. But Gazzaniga says this way of being you might be OK:

But who is "you"? "You" is this person with this brain that has been interacting with this environment since you were born, learning about the good and the bad, the things that work and don't work. You've been making decisions all the way along, and now you have a new one and you want to be free to make it. So psychologically, the Interpreter is telling you you're making this decision. But the trick is understanding that your brain is basing the decision on past experience, on all the stuff it has learned. You want a reliable machine to make the actual act occur. You want to be responding rationally to any challenge that you get in the world, because you want that experience to be evaluated. That's all going on in your brain second by second, moment to moment. And as a result, you make a decision about it. And phenomenologically, when the decision finally comes out, you say, "Oh, that's me!"

Choices arrived at neuro-deterministically are what you rationally would want to make. You want to be a good anticipator of probabilities and contingencies based on past experience, and inserting something random, undetermined, or (a logical impossibility) ultimately self-caused would simply detract from the mostly reliable calculations your brain makes "second by second, moment to moment." So it's a good thing you don't have the free will to do something other than what your brain decides, even though it might feel like you do. And indeed, never did a choice-making machine feel so spontaneous!

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Ongoing Activities

~ Naturalism Meetups - monthly get-togethers for those wanting to explore and meme naturalism.

~ Philosophy Cafe @ Harvard Book Store - monthly philosophical discussions on any number of topics; moderated, with refreshments. No worldview commitment required.

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Resources

For those interested in learning more about naturalism, or in participating in outreach, research, and writing in collaboration with the CFN, here are a few resources, online and otherwise.

Encountering Naturalism: A Worldview and Its Uses - "the little orange book of naturalism" is in its second printing, available at Amazon. About the book, see

Point of Inquiry interview with DJ Grothe
Faith and Freethought interview with Richard Spencer
Skeptiko interview with Alex Tsakiris
Review by Molleen Matsumura, aka "Sweet Reason"
Recommendations by Taner Edis and John Derbyshire

Naturalism: The Next Step for Humanists? - online video presentation about naturalism for the Freethought Association of Western Michigan; works as a spoken introduction to the philosophy and its implications.

Causality Consulting - practical philosophical consultation that's science-based, short-term, and results-driven.

Applied Naturalism Group - a forum to explore the personal and social applications of naturalism; membership by application.

Naturalism Philosophy Forum - to facilitate the investigation of scientific naturalism, its assumptions, structure, and logical implications; open membership.

Naturalism as a World View - Richard Carrier's page devoted to explaining and defending naturalism.

Religious Naturalism - an online group explores the spiritual implications of naturalism, see Religious Naturalism and its associated Yahoo group.

Psychological Self-Help - an excellent resource, see in particular two chapters on determinism applied to issues of self-acceptance and self-control.

Cause and Effect World - a smart and skeptical take on this crazy thing called life with host Samantha Clemens; her radio shows, including one on naturalism, are linked here.

Garden of Forking Paths - a free will/moral agency blog with knowledgeable contributors on the leading edge of current academic debates.

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