Naturalism.org

To what extent can secular humanists be spiritual? Can those of us with a more or less naturalistic view of the world, one that doesn’t involve spirits, gods, or ghosts, legitimately seek spiritual experience? There seems a prima facie difficulty here since traditional notions of spirituality often posit a non-physical realm categorically separate from the world described by science. Such dualism is of course the antithesis of naturalism, which understands existence to be of a piece, not split into the natural and supernatural.

In a recent column in the National Institute on Drug Abuse’s (NIDA) monthly newsletter (V 16, #2), NIDA director Alan Leshner gets close to an entirely naturalistic view of drug abuse. That is, with minor but telling exceptions (which I will discuss), he sees drug abuse as a function of various causes, not a matter of willful misconduct. I’ll quote several paragraphs, emphasizing one sentence. He says that

Introduction

It’s strange to think that feelings of love, or empathy, or euphoria might be nothing over and above states of your brain: that the right neural networks, when spurred into action by the right neurotransmitters, just are those emotions. After all, feeling amorous or affectionate doesn’t at all seem the same sort of thing as being "a pack of neurons," as DNA co-discoverer Francis Crick once put it. Yet the resurgence of MDMA, the drug popularly known as ecstasy, is a compelling illustration of how the neural basis for affection can be exploited as a short cut to intimacy.

Dr. Alan I. Leshner, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a division of the National Institutes of Health, is known for his slide shows. Two or three times a week he gives a speech -- to treatment counselors and prevention specialists, physicians and policymakers -- and almost all feature slides culled from the work of the 1,200 researchers supported by his institute. The slides are of brain scans, and they usually come in pairs. The "before" slides show the activity of a normal brain; the "after" ones depict a brain that has had prolonged exposure to drugs.

The December 10, 1999 issue of Science reported that microbiologists may eventually pin down a "minimum genome": the bare bones, molecularly speaking, of what it takes to make a living organism. The interplay of DNA, proteins, and other sub-cellular components in supporting the necessary functions of life – in this case a very simple bacterium – would be completely understood. Nothing mysterious or "protoplasmic" would remain: the very mechanism of life would stand revealed in all its complexity.

As a longtime fan of Stephen Jay Gould, I could hardly resist attending his lecture on immortality at the Harvard Divinity School. (The lecture is a semi-annual affair, in which luminaries from various disciplines are invited to address the ever-popular topic of our prospects after death. Previous speakers have included William James and Josiah Royce.) What would the eminent geologist and neo-Darwinian venture to say on a topic so far outside his ordinarily naturalistic concerns?

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As I began reading Corliss Lamont's The Philosophy of Humanism, I was pleased to see his use of the the term "naturalistic". At the same time I wondered just how far he would extend this characterization. Would he balk, as so many others have, at an understanding of mankind as a completely natural creature, and reserve for us some special status? Or would he not flinch, and so conclude that even our highest capacities are explicable, at least in principle, by scientific generalizations?