Naturalism rests on three basic assumptions: materialism, reductionism, and causality. I examined these assumptions in more detail in chapter 4, so their description here can be brief. First, naturalism denies that there are any supernatural or spiritual realities. Nothing transcends the physical world described by chemistry and physics. There are no realities independent of physical realities; literally, no metaphysics. Even independent mental states, such as emotions and consciousness, can be understood as very complex combinations of material elements. Closely allied with materialism, the analytic, for us commonsense, process of reducing complex phenomena to relatively simpler parts—emotions to organic chemistry, for example— expresses the second foundation of naturalism: reductionism. Complex phenomena, including, for example, "spiritual experiences" can be analyzed into increasingly simpler material components. We quickly progress from God to psychology to chemical reactions in the body. Third, a naturalistic understanding of causality ties materialism and reductionism together by saying that all phenomena are caused by a sequence of exclusively material events, from the simple to the more complex, without supernatural, metaphysical, or divine intervention.
What this means in practice is that we cannot call on God, mental states, or anything outside a material causal sequence to explain either how or why an event or reality occurs. There is no supernatural agency or teleological purpose, nor for that matter a physically autonomous mind or human spirit. Naturalism accepts the fact, as do the existentialists, that we are living exclusively in a material, finite, closed world.
The history of science can be understood as a record of naturalizing (others would say secularizing) one phenomenon after another. Naturalizing describes a process whereby things that used to be explained by and attributed to supernatural agency, special powers, or immaterial stuff are understood to be the result of entirely empirical, material processes. The biblical narrative of creation is naturalized into the Big Bang, just as the origin of humankind, formerly held to be created in God's image, was naturalized by Darwin into a sequence of biological adaptations and random selections, albeit a very long one. Closer to our own interests perhaps, Freud and Feuerbach naturalized religion by tracing its origins to psychological or anthropological needs; similarly, Marx and Durkheim traced religion's origin to social relationships. Of course, the naturalizing project continues. More and more, we explain our own behavior, consciousness, and self-consciousness alike without recourse to the inner, supervising agency of mind or spirit. In short, the naturalist replaces the soul with DNA.
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