The Argument for Naturalism

In this short essay I will try and discuss naturalism and creationism and try to show that naturalism is the better viewpoint of the two, and more importantly should be adopted and creationism rejected. I'm not quite sure if I will succeed in doing so, but I think I will get very close.

In most ancient cultures and in some primitive cultures today most events were explained teleologically. This means that they were explained in terms of purposes. Thor became angry at our tribe because of something we did and so he punished us by sending us a terrible thunderstorm; or, God sent us a rainbow to remind us that He would never again send a flood as devastating as Noah's flood. Many examples of these kinds can be seen in the mythologies of the world. Nowadays many of us believe that most of these teleological explanations are laughable and wrong. But it's intriguing to me that most religions are built up around exactly these kinds of teleological explanations.

So I have been asking myself why we should be using teleological explanations at all. If we laugh at some then why not all of them. What's the difference between the ones that we won't believe and we do believe? I believe there is no difference.

Why teleological explanations in the first place? Well, if we look at humans we will see that we live in a complex social setting. Humans have purposes for their actions, and so we use teleological, purposeful, explanations when we are dealing with human interactions and social settings. Human beings are highly skilled at social interactions and dealing with those kinds of situations, and have developed the ability to explain things teleologicaly to a high degree. So I think it is only a small step to see that after a while humans started using their skills at teleological explanations on non-human things.

I think this gives us an adequate understanding of why humans have used teleological explanations. So why did we ever start giving them up in the first place? When civilizations started to form many thousands of years ago through agricultural development along the Nile river valley, in Mesopotamia, and other places jobs became specialized, and some people, having high social status, had more leisure time to spend on other things than manual labor. Of course out of this astrology, astronomy, math, philosophy, and other things of this nature developed.

Around 400-300BC the philosophers in Greece started to think about nature in different ways. Thales was one of the first to describe nature and the whole world in terms a single underlying, fundamental element. In this case it was water. Many other early philosophers like Heraclitus and Democritus came up with their fundamental elements and explained nature differently. A major contribution to this development was math, which the Greeks learned and expanded greatly in their years. This made the philosophers think analytically and they then directly that toward nature. Or so it might have happened.

In any case, natural philosophy was formed, which of course is the philosophy about nature. Philosophers did not have to use the teleological explanations which were provided by way of stories told by local priests or seers anymore, but were free to engage their minds in philosophical and analytical thought about natural events in the world around them. This was the beginning of the foundation of science.

Science as we know it today did not really start until the twelfth or thirteenth century when Roger Bacon started doing experiments and writing about the philosophical basis for science. It is really the experiments that sets modern science apart from ancient science or natural philosophy. The ancient Greeks only thought about the natural word and tried to make theories from that, but never experiment. Aristotle, the protege of Plato, who himself was the protege of Socrates, did do lots of observations of nature and had people help him gather specimens of organisms all of over the then known world, as Alexander the Great did. But this difference between modern science and natural philosophy in the ancient world is not important in this discussion.

What is important is that a different way of looking at nature developed and is now, and has been for a long time, at odds with the old way of looking at nature. The old way of course is the teleological explanation which uses purposes to answer the questions of why things happen, and the way is naturalism which uses natural laws to explain why things happen in nature. Now that we have two paradigms which both can be used to explain a certain situation how should we decided which one is better or right/wrong?

So let us think about explanations for a second and what we think an explanation of nature and natural phenomena should consist of. Often we feel that an explanation of a natural event should give an adequate account for the physical motion or causation of the event. Both theories try to explain causation in some way. A teleological explanation of causation starts from something more complex and ends with something less complex. With a naturalistic explanation of causation it's exactly opposite. It starts with something simple and ends with something simple or complex.

Teleological: (Complex) X --> x (Simple)

Naturalistic: (Simple) x --> x (Simple) or X (Complex)

The main problem with starting off with something complex is that if it's complex then that means that it can be broken down into simpler parts. So really it should start with the simpler constituents of the complex rather than the complex itself, and that, I think, is a major problem in teleological explanations. Because how do the simpler parts know what to do if what you start with is the complex? If the complex can be broken down into simpler parts then there must be more fundamental laws that the simpler parts obey, and that underlie the complex. So really it is the more fundamental laws that we start off with.

Teleological explanations start with persons and minds and purposes, but we have discovered that all of those things are very complex are not fundamental but built up from smaller constituents. Al the persons and minds and purposes that we have encountered come from biological organism that are made up of cells and obey fundamental laws. There still are certain parts of persons and minds and purposes that we haven't explained yet, but most of the important parts have. And these important parts have turned out to be artifacts of the structure and functions of the simpler parts, the cells.

Theories must have coherence within themselves, otherwise they are contradictory. The theories that are the products of naturalism and teleology can be compared on account of their coherence. Since the theories of naturalism are products of science they are always improved and made to fit the data available at the time. So as time progresses the theory changes because more data is available. The theories of teleology which are mythology and creationism don't change very much. And they seem to have problems with coherence. It would easy for somebody, even a child, to find holes in these theories. So when we look at coherence naturalism comes out ahead.

My main argument against teleological explanations and therefore creationism is that if we believe that something outside of nature created or did something in nature we can't seek a natural explanation and therefore we can't use science to discover it, and therefore it is not science. It totally inhibits science and scientific inquiry. What are we to say when we are told that God created the world? Are we to ask how He did it and when and where? We can't ask those questions because it is beyond the scope of science. So basically my reasons for rejecting creationism at this time are pragmatic, because it stifles scientific inquiry. Not just because I think it does, but because in the past that's exactly what happened and heroic scientists like Galileo who questioned the creationistic and teleological accounts of nature turned out to be right. It is more of an inductive argument than deductive. I will try make this argument more robust in the future by doing some more research.