{"id":1174,"date":"2017-03-10T11:37:15","date_gmt":"2017-03-10T11:37:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/?p=1174"},"modified":"2017-03-10T11:37:15","modified_gmt":"2017-03-10T11:37:15","slug":"naturalism-and-its-discontents-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/?p=1174","title":{"rendered":"Naturalism and its discontents"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is a story I\u2019ve heard used by preachers (source unknown) which goes like this:-<\/span><\/p>\n

A very religious man was once caught in rising floodwaters. He climbed onto the roof of his house and trusted God to rescue him. A neighbour came by in a canoe and said, \u201cThe waters will soon be above your house. Hop in and we\u2019ll paddle to safety.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNo thanks\u201d replied the religious man. \u201cI\u2019ve prayed to God and I\u2019m sure he will save me\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A short time later the police came by in a boat. \u201cThe waters will soon be above your house. Hop in and we\u2019ll take you to safety.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNo thanks\u201d replied the religious man. \u201cI\u2019ve prayed to God and I\u2019m sure he will save me\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

A little time later a rescue services helicopter hovered overhead, let down a rope ladder and said. \u201cThe waters will soon be above your house. Climb the ladder and we\u2019ll fly you to safety.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNo thanks\u201d replied the religious man. \u201cI\u2019ve prayed to God and I\u2019m sure he will save me\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

All this time the floodwaters continued to rise, until soon they reached above the roof and the religious man drowned. When he arrived at heaven he demanded an audience with God. Ushered into God\u2019s throne room he said, \u201cLord, why am I here in heaven? I prayed for you to save me, I trusted you to save me from that flood.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYes you did my child\u201d replied the Lord. \u201cAnd I sent you a canoe, a boat and a helicopter. But you never got in.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Most preachers go on to say that we should always look for the hand of God in things which seem to happen naturally. But I suspect a subtext. The overwhelming majority of the people sitting in the pews, whatever they say about belief in divine providence, will be methodological naturalists, i.e. they put their trust in natural, not supernatural, causes and effects and will assume that there\u2019s a natural explanation for everything \u2013 and this story is also telling them that they\u2019re not being stupid doing that. Indeed, it\u2019s probably telling them that<\/b> louder than it\u2019s telling them to look for the hand of God in a guy with a canoe.<\/span><\/p>\n

I am most definitely a methodological naturalist. How could I be anything else? I have a science degree and actually do a bit of research part time, I spent over 25 years as a practising lawyer, and in my teens I used to love stage magic, because I was forever trying to work out the mechanics of magic tricks (sometimes with success) and try some of them out on my friends (and I assumed that any report of the supernatural was someone doing a \u201cmagic trick\u201d). By the age of about 9, I was an atheist \u2013 indeed, I was an evangelical atheist, thinking that people needed to be rid of their ridiculous attachment to supernatural explanations (which was something of a burden to my preacher father\u2026).<\/span><\/p>\n

That, for the philosophically minded, meant that I was also at that point an ontological<\/b> naturalist, i.e. I thought that all that there was consisted of natural causes and effects. Another way of putting it was that I was a scientific rationalist materialist; material was all there was.<\/span><\/p>\n

So, what am I doing hanging around most Sunday mornings and at some other times during the average week with a group who believe (at least ostensibly) in miracles, including resurrection, walking on water and creating food out of thin air? Surely the cognitive dissonance is too much?<\/span><\/p>\n

Well, at 14 I had, out of the blue, a peak mystical experience. The naturalist, scientific rationalist explanation was, ultimately, that there was no reason for this and no meaning in it \u2013 it was just something my brain did. That was not enough for me \u2013 for a start, it was the best experience of my existence to date at that point (it still is, along with a few \u201crepeat performances\u201d), and I wanted more of that. However, the language used by almost all the people who reported something similar (who I found were called \u201cmystics\u201d) was \u201cGod language\u201d (those who avoided \u201cGod language\u201d didn\u2019t give very good descriptions, and didn\u2019t propose any ways of achieving repeats, so I rather discounted them\u2026)<\/span><\/p>\n

Then in the course of my physics studies I encountered wave-particle duality \u2013 matter was , when looked at one way, a wave (and that explained a lot of phenomena), but when looked at another, was particles (and that explained a lot more). There was no really sensible way in which it could be both, and in reality, it probably wasn\u2019t actually either \u2013 but there was no way of knowing.<\/span><\/p>\n

In other words, we could tell a story about it being a wave, and that was useful in some circumstances, we could tell a story about it being a particle, and that was useful in some others. It was a lot later that I encountered Terry Pratchett\u2019s \u201cScience of Discworld\u201d books, but I think he expounds the idea very well in those \u2013 we tell stories about the world, about our experience, and some are useful, some aren\u2019t. Pratchett calls us \u201chomo narrans\u201d, the story-telling hominid.<\/span><\/p>\n

Telling the story that my peak mystical experience was an experience of God was useful. It gave me a narrative, it gave me access to a set of people who had had similar experiences and who also wanted more where that came from. It wasn\u2019t the same story as was told about that by an atheist friend of mine \u2013 he said it was a \u201cbrain fart\u201d. Maybe that was useful to him, but it definitely wasn\u2019t useful to me!<\/span><\/p>\n

What about ontology, I wonder? Well, I\u2019ve come to the conclusion since that we actually can\u2019t ever hope to say anything definitive about ontology, about the way things actually are in and of themselves, we can only talk about how they appear to us. We can only tell stories about them\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a story about a wise and charismatic teacher, preacher and (I believe) mystic who gathered a following and ultimately was faithful to his vision in the face of persecution and died at the hands of an occupying empire as a result, and whose followers then continued to experience him afterwards. I am captivated by that story, and I follow that teacher as best I can (which is not very well, to be honest \u2013 he set some incredibly high standards). Is it a true story? I don\u2019t know. Is matter composed of waves or is it composed of particles or is it something we can\u2019t conceive? I don\u2019t know that either. It\u2019s a story I want to identify with, a story I find useful.<\/span><\/p>\n

And, returning to the story with which I started, I have no problem these days in saying \u201cthank you, God\u201d when a parking space suddenly opens up for me. I don\u2019t expect that there\u2019s been any suspension of natural law to enable that to happen, or even a subliminal command to the departing driver. That\u2019s a different story, a different narrative, and one which is not at that point useful to me\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

(First appeared on The Way Station blog at https:\/\/theworldwidewaystation.wordpress.com\/2017\/03\/10\/im-a-methodological-naturalist-get-me-out-of-here\/)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is a story I\u2019ve heard used by preachers (source unknown) which goes like this:- A very religious man was once caught in rising floodwaters. He climbed onto the roof of his house and trusted God to rescue him. A neighbour came by in a canoe and said, \u201cThe waters will soon be above your […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1175,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions\/1175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/eyrelines.energion.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}