Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
Supernaturalism and Naturalism
Supernaturalism embraces all those ideas that suppose that, alongside the physical
world that we are all aware of, there co-exists another world that is invisible, but
which contains active agents, variously termed gods, deities, spirits, souls, ghosts,
demons, fairies and so on. These agents are often believed to have their own agen-
das, their own views, preferences and purposes. They can behave unpredictably, that
is, they may be capricious, and often, but not always, they are supposed to interact
with the physical world.
Explaining the world in supernatural terms is extremely popular. All human cul-
tures throughout recorded history have produced such beliefs and the vast majority
of people in the world today adhere to one or other of them. The term “belief” is
defined as a statement of faith that an idea is true or important, whether or not there
is any testable evidence for it. The term “religion” is defined as the belief in some
superhuman controlling power or powers, often requiring obedience, respect and
worship. Every culture has a belief in an invisible world that contains one or more
gods who are in control of powerful forces, and thus can be prayed to for advice,
comfort and practical action. If we ask how this type of thinking is maintained from
generation to generation, it is by accepting the authority of tradition, personal revela-
tion and ancient texts. These sources of authority are usually regarded as sacrosanct
and not open to question, but can be subject to different interpretations. Surveys
show that the best predictor of peoples' religious belief is that of their parents -
children tend to believe what their parents tell them because their parents are their
first sources of authority.
The alternative way of explaining the world is called “naturalism” by philoso-
phers. This view argues that there is only one world; it is the physical world we
are all aware of, and it behaves according to
inbuilt, unvarying regularities
as deter-
mined by observation and experiment. These regularities are sometimes called “laws
of nature” but this term is often misunderstood to imply a lawgiver
,
which is not the
intention. Examples of such unvarying regularities are the three laws of motion pro-
posed by Isaac Newton, and the four laws of thermodynamics. In this naturalistic
scheme of things, there are no supernatural agents, so there is no possibility of mir-
acles nor is there any point in praying for divine intervention, other than to make
people feel better.
The naturalistic view is very recent in human history. It began in a serious
way only at the time of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century in Western
Europe. The Enlightenment is the term used to describe an intellectual movement
whose members believed that reason could be used to combat both superstition and
tyranny and to build a better world. The principal targets of the founders of the
Enlightenment were organised religion and the domination of society by an heredi-
tary aristocracy. The founders of the Enlightenment were motivated by the desire
to be free to pursue the truth as they saw fit, without the threat of sanction for
challenging established ideas.
Naturalism argues that reason should be the prime means of understanding the
world, but reason based on observation and experiments and not on an acceptance of
