The Attraction of the Natural

Traveling in the Borderzone in contrast to visiting occasionally—which is all a busy life permits—means to be alone or, what amounts to the same thing, to be interested in odd matters most people can’t or don’t bother to fathom and think kinda weird. Here comes one of those. I’ve long found the naturalistic far more attractive than the arbitrary explanations of reality. On the one side things evolve, flow, change, emanate. On the other God created everything. Mind you, the poetics of Genesis manage to do both. Its leading verse contains the latter in a sharply rendered concept (“created”); its second the former as wondrous images:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. [Genesis 1:1-2]

The naturalistic view is that paragraph if stripped of any conscious agency, a meaning that the word “created” unmistakably carries. The first sentence would be missing; the second would replace “Spirit of God” by “energy.” Energy introduces motion without endowing it with the features of a person, an agent.

The attraction of the natural arises in me because that’s what I see at the large scale—thus, say, looking out at the sky, with or without a telescope, or down at the earth from orbit. The sun is blazing but nothing tells me Why. It is so great that, when it finally goes into its death stage, it will extend out and way beyond the earth. The earth will simply melt away in its heat. And yet this thing is but a microscopic little thing in one galaxy—and our galaxy is one of countlessly many. From space, at least by sunlight, the earth may have a vague green sheen, here and there, but life, as such, is quite invisible, the merest rash a few degrees of centigrade, either way, would rapidly eradicate. Nothing about this gives us any explanations, and the scale is such that it is incommensurable with the human—or even the blue jay-ish.

The maddening aspect of the naturalistic, however, is that it simply doesn’t cover everything. It works up to the level of life. The chaos can yield different kinds of atoms that will then attract or repel each other and thus form various bodies by a cosmic evolution provided that the chaos is moved by “energy.” To be sure, by adding motion, as such, we are already introducing an agency, by the back door, as it were, but never mind. What the naturalistic does not cover, not at all, is the life phenomenon. And least of all human self-awareness.

Pantheism is great at a distance but becomes very problematical up close—thus when we encounter either end-seeking form-preservation or consciousness. What all modern naturalistic systems attempt, vainly, of course, is to explain how the lifeless can suddenly take on life, the purposeless develop purpose, and the mindless evolve mind ex nihilo. These explanations have trended from the mechanistic to the ever more ephemeral. Each advance in physics has had its corresponding exploitation by cosmology. Thus we have the clockwork universe, then atoms, then quanta, then morphic fields, and last complexity, whatever that is, sort of floating in the air or hiding in the core of reality, with a tropism for increasing itself; until minds form.

Temperamentally I am a naturalist. But when it gets down to decision time I’m forced, by the very logic of things, to side with the arbitrary, which is to assert that the only way we can squeeze any meaning out of this chaos is to discern invisibly behind it a genuine conscious agent. Its flowing garments, while they may not be fully alive still carry a kind of impress or memory of their creator, and that emanation itself is what makes the natural world magical and attractive. But there is something inexpressibly more wondrous beneath.

Science and Natural Philosophy

When push comes to shove, I define myself as a “hard,” top-down spiritualist. By that I mean that reality comes from a single conscious agency. From this vantage reality appears to me as hierarchically arranged. If that word jars, I suggest a glance at this recent post. This viewpoint clashes with materialism but is yet entirely compatible with a scientific approach to reality. Science can and should be viewed as a discipline, one of the disciplines of thought. Its focus is the observation and explanation of observable reality based on the rules of reason. The western world has excelled in this discipline and has vastly enlarged our understanding of organic and inorganic nature. This is a marvel and a triumph—and all of humanity has benefited. The determination of how things work and how they are arranged is subject to objective determination and, in very large regions of reality, even to experimental verification. In this sense I’m also a “hard” scientist.

Science is said to have emerged from “natural philosophy”—and said to have displaced the latter. I rather think that speculative or contemplative thought about Nature remains alive and well to this day; science hasn’t displaced it at all. The more disciplined approach to observation, augmented by experimental and statistical methods of verification has, instead, greatly empowered philosophical thought about the observable and measurable world. The task of natural philosophy, indeed of all philosophy, is to work with why rather than with how or what questions. And those questions remain perennially new. They remain—and shall remain—open. We may gain much better and firmer answers to those questions—but not in our current state of existence.

Materialism, in effect, is one school of natural philosophy. It interprets and makes assertions about the meaning of scientific discoveries. Its conclusions, much like those of any philosophy, natural or metaphysical, must be assessed comprehensively in view of our total understanding of all facts and values available to us. And no philosophy produces a “final solution” to the questions that we pose. All of them have a tentative character. They’re all approximations.

I emphasize this distinction because there is a distinction. The very definition of science suggests that, with appropriate study, qualifications, effort, and (often) sufficient funds, anybody should be able to replicate the findings of science to his or her own satisfaction. Problems arise at the edges of genuine science—where science gradually slips away into the speculative mode. Examples of such regions are those where “hard” data are impossible to obtain. Not that these regions are off limits to investigation (the very deep past, the very tiny, the very large, the origin of life); but in these areas a certain kind of humility is necessary—not least the open admission that the investigator, if he or she offers conclusions that cannot be replicated by experiment, may be practicing natural philosophy rather than science. But, as I say, conclusions of that philosophy may also be examined. It’s simply that the rules to be applied to that kind of result are not scientific but—philosophical.