I believe in nature: An exploration of naturalism & the biblical worldview

This sounds a lot like Perkins’s argument about the clock. However, there is a major difference. Perkins knew perfectly well that the natural world is God’s creation. He did not need to study it in order to find out; he knew because the Bible had told him. Paley’s work, on the other hand, is operating from a different premise. He argues in the opposite direction: we know that there is a creator by reason of the intricacy of creation.

Instead of the creator explaining the creation, the argument is now being used the other way around.[7]

The problem with an argument for God’s existence based on the intricacy of the natural world is that it depends on the human’s evaluation of how good the secondary causes are. If a human viewer decides that, actually, the secondary causes look pretty convincing on their own, then that person may well decide that there is no need for a first cause.

The ‘first cause’ becomes not a cause at all, but an unnecessary speculation.[8]

Paley’s argument set up God, not as the known creator, but as an explanatory theory. This was not what Paley intended, but it was the way many people  took the argument and the way many restate it now.[9] In this sense, Paley set up the challenge that there is no other way to explain a world in which parts work together ingeniously, except by the deliberate design of a creator God.

Charles Darwin

The young Charles Darwin (1809–82) studied Paley’s work at Cambridge when undertaking study for ordination in the Church of England. He found Paley’s argument convincing. For Darwin himself and for countless others to follow, to find a mechanism by which nature could come to be organised to the benefit of living organisms was a deadly threat to his Christianity. That mechanism is precisely what Darwin is so famous for discovering – the principle of preservation he termed ‘Natural Selection’.[10]

Darwin speculated that the reason living organisms seem to be so superbly adapted to their natural environments was not because this was the immediate work of a Designer. On the contrary, there was a natural explanation: it was a result of natural selection. Paley’s challenge had been met. This, to Darwin, was the end of his belief in a creator God. ‘The old argument from design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered.’[11] Having set up God in his mind as an explanatory theory, the discovery of what he saw as an alternative explanation crushed the only role he had for God.

Thomas Huxley

Huxley (1825–95) was a scientist   with  a passionate devotion to science as a philosophy. He wanted naturalistic philosophy to take the place of Christianity as the ruling philosophy of society. He wanted scientific thinking and scientific leaders to replace religious thinking and religious leaders.[12] In particular, he hated the idea that religious leaders were regarded as having the right to comment on intellectual issues.

Huxley was ambitious and energetic, an excellent organiser and public speaker. He and a group of allies (who called themselves the ‘X-club’) set about changing British society by taking control of the scientific institutions and seeking to change the way both scientific education and scientific influence were organised. He aimed for an incredible achievement, and it is even more incredible that to a great extent he succeeded. From  1873 to 1885, every president of the Royal Society was a member of the X-club.

All over Britain, prominent scientific societies came to be dominated by X-club members or their friends.[13]

At the same time, Huxley was becoming more and more famous as a public commentator on science. This was another part of the battle. In his view, naturalism must take over the role of Christianity as the dominant philosophy. This was more than a battle of political influence; it was a battle over what was to be the public definition of truth. All the deference and respect previously given to religion in society was to come to science.

Huxley and his friends constantly publicised the successes of science and the improvements in industry that resulted. They managed to have this success attributed to the naturalistic philosophy in general. It was not a fair  attribution.

By far the majority of those actually working in science and industry would probably have thought of themselves as Christian and would have been appalled at the thought of atheism. That was irrelevant. Huxley, in the way he presented the successes of science, consistently allied them with a naturalistic worldview, giving the impression that it was only a non-theistic philosophy that could guarantee social progress.

Indeed, one of Huxley’s favourite techniques was to set science and theology up as rivals, with science as the inevitable victor. Time after time he would portray science in mythical terms as the hero, striving forward against adversity and ultimately victorious, while religion was the villain, trying to stop progress but unable to do so. ‘Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules …’[14]

Huxley managed to take society with him. People began to believe his message that science was necessarily anti- religious and was better than religion.

People began to believe that Darwin had, indeed, provided the means to become an intellectually fulfilled  atheist.[15]

Science and Naturalism Today 

Science today is thoroughly naturalistic. Any movements to the contrary are fervently and noisily resisted. The supernatural, we are told most firmly, has no place in science.

For practical reasons, it may make sense for scientists to talk about natural causes only, for natural causes are what they are interested in. What does not make sense is to turn this into an argument that claims that science therefore proves that natural causes are the only ones.

In fact it is almost tautological  to say this. Science cannot incorporate supernatural phenomena, for whatever science can study and analyse is defined as natural. Whatever is supernatural,  if it is genuinely supernatural (i.e., beyond this world), is not able to be studied by the activity that studies this world.

Science is unable to disprove the spiritual. This is not an argument. It is a  matter of definition.

That science, on the whole, ‘works’, is something, but not enough. Why does it work? Contrary to the dearly held beliefs of some, the best basis for believing in science is found in the Bible. To understand that, we need to know a little more about what the Bible says about God and this universe he has created.

The Bible and the Natural World

It is God’s world

The first verse of the Bible says, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and earth’ (Genesis 1:1). It is the first and most basic truth of the Bible. There was nothing, and then God created everything. This is the basis of God’s power and authority over nature. Furthermore, God runs nature – he keeps it going, moment by moment under his deliberate attention. God, as he is described in the Bible, never goes away to leave the world on its own. If he did, the world would simply cease to exist. Creation is not something he merely made; it is something he makes happen.

If that is the case, then how is the Bible at all compatible with science?

Surely science works on the premise that the universe is causal and regular? How can this fit with the idea that a god controls nature by fiat?

If we were talking about a fickle god, then that objection would be valid; but we are not. We are talking about the biblical God. This is a second fundamental concept that is crucial to understanding God and nature: God’s character.

God is not capricious

God’s normal way of acting is through regular, patterned causes. He sets up systems of doing things, and he keeps to them. He keeps planets moving in their orbits. He keeps seasons coming, year after year. He keeps the cycles of life going. This is the kind of predictability that science depends upon.

The world is orderly and logical because God is reasonable and trustworthy. He does not act on whims. He is not capricious. He can be trusted to be consistent. He does what he says he will do, and his character does not change. He made a world to reflect the way that he is himself, and he keeps it running that way.

God’s reason for creation

God is rational, wise, and trustworthy, and he created a world that he wanted humans to be able to inhabit. We are capable of emulating God’s wisdom, at least to some extent, the Bible says, because God has created the kind of world that we can learn from. We live in a world that makes sense. We are expected to come to understand the way that cause and effect works in the world and draw general principles from that. It is the kind of world that can be immensely intellectually satisfying because God designed it to make sense.

Does the Bible encourage knowledge?

It’s a famous tactic of the ‘science against religion’ lobby to assert that the Bible encourages people to be narrow- minded, against research, and against progress in knowledge. Fortunately for science, that has never been true.

Rather, the Bible encourages people to go ahead and investigate the world in order to understand and take care of it. This is part of what comes under the category ‘wisdom’.

The limits of natural knowledge 

God created us, humanity itself, for Christ, and he intends humanity to be like Christ. We will never  understand

what it is to be human and will never be fully human until we take seriously our purpose in being created for Christ.

This is where naturalism fails us entirely. Yes, one can live without belief in God and even enjoy the many good things of this world, including natural knowledge, for a time. But there will still be something absolutely crucial missing: what it is all for. Naturalism, by its very nature, cannot tell us what life is about because life is about something beyond this universe. It is real; and it is essential. Without this crucial knowledge, we will never be truly human because that knowledge is central to why we were made. Knowing that we and the world were made for Christ is the only thing that can give meaning to all our other knowledge. It is the only thing that can actually turn knowledge into wisdom.

Putting it all together

Discovering how the natural world works is a God-given ability and a worthy task. We could not do it if God had not created the world as it is and us as we are. As God’s creatures with the responsibility to live in God’s world and look after it (although God entirely controls it), we are in a position to understand a great deal about it.

What we discover about the world— whatever true knowledge the scientific enterprise comes up with—cannot possibly do away with the need for God. There is no such thing as a natural cause that is an alternative to God as cause.

God is behind every causal process. God is not in competition with his world.

God was never an explanatory theory put there to make sense of a world that was otherwise inexplicable. The Bible never presents the complexity of the world as an argument for believing in God. It is entirely the other way around. The fact of the existence of the creator God is why people should accept the complexity of the world and tackle it with confidence, knowing that knowledge is possible. God as explanation can never be replaced by scientific explanation. He is the reason for scientific explanation.

The  Problems  of Naturalism  

The Bible establishes a strong case against naturalism. But just suppose the naturalists are right. What if we have no resources for explanation or understanding other than what we can observe around us? What then?

The Problem of  Power

Where does the generative power of the universe come from? We have two alternatives: either the power comes from within or outside the universe. For naturalists, this is reduced to one alternative: the power comes from within the universe itself. Most naturalists would baulk at being called pantheists, but that is very close to what they are saying.[16] Naturalists are committed to saying that the creative power of matter comes from matter itself.

However, there is an essential problem in claiming this, for the scientific conclusion from study of the natural universe itself is that the universe had a beginning. It is not eternally self-generating. It started from nothing. What made it start?

The questions do not stop there.

Even if we take the universe as it is right now, what keeps it going? This is generally not recognised as such a big question.

The simple answer is energy or the second law of thermodynamics, the imperative of entropy to increase, the arrow of time that leads from one end of the universe to the other.

Yet is it so simple? As David Hume pointed out, we never actually observe causation. We observe one thing happening, then another. We observe the same pattern of events happening hundreds of times. We  see billiard  ball  A hitting billiard ball B and transferring its momentum. But all we actually observe is one event, then the next event:   ball   A moving, ball B moving. We do not actually observe causation.

We live in a universe that keeps on working reliably and consistently over time. Why? What makes it keep going in this causal fashion? Naturalism can give no answer. The choice between Christianity and naturalism is not the choice between different types of explanation. It is the choice between having an explanation or not having one at all.

The Problem of Morality

Every human society has had some system of morality. Where do the rules about right and wrong come from?

The Christian view is that God is a personal creator and has made us as responsible creatures. We are responsible for ourselves, each other and the world he gave us. Naturalistic ethics will, in general, utterly deny this. A purely naturalistic ethic recognises that we are meaningless organisms, purposelessly evolved matter on one unimportant branch of the evolutionary tree. We are not beings created to love and care for each other with responsibilities, duties and moral expectations.

This makes for an easy solution to many ethical problems. ‘I don’t see what the fuss is,’ stated one politician about the issue of experimenting on human embryos. ‘I’ve looked down the microscope, and they’re just a bunch of cells.’ That answer is entirely consistent with naturalism. The problem is  that the politician himself is no different.

He, too, is just a bunch of cells. If there is nothing but the natural world around us, then we don’t matter.

But people do matter because they are made in the image of God. There are very few practical atheists in this world, thank God, for when most atheists face suffering, they think their suffering matters.

Explaining  Humans

Humans are animals. From the minute level of biochemistry up to the level of observable behaviour and anthropology, we can be understood as animals and as part of the interwoven network of organisms that make up the biological world. Why, then, are we so outlandishly different from other animals? We    are    so used to looking at the similarities between ourselves and other creatures that we can miss the truly amazing fact that humans stand out as the only species that actually rules the world.

How are we to account for this? In physical terms, it does not make much sense. We have, it appears, 97 per cent of the same DNA as chimpanzees. The actual genetic difference is tiny, yet why is it that a 97 per cent chimpanzee manages to conquer the highest mountains and the depth of the seas,  dominate  any habitat, survive in the most wide-ranging and hostile of environments, discover the fundamental particles of matter itself, go into space, overcome disease, and even investigate the very nature of life, when a 100 per cent chimpanzee does not? Why are we concerned with justice, love, linguistics,communication and society? What could make a 97 per cent chimpanzee being like this? The 97 per cent  similarity does not prove that we are ‘just’ apes.

It proves that there is something very strange about being human.

A naturalistic theory of humanity— whether it is Darwinian evolution or any other theory that might come along— still has a lot of explaining to do. It is not good enough to reduce our conception of humanity to fit the convenience of a naturalistic theory. Any theory has to cope with reality. We keep hitting up against the ‘inconvenient’ reality that we are, in fact, more than animals. In our very attempts to theorise and understand ourselves as an equal part of nature, we demonstrate our inequality. Naturalism fails to explain humanity.

Conclusion

In many ways naturalism is an easy philosophy to slip into. It does not demand much of us. It leaves us without any particular responsibility. It can even feel intellectually humble by not postulating entities unnecessarily. It can feel as if one is, simply, not going beyond the evidence.

The easiness of the philosophy is deceptive. Accept naturalism and you enter a bewildering universe in which there is no necessary reason to accept that things will continue on as they always have, that they will be understandable, or that anything will make sense at  all. It is a universe in which you are merely another bit of stray matter fighting for survival among all the other bits of stray matter. It is a universe in which your consciousness is an unfortunate side- effect of complexity. It is unfortunate because it enables you to ask questions that will never be answered and enables you to be aware of the agony of existence that does not mean anything.

It is also an entirely unnecessary philosophy. There is no need at all for the contortions that well-meaning materialists go to in order to understand the universe, humanity, the existence of life, or the eternal struggle for harmony. The tools are all there and all perfectly accessible for those who would actually like to know the truth.

Kirsten Birkett teaches pastoral counselling, apologetics and church history at Oak Hill Theological College, London.