Contradictions of naturalism

Mary Midgley

Several times I have pointed out some of the contradictions stated by naturalist philosophy and its different variants: materialism, reductionism, physicalism, scientism, etc. In the previous post I pointed out that Raymond Tallis has detected two important contradictions that he calls darwinitis and neuromania. In this post I am going to bring together a few more, because when one sees them together their power is multiplied. Here are those I have selected:

• Science is the only valid source of human knowledge: Which science has reached this conclusion? Physics? Biology? None of the sciences. Therefore, if what this statement says is true, this statement must be false. We arrive at a contradiction. On the other hand, if this statement is false, there is no problem. Ergo, this statement is false. Therefore, scientism (and thus naturalism) is false.



Francis Crick

• The self is an illusion: You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (Francis Crick, The astonishing hypothesis: The scientific search for the soul, 1994). But an illusion is a concept that requires the existence of a subject who experiences that illusion. Which subject experiences the illusion of the self, if the self does not exist? We can get along without believing in God, but can we get along without believing in ourselves? (Mary Midgley, Are you an illusion?, 2014).
• Science has proven that miracles do not exist: Stated this way, it seems that the phrase means something. But it is possible to formulate it in an equivalent way that makes it clear that it is contradictory: Science has proven that there are no events inexplicable to science. How can science prove that? It is impossible. What actually happens is that naturalistic philosophy (which is not science) affirms this as dogma, without science having said anything about it. And then they say that this phrase is a result of scientific research, which is obviously false.
• Nature is subject to laws that are sometimes surprisingly simple if expressed mathematically. Naturalist philosophers think that there is no need to seek an explanation for the existence of laws, that they are simply there, for no reason. Therefore, they refuse to find the reason for some things that we can verify. How does this square with the claim that science will one day be able to explain everything?
• Naturalist philosophers affirm that the theory of evolution proves that there is no design in living beings, because they appeared as a consequence of a mixture of chance and necessity. However, human beings are capable of carrying out designs that involve both chance and necessity, such as artificial life experiments. Why can we do something that nature is not capable of doing? Aren’t we a part of nature? Obviously yes, we are. Therefore, the previous statement is false.
• Naturalist philosophers affirm that in nature there are only efficient causes, that there are no final causes or purposes. But we are part of nature and we have purposes. To this they usually answer that our purposes are an illusion, that everything is decided in advance. So why make the effort to achieve something? For example, why strive to convince others of the truth of naturalistic philosophy?

In his book La Cosmovisión Naturalista (The Naturalist Worldview), Moisés Pérez Marcos includes a quote from Richard Lewontin, a naturalist philosopher, that makes things quite clear:

We side with science despite the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, despite its failure to fulfill many extravagant promises... because we have an a priori commitment to materialism... Furthermore, this materialism is absolute, because we cannot let a Divine Foot appear under the door. (Billions and billions of demons, The New York Review of Books, 44:1 1997).

And Pérez Marcos comments: It seems clear that naturalism, before many other things, really is anti-theism.  Note that Lewontin, in this quote, identifies science with materialism: a very common fallacy among materialists, who don’t know (or don’t want to know) to distinguish science from their philosophy.

The same post in Spanish

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Manuel Alfonseca