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.

Neuromania and Darwinitis

Raymond Tallis

Chapter 11 of the book The Naturalist Worldview of Moisés Pérez Marcos, which I discussed in the previous post, is dedicated entirely to the philosopher and neuroscientist Raymond Tallis, who despite his atheistic religious stance opposes some of the modern exaggerations of reductionist naturalism. Tallis published a book in 2011 titled, significantly, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the misrepresentation of humanity. This book describes two very widespread philosophical pathologies, which emerge from professional journals and educated colloquiums to discussions in the pub or TV screens. (Pérez Marcos, paraphrasing Tallis). They are the following:

Naturalism or naturalisms

La cosmovisión naturalista (The Naturalist Worldview) is a monumental book, written in Spanish by Moisés Pérez Marcos, about naturalist philosophies. As with the multiverse, of which there are many different theories, usually incompatible with each other, there are (almost) as many naturalistic philosophies as there are naturalistic philosophers. In other words, they don’t agree among themselves.

The first thing to do when confronted with naturalism is to try to define it and differentiate it from related worldviews: