On April 10th we posted commentary on claims the Center For Naturalism (CFN) present on their web site where they seek to clarify and promote the fundamental tenets of naturalism and to tease out their implications for modern man.
CFN embraces a deterministic view of human volition, a view that all of our behavior is caused by our strongest motives, and that free will is an illusion. They state, for instance, that:
Nor, however, can these inequalities be condemned. On the naturalist view, they are neither right nor wrong. They just are. Social inequalities, like everything else, are simply the product of the conditions in which society has emerged.
But if it is true that all our choices are determined, if indeed all of our successes and failures are the result of factors over which we have no real control, why does CFN assert the following:
Naturalists like those at (CFN) assume that everyone will agree with them that acquisitiveness and self-preoccupation are bad, and that concern for others is good. Yet why, if naturalism is true, should anyone assign value to these things at all? Concern for others, especially those who haven't been born yet, is neither good nor bad. In a Godless universe it's simply a personal preference, an expression of one's taste. CFN suggests that there is some sort of moral meaning in their claim that naturalism prompts concern for others, but in a world without God there is no moral meaning. There's no morality at all. Neither good nor evil have any existence.
They also write that:
The problem here is that if death is the end of all personal existence there really can be no ultimate meaning in our lives. On the assumption of atheism, meaning is at best ephemeral and at worst illusory. Everything man does is doomed to perish, all that he seeks to build are just so many sand castles at the edge of the surf, fated to be washed away at the next tide. We're born, we suffer, and we're annihilated. It's all pointless. There's no more meaning in our individual lives than there is in the life of a solitary fly, nor can there be unless physical death is not really the end of our existence.
Naturalism does not have the sort of record that engenders confidence in its claims to possess the key to human flourishing. Almost all of what is great in Western culture - its music, art, and much of its literature; its charitable and educational institutions; its hospitals and orphanages; its democratic forms of government; its concern for the oppressed and for human rights; even the work of its seminal scientists, was inspired directly or indirectly by Christian theism.
What cultural achievements, on the other hand, have been specifically contributed by atheistic men and women inspired by their naturalistic worldview? What cultural achievements can atheism point to as unambiguous contributions to "human flourishing"? Totalitarian communism? Darwinian survival of the fittest? Post-modern nihilism? The drug culture of the sixties? Gangster rap and punk rock? The art of Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano?
The unfortunate fact is that naturalism, so far from assisting human flourishing, actually stifles it. Its fruits are the Gulag, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Tiananmen Square, and the Holocaust. What's more, such fruits are inevitable when man is reduced to a mere flesh and bone machine with no soul nor anything about him that participates in the divine. The naturalist worldview affords meager support for the concept of human dignity and thus no solid basis for human rights. Rights, without transcendent sanction, are arbitrary and transient. They do not inhere in persons, they are mere words on paper which endure only so long as it pleases those who have the power to rescind them.
To paraphrase George Orwell, if you wish to picture the future in a world in thrall to naturalistic materialism imagine a boot smashing a human face, forever.