NATURALISM

INTRODUCTION.
Naturalism is the view of reality that nature alone real; there is no supernatural source of nature beyond nature. It is opposed to both idealism and materialism. It asserts contrary to them that mind and matter are not ultimate but they arise out of nature and nature is the source of mind and matter.
HISTORY OF NATURALISM.
Naturalism is a modern phenomena; it has developed in the United States in the twentieth century. At the close of the previous century the philosophy taught in American colleges was gennerally some form of idealism. At the beginning of the twentieth century a reaction against the idealistic metaphysics took place, led by Peirce, James, Dewey, and their followers. Instead of replacing the idealistic metaphysic with an alternate, they shifted the study of philosophy from systematic metaphysics to a empirical epistemology, the scientific method, and a pragmatic approach to moral and social problems. Not being able to avoid metaphysics altogether this American empiricism declared itself metaphysically on the side of Nature against Supernature. They adopted the results of the physical and biological sciences as their metaphysics. Naturalism challenged the cosmological, teleological, moral arguments for the existence of God, asserting that there is no supernatural reality that is the cause and in control of the universe; they asserted that the universe is self-existence, self-explanatory, self-operating, and self-directing. The cosmic-process is not teleological and anthropocentric, but purposeless and deterministic; everything that exists is conditioned by a causal laws of the all-encompassing system of nature.
1. Neo-Realism.
  In England during the early decades of twentieth century a movement called Neo-Realism was initiated by G. E. Moore (1873-1958), Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), and others. Essentially an epistemological movement they argued for the independence and external relatedness of the objects of knowledge. Its arguments was directed against the idealistic epistemology that reduced things to thoughts on the ground that all awareness is mental, and that all relations between objects of knowledge and the act of awareness are internal to the mind. The Neo-Realist, wanting to avoid the extreme of idealism that reduced objects to the subject and the extreme of materialism that reduced subjects to objects, developed the alternative, called Neutral Monism, which posited a neutral kind of entity underlying both objects and subjects. Beginning in 1909 six American philosophers, E. B. Holt, W. T. Marvin, W. P. Montague, R. B. Perry, W. B. Pitkin, and E. G. Spaulding, developed a program and platform for the movement and published in 1912 a cooperative volume titled The New Realism. The new movement rapidly won converts among the philosophers in both countries.
2. Emergent Evolution.
  Among Neo-Realist was an English philosopher Samuel Alexander (1859-1939). He was a brilliant interpreter not only of the New Realism but of a new naturalistic metaphysic called Emergent Evolution. He presented his complete system in his Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Glasgow between 1916 and 1918 and published as Space, Time and Deity in 1920. According to Alexander, the primordial reality, from which all things have evolved, and of which they still consist, is Space-Time. He was influenced by the relativity theories of Einstein, and Bergson's doctrine of duration, real time. He re-interpreted its significance, asserting that nothing exists in the world that is not both spatial and temporal: "space is full of time and time is full space." Time is not the fourth dimension of space; it has only one dimension, but this dimension is its own, and every instant within the infinite course of time occupies the whole space; while every point in space endures throughout infinte time. Nothing in the universe is at absolute rest: everything is in movement of some kind within Space-Time. In this constant movement new qualities emerge that cannot be reduced to existing qualities. At each new level of emergent evolution novel qualities are added, while those of lower levels are retained. The movement is toward complexity; evolution has a nisus ["a striving"] toward ever higher levels. God is either the entire space-time universe striving to the next emergent or the characteristic of transcendent which the next emergent has to what exists. From the standpoint of the dog, man is a deity. From the standpoint of all existence the new emergent is deity. Since evolution is unending, the quality of deity remains in a sense always transcendent.
3. Critical Naturalism.
  Other naturalist, critical of both idealism and materialism, subscribe to a broad definition of naturalism; they do not adhere to any detailed metaphysical doctrine. They see themselves as a "third force" between idealism and materialism. They reject the idealist's view of reality as wholly mind, but give credit to idealism for calling attention to powerful role played in our experience by reason and intelligence. On the other hand, critical naturalism criticizes materialism for reducing everything to matter in motion, yet they accept its rejection of supernaturalism. Thus critical naturalism attempts to recognize the philosophic contributions of both idealism and materialism. But critical naturalism is not just a simple compromise between idealism and materialism. Critical naturalism is not just a kind of materialism; on the contrary, naturalism is much broader; materialism is a narrow, and in some ways, a naive kind of naturalism. The critical naturalist rejects the idealist's dualism in which appearance is opposed to reality. And most fundamentally, the critical naturalist cannot accept is the concept of a supernatural entity, God or something like a God, since he believes that Nature is the ultimate category of explanation. And on the other hand, the critical naturalist, in spite of their common empiricism and the rejection of supernaturalism, objects to materialistic reductionism. This fallacy of reductionism or "nothing-but" is committed when one explains A by saying "A is nothing but B." This reductionism happens when we try to account for something by saying it is not what it is, but something else. The materialist commits this fallacy when attempt to prove that "all is matter in motion," reducing really different levels of experience to one only. To say that life is simply highly organized matter is to say that it is nothing but matter. But this explanation ignores the real differences between living and non-living things. Instead of explaining life, the materialist explains it away. The critical naturalist in contrast to the materialist holds that mind and physical events display really different levels of nature. The critical naturalist is both a monist (one kind of reality, Nature) and a pluralist (many levels of reality).
  He is pluralist in that he grants full reality to levels of experience, whether it is matter, life, mind or value. He is a monist in that he tries to explain all these things under the one ultimate category of Nature. He opposes all attempts to explain experience by a dualism that splits things too widely apart. Thus he rejects Descartes dualism of body and mind as two different kinds of substance: mind as thinking substance and body as extended substance. He sees the relation of mind to body as one of integral unity. Though in detail various naturalist differ on how they see this unity, they all agree that mind is a way of acting integral with the human organism, rather than a spiritual substance residing in a body, an extended substance. Mind is rooted in Nature without being reduced to matter in motion. Man is not a dualism of mind and matter, but an integral, natural whole. Critical naturalism does not favor explanations of human behavior in terms of a thoroughgoing mechanistic determinism; as such it precludes human responsiblity. The critical materialist points out that determination need not be external - a compulsion upon the organism "from the outside." Human beings are organisms capable of a certain measure of self-determination. While conceding the relative autonomy of human agents, the critial naturalist reminds us, however, that a large part of human behavior is directly related to its physical environment. The most genuine free act cannot be entirely disassociated from the natural environment surrounding it. Even though the critical naturalist rejects the dualism between Nature and Supernature (that is, to put it buntly, he denies the existence of God, if God is conceived as an actual being distinct from and transcending Nature), he recognizes that religion plays a important function in human behavior; taken as a symbolic representation of life, they can help one to accommodate himself to destiny with tranquilty. God is thus a name for human ideals and values conceived as a unity. Since ideals and values have the power to guide action, religious values occupy a high place among those norms which govern human conduct. "Right-wing" naturalist believe that there is a place for religion in a naturalistic philosophy, since religion is a fact of human experience. "Left-wing" naturalist reject religion in any form as detrimental to human behavior. But what the naturalist usually mean by "religion," however, is not some historical form of relgion, not an "organized" religion. All naturalist reject religion grounded in any supernatural source. However sympathetic he may be to religion, the "right-wing" naturalist gently, occasionally reluctantly, declines to concede the existence of God as an actual being distinct from the universe. The naturalist view is that while the concept of a transcendent God is not inherently self-contradictory, there is no empirical evidence to warrant belief in the actuality of such a being.