What is naturalism?

Naturalism says that God does not exist and that physical matter is all there is. Charles Colson, prolific author and shaper of contemporary Christian thinking, believes that naturalism is by far the dominant worldview today and that it is responsible for creating our post-Christian and postmodern culture. Linked closely to naturalism are other anti-Christian worldviews, such as secular humanism, empiricism and evolutionism.

It is not true that "law, order, uniformity, slowness, partiality characterize those changes; not suddenness or universality. Universal destruction and reconstruction — anarchy followed by order — are things unknown to science, and opposed to all its fundamental conclusions." A little learning is a dangerous thing. Had it been said that, once established, such is the way of the Creator as long as a given state of things is permitted to endure, Dr D. would have been right; but to put matters thus absolutely is only the science of infidel progressionists or unwary souls, like the late Hugh Miller, beguiled in a measure by them. Laws of phenomena are quite distinct from causes; and the reason why moderns merge the last in the first is the instinctive desire to escape from the thought of creation, and hence of the true God. Positivism is the lowest form of all, and hence is essentially atheistic.

*It is not true that "law, order, uniformity, slowness, partiality characterize those changes; not suddenness or universality. Universal destruction and reconstruction — anarchy followed by order — are things unknown to science, and opposed to all its fundamental conclusions." A little learning is a dangerous thing. Had it been said that, once established, such is the way of the Creator as long as a given state of things is permitted to endure, Dr. D. would have been right; but to put matters thus absolutely is only the science of infidel progressionists or unwary souls, like the late Hugh Miller, beguiled in a measure by them. Laws of phenomena are quite distinct from causes; and the reason why moderns merge the last in the first is the instinctive desire to escape from the thought of creation, and hence of the true God. Positivism is the lowest form of all, and hence is essentially atheistic.

The fact is, it is simply positivism borrowed from Comte which knows nothing but what is presented to the senses, with perhaps some inferences, and leaves every moral and divine idea wholly out, and covers absurdities and rejection of what is intuitively known by what is illogical and contradictory too. It is merely the absurdity of positivism; conscience and morality all gone, as is the possibility of a higher power acting influentially on me. I am to seek the good of all. Why so? What motive have I for doing so? What is the good? Am I the judge of it, or are they? And who are they? It is as empty as it is bad. His affinity with another man's wife he calls his first marriage to her (one of mind and affection, I dare say); and then he married her after her husband's death, who was a convenient sort of man that let things go on. There was immense moral and mental weakness in Mr. Mill, he was in a state of despairing melancholy for a long while.

Against a reverent study and inquiry into the form, structure, and contents of the Scriptures we have no word to say. Indeed, the very purpose of this present series of studies is to encourage a deeper, fuller, wider, and bolder examination into the whole realm of revealed truth; but a casual examination of the so-called modern criticism shows that it is hostile in its intent; it is destructive, not constructive. As in nature God had been so far removed from His creation as to have practically nothing to do with it, so in revelation everything of a supernatural character was eliminated. Miracles were therefore pronounced a priori impossible, or at least most unlikely, and prophecy as well. So, too, the conceptions of God — the earlier ones — were taken as necessarily materialistic and low, developing later on to the more spiritual ideals as a result of the cultivation of the human family.

There has been, too, already, on the part of those who maintain the defence, so large a yielding of the ground in dispute, as brings into peril of loss all that remains of it. They have allowed the principle — at least the mass have — that "Scripture was not intended to teach science," to be pushed so far as practically to separate from one another God's two witnesses. The natural has been cut off from the supernatural, and become thus merely secular. We may, perhaps, indeed find God in it, but scarcely the God of revelation: rather a heathen than the Christian God or God reduced to the features common to the two. The effect of which, for those to whom Christ is the revelation, and the only revelation, of God, is to make natural theology but the dullest, coldest candlelight to those accustomed to the warmth and glory of the noonday sun. Thus it is no wonder if Nature be left as neutral territory, or debateable ground, for the materialistic or agnostic squatter to build upon, with only scant and ineffective protest.

But for Christianity such a division of the empire must be ruin in the end. Christ, if not a, universal King, is none. If the physical universe say "I know Him not," where, then, is this kingdom of His? Thus science has gone on, taking fullest advantage of the concession made to it, pushing further and further its limits continually, insisting on full freedom for speculation, — on having room to add to the history of the world its dreams of the beginning, its prophecies of the end, and to fill up all the gaps between after its own fashion. If we object, we are told that "the world moves still," in spite of the efforts of theologians to arrest it. "Scripture was not intended to teach science." If science, then, can only conjecture a cosmogony, how life was produced, how species originated, how man descended (or ascended), nay, as to the birth of religion itself, the spectre of Galileo warns off interference, and Scripture, by the concession, must retire before it. Science is knowledge reasoned out and verified, — knowledge verified by facts of observation. But then the first of Genesis has not the value of the poorest text-book of geology: it is not reasoned out, but revealed authoritatively. And here, after all, is the stumbling-block for the mere "naturalist": can the supernatural be upon any terms with the natural? — can it, above all, be admitted as really "super" to the "natural"? — which means, of course, can it have leave to exist?

Infidel scientists may grudgingly acknowledge an unknowable First Cause, who has brought everything round us into existence, but who, having given laws to nature, they treat as having entirely retired, and bound hand and foot by His own laws, so that they may not be set aside. Hence they deny that there is such a thing as a miracle.

Infidelity would exclude a Creator. Its will is in its thought. Mr. Mill talks of primeval causes, primitive facts, collocation of permanent causes; but this only proves that he was forced to come to what was primitive and permanent, what exists of itself. Another tells us we are compelled to admit a primordial cause or causes, of whose nature logic and science can tell us nothing. "Thus we are conducted to a blank wall by a method which is wholly powerless to penetrate the mystery which lies behind." He adds, "This we may call logical or negative atheism." Now I understand this; for this author, though an evolutionist, does not deny revelation, but avows himself a Christian; but it is not correct, because it pretends to think of what is beyond the blank wall, when it knows and sees nothing. It has no negative right even, but only to say, I do not know — it is not in the sphere of my knowledge; I am simply ignorant, and leave it to intuition and revelation, where all is plain. Indeed we may go farther, because the mind of man does conclude there must be a cause, nature.

H. In one sense no human being can. It is a design which has no designer, but has grown up naturally — a mere contradiction of terms, a fortuitous concurrence of atoms to make a tree. It means that, if anything grows naturally, God is to be shut out as the cause. And he would have scripture so considered, lest God should be believed to be in it. He will, (the Lord deliver him from it!) at the cost of nonsense, shut out God. For if "natural" means springing up without a cause, it is a contradiction in terms to say a "natural design;" and it is Atheism. But you have a clue to it: "There is nothing miraculous or artificial," he tells us, "in the arrangement of the books of scripture." Now arrangement of the books is of his usual looseness. Is it of the contents or of the books themselves? But, take it in any way, there is nothing miraculous or artificial — i.e., neither of God or man — in it; it grew up naturally, yet was a design, not of God's, not of man's; of whose? a result which appears when bound in a volume!

The method of science is thus essentially sceptical, and continually leads to reject all interference of casual powers not themselves phenomena, till we reach a point where analysis can go no farther, and we are compelled to admit a primordial cause or causes, of whose nature logic and science can tell us nothing.

Thus we are conducted to a blank wall by a method which is wholly powerless to penetrate the mystery which lies behind. The only thing it conducts to is not really what these authors say. The last says, "What we may term logical or negative atheism"; the former, who could not - being melancholy almost to madness for several years - but see the misery and degradation in which men were, and even creation itself, and not believing in the fall of man, concluded that a God of very feeble power, but in the main benevolent, had made the best He was able out of the materials He had at hand! The simple and only true history of the matter is this - man is so constituted that he cannot conceive a thing which has a form or individual existence without a cause. He sees something so existing: it came into existence by a cause. Hence he goes on to a primordial cause because he cannot conceive anything existing without one. But this is exactly what a first cause does, it exists without one. That is, he cannot conceive it. He knows it must be. What it is he cannot conceive. That is where man's mind ends, so that such is the result of science; "it conducts us to a blank wall by a method which is wholly powerless to penetrate the mystery which lies behind." Poor comfort to those led by it! Or, to use the larger work, and say with Mr. Mill, "We can give no account of the origin of the permanent causes themselves. Why these particular natural agents existed originally, and no others, or why, etc., is a question we cannot answer."

Now, in these statements, the substantive truth of which cannot be denied, we have the proof that the whole a priori argument against miracles entirely fails. Science, based on experience, reaches no farther than the actual sensible course of things already set in motion within the present limits of our senses or experimental discovery. Now, within that course - and science knows nothing but that, as science - we have, of course, no reason to expect a change so far as we reason from that, and this is all we can do. It is indeed tautology. It would not be a course of things else. But it does do something more. It leads us to the blind wall, to its own end; but to what discloses that there is something of which it knows nothing, for it proves that everything we know comes from something that preceded it. This is a fixed principle, then. There are primeval causes of which we know nothing but that they exist, save that they must have a cause of which science is simply and wholly ignorant - cannot touch, as beyond its kind, and sphere of knowledge.