Ojuice5001

The definition of naturalism that I use here is the belief that all entities, properties, and events can be understood with the concept of nature. For this argument, I don't need to say exactly what the concept of nature is, only where it came from. It is an argument that purports to say that the modern philosophy of naturalism had its origin in a thought process different from the one that would probably produce the true philosophy.

Where did the concept of nature come from? From the Scholastics and other similar medievals. They were Christians, and they were trying to create an understanding of the universe that meshed very well with the teachings of the Church. The system they came up with had a natural reality governed by a supernatural reality. The concepts of nature and supernature were both designed to make this system work. It's important to see that before them, people defined the concept "nature," if at all, in a significantly different way.

So you have Christian Scholastics believing in a natural world and a supernatural one. Then along come the intellectual ancestors of the SecWeb, and they decide that all things can be explained using only the concept of nature. But wait, where did they get this concept of nature? From the Christians. Naturalists are one of the biggest opponents of the Christian theology, and yet their central concept was designed by Christians. If the concept of nature worked so well when it was governed by supernatural reality, how can it also work well by itself in understanding the universe.

I'm saying that the true philosophy would probably not come about by selecting part of a false philosophy (even if it is the best part). When Socrates and Plato didn't like the Sophist philosophy, they didn't take out what they liked and make that into a philosophy. If they had, it is unlikely that they would either be household names today, or deserve to be.

So it seems that instead of devoting too much attention to the question of modern naturalism, the debate should be between ancient naturalism (Heraclitus, Epicurus, etc.), ancient supernaturalism, and Christian supernaturalism (until the latter ruins its credibility by saying something like "Hell for the masses is perfectly just ).

ohwilleke

I would go back much further in dating naturalism, really to the distinctions between Plato and Aristotle. Plato described a world in which supernatural "ideal forms" provided standards for the world we live in and where everyone was born with knowledge of everything and had only to realize it (a bit like modern Scientology). Aristotle, in contrast, gave more importance to empiricism and observation. We know things, according to Aristotle, not because we have unlocked the keep to omniscience which already exists in all of us, but because we have observed things and learned them.

The notion of a physical world and a supernatural world also greatly pre-dates even the Greeks. The Egyptian cult placed great emphasis on the relationship between a spiritual world of the dead, and a material world. Indeed the notion of embalming, which is still done today under the guise of Christian religious concerns, really makes much more sense in the context of Egyptian religion than Christian doctrine.

Admittedly, naturalism is a philosophy that wouldn't need to be expessly stated, if no one believed in the supernatural. And, admittedly, the Christian scholastics did transmit much of the Mediterranian's classical heritage to the European philosophers who, as it turned out, went on to become the people who finally got over the hump and brought the whole world into its current scientific and technological world. But, this does not support the underlying motive of your argument, which is to show that Christianity was a necessary pre-condition to modernity.

Vorkosigan

So you have Christian Scholastics believing in a natural world and a supernatural one. Then along come the intellectual ancestors of the SecWeb, and they decide that all things can be explained using only the concept of nature. But wait, where did they get this concept of nature? From the Christians.

That's debatable. I suggest you immerse yourself in a couple of good books about early Islamic science. You'll find that the Scholastics were indebted to Islam, both positively, in the form of ideas and doctrines, and negatively, in the form of a negative stimulus to Scholastic thinking.

Western thought did not exist in an intellectual vaccuum. Someone familiar with western scientific history might point out that thinkers such as Galileo and Harvey were trained at Padua, which was deeply influenced by Arabic philosophy. Harvey in fact imported the theory of circulation from the Arabs, who got it from the Chinese. Copernicus had a book on heliocentric systems by an Arab scholar on his bookshelf.

Europe in the late medieval period understood that it was the least advanced part of the world it knew socially, scientifically and technologically, and European scholars put great effort into acquiring ideas and information from abroad.

The real origins of the scientific worldview lie in several areas, in no particular order:

1) rising capitalism that demanded mathematical skills to deal with money, and reliable knowledge about the world. Consider that Copernicus wrote on monetary theory, and Newton ran the Mint. Math texts of the Middle Ages frequently were built around double-entry bookkeeping.

2)The discovery of the New World. Westerners suddenly had hordes of people, places, animals and plants not mentioned in the Bible. This was a huge psychological shock to the Christian west.

3) The knowledge that Europe was behind other places. This spurred thinkers to acquire useful knowledge to compete with Arab, Chinese and Indian civilization.

4) The development of printing. Copernicus' book circulated among astronomers, who made notes for each other in its margins. Tycho owned his own printing press for disseminating his ideas.

5) The widespread belief in alchemy that spurred empirical exploration of the properties of matter, and provided a powerful countercurrent to Christian thought.

6) Technological imports from abroad. The compass, gunpowder, printing, guns, cannon, paper, paper money, the check, and hundreds of other items began to enter Europe at this time, transforming its technological basis. Europeans began to study and model machinery, and use that as their basis for understanding nature.....

7)....the development of the clock. The clock became for many Renaissance thinkers the Model of the how the universe should be thought of.

8) the fusion of artisanship with knowledge production. Western scientists scored two major firsts. They were the first group to meld mathematical modeling and empirical testing with hands-on building skills. Galileo built his own telescopes, for example. They were also...

9)...self-conscious of their new identity, and began to compel society to recognize it. With the advent of the Royal Society in England, the west became the first place to set aside "science" as a social role. IN all other cultures, "science" had no defined space; it was done largely by dilettantes or by artisans with no great training in math, and no social standing. In China, for example, a State Research apparatus existed that produced useful knowledge, but the researchers themselves were generally low-status artisans....

10) the introduction of ideas from Islam

11) The failure of Christianity to provide any useful and coherent explanation for the world. By the 16th century, thinkers were beginning to search for other ways to think about the world, because Christianity had failed so utterly.

12) the fractured nature of European state structures. In Europe, nations competed with each other. If a scholar was exiled from nation A, he could find a more liberal patron. Many European princes were themselves educated and not averse to hands-on work. By contrast, in China and the Islamic world, large empires stultified growth by making centralized decisions.

I could write more, but that's probably enough.

Michael