Blackwell Reference Online

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As it stands, naturalism is presumably not a religion. But if we examine it, we find that it performs one of the central functions of a religion: it provides its followers with a worldview. And as such, it might be called an “honorary religion.” And as such, we are led to ask, is there a conflict between naturalism understood in this way and science? And if the answer is “yes,” there is a science/religion conflict, but not between science and religion, but between science and naturalism.Naturalism is the view that there is no such person as God or anything like God. So taken, it is stronger than atheism; it is possible to be an atheist without rising to the heights (or sinking to the depths) of naturalism. A follower of Hegel could be an atheist, but, because of his belief in the Absolute, fail to qualify for naturalism; similarly for someone who believed in the Stoic's Nous, or Plato's Idea of the Good or Aristotle's Prime Mover. This definition of naturalism is a bit vague: exactly how much must an entity resemble God to be such that endorsing it disqualifies one from naturalism? Perhaps the definition will be serviceable nonetheless; clear examples of naturalists would be Bertrand Russell (“A Free Man's Worship”), Daniel Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea), Richard Dawkins (The Blind Watchmaker), the late Stephen Jay Gould, David Armstrong, and the many others that are sometimes ... log in or subscribe to read full text