The Fatalism of Naturalism

I want to write here about one of the reasons I would never want to become a naturalist.  What I mean when I say "naturalist" is someone who believes that nature is all there is.  Matter is all there is.  There is no "supernatural" world behind it.  We have no need to resort to God as a solution.  There is no such thing as angels or demons or other such invisible things.  Nature is all there is, and it is accessible through the methods of science.

Within this naturalistic framework, everything that happens has a physical cause.  Everything that happens is a physical effect of a physical cause.  Event B happens because in the moment prior we had some state of the system and Event A triggered Event B.  Or more likely Events A, B, C, and D working together bring about Event E in the next moment.  There is a chain of cause and effect. 

Also within this naturalistic framework, the higher levels of things are explainable by interactions of things on the lower levels.  As an example, different biological processes in the cell can be explained in terms of the chemistry on the lower level.  The chemistry on the lower level may be explained by physics on an even lower level.  It is supposed as well that things like history may be explained by psychology and sociology, which may in turn be explained by biology, which is explained by chemistry, which is explained by physics, which is described by mathematics...  In theory, everything may be boiled down to the ordered interactions of atoms doing stuff with each other.

Now, this is a theoretical explanation.  I think any good naturalist would admit that there are some massive epistemological issues in coming up with that explanation.  It requires us to know a lot of stuff we don't know yet.  It requires us to put together a huge number of pieces.  But the idea is that anything is explainable in terms of physical cause and effect.  Everything may be explained by science which does its work on this physical cause and effect.  All legitimate studies are now subsets of science, and they are simply working on pieces of this giant scientific puzzle, that is a Grand Unified Theory of Everything.  Materialists and naturalists may not know this Grand Unified Theory, but they have faith that it exists, that it will explain both why the universe exists and why everything is the way it is within it. 

Why do I not put my own faith in this theory?

Naturalism, the way I see it, leads to determinism.  If everything may be simply boiled down to interactions, everything is pre-determined by the interactions of those atoms.  The things that happen this moment are determined on the level of atoms by things that have happened the moment before.  Which were determined by things that happened the moment before.  Which were destined to happen from the beginning of things ages ago.  We see a trail of dominoes receding into ages past.  And this moment was bound to come to us exactly as it has come to us. 

This is a closed system of cause and effect, and reality and nature are this grand interlocking web of cause and effect.  We may refer to this as The Whole Show. 

If nature is all there is, then my own mind and consciousness would be merely a function of things that are going on in my brain.  Mind would be synonymous with brain.  And what I think would be determined by things going on in my brain.  Each thought would be an event that was preceded by and caused by some other event.  And all of this is explainable by the physics and chemistry of the atoms in my brain, an organ that I have inherited through evolution, which is the biological explanation of how I have arrived at this point in The Whole Show. 

But if this is the case, I have always been destined to hold the beliefs that I hold now.  And you have always been destined to hold the beliefs that you hold now.  And you were always destined to have the cognitive reaction that you are now having to this blog.  And I have always been destined to think these thoughts and write them this way.  And we will die thinking the things we were always destined to think.  All pre-determined by our chemistry and the way things have locked together to produce The Whole Show, of which we are a part. 

So my brain happens to fizz and cause Christian thoughts.  And your brain - perhaps - happens to fizz and cause atheistic thoughts.  But there is no reason to think that our brains produce true thoughts.  There is no reason to prefer the atheistic fizzing to the Christian fizzing, and there is no way to control the fizzing.  You and I are merely functions of our chemistry.  And so we might have a conversation, but it is all a charade.  Because you will leave it believing what you were destined to believe, and I will leave it believing what I was destined to believe.  Maybe we will have changed one another's minds.  But it was all an illusion.  An elaborate dance.  We played our part.  We may continue on, but it is an illusion.  Free will is an illusion.  So choosing what I will believe is an illusion, whether Christianity or Buddhism or atheism or evolution or whatever.

To me, this shuts down inquiry and thought.  It is fatalistic.  If I were to be a naturalist, I would want to follow the logic all the way down.  And I think it would take me to this dark place.  I do think that thought and conversation are real and meaningful, and therefore, I reject naturalism.