For a decade, I adhered to philosophical naturalism, a worldview asserting that the universe, the cosmos, indeed all of reality, consists solely of nature. As an eliminative materialist, I went further, contending that even mental phenomena like consciousness were mere linguistic illusions—figments of human imagination. In truth, I believed, there existed only atoms and the void: no mind, no consciousness, no soul, just unadulterated matter.
My ontology was austere, deliberately sparse, rejecting the unnecessary proliferation of entities that lack genuine existence. For me, physics alone revealed what truly is, cataloging the fundamental building blocks from which all phenomena emerge.
But what is "nature"? What does it mean to declare all reality natural? What of mathematics? I leaned toward Charles Sanders Peirce, the pragmatist logician, who argued that mathematical truths are human constructs, reducible to the semiotics of signs—tautologies uncovered through the logical arrangement of symbols in formalized systems.
Thus, I accounted for consciousness and mathematics, resting comfortably in my grasp of reality’s essentials. Moral facts and values, too, I dismissed as projections of willful organisms onto an inherently valueless world. Normativity and worth, I reasoned, stemmed from the preferences of individuals who, for evolutionary and social purposes, upheld certain norms as binding. No intrinsic value graced the universe.
Yet the question lingered: what is nature? Often defined against the supernatural, philosophical naturalism denies anything beyond nature. But this risks circularity, for if "natural" means "all reality minus the supernatural," and "supernatural" presupposes "natural," the definition collapses into itself.
Why presume the supernatural exists at all? History brims with tales of miracles and spiritual realms—spirits transcending the material. If spirits were real, wouldn’t they, too, be "natural" if nature encompasses all reality? Philosophical naturalists, however, equate "natural" with "physical," confining it to entities described by physics.
But how can we prove that only the physical exists? What evidence refutes a transcendental, spiritual reality beyond matter? How do we dismiss spirits or a transcendent ground in which the physical subsists?
Consider God: the omnipotent, necessarily existing source of all Being—Being itself, Goodness itself, Truth itself, Pure Will, Pure Existence. Unbounded, eternal, beyond spacetime, this Prime Mover creates all contingency, the foundation without which nothing could be, not merely an entity but the ocean of existence in which contingent entities ripple like waves.
How could a naturalist disprove such a Being? They might assert that nature itself is this necessary, eternal entity. Yet the Big Bang suggests spacetime (i.e. the physical world) emerged contingently, prompting the question: what underlies this contingency? What ignited the Big Bang itself, birthing spacetime from nothing?
Stephen Hawking, an ardent atheist, sought a mathematical model of an eternal, oscillating universe, sidestepping a cosmic beginning—and its theological implications. Yet, to my lay understanding, these models lack empirical or mathematical validation, demanding a leap of faith from atheists. Their insistence that reality excludes the supernatural seems less a reasoned conclusion than a willful rejection of a divine Sovereign.
Ultimately, all philosophical paths converge on an ultimate Truth: God exists, necessarily. Perfect in every way—omnipotent, omnibenevolent, pure Consciousness, pure Existence—He is the Creator, the foundation of an Eternal Law woven into His design. This blueprint imbues humanity, and all creation, with a telos, a purpose, from which moral normativity flows.
If such a Being grounds all reality, His incarnation as a human, His death, and His resurrection become metaphysically feasible—indeed, trivial. Only through this necessary Being can we comprehend the soul, free will, miracles, and the historical truth of divine revelation: Scripture, the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and the Resurrection offering redemption from humanity’s freely chosen defiance of His Eternal Law.
“The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both.
Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story.
That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism — the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence — it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed.“ - G K Chesterton
This is a fascinating look into your perspective shift. Thanks for writing it!