Christian Worldview and The Critique of Naturalism

The term “worldview” describes the way people perceive the realm. Most people have secular worldview, which is formed by their culture or influences from their surroundings. Historically, people genuinely believed that there is a god or gods that created the world. In

The word 'nature' usually indicates a world that is uninterrupted by human and maintained its natural condition. By adding 'ism,' however, there is a slightly different tone to the meaning. Naturalism is the belief that nature is all that there is. Nature is essentially unchanged by anything but only by itself. In other words, nature itself is believed to be the ultimate realm.

Nature is energetic and lively, but according to the world view of 'naturalism,' there is nothing beyond nature that has any influence upon the nature itself. With that said, in their belief, God has no effect or influence on the nature and nature itself is thought to be as a creative being. Naturalism claims that all the lives on earth arose from natural substances by natural selection for natural ends. There is no realm that can suitably be termed super-natural. Spirituality, according to naturalism, are either illusions or else they are merely complex or unusual natural realities.

Since the eighteenth century, a materialistic philosophy has embedded in the Western countries. Previously, most people in the West believed that the world was made by a divine creator. God was responsible for its form and for its very existence. It was understood that God was accountable for all things by the word of His power. In the beginning, God had created all things. Since God was a living being, it was logical to expect lives in the world since life believe to come from another life. However, naturalistic thinking gradually challenged that view and started to substitute the beliefs of numerous population. In the Twentieth century, naturalism shaped the idea that the universe came into being because of sequence of natural changes and developed by natural processes from its original natural alterations. As a result, people who believe the naturalism started to hypothesize that indeed, life began from non-living things.

Naturalists reason the existence of God, especially the aspect of His interference in this world. A natural process of change is fundamentally unguided but depends on a specific condition. Stronger and better fit into a given environment tend to naturally increase the survivability in the nature. Naturalists believe that this unmodified, unconscious, process of selections, evolutions and mutations are the keys that explain the foundation of lives in today’s world.

Perhaps, the world view of naturalism is that nature itself is all of the world that there is. God did not design it. Nature strictly formed itself by its natural processes.

In the naturalistic universe, essentially, there is no concept of being personal. Since naturalist believe that a person was created naturally from non-living things, personality have arisen spontaneously from the non-personal, without any route or direction from any personal sources. Scientifically, this concept appears to contradict against the natural law of cause and effect. Any matter, whether it is a living or non-living thing, cannot become more complex unless additional energy and order is added from outside the system. An action must either contain the reaction or at least be sufficient enough to produce the less complex effect. However, personality is far more complex than chemicals in nature that order physical changes and mutations selectively.

The same with life! Naturalists admit that there is life (usually they are alive). But to maintain their naturalism, they argue that nature spontaneously and without direction or external cause produced life out of non-life. The lack of evidence for and high improbability of this kind of event does not dissuade these thinkers, because (they say) it only had to happen once. In fact the genetic similarity of all life forms leads naturalists to assume that all life must have come from a single simple cell or collection of chemical processes approximating a working cell. This simple cell must have randomly (and without direction or programming) initiated orderly energy usage and replication processes over the years. The chemical activity and physical changes supposedly led to more complex arrangements that then mutated and began to use energy and replicate in new ways. Over time, all living things supposedly arose from those simple and randomly collected natural chemicals, with those evermore complex processes arising randomly and without intelligent design. 

This also means that at some late stage of development, rational mental states arose out of utterly non-rational precursors. Rational thinking was and is, for naturalists, simply a complex form of natural chemical interactions. Reason was never intended by the natural, non-intelligent process, for intention is a rational characteristic. So intention or purpose could not exist until reason came into being, but naturalism denies that reason existed in the beginning. Reason evolved only at the end of the process. Prior to the appearance of reason, there could only have been substances characterized by non-reason.

This leads us finally to a very important insight. Reason itself, in the naturalistic world view, is nothing more than the natural and random result of a particular randomly changing original bit of matter. Reason is not really an independent evaluative process that can critique itself. Reason is only what the chemistry allows through self-arrangement and self-organization, and the shaping of logic and rationality and grammatical language is merely a chance result of an undesigned process that has no necessary relation to truth or meaning. All truth could be merely a pragmatically qualified set of ideas. No intrinsic truth would exist, and yet naturalists claim that naturalism itself is true. But how could that claim avoid the inevitable skeptical conclusion. Nothing can be known for sure to be objectively true, for there is no standard other than the chemical pattern one happens to be using at the time. Why should reason be trusted? How could naturalism be known to be true? The answer is: it can't.

Thus naturalism fails to be able to sustain its own truth claim. In fact, all knowledge becomes mere temporary chemical behaviors in the brain, which is a product of meaningless and random chemical processes. You and I are nothing more than two sets of chemical processes temporarily in this present configuration. Nothing can in the traditional sense be true, for there is no objective standard. The human mind is only a temporary effect of a particular set of chemical processes, and thus is not a true observer of fact and reality.

Naturalism claims to be the best and most scientific way to seek truth, but it is an extreme case of circular reasoning that has forgotten its objective roots in the knowledge of the world that stands upon divine revelation ('In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth'). Only in theism do we have a personal, living, intelligent cause. Only theism has a sufficient explanation of life in the world. God is a necessary being, but this is exactly what naturalism denies. Thus reason is lost. Truth is lost. Knowledge is lost. Meaning is lost.

Naturalism dies of its own success.