Religious Naturalism: Where Science and Spirituality Meet

[Jetavan]

ReligiousNaturalism.org:

As you will find, there is a lot of diversity among Religious Naturalists. It is probably fair to say that virtually all of us find meaning, joy, and value in the natural world. We trust our own experience at interpreting that world but realize that our experience can also lead us astray. We therefore look especially to science to resolve differences of opinion in understanding and interpreting the natural world. A consilient understanding of our place within the natural world is pursued as we strive to protect and enrich our home on earth.

The spirituality of Religious Naturalism (spiritual naturalism) includes the idea of a sound emotional life. It also includes the well-winnowed wisdom and morality that have emerged within human cultures over the ages. We don't take traditional wisdom at face value, however, but explore it in the context of social processes, reason, and the aesthetic insights supplied by art, music and literature.

We sense and appreciate an essence, a grandeur and a magnificence in Nature, in which we take great joy. We are awed by its vastness and complexity. We revere these qualities but do not worship them. Nature is the interrelated conditions and processes for our emergence as living and thinking beings. We respect this context and are committed to an environmental ethic that honors it.

If "Nature" is the "interrelated conditions and processes for our emergence as living and thinking beings", then would that not mean that God, and the spiritual realms, are part of "Nature"?

[NicholasMyra]

Not if the processes were wrought by a God whose essence is not the created processes.

[Jetavan]

Not if the processes were wrought by a God whose essence is not the created processes.

Yes, but what a God whose actions create the process?

[Iconodule]

Sounds like "scientific pantheism" or, as Richard Dawkins would say, "sexed-up atheism."

[Jetavan]

Sounds like "scientific pantheism" or, as Richard Dawkins would say, "sexed-up atheism."

"Scientific pantheism", as merely "sexed-up atheism", argues that the foundation of reality is the matter-and-energy realm as discoverable and measurable by the instruments of modern Western science.

But, if "Nature" is the total set of processes that make our bodily and mental existence possible (and notice that there is no limiting to the 'matter-and-energy' realm in this definition), then -- since from a theistic perspective God is part of what makes our bodily and mental existence possible -- that would mean that this definition of "Nature" would include the Christian idea of God. Obviously, religious naturalists would object to that inclusion, even though their definition strongly implies that inclusion.

From an Orthodox perspective, it would seem that one could not divorce God's Energies from this definition of "Nature". God's Essence, however, seems to be totally beyond 'the total set of processes that make our bodily and mental existence possible', and thus God's Essence would be truly "super"-Nature. Religious naturalism, from an Orthodox perspective, unwittingly accepts one aspect of God, while rejecting another aspect (if we can speak of Energy and Essence as "aspects" of God).

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