metis
aged ecumenical anthropologist
As probably many of you have done, my life has been one of wondering and searching, thus leading me to contemplate what's really going on here with religion in mind. About 15 years ago, with help from a book entitled "E=MC2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation" by David Bodanis that scared me even before I read it because I was worried it would shake me up, my fear was well founded.
Einstein believed in what he called "Spinoza's God", and both of them can be classified as believers in "liberal naturalism" even though they didn't use that terminology. Spinoza often called God by a different name: "Nature". Einstein took it a step further saying that if one studies the cosmos and all that's in it, one can get at least a better understanding what God is like, feeling that they cannot be separated.
Sweden is one of the countries whereas this is a fairly popular approach, and most Swedes tend to feel that they can more relate to God by observing the countryside or the woods than in a church or synagogue. I generally feel that way, although I do attend services regularly.
Here's a general summary:
Liberal naturalism is a heterodox form of naturalism that lies in the conceptual space between scientific (or reductive) naturalism and supernaturalism. It allows that one can respect the explanations and results of the successful sciences without supposing that the sciences are our only resource for understanding humanity and our dealings with the world and each other. For a liberal naturalist many things in our everyday world that are not explicable (or not fully explicable) by science are, nonetheless, presupposed by science—e.g. tables, persons, artworks, institutions, rational norms and values. Explaining such things might require non-scientific non-supernatural resources according to this form of naturalism. So, rather than tailoring their ontology to the posits of the successful sciences, as scientific naturalists do, liberal naturalists recognise the prima facie irreducible reality of everyday objects that are part of what Wilfrid Sellars called "the manifest image".
Liberal naturalism is a "liberal" or "catholic" naturalism for several reasons each of which contrasts with scientific naturalist orthodoxy:
Einstein believed in what he called "Spinoza's God", and both of them can be classified as believers in "liberal naturalism" even though they didn't use that terminology. Spinoza often called God by a different name: "Nature". Einstein took it a step further saying that if one studies the cosmos and all that's in it, one can get at least a better understanding what God is like, feeling that they cannot be separated.
Sweden is one of the countries whereas this is a fairly popular approach, and most Swedes tend to feel that they can more relate to God by observing the countryside or the woods than in a church or synagogue. I generally feel that way, although I do attend services regularly.
Here's a general summary:
Liberal naturalism is a heterodox form of naturalism that lies in the conceptual space between scientific (or reductive) naturalism and supernaturalism. It allows that one can respect the explanations and results of the successful sciences without supposing that the sciences are our only resource for understanding humanity and our dealings with the world and each other. For a liberal naturalist many things in our everyday world that are not explicable (or not fully explicable) by science are, nonetheless, presupposed by science—e.g. tables, persons, artworks, institutions, rational norms and values. Explaining such things might require non-scientific non-supernatural resources according to this form of naturalism. So, rather than tailoring their ontology to the posits of the successful sciences, as scientific naturalists do, liberal naturalists recognise the prima facie irreducible reality of everyday objects that are part of what Wilfrid Sellars called "the manifest image".
Liberal naturalism is a "liberal" or "catholic" naturalism for several reasons each of which contrasts with scientific naturalist orthodoxy:
- As we have seen, it does not limit its ontological commitments to the explanatory posits of the successful sciences.
- It acknowledges the existence of non-scientific modes of knowing and/or understanding such things as the value of artworks, the moral dimension of persons, and the relations between reasons of different kinds;
- It allows for distinctively 1st-personal aspects of rational agency such as making up one's mind, taking responsibility for one's actions, and self-consciousness;
- It attempts to provide a non-reductive non-supernatural account of the rational or conceptual normativity to which we are responsive in theoretical and practical reasoning, e.g., by appeal to the Hegelian or pragmatist idea of mutual acknowledgement in a community;
- It challenges the widely influential Quinean thesis that philosophy, when properly naturalized, must limit itself to the methods of the successful sciences. --https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_naturalism