> > Now, insofar as naturalism can be equated with the axiomatic fact of
> > Existence (that there is something, and the entirety of what exists is
> > called "Existence"), then naturalism would be basic as well.
>
> I have never heard this defn of naturalism. If this is what you mean by
> "naturalism", then even God is a naturalist! :^>
Chris
I didn't mean this as a definition. And I was wrong as well (rather, I
misstated my views). I don't believe that naturalism is basic in the same
way or to the same degree that the fact of Existence is, only that it
naturally ( :-) ) flows from the fact of Existence. We don't start out with
any reason even to think of the issue of whether what exists is natural or
not. It just *is* as far as we initially can tell, and it is only later,
much later, that we can even conceive of ideas like non-naturalism, which we
can define only in terms of naturalism because the "natural world" (whether
it's *really* natural or not) is the only world we have any experience of
(or in, at least, being "natural world" beings ourselves). *If* we are to
rationally conclude that there is a non-natural world, we need special
evidence for it, but that evidence must somehow be *in* the natural world
(because, otherwise, we have no access to it).
But this means that there must be facts that not only do not submit well to
current naturalistic explanations, but which *cannot* do well under
naturalistic explanations (particularly since *relocating* the problem into
a non-natural realm does not really *solve* it).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jan 20 2000 - 22:46:54 EST