{"id":75849,"date":"2019-07-08T15:16:30","date_gmt":"2019-07-08T21:16:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=75849"},"modified":"2019-07-09T10:45:25","modified_gmt":"2019-07-09T16:45:25","slug":"is-naturalism-a-religion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2019\/07\/is-naturalism-a-religion.html","title":{"rendered":"Is naturalism a religion?"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_41399\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-41399\" style=\"width: 250px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2017\/04\/image.axd_.png\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-41399\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/186\/2017\/04\/image.axd_.png\" alt=\"Dr. Plantinga\" width=\"250\" height=\"228\"><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-41399\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Professor Alvin Plantinga<br>(Wikimedia Commons public domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>In the seventies, eighties, and nineties of the last century of the previous millennium \u2014 putting it that way, quite accurate though the formulation is, makes it seem even longer ago than it actually was! \u2014 the most pressing and urgent challenges to the claims of the Restoration seemed to me to be coming from aggressive Protestant anti-Mormonism. \u00a0Accordingly, especially in its first years, the <em>FARMS Review<\/em>, which I founded and edited until its 2012 demise, devoted considerable attention to materials emitted by that colorful sector of Evangelicalism.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>But the heyday of that bygone era\u2019s \u201ccounter-cult ministries\u201d seems to me long past. \u00a0And, in any event, the rise of the religious \u201cnones\u201d and of a naturalistic secularism seems to me now to pose by far the most urgent challenge \u2014 not merely to Latter-day Saint faith but also to other faith traditions, very much including those once complacently overconfident Evangelical Protestants \u00a0\u2014 and it is a much more fundamentally important and intellectually serious one.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Among the very best writers on the subject is the prominent Christian philosopher <a href=\"https:\/\/www.deseretnews.com\/article\/865638546\/Perhaps-the-worlds-most-important-living-Christian-philosopher.html\" class=\" decorated-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\">Alvin Plantinga<\/a>. \u00a0And one of the books in which Professor Plantinga discusses it is his <em>Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism<\/em> (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), from which I here offer a couple of quotations:<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993300;\">Naturalism is what we could call a worldview, a sort of total way of looking at ourselves and our world. \u00a0It isn\u2019t clearly a religion: the term \u201creligion\u201d is vague, and naturalism falls into the vague area of its application. \u00a0Still, naturalism plays many of the same roles as a religion. \u00a0In particular, it gives answers to the great human questions: Is there such a person as God? \u00a0How should we live? \u00a0Can we look forward to life after death? \u00a0What is our place in the universe? \u00a0How are we related to other creatures? \u00a0Naturalism gives answers here: there is no God, and it makes no sense to hope for life after death. \u00a0As to our place in the grand scheme of things, we human beings are just another animal with a peculiar way of making a living. \u00a0Naturalism isn\u2019t clearly a religion, but since it plays some of the same roles as a religion, we could properly call it a <em>quasi<\/em>-religion. \u00a0(ix-x)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #993300;\">My overall claim in this book: <em>there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism<\/em>. \u00a0(ix, italics in original)<\/span><\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u00a0 \u00a0 In the seventies, eighties, and nineties of the last century of the previous millennium \u2014 putting it that way, quite accurate though the formulation is, makes it seem even longer ago than it actually was! \u2014 the most pressing and urgent challenges to the claims of the Restoration seemed to me to be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-75849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Is naturalism a religion?<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"&nbsp; &nbsp; In the seventies, eighties, and nineties of the last century of the previous millennium -- putting it that way, quite accurate though the\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2019\/07\/is-naturalism-a-religion.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" 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