Adventures in Missing the Point (Naturalism Revisited)

My apologies to Tony Campolo and Brian McLaren for ripping off their excellent book title. Just to be fair, I’ll put in a plug here for their book Adventures in Missing the Point. The title fits perfectly how I feel about my naturalistic interlocutors here. They simply keep missing (I am tempted to say intentionally avoiding) the point.

So let me put it this way. I’m not a naturalist, but here I will adopt the “voice” of one:

I am a young naturalist, having adopted a purely naturalistic worldview, such that I believe nature is all there is and there is no transcendent meaning or purpose to my life or anyone else’s life. I am here by accident and when I die I am simply gone. There is no God or gods, only matter, energy, space and time.

I have decided to live for pleasure; I will do only what pleases me. I happen to find that treating others as means to my end is advantageous to me. I do not find that compassion or empathy or cooperation are of any value to me except insofar as they happen to enhance my own happiness. More often than not they don’t. I use them as tools for my own advantage–to enhance my own pleasure.

However, I have discovered certain ways in which I can mistreat other people, take advantage of them, through deception and manipulation, and not at all be disadvantaged by it. You can’t convince me otherwise. I see other people doing the same and I follow their example and am perfectly happy.

So long as I am not socially or personally disadvantaged, why should I not manipulate, even oppress, others?    My life plan is to live entirely for myself and my own personal pleasure. It brings me satisfaction. I am very smart, smarter than the majority of people, and am confident that I can get away with my chosen path of life. If it leads me to commit crimes, I will do so–so long as I am sure I will not be caught.

Some people tell me that I have some kind of altruistic gene and that I ought to live a life of cooperation and compassion. I do not feel that; if there is such a gene I didn’t inherit it. Don’t tell me I’m not normal; I don’t care about being normal. I care about being happy and I am happy taking advantage of others and living solely for myself.

My life philosophy is “Eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow we die.” I am a hedonist and don’t see any reason not to be. Life is what it is and its only purpose is survival, reproduction, and happiness. Those are my only values.

Try to convince me, on naturalist presuppositions alone, that I am wrong. Good luck.