Democritus birth and death

96-55 B.C.

Birth and death of Leucippus Birth and death of Democritus Birth and death of Epicurus Epicurus founds his university, the Garden, in Athens Birth and death of T. Lucretius Carus

I f we accept the fairly widespread tradition that Democritus lived more than one hundred years ( 460-360 B.c.), his life overlapped the lives of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. This chapter helps set the stage for the fol- lowing chapter's treatment of Plato's philosophy. This is so because Plato opposed every distinctive claim of naturalism, including the theories of Democritus that we will examine in this chapter.

Versions of the theories discussed in this chapter are still popular. It is important to recognize how much of contemporary naturalism is largely a restatement, however more sophisticated it may appear, of ideas known and opposed by all of the other systems discussed in chapters 3-7. Because naturalism is such a powerful and influential system, it makes sense to begin with a look at contemporary naturalism. Among other things, this will help establish a definition for the term. As dead as many ideas of the ancient naturalists may seem, the worldview they represented is alive.

For much of the twentieth century, the worldview of naturalism has been the major antagonist of the Christian faith in those parts of the world described by the label of Christendom. The central claim of meta- physical naturalism is that nothing exists outside the material, mechanis-

Why Begin with Naturalism?

Contemporary Metaphysical Naturalism

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PART ONE: SIX CONCEPTUAL SYSTEMS

tic (that is , nonpurposeful), natural order. My discussion will focus on naturalists who are what we call physicalists, people who insist that every- thing that exists can be reduced to physical or material entities. But some thinkers reject physicalism (that is, they deny the physicalist's claim that all of reality can be reduced to material entities) yet are also naturalists because they deny the possibility of any divine intervention in the natural order. The famous deists of the eighteenth century were naturalists in this second sense. So too are certain liberal Christian theologians of the twen- tieth century such as Paul Tillich and Rudolf Bultmann. Because we live in a day when physicalists control the agenda, I am justified in concen- trating on this first kind of naturalist.

A naturalist believes that the physical universe is the sum total of all that is. In the famous words of Carl Sagan 0934-1996), "The universe is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. " In the naturalist view of things, Christian supernaturalism is false by definition, as are miracles and the existence of the Judea-Christian God. Since the matter that makes up the universe is eternal, any belief in a divine creation of the universe is false by definition.

One of the better accounts of contemporary naturalism can be found in a book by the British author C. S. Lewis:

What the Naturalist believes is that the ultimate Fact, the thing you can't go behind, is a vast process in space and time which is going on of its own accord. Inside that total system every particular event (such as your sitting reading this book) happens because some other event has hap- pened; in the long run, because the Total Event is happening. Each par- ticular thing (such as this page) is what it is because other things are what they are; and so, eventually, because the whole system is what it is . All the things and events are so completely interlocked that no one of them can claim the slightest independence from "the whole show." None of them exists "on its own" or "goes on of its own" except in the sense that it exhibits at some particular place and time, that general "existence on its own" or "behaviour of its own accord" which belongs to "Nature ," the great total interlocked event as a whole .I

For a naturalist, the universe is analogous to a sealed box. Everything that happens inside the box (the natural order) is caused by or is explic- able in terms of other things that exist within the box. Nothing, includ- ing God, exists outside the box; therefore, nothing outside the box that we call the universe or nature can have any causal effect within the box. The resulting picture of metaphysical naturalism looks like this: