Read also earlier posts »Intro: About Naturalism »Part 1: A New Faith, Born Of Lockdown »Part 2: The Need For Naturalism
In the intro to this substack, I mentioned that the concepts of “God” and “nature” are considered equivalent in this new religion.
I started thinking about this equivalency when I was a young adult, when it occurred to me that I could make more sense of Christian religion by simply replacing the word "God" with the word "nature", using the latter term with the same sort of reverence as the former. For me, this made it much easier to appreciate traditional religion.
The equivalence of God and nature is not entirely a new idea. Theologians and philosophers have long expounded on the overlap of these two ideas. Panentheists and Pantheists many centuries ago considered God to be present in everything in the universe. The Deists of the Enlightenment found God in the natural laws that underlie physics and mathematics, and Darwin later saw God’s hand in the laws of biology. I could delve deeply into the history of such ideas connecting nature and God, but instead I'm more interested in a practical belief system which will have some chance of not only making sense to normal people, but also creating positive ethical change in today's world.
To this day, it still impresses me how workable it is to consider God and nature as equivalent. After all, "nature moves in mysterious ways" just as God does. Similarly, I can easily understand that "nature helps those who help themselves." "May nature bless you" makes perfect sense to me. And "nature created the world in seven (figurative) days" strikes me as a rather accurate pre-scientific description of what we now call evolution and the epochs of natural history. All such sayings substituting “nature” for “God” not only make sense to me, but also stimulate my thoughts to find spirituality in things that previously seemed just dry science or inaccessible theology.
One semantic difficulty that some may have in equalizing these two terms is that “God” for most people implies both a consciousness and a sacredness. God is assumed by most believers to be self-aware, intelligent, and worthy of worship. God is often understood to be something like a perfect person on a cosmic scale. Many people feel this because that is what traditional religion often teaches. On the other hand “nature” often sounds like it does not imply consciousness or intelligence, and seems to be a dry descriptive term rather than a reason for worship. That’s because the de-sacralized modern worldview has encouraged people to feel so about this word.
Of course, both words have many nuances. Consider that “nature” is sometimes personified, such as in the notion of “mother nature”. This implies intelligence. Also, the infinite mystery and grandeur of nature are frequently discussed in worshipful terms. As for the word “God”, in various theologies it is sometimes seen as having little or no involvement in petty human affairs. For some Deists and other philosophers, the term “God” became a fairly abstract universal principal, rather than a person-like figure. Both “nature” and “God” are very broad terms, and in my mind, there is enough overlap in the meanings of these two terms to allow them to be equivalent. Defining them as equivalent is just a matter of choosing to do so. Choosing to do so yields a lot of interesting and beneficial results.
Above all, when you make these terms equivalent, the very concept of “nature” becomes sacred, rather than simply a dry science term. (Later, I hope to explore the ramifications of this sacredness of nature.) Likewise, the concept of “God” becomes much more concrete and accessible when you assume the equivalency. The question “Do you believe in God?” becomes rather silly. If nature is God, how could any sane person not believe in God? Some might complain that this equivalency takes the mystery out of religion, but there is infinite mystery in nature itself, and if it is holy, it becomes the religion.
What does this equivalency of God and nature imply about the consciousness of God and nature? In fact, the equivalency says nothing about universal consciousness. For a couple reasons, I feel it is not necessary in Naturalism to answer whether universal consciousness exists. First, it’s impossible for humans to prove whether it exists, at least by rational means, and it’s difficult to argue about something that can never be proven to others. Second, nature is infinitely more complex than humans alone, so we can never fully rationally understand nature anyway. Aiming to locate our comparatively puny human notion of “consciousness” in the vastness of nature is liable to be a very shortsighted and futile undertaking.
This leads to another benefit of assuming the equivalency of nature and God: nature is sacred regardless of whether it has a consciousness.
A philosophical shortcoming of much traditional religion is to assert the existence of a human-like higher consciousness in a universe that is obviously complex and mysterious beyond our comprehension. An ethical shortcoming in atheism is not to see the sacredness in nature. Naturalism has neither shortcoming. For a Naturalist, nature is simply sacred.
Finding evidence for a universal God consciousness in nature might be very interesting, and some enlightened people may even feel a deep contact with universal consciousness through meditation or other spiritual experience. However, these efforts and experiences are not necessary to assume that nature is sacred.
In the next post, I’ll explore the special relationship between Naturalism and science.