UTT - Blog Post 7

Does Non- Naturalism explain truth, reality and knowledge?

       Well, it’s best to start out with a little definition of non-naturalism that we can work with to reference here: In essence, it’s the heart of the new-age movement, or in scientific circles, cosmic humanism. The standing belief is that basically everything is spiritual and nonreal. All of reality is really spiritual and can be anything from divine to a piece of an overall God to anything else—nothing at all is simply physical. When you take this worldview and contrast it with the ideas of truth, reality, and knowledge, what you find leaves you wanting way more answers than they can provide.

       Let’s look at truth first, since that one relates to the others. If truth is spiritual, rather than physical, what can we really know is true? Not much, since we live in a world of physical issues. Also, that could really be a problem for the scientific community, because they focus their efforts on the physical, but non-naturalism negates all of that, so their scientific truth would be rendered useless. Honestly, they would treat truth like it’s all relative, since we really don’t understand the spiritual all that well anyways, so for them, they would explain truth like a postmodern would. It just seems too easy and boring, so I would say that no, the non-naturalism cannot explain the existence of truth because they wouldn’t acknowledge anything concrete anyways.

       To build on that, their idea of knowledge is relative and thus there really is no secure knowledge. The same way with truth, knowledge is relative since we don’t understand the spiritual, and thus unable to be seen or unexplained. So, non-naturalism doesn’t present any real explanation of knowledge, just like it doesn’t with truth. There’s nothing to discuss because they can refer to anything as spiritual, which we cannot understand.

       Even further, what about the non-naturalistic idea of reality as a whole? Again, nonexistent. To them, there is nothing that is physical or real, so therefore reality is just like a bad joke—something that will pass away because it doesn’t exist; it’s all just an illusion. So they don’t believe in reality at all.

       Overall, non-naturalism feels like a wishy-washy way to whitewash religion into any and everything. After all, they see it as an illusion that would just pass away and can’t even provide satisfactory explanations for truth, knowledge, or reality.