Is Naturalism Going the Way of Divination?

by Asa Boxer

Welcome to Barstool Bits, a weekly short column meant to supplement the long-form essays that appear only two or three times a month from analogy magazine proper. You can opt out of Barstool Bits by clicking on Unsubscribe at the bottom of your email and toggling off this series. If, on the other hand, you’d like to read past Bits, click here.

---

I have often found myself deeply unnerved by the dismissiveness of atheists, especially those in popular culture who represent themselves as scientists. There’s a whole swathe of phenomena they deem woo-woo or spooky that they simply won’t countenance; and they go so far as to dismiss the existence of these phenomena without making any effort to conduct experiments. They don’t speak from any direct observation; they glibly toss out the possibility, usually with some sort of joke. Often enough, they will invent a straw man version of a phenomenon so they can dismantle it and laugh. Where does this stubbornness come from? I’ve considered it a kind of mental illness, a left-brain lockdown that ignores inconvenient material because the left brain must be right, and even gets angry at the suggestion that it may be mistaken. I borrow this line of thinking from neuroimaging specialist and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, and I believe there’s some truth to it. But labelling a worldview as a form of madness can stop us short of the sort of analysis that has the potential to unravel the trouble and perhaps present a cure.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been reading Cicero’s On Divination, and I’m finding value in learning from the horse’s mouth about a system that once commanded awe and political authority—especially at a moment when that system was still active, though rapidly losing respect and authority. In Book 1 of On Divination, Cicero uses the voice of his brother Quintus to elaborate the Stoic school’s take on divination, and we get a set speech that unfolds nearly without interruption. The value here is that it allows the reader to follow the thinking and take in the worldview, while accepting some ideas and rejecting others on his own terms. Cicero then steps up in Book 2 to decimate the whole paradigm using the rationale of naturalism.

That’s our point of contact with today’s new atheists—the Dawkinses and Dennetts and Shermers of this world: naturalism. What is naturalism? Reading Cicero, one discovers that the concept of “rerum natura” or the nature of things hasn’t changed much since ancient times. Essentially, it consists of the idea that there are natural laws that govern humanity, life and the cosmos, and that every phenomenon must be explained by those natural laws. Furthermore, these laws govern cause and effect in a coherent, consistent and sensible manner. No magical or supernatural forces intervene in these processes. This is the perspective we’ve been raised with, and none of this seems in any way controversial. Today, we’d say that all phenomena must be explained in terms of matter and energy. Those phenomena that cannot be so explained are aberrations. If you saw a ghost or had a psychic premonition, there’s something wrong with you. The ghost was just a stupid mind trick and the premonition was coincidence. And that’s that. If you insist that your experience was real, there are meds for you.

We all understand this sort of thinking. There’s something safe about it and even comforting. There’s nothing spooky in the world. But this sort of thinking gets taken to extremes, especially when a naturalist explanation like Darwinism becomes the only game in town. The notion that we’ve reached a final revelation through a given naturalist explanation comes from an ignorance of history, philosophy, poetics, and narrative frameworks. Just because a worldview appears to be internally consistent and coherent doesn’t mean that it is; and even if it were, that wouldn’t necessarily mean that it’s a mirror of reality.

Moreover, there are things that naturalism can’t handle. It simply has no language to deal with spirituality. More woo-woo. And yet, as science historian and philosopher Mary Midgley puts it in her Science as Salvation: “These topics do not cease to be thought about because they lie outside the borders of science. They have to be thought about in other ways” (56). She’s speaking of things “spiritual, moral, metaphysical or psychological in a sense of ‘psychology’ which falls outside today’s narrow notion of science.” What is a fact?—for instance. Midgley points out that “the Copernican Revolution disturbed the general symbolism of ‘up’ and ‘down’ in a way that has proved a lasting nuisance” (55). Here’s more:

The world’s new position is often felt to have astonishing moral and metaphysical consequences, such as that truth or justice has become a meaningless concept — sometimes, even more strangely, the psychological consequence that all human kindness is an illusion. (55)

And right there! That’s what I’m after. These naturalist paradigms or “maps” (as Midgley calls them) extend beyond their applicability and dismiss our inner worlds as illusions. Love, joy, altruism, virtue. . . anything to do with the heart life, anything that makes life worth living is woo-woo, just a bunch of chemical reactions arising from evolutionary expediency and resulting in some amazing illusions. We’re just automatons having some sort of acid trip.

The other part of the issue that I’m after is that naturalism, like divination, can prove inconsistent and incoherent. And like divination, as the public becomes aware of the inconsistencies and lack of coherence of the system and its methods, the entire worldview comes apart, falls into disrepute and winds up being disparaged as the stupid way our ancestors used to think about things. We’re seeing this happen now with science, and it seems science has been facing this crisis since the late nineteenth century, just as its abilities to deliver amazing technologies like electricity, radios, automobiles and airplanes brought awe and respect to the scientific way. So long as it was wowing us with technologies and financial success, there was no reason to scrutinise it. Whatever its methods were, they were working. In a pinch, the good guys even developed an A-bomb and brought a decisive end to the second Great War against the greatest, most destructive evil yet encountered. The Science saved us!

But all that time, as science became institutionalised, frauds started creeping in through the cracks: reputations were pursued rather than real scientific discoveries; corporate interests began to submerge technologies not deemed profitable. Corporate interests buried information critical to the public as “proprietary”—while any science true to its own enlightenment spirit cannot be proprietary. Indeed, proprietary science is woo-woo. Some frauds were big, others small, but slowly naturalism or “being scientific” proved to be a wide enough warren for far more than science. Whatever was being proposed just had to more or less fit the bill of being sciency. So long as you could scientiphysize your project, give it that lab flavour, dress it in a white coat, it was deemed level-headed and reliable.

Nothing has changed quite yet. We’re still following the ineluctable logic of naturalism toward its most extreme and absurd finale. But there are accelerants in play. The recent covid mania, the tyranny, and the protracted lockdowns along with the forced pseudo-vaccines has certainly dealt a blow to public trust in science. That entity that promised to serve us has now turned around and demanded we serve it. The fanciful measures presently being planned to “fight climate change” will bring so much misery over the next twenty years, that the days of science are surely numbered. In fact, as the technologies we’ve devised turn on us like Frankenstein’s monster, we are finding ourselves in an actual fight against the scientific thinking that would have us all penned into a version of Plato’s dystopian republic.

We’ve come to the end of this week’s Barstool Bit and I still haven’t presented the historical evidence I’ve found in Cicero’s On Divination—showing an older map of reality giving way to a new one. That will have to wait till next week. Until then, I’ll be saving your seat at the bar. There’s a good spot here where we can watch Rome burn.

---

Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies(Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018), and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also a founder of and editor at analogy magazine.