Professor of philosophy Crispin Wright (M.A., Ph.D., Cambridge; B.Phil., D.Litt., Oxford) is a naturalistic philosopher who specializes in the philosophies of language and mathematics, metaphysics and epistemology. He is Director of the Northern Institute of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has taught at Columbia, Michigan, Princeton and St. Andrews, where he was the first Wardlaw University Professor and founded the research centre.Wright is not a philosophical sophomore or amateur, but a first-rate and world-renown professional philosopher. As an honest and rational metaphysical naturalist, Wright acknowledges the obvious problems faced by metaphysical naturalism as a worldview.
In his excellent contribution to the book Conceivability and Possibility, Wright writes:
"A central dilemma in contemporary metaphysics is to find a place for certain anthropocentric subject-matters—for instance, semantic, moral, and psychological—in a world as conceived by modern naturalism: a stance which inflates the concepts and categories deployed by (finished) physical science into a metaphysics of the kind of thing the real world essentially and exhaustively is. On one horn, if we embrace this naturalism, it seems we are committed either to reductionism: that is, to a construal of the reference of, for example, semantic, moral and psychological vocabulary as somehow being within the physical domain—or to disputing that the discourses in question involve reference to what is real at all. On the other horn, if we reject this naturalism, then we accept that there is more to the world than can be embraced within a physicalist ontology—and so take on a commitment, it can seem, to a kind of eerie supernaturalism". (p. 401. Emphasis in blue added)
Let's to comment Wright's insights in detail.
1-As a consistent naturalist (and an honest truth seeker and philosopher, not an ideologue, charlatan or propagandist), note that Wright fully realizes that naturalism is NOT neutral regarding metaphysical questions about semantics, moral and psychological matters. He fully realizes that naturalism, as a metaphysical position, HAS actual implications for all of these questions.
2-Based on point 1, Wright realizes that contemporary metaphysics faces a dilemma, caused in part because naturalism is the widely accepted metaphysical position and, at the same time, there is not an obvious or clear place for certain phenomena and properties (that Wright calls anthropocentric subject-matters: semantic, moral and psychological properties) in a purely physicalist world (a world where purely physical and material causes are operative) entailed by naturalism.
Note that it's not a sort of argument from ignorance. The argument is not that we ignore or don't know or lack evidence on how to place moral and similar properties in a physicalist ontology and thereby naturalism is false. Rather, the argument is that if naturalism is true, then a physicalist ontology has to be true; and a physicalist ontology by definition EXCLUDES non-physical entities or phenomena. Therefore, if moral or psychological or semantic properties are non-physical (=not fully reducible to physical processes or entities), naturalism is false.
3-As consequence, Wright realizes that, if naturalism is true, then reductionism to the physical follows. Moral, psychological and semantic properties are, somehow, "physical", because non-physical entities and properties cannot have a place in purely physicalist ontology. This is entailed logically (and hence, inescapably if we're rational) by naturalism.
Note that this is exactly the same conclusion of another naturalist philosopher, Alex Rosenberg. Regarding morality, Rosenberg writes: "If there is no purpose to life in general, biological or human for that matter, the question arises whether there is meaning in our individual lives, and if it is not there already, whether we can put it there. One source of meaning on which many have relied is the intrinsic value, in particular the moral value, of human life. People have also sought moral rules, codes, principles which are supposed to distinguish us from merely biological critters whose lives lack (as much) meaning or value (as ours). Besides morality as a source of meaning, value, or purpose, people have looked to consciousness, introspection, self-knowledge as a source of insight into what makes us more than the merely physical facts about us. Scientism must reject all of these straws that people have grasped, and it’s not hard to show why. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality. There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values (or facts about them) that humans are uniquely equipped to discern and act upon" (emphasis in blue added)
Regarding psychological properties and consciousness, Rosenberg comments "Nevertheless, if the mind is the brain (and scientism can’t allow that it is anything else), we have to stop taking consciousness seriously as a source of knowledge or understanding about the mind, or the behavior the brain produces. And we have to stop taking our selves seriously too. We have to realize that there is no self, soul or enduring agent, no subject of the first-person pronoun, tracking its interior life while it also tracks much of what is going on around us. This self cannot be the whole body, or its brain, and there is no part of either that qualifies for being the self by way of numerical-identity over time. There seems to be only oneway we make sense of the person whose identity endures over time and over bodily change. This way is by positing a concrete but non-spatial entity with a point of view somewhere behind the eyes and between the ears in the middle of our heads. Since physics has excluded the existence of anything concrete but nonspatial, and since physics fixes all the facts, we have to give up this last illusion consciousness foists on us. But of course Scientism can explain away the illusion of an enduring self as one that natural selection imposed on our introspections, along with an accompanying penchant for stories. After all it is pretty clear that they solve a couple of major design problems for anything that has to hang around long enough to leave copies of its genes and protect them while they are growing up" (emphasis in blue added)
Regarding semantic properties and beliefs, Rosenberg says: " It is of course obvious that introspection strongly suggests that the brain does store information propositionally, and that therefore it has beliefs and desire with “aboutness” or intentionality. A thoroughgoing naturalism must deny this, I allege. If beliefs are anything they are brain states—physical configurations of matter. But one configuration of matter cannot, in virtue just of its structure, composition, location, or causal relation, be “about” another configuration of matter in the way original intentionality requires (because it cant pass the referential opacity test). So, there are no beliefs"(emphasis in blue added)
Like Rosenberg, Wright fully recognizes that naturalism, being a picture of the entire world (a worldview) is not and cannot be neutral regarding metaphysical problems about moral, psychological and semantic matters. Naturalism has to have implications for all of these fields; implications that if are proved false, would falsify naturalism.
I suspect that the latter point is what many naturalist propagandists, ideologues and charlatans are afraid of. As they're true believers and they WISH that naturalism and atheism be true, they carefully and smartly avoid making explicit the implications of naturalism for concrete areas of inquiry. With this strategy, they avoid that the implications of naturalism be fully and rigorously known and examined. It is a clever way of protecting their atheistic faith.
This is why they prefer to write debunking articles about creationism, God, afterlife or parapsychology, instead of critically and objectively working out the full implications of their actual worldview and testing the implications with the relevant evidence and philosophical arguments.
They don't want to know the truth, except it if confirms naturalism. They are not intellectually nor emotionally prepared to reject naturalism if the evidence or philosophical arguments force them to do it. It's a sophisticated method of self-delusion and a silly way to avoid cognitive dissonance.
4-Wright concedes that the acceptation of non-physical properties or entities would imply the denial of naturalism and, therefore, provide evidence for "supernaturalism" (he calls it "eerie supernaturalism")
Note that Wright is not talking about a specific religion or God, but simply about a facts which, if exist, are incompatible with the implications of naturalism, and therefore can be called "supernatural" (beyond the limits of nature as understood by naturalism). If such supernaturalism entails a specific form of theism (e.g. Christian theism), is another (important) question, but it is not the point relevant for Wright's argument.
His point is that naturalism has clear implications that need to be true if naturalism is true. But if the implications are false, then naturalism is false, and some kind of "supernaturalism" has to be right.
In my view, the absolute beginning of the universe in a finite past, the fine tuning for intelligent life of the universe, the existence of consciousness, the existence of rationality, the reliability of science and logic, the existence of objective moral values, the existence of paranormal phenomena, the (probable) existence of an afterlife and other facts like those show, compellingly, that naturalism is false and pointed out to a trascendent spiritual reality (namely, God).
Naturalism can only exist if it disregards, conceals, misrepresents or undermines the evidence for all or most of these facts (organized skepticism is the logical consequence of naturalistic purpose to precisely undermine the evidence and research which, if widely accepted, would demolish the atheistic naturalistic-materialistic worldview). But people is not always stupid; even naturalists themselves are beginning to realize the serious and fatal flaws of naturalism, and probably some of them will ultimately conclude that naturalism is false.
And if it is false, and we have respect for the truth, we have to fight (intellectually) and criticize naturalism (and its ideologues) with the severest and strongest arguments, criticisms and empirical evidences available to us.
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