It’s a physical world, with physical laws that predictably operate a certain way under certain physical conditions. For instance, if I sit downstairs at the computer with my bare feet on a cold floor, my feet will get cold. If I hold a rubber ball in my hand right now and let go of it, it would drop to the ground due to gravity.
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If I exercise regularly and eat right, my health will improve. Here’s a more obscure example, yet it too is physical: If I made friends with people who dabble in gothic style and think it’s cool, and immerse myself in their culture, watching violent and sexual TV shows and movies, listening to pounding heavy metal music with lyrics that are consistently negative, obscene, violent, sexual, depressive, demeaning, and anti-social, and play consistently violent video games, it will have an effect on me somehow, and change me in some way – the way I think, act, and behave – and in a different way than if I immersed myself in a more Christian culture. I don’t purposely mean to sound naturalistic here. In the normal view of naturalism, God doesn’t fit, for true naturalists believe in the existence of the physical world and the natural laws that operate in it only. I, on the other hand, believe there is more – a spiritual world that drives the natural one. There are simply too many unanswered questions and problems with the view that the physical world is all there is, problems I’ve explored many times in my constant search for the truth.
I believe that God created the physical world, and designed it to operate under physical laws he imposed upon it. This view is called Theistic. We are physical creations of God, existing in this physical world, and therefore, are subject to the physics of this world. Being part of this physical world, events here have an effect upon us, and we have an effect upon this world. But that is not all there is, for God does exist outside of the physical world he designed, and outside of the rigid constraints of linear time that we cannot escape. Like everything else, linear time is merely one of the constraints God created for us here. God exists simultaneously in this universe and outside of it, and simultaneously in what we perceive to be the past, present, and future. It sounds like science fiction, and is one reason why God is so hard to understand or comprehend.
Additionally, theists believe in morals, ethics, responsibility, and free will, while naturalists are confined in their cause and effect world view to believe in destiny, fate, and pre-determinism. Since theists believe in a Designing Creator, and a spiritual existence behind the curtain of this world, the concept of God’s desires for this universe means there is a difference between right and wrong, bringing morality into the picture, along with the free will we would need to make choices between right and wrong. Naturalists, on the other hand, believe in only one long, unbroken chain of cause and effect. People are thereby destined for an unalterable future, locked into their fates that are determined by the causes and effects that came before. In the truly naturalistic world view, people cannot, or should not, be held responsible for their actions, because given a cause and effect world, they really had no other choices, and things could not have turned out any other way. They are merely products of their environment. It’s kind of a sad view, really: A world where nobody is to be blamed for what they do, a world where any morals and ethics are merely illusions, where free-will for the choices we make is really not free-will, because our choices are based on our past existence in the purely physical world of cause and effect.
Naturalists believe that every given point in existence, everything that occurs, is ultimately predictable, and actually unavoidable – in their view, any given event could only have happened in one way based on the past events leading up to it, and everything and everyone involved. In the naturalist’s view, chance is also an illusion.
Let me illustrate. You’re walking along, and come to a fork in the road, and have to make a choice about what to do.
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You could keep walking, and take the road on the right, the road on the left, or take neither path, and either travel off-road, come back the way you came, or just stay where you are for the time being. You could make your decision of what to do randomly by yourself, or reason it out, or flip a coin. There’s also the possibility that something in the physical world could affect you, such as a lion attacking you, or getting hit by lightning, or perhaps a city work crew is repairing one of the roads.
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In the naturalistic view, you are not exercising free-will when you make your choice, because whatever choice you make, there will be a reason for making the choice, and that reason has to do with your past, your physical experience up to that point.
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Even if you flipped a coin, you make a choice for a reason. There would be a reason why you would decide to flip a coin instead of making your choice in some other way. There are also several options as to how you could flip the coin: You could choose heads left and tails right, or heads right and tails left, or even something like heads travel and tails stay put, etc. The actual act of flipping the coin also depends upon the physical world: toss the coin higher or catch it lower, and it will change the outcome, or flipping it during a heavy wind storm. In the naturalistic world, no matter what you decide, or what the outcome, it is all based on physics. The thing making it seem like chance or luck is merely that we are not aware or prepared for what occurs, yet if we knew enough about it before hand, it could still all be pre-determined.
I even agree with this model…to a point. Yes, this world is physical, but no, there is more than this physical world. God, Satan, angels, demons, and whatever other things and forces that exist beyond this world are as real as this world. Such beings and things would see our world in a way we cannot, and be able to manipulate it in ways that would be unfathomable to us who exist only here. I also believe that they are not the only ones who can rise above the rigid cause and effect physics of this world, but that God has given us this ability as well; otherwise, how would we even be able to have free-will, and make choices between right and wrong? In my theistic world view, we are all creatures of the next world; we just happen to inhabit this world for a short time. I believe God has given us the ability to stay connected to the real world behind this created one, allowing us to rise above cause and effect where freedom of choice is concerned. For this reason, I pity the naturalists. I’ve got God, free-will, and love, and they’ve got fate, pre-determinism, and physical science. Which would you rather have?
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- From my personal journal, May 1999
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