Is the naturalist bound to be an atheist?

1. Introduction

Naturalism can be regarded as the mainstream philosophical

position, at least in the contemporary English-speaking world.

It is however a broad movement and opinion differs among

naturalists as to whether value (including moral value) can be

accommodated into a naturalist ontology. Nevertheless, with a

few exceptions1, there is overwhelming agreement amongst

naturalists of all shades that a naturalist ontology should

not allow for the possibility of supernatural entities,

including notions of the divine or God. This paper examines

the premises underpinning the naturalists’ rejection of God,

and will seek to analyse notions of ‘nature’, ‘value’,

‘supernatural’, and ‘God’. It will conclude that developments

in approaching naturalism in a more expansive way have opened

the door to the possibility of incorporating a revised notion

of God into a conception of value and therefore nature. As

such, the naturalist who embraces an expansive naturalism is

not bound to be an atheist.

2. Naturalism: a few preliminaries

Leaving aside ‘expansive’ interpretations for the moment, how

might the classical (scientific) notion of ‘naturalism’ be

characterised? A simple definition might be that it1 For example those naturalist accounts, which might beregarded as ‘pantheistic in the sense that they read intonature what might be characterised as supernatural aspects.See for example, the works of Robert S. Corrington in respectof ‘ecstatic naturalism’.

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encompasses those philosophical positions, which maintain that

empirical science is the only guide to a proper understanding

of the world’s nature and content. Unpacking this definition,

we may follow De Caro and Macarthur in discerning three main

components present in various naturalist accounts.2

The first component is the ontological assertion that the only

things in existence are those things that are acknowledged by

science as currently practiced or will be acknowledged in the

future by good science.3 A strong version of this component

manifests itself in ‘Physicalism’, namely a view that the

natural world consists of nothing save for entities recognized

by the physical sciences. On the other hand, a weaker version

holds that scientific findings are the only unproblematic (or

‘nonqueer’) entities that exist. At this stage is worth

noting Barry Stroud’s observation that this ontological

component is essentially a metaphysical thesis rather than a

scientific one.4

2 Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, ‘Introduction: The Natureof Naturalism’, in Naturalism in Question (Cambridge, Mass.;London: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 1–17 (p. 7).3 Nicholas Tebben, ‘On the Prospects for Naturalism’, inMetaphysics or Modernity? Contributions to the Bamberg Summer School 2012,ed. by Simon Baumgartner, Thimo Heisenberg, and Sebastiankrebs (University of Bamberg Press, 2014), pp. 235–48 (p. 2).4 ‘A positive science of physical nature tells us what theworld is like – what qualities objects in the world do, infact, have … Physical scientists professionally restrict theirattention to the physical aspects of the world that can becaptured in their theoretical network. If there is more tothe world than that, physical science says nothing about it.’Barry Stroud, The Quest for Reality: Subjectivism & the Metaphysics of Colour:Subjectivism and the Metaphysics of Colour, New Ed edition (New York:Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 10. Quoted in Tebben, p.2.

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The second component is the epistemological concern for coherent

explanations. It proposes that genuine knowledge is only

obtained through use of natural scientific methodology, or at

the very least, empirical methods of a posteriori enquiry. Can it

be therefore said that epistemological naturalism entails a

somewhat deferential approach to science? Wilfred Sellars’s

often-quoted statement would certainly suggest so: ‘Science is

the measure of all things, of what is that it is and what is

not that it is not’.5 Arguably such a view does not preclude

the existence of non-scientific knowledge in a loose or

practical sense, but it nevertheless upholds that only

scientific knowledge is the only unproblematic method of

inquiry.6

A third semantic component of naturalism asserts that the only

genuine concepts in existence are those employed by the natural

sciences. As such, ‘other concepts can only be retained if we

can find scientifically respectable conceptual

interpretations.’7

3 Unpacking the notion of ‘supernatural’

As pointed out in the introduction, there is a near consensus

among naturalists that supernatural entities are to be

5 Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, inScience, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1963),pp. 127–96 (p. 173). Quoted in Mario De Caro and DavidMacarthur, ‘Introduction: The Nature of Naturalism’, inNaturalism in Question (Cambridge, Mass.; London: HarvardUniversity Press, 2009), pp. 1–17 (p. 4).6 See Fiona Ellis, Notes for Lecture 4: Nature and Naturalism,2013, p.4.7 Caro and Macarthur, p. 7.

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excluded from a naturalist ontology. Indeed a rejection of

the supernatural is perhaps seen to be implicit to naturalism

itself. Stroud characterises the prevailing naturalist

position thus: ‘naturalism says that there is nothing, or that

nothing is so, except what holds in nature… naturalism on any

reading is opposed to supernaturalism’.8 Likewise, Philip

Pettit states that ‘Naturalism imposes a constraint on what

there can be, stipulating that there are no non-natural or

unnatural, preternatural or supernatural entities’.9 Hence we

can agree with De Caro and Macarthur that ‘For the few who do

take the trouble to explain naturalism, perhaps the most

familiar definition is in terms of the rejection of

supernatural entities such as gods, demons, souls, and

ghosts.’10

Our first challenge is therefore to unpick the somewhat

underdeveloped assumptions underlying many naturalists’ notion

of ‘supernatural’. Although some naturalists go beyond a

characterisation of the supernatural as ‘gods, demons, souls,

and ghosts’, even the more advanced naturalist conceptions of

supernatural can be regarded as inadequate. Stroud for

example defines supernatural as ‘the invocation of an agent or

force that somehow stands outside the familiar natural world

and whose doing cannot be understood as part of it’.11 A8 Barry Stroud, ‘The Charm of Naturalism’, in Naturalism inQuestion, ed. by Mario De caro and David macarthur (Cambridge,Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 21–35 (p.23). 9 Philip Pettit, ‘The Nature of Naturalism’, Proceedings of theAristotelian Society, 66 (1992), 245–66 (p. 245). Quoted in SteveClarke, ‘Naturalism, Science and the Supernatural’, Sophia, 48(2009), 127–42 (p. 128).10 Caro and Macarthur, p. 2.11 Stroud, ‘The Charm of Naturalism’, p. 23.

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similar definition is offered by David Armstrong for whom

supernaturalism is the antithesis of his definition of

naturalism, namely ‘the doctrine that reality consists of

nothing but a single all-embracing spatio-temporal system’.12

According to these definitions, the notion of supernatural

would thus constitute anything that might exist outside a

single all-embracing spatio-temporal system. But surely these

definitions are question begging. As John Dupré rightly

asserts, we cannot simply equate the supernatural with the

immaterial since that would not explain those immaterial things,

such as concepts or colours, which naturalists would accept.13

Another definition may posit that ‘supernatural’ is simply

synonymous with ‘non-scientific’. This is however patently

inadequate since it lends itself to a conclusion that the

natural scientist has a monopoly on the contents of the world,

a conclusion that would surely be philosophically disastrous.

4. Supernatural and scientific methodology

Before going on to consider how ‘expansive’ naturalism seeks

to avoid an inference that science has a monopoly on our

understanding of the world, we should briefly consider one way

12 D. M. Armstrong, The Nature of Mind (Brighton: Harvester, 1981),p. 149. Quoted in Clarke, p. 130.13 John Dupré, ‘The Miracle of Monism’, in Naturalism in Question,ed. by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (Cambridge, Mass.;London: Harvard University Press, 2009), pp. 36–58.Elsewhere, Dupré describes the common naturalist position as‘anti-supernaturalism’ in the sense that it stipulates anunderstanding of the world that does not admit anything beyondthe remit of empirical knowledge. John Dupré, ‘How to BeNaturalistic Without Being Simplistic in the Study of HumanNature’, in Naturalism and Normativity, ed. by Mario De Caro andDavid Macarthur (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010),pp. 289–303 (p. 290).

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in which scientific naturalism can be seen to be inconsistent

with regard to its own treatment of the concept of the

supernatural.

In his article Naturalism, Science and the Supernatural,14 Steve Clarke

makes an interesting and bold case for an argument that

according to its own lights, all naturalists should allow for

the possibility of the supernatural in their naturalist ontology.

Clarke posits that owing to their acceptance of the

epistemological component of the naturalist position (outlined

above), naturalists defer to universally recognised scientific

methodologies. As such, they are committed to accepting the

use of inference to the best explanation (‘IBE’). Clarke

observes that in contemporary times, with the exception of a

few minority movements at the fringe of science, such as

proponents of Intelligent Design, contemporary scientists

never invoke the notion of supernatural (in the sense which a

‘scientific’ naturalist conceives it) when formulating

scientific explanations. Yet Clarke argues that appeals to

the supernatural were not uncommon in IBE scientific

explanations of the past. For example, Isaac Newton argued

that the stability of the planets in the solar system is best

explained by appeal to the law of gravity, together with God’s

careful initial placement of the planets relative to the sun.

Thus there are important precedents where IBE has incorporated

elements of the supernatural. This demonstrates that, in

principle at least, it is possible for naturalism to commit

itself to the ontological existence of supernatural entities.

14 Clarke.

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Whilst Clarke’s claim that because IBE in science of the past

has led us to the conclusion that supernatural entities exist,

‘it is reasonable to believe that it may do so again’,15 is

perhaps to take the argument a little too far, his basic

observation that IBE is changeable through time, is useful.

There is nothing to preclude revolutions in scientific

understanding (for example the way the theory of relativity

overturned key aspects of Newtonian physics), occurring in the

future, and this may well have ontological impacts, that in

turn affect our conception of supernatural. However Clarke’s

arguments do more to reveal the weaknesses and flaws inherent

in the somewhat dogmatic scientific account of naturalism,

rather than provide positive reasons to incorporate the

supernatural or divine into an alternative wider account of

the world. As will be demonstrated below, the type of

‘explanatory’ God promulgated by Newton is more of a hindrance

than a help to those seeking to accommodate theism into

naturalism. A better means by which to achieve the aim of

including the possibility of the divine within naturalism is

to go via the notion of value identified by the expansive

naturalists.

5. Expansive naturalism

Let us now turn our attention to the claims of expansive

naturalism, and at the same time examine how their critique of

scientific naturalism could be construed as useful to the

philosopher who wishes to uphold naturalism without giving up

the possibility of theism. We shall focus primarily on the

pluralistic naturalism of John Dupré as presented in The Miracle

15 Clarke, p. 131.

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of Monism16 and the expansive naturalism of James Griffin in his

text Value Judgement: Improving Our Ethical Beliefs.17

Expansive naturalists attempt to undermine a scientific

naturalist account by questioning what is meant by ‘natural’

and ‘value’. They then seek to incorporate value, for example

our capacity to make moral distinctions, into the natural

world.

5.1 Expansive naturalism – defining ‘natural’

A definition of ‘natural’ largely hinges on our notion of

‘empirical’ upon which all versions of naturalism rely.

Empiricism is however a far from precisely defined concept.

Thus Griffin claims that a natural science is usually regarded

as any systematic set of empirical regularities and yet this, he

asserts ‘throws all the burden on to the hardly sharp-edged

notion of ‘empirical’ and it is there that it seems to me best

to leave it.’18 Griffin’s point is that in order to achieve

internal consistency, or at least to avoid descending into

materialism, naturalism must maintain ‘empirical’ is more

inclusive than mere ‘material’. De Caro and Macarthur observe

that scientific naturalists are inclined to adopt a very

narrow conception of what constitutes legitimate natural

science, consisting of physics at a minimum, or physics,

chemistry, and biology.19 There is an element of ‘dazzlement

by science’ as John McDowell has called it, which is in fact

16 Dupré, ‘The Miracle of Monism’.17 James Griffin, Value Judgement: Improving Our Ethical Beliefs, New Ededition (Oxford; New York: OUP Oxford, 1998).18 Griffin, p. 38.19 Caro and Macarthur, p. 4.

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out of step with current science itself. As Dupré points out,

a doctrine positing a hierarchy of natural sciences, assuming

a certain scientific unity, has been more or less abandoned by

scientists themselves, the impetus emanating especially from

the area of genetics. Nevertheless a reductive spirit

continues to ‘govern thinking in central areas of

philosophy’.20

Dupré’s thesis is that using our own empirical experience of

nature, we are able to discern a

‘Huge diversity of kinds of things with an even huger

diversity of properties and causal capacities … some of

these properties are open to causal inspection, others

require careful, even inspired, scientific investigation.

Neither causal experience nor detailed investigation

suggest that all these properties are best understood

through attention to the physical stuff of which things

are made.’21

As such, Dupré thus endorses a type of ‘pluralistic

naturalism’, which rejects the so-called unity of sciences in

20 Dupré, ‘The Miracle of Monism’, p. 47. Dupré believes thatthere is a dogmatism inherent in much naturalism (at least ofthe scientific and extreme reductive variety) which risksgoing beyond their empirical starting-point: ‘The universe-wide microphysical machine, the integrated realm ofmicroscopic particles that forms the substance of reductionistfantasies, is not a product of naturalistic enquiry, but asupernatural construct of the scientific dreamer. Naturalistsshould reject the image not just because it lacks propernaturalistic credentials, but because it violates the mostbasic naturalistic commitment to the rejection of thesupernatural.’ Dupré, ‘The Miracle of Monism’, p. 52.21 Dupre, ‘The Miracle of Monism’, p. 55.

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favour of an inclusive approach embracing non-scientific

approaches in addition to natural and human sciences.

5.2 Expansive naturalism – defining ‘value’

It shall be argued below that this move of the expansive and

pluralistic naturalists can be viewed as opening the door to

an argument that such a wider definition of nature can include

a notion of ‘God’. Such a move is however tied to the link

between theism and an expansive naturalist understanding of

‘value’, which we will now examine.

Expansive naturalists contend that scientific naturalism has a

stunted ‘reductivist’ understanding of ‘value’ or ‘ethics’.

Griffin observes that scientific naturalism tends to keep the

boundaries of the ‘natural’ tight.22 This is unsatisfactory

for Griffin who posits that ‘reductivist arguments are strong

only if they start with a sufficient appreciation of what it

is they need to reduce.’23 For example, one reductivist

argument is that under the Freudian model, ethical standards

are simply a means of controlling our instinctive aggression

to one another. And yet according to Griffin ‘that and other

possible psychological explanations cover only a small part of

the ground … we also want to make our life both reasonable and

fulfilled … the deliberation that we find ourselves

necessarily involved in cannot plausibly be explained

exhaustively.’24 Appealing to ordinary experience, Griffin

points out that the nature of our everyday deliberations such

22 Griffin, p. 50.23 Griffin, p. 42.24 Griffin, pp. 41-42.

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as deciding whether an accomplishment or certain personal

relations are life-enhancing reveal reductive explanations to

be superficial and ‘very little in accord with the details of

what actually goes on.’25 Accordingly, Griffin asserts an

expansive naturalism allows the boundaries of the ‘natural’ to

be pushed outwards.26

6. What ‘Theism’?

6.1 The traditional picture of God according to naturalists

The approach of the expansive naturalist to value and ethics

has resonances with the arguments of those who attempt to

rescue a more integrated notion of the divine from the claws

of the reductivist and dualistic image a scientific naturalist

might have of God. Let us therefore now attempt to examine

exactly what the atheist naturalist (both scientific and

expansive) is rejecting, and analyse how a better developed

understanding of theism could allow the expansive naturalist

to accept that the divine and God can be accommodated in their

version of naturalism, and that this modification arguably

leads to a better account of naturalism.

The majority of contemporary naturalists of every shade would

hold, or at least sympathise, with the view that ‘God’ cannot

be distinguished from primitive notions of ‘supernatural’

agents, and that science has more or less eliminated such a

notion. As Ellis explains in respect of Richard Dawkins, a

typical exponent of such a view ‘the scientific fact about the

25 Griffin, p. 42.26 Griffin, p. 51.

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universe is that God is absent from its domain, and he

concludes on this basis that atheism must be embraced.’27 But

as we have seen, the problem associated with binding the

limits of nature so tightly to the object of scientific

inquiry is that it runs the risk of consigning certain things,

for example value, to the category of ‘supernatural’.

Expansive naturalism of course seeks to overcome these issues,

and yet its advocates generally agree that their revised

conception of nature containing value should nevertheless

exclude any reference to gods or God, since acknowledgement of

such entities would exceed ‘the limits of intellectual

propriety.’28 Thus Dupré, for example, proposes that his

pluralistic naturalism is a means by which to uphold the chief

characteristics of good philosophy, namely the epistemic

virtues of analytic rigour and clarity of argument whilst at

the same time avoiding the dangers of consigning the

philosopher to ‘the noumenal world or Plato’s heaven’ of a

purely supernaturalist approach.29

6.2 Reinterpreting expansive naturalism to include theism

The expansive naturalism of the philosophers we have

considered so far therefore firmly posits God outside the

natural realm. The theist, if he hasn’t been persuaded to

give up on God and settle for the natural world alone, is

forced to locate God in a supernatural realm. And yet can God

not be included in the expanded definition of nature as

proposed by the expansive naturalists?

27 Ellis, God, Value, and Nature, Intro., p. 1.28 Ellis, God, Value, and Nature, Intro., p. 1.29 Dupre, ‘The Miracle of Monism’, p. 55.

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Ellis argues that it can, and she presents a convincing case

for an interpretation of expansive naturalism that

incorporates notions of supernatural and God on the basis that

expansive naturalists concede that ‘nature’ is not solely

limited to the objects of scientific inquiry. As she

explains:

The expansive naturalist grants at least some of the

items which are deemed ‘supernatural’ by scientific

naturalist lights, but he stops short of God. His

reluctance to concede in this direction is understandable

at one level – after all, God is not a part of the

natural world in one clear enough sense. Nevertheless …

his position can be expanded to give us a form of

theistic naturalism which can accommodate the distinction

– and indeed, the relation - between God and nature.30

6.3 The relationship between the demise of value and an immanent God

At this point, it is worth considering the thesis of Akeel

Bigrami in his article The Wider Significance of Naturalism.31 Bilgrami

views the emergence of the forms naturalism which posit that

values as properties in the world as commonsense, and asks the

question why such a ‘natural way of thinking about values’ has

been so marginalised in the past three centuries.32 To answer

this question, Bilgrami charts the intellectual and cultural

30 Ellis, God, Value, and Nature, Intro., p. 2.31 Akeel Bilgrami, ‘The Wider Significance of Naturalism’, inNaturalism and Normativity, ed. by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur(New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 23–54.32 Bilgrami, p. 45.

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history of the West in the post-Enlightenment era to show the

link between the roots of what McDowell has described as

‘disenchantment’ and the notion of perceiving values present

in the world. Bilgrami argues that this disenchantment is in

turn a result of what he terms the exile and deracination of an

immanent God from the world of matter and nature, and hence

human perception.33 Bilgrami’s point is that the prominence of

scientific rationality which is often used as a platform for

contemporary attacks on religious belief, can be linked to a

philosophical bias at a time when, for example in England, the

Royal Society was dominated by Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle and

Samuel Clarke. This party advocated a metaphysical picture in

which God was exiled to a place outside the universe, and

hence the world itself is ‘brute’ and ‘inert’, in need of ‘an

external divine source for its motion.’34 Crucially, Bilgrami

proposes that the supporters of this party were motivated more

out of social and political factors rather than for good

philosophical or scientific reasons. According to Bilgrami’s

research, there was a body of respectable scientists who

dissented from the dominant party view on metaphysical grounds.

These dissenters argued that matter was not brute and inert.

Tending towards a more pantheistic vision of the divine, they

believed that matter was infused with an inner source of

dynamism responsible for motion, that was itself divine. As

Bilgrami puts it, for them ‘God and nature were not separable

as in the official metaphysical picture that was growing

around the new science’.35

33 Bilgrami, p. 46.34 Bilgrami, p. 50.35 Bilgrami, p. 50.

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A key argument Bilgrami makes is that what the dissenters were

arguing for in contrast to the ‘God in Exile’ party is not

very different from the position of the expansive naturalist

vis-à-vis scientific naturalism (if we were, for example, to

substitute the dissenter’s term ‘God’ for ‘value’). Just as

the dissenters sought to ‘sacralise’ nature by viewing God as

within it, so it could be said that expansive naturalism is an

equivalent secular exercise in re-enchanting the world with

value.36

6.4 Reimagining theism through value

We are still left, however, with the fact that expansive

naturalists believe that the exercise of ‘re-enchanting’

naturalism can, and indeed must, be done without reference to

gods or the divine. Bilgrami has however afforded us with an

understanding as to why an expansive naturalist may feel he

needs to be an atheist, and perhaps also the resources to

overcome this view.

A fundamental factor militating against an expansive

naturalist’s acceptance that God could be part of their

definition of nature is the existence of dualism, or to use

Bilgrami’s phrase, ‘God in exile’ inherent in much ‘God-talk’

of both naturalist philosophers and some theologians. The

conception of a God, who exists in some order or realm above

and beyond our world, indeed plays into the hands of atheist

naturalists. And yet this is not a notion of God that most

believers would identify as the one they experience in their

own spiritual lives. Nor does it represent a view of God for

36 Bilgrami, p. 54.

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which there is a consensus among theologians. As we have

seen, the ‘dissenters’ referred to by Bilgrami believed matter

is infused with the divine. Similarly, Ellis draws attention

to the work of John Robinson who articulated a view of a

single world, rather than a two-world, framework in which ‘God

includes and penetrates the world without being reducible to

it’.37

There are parallels between the way Robinson upholds a (albeit

pantheistic, or rather panentheistic) notion of the divine, and

the strategy employed by expansive naturalists’ treatment of

value as against scientific naturalism. As Ellis observes,

for Robinson, ‘God is required because our being has depths

unacknowledged by naturalism … which can [not] be explained

using ‘purely naturalistic categories’.38 Furthermore,

Robinson’s aim is not to establish the existence of a separate

entity but to argue that God represents the ultimate ‘ground

of our being’. As Ellis explains, Robinson’s quest is ‘an

exploration into God’ because God is within things rather than

external to them.39 This approach certainly resonates with

expansive naturalism’s concern to speak of a world in which

values are incorporated into reality rather than ‘out there’.

Ellis argues that the step towards including God in an

expansive naturalist conception of the world is not

37 Fiona Ellis, ‘God, Value, and Naturalism’, Ratio, 24 (2011),138–53 (p. 151).38 Ellis, ‘God, Value, and Naturalism’, p. 146. Quoting JohnA. T. Robinson, Honest to God, Trade Paperback edition(Philadelphia., USA: Westminster John Knox Press, 1963), p.33.39 Ellis, ‘God, Value, and Naturalism’, p. 147. Quoting JohnA. T. Robinson, Exploration into God, 1st edition (SCM-CanterburyPress Ltd, 1967), p. 74.

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unintelligible since if we were to block such a move on

metaphysical or epistemological grounds ‘an analogous response

can be exploited to block the ascent to values, and then we

are back with the conception of nature which made a dualism of

worlds such a temptation in the first place.’40

Ellis therefore seeks to undermine the naturalist’s conception

of God as dualistically opposed to the world, an explanatory

‘placeholder’ that is now redundant. To the expansive

naturalist who insists that value is a stand-alone concept and

that we have no justification for supposing God relates to us

in an ethical context, she argues for a way of looking at God

according to which ‘relating to value is both necessary and

sufficient for relating to God.’41

6.5 A theism that is not ‘reducible’ to value but a means to it

It might however be argued that the notion of relating to God

by relating to value can really only lead to atheism since it

implies that our relation to God is reducible to our ethical

relations with other people. This is a powerful criticism.

In order to respond to it, Ellis draws on the work of Emmanuel

Levinas. She argues that Levinas would maintain that the

exercise of relating God to value involves removing a false

conception of God rather than a knocking of God out of the

equation per se. In Levinas’s scheme, God’s radical otherness

is not compromised, since as Levinas puts it, when we relate

to others ‘The infinite is not ‘in front of me’; it is I who

40 Ellis, ‘God, Value, and Naturalism’, p. 153.41 Ellis, God, Value, and Nature, Intro., p. 4.

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express it, but I do so precisely in giving a sign of the

giving of signs …’.42

Integral to Levinas’s thought is that humans are responsive to

value, which emanates from an external source, and that this

responsiveness is fundamental to our humanity. As Ellis

summarises, this desire is irreducible to the kind of desire

experienced when we are driven by purely egoistic

considerations. Rather it is situated ‘beyond satisfaction

and non-satisfaction’ and it is described as ‘metaphysical’.43

According to Levinas, we relate to God when we relate to

value. In short, for Levinas, we relate to God though our

moral relations with others (a relation that is both cognitive

and desire-involving).44 Desire plays a central role. Our

desire for God originates from God, but the desire is awakened

in my by other humans which motivates me to be moral, and

hence I gain an authentic insight into the God through knowing

what needs to be done.45 Ellis draws a connection between

Levinas’s concern for social dimension of ethics and value

(indeed metaphysics is enacted where social relation is

enacted), and David Wiggin’s emphasis on the human solidarity

as constituting human beings qua human, as example of the way42 Emmanuel Lévinas, ‘God and Philosophy’, in Of God who comes tomind, Meridian, Crossing Aesthetics (Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press, 1998), p. 75. Quoted in Ellis, God, Value, andNature, Ch. 6, p. 10.43 Ellis, God, Value, and Nature, Ch. 6, p.3–4. Quoted in Ellis,God, Value, and Nature, pp. Ch.6, p.11.44 Ellis, God, Value, and Nature, Ch. 6, p.10. Ellis furtherobserves that Levinas claims that ‘there can be no ‘knowledge’of God separated from the relationship with men’, and that‘[e]verything that cannot be reduced to an interhuman relationrepresents not the superior form but the forever primitiveform of religion’. Ellis, God, Value, and Nature, Ch. 6, p.10.45 Ellis, God, Value, and Nature, Ch.6, p.11.

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the theistic position and an expansive naturalist to

demonstrate a common framework of understanding.46

In bringing God into the arena of what it means to be moral

and ethical in our relation to others, what Levinas is

arguably doing is making the notion of God palatable to

naturalists who object to a dualistic (and somewhat childish)

notion of God. Levinas’s understanding of an elevation into

the life of God is that it occurs when we become receptive to

value, as Ellis describes ‘an added richness is brought into

the world we inhabit and we are elevated into the life of

goodness’. For this reason, Ellis can claim that ‘Levinas’s

position - in one respect at least – is no different from that

of the expansive naturalist, for his account of our relation

to God proceeds via our relation to value, and his conception

of this latter relation corresponds in large measure to that

of the expansive naturalist.’47 At the same time Levinas

avoids reducing God as being completely congruent to value

because he is able to preserve the otherness of God. There is

indeed a parallel with the debate between expansive

naturalists and scientific naturalists in that ‘just as there

is more to nature than what the scientific naturalist can

comprehend, so, too, there is more to God than what can be

comprehended at the level of morality.’48

Concluding remarks

46 Ellis, God, Value, and Nature, Ch.6, p.8.47 Ellis, God, Value, and Nature, Ch.6, p.12.48 Ellis, God, Value, and Nature, Ch.6, p.18.

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In conclusion, we can agree that by drawing on Bilgrami’s

account of the root causes of why a naturalist might reject

accommodating the divine into their naturalism, and through

our use of Robinson and the Levinas to provide an alternative

and altogether more persuasive account of the type of divine

we are dealing with, there is indeed a compelling case for the

argument that discussion of God entails discussion of value.

We therefore have the beginnings of a formulation for a

‘theistic naturalism’ that is capable of meaningfully relating

God to nature.

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