Naturalism: Devalued Existence

In a previous post I had briefly pointed out a few flaws with a naturalistic worldview. It fails to explain the humanity behind being human. Free will, appreciation for beauty, and reason aren’t well-explained in terms of natural causes. Another difficulty with a naturalistic worldview is the devaluing of existence. If our lives are to have objective meaning, there must be some things that are good, right, and beautiful. Those things must be ends in and of themselves, and they must be worth pursuing. There must be people and ideals that are worth living and dying for.

Of course, we must also believe that we can know what is good, right, and beautiful. This also means that we can know what is wrong, evil, and marred somehow. The means of knowing is unsavory to the naturalist. The existence of value and the standard of value are seemingly abstract and not a part of the physical world, which of course blows the naturalistic agenda to bits. Therefore, things and people of value are flatly denied, or the value of everything and anything is readily affirmed. The problem, then, is that if everything has value we still have no basis for evaluating worth in an objective sense. I say that hard work and honesty make a person valuable, but what if you value deceit and slothfulness? Are those character traits truly valuable to individuals or societies? I dare say not! No, the naturalist would rather blithely put that all things lack intrinsic value. It is much easier to say “vanity, vanity, all is vanity” and leave it at that. That’s the sort of world Bertrand Russell believes in.

You are no more valuable than a cockroach or a star or an atom in a naturalistic world. Fortunately we know that reality is far different than the naturalist portrays it. Some things are beautiful, and some are not. Some things are valuable, and others are worthless. Some things are moral, and others are horribly immoral. The naturalistic world required to allow Darwinism to exist as a plausible theory simply cannot be.