The Simplicity of Naturalism

[BrendaCreates]

When you post excerpts I would be great if you gave a link to the debate plz. 😊

[Nexus-jgev]

The only thing about naturalism that I am sometimes confused about is what it would actually mean for something to be natural.

[drawnmyattention]

I like the Naturalistic worldview. It distills the KISS principle: keep it simple, stupid. It comes instinctively to anyone who works with their hands. Got a lamp that won't turn on? Don't hypothesize invisible gremlins who live in the wall--just check the bulb!

[jeremymewhort]

Admittedly I'm a Christian now, but I wasn't a naturalist when I was an atheist. I would say that we have evidence of a non "stuff" made reality - that being the internal reality of the mind.

[James-lljb]

Silly: "The world has one simple type of stuff with one basic set of laws."
"The simplest explanation is the true one." Peurile.
Too many crude and disingenuous types with little or no intellectual honesty, believing in too many presuppositions that operate as limits of their thinking; especially your fabled presupposition of naturalism.
The presupposition of naturalism is when, before you look at the evidence you decide the only allowable explanations are those that are consistent with our current understanding of the laws of physics.
But there is no validity to that assumption either philosophically nor by means of scientific experimentation.

[TheWorldTeacher]

Materialism/Physicalism is NONSENSICAL.


monism:
the view in metaphysics that reality (that is, Ultimate Reality) is a unified whole and that all existing things can be ascribed to or described by a single concept or system; the doctrine that mind and matter are formed from, or reducible to, the same ultimate substance or principle of being; any system of thought that seeks to deduce all the varied phenomena of both the physical and spiritual worlds from a single principle, specifically, the metaphysical doctrine that there is but one substance, either mind (idealism) or matter (materialism), or a substance that is neither mind nor matter, but is the substantial ground of both. Cf. “dualism”.

To put it simply, whilst believe that the ground of being is some kind of tangible form of matter (or a field of some sort), and consider some kind of mind(s) or consciousness(es) to be most fundamental, MONISTS understand that Ultimate Reality is simultaneously both the Subject and any possible object, and thus one, undivided whole (even though it may seem that objects are, in fact, divisible from a certain standpoint).
The descriptive term favoured in the metaphysical framework proposed in this Holy Scripture is “Brahman”, a Sanskrit word meaning “expansion”, although similes such as “Sacchidānanda” (Eternal-Conscious-Peace), “The Tao” and “The Monad” are also satisfactory.

Perhaps the oldest extant metaphysical system, Advaita Vedānta, originating in ancient Bhārata (India), which is the thesis promulgated in this treatise, “A Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity”, is a decompositional dual-aspect monist schema, in which the mental and the physical are two (epistemic) aspects of an underlying (ontic) reality that itself is neither mental nor physical, but rather, psychophysically neutral. On such a view, the decomposition creates mutually-exclusive mental (subjective) and physical (objective) domains, both of which are necessary for a comprehensive metaphysical worldview. The mere fact that it is possible for Awareness to be conscious of Itself, implies that, by nature, Ultimate Reality is con-substantially BOTH subjective and objective, since it would not be possible for a subject to perceive itself unless the subject was also a self-reflective object. The term “transjective” has been coined by contemporary scholars to account for precisely this reality.
This subject-object duality, and the notion of the transjective, is foundational to a complete understanding of existence/beingness.

Therefore, it seems that the necessary-contingent dichotomy often discussed by philosophers in regards to ontology, is superfluous to the concept of monism, because on this view, BOTH the subjective and the objective realities are essentially one, necessary ontological Being(ness). In other words, because you are, fundamentally, Brahman, you are a necessary being and not contingent on any external force. This concept has been termed "necessitarianism" by contemporary philosophers, in contradistinction to "contingentarianism" — the view that at least some thing could have been different otherwise — and is intimately tied to the notions of causality and determinism in Chapters 08 and 11.
Advaita Vedānta (that is, dual-aspect Monism) is the only metaphysical scheme that has complete explanatory power.

Hypothetically, and somewhat tangentially, one might question thus: “If it is accurate to state that both the Subject of all subjects and all possible objects are equally ‘Brahman’ (that is, Ultimate Truth), then surely that implies that a rock is equally valuable as a human being?”. That is correct purely on the Absolute platform. Here, in the transactional world of relativity, there is no such thing as equality, except within the conceptual sphere (such as in mathematics), as already demonstrated in more than a couple of places in this Holiest of Holy Books, “F.I.S.H”, especially in the chapter regarding the spiteful, pernicious ideology of feminism (Chapter 26).

Cf. “advaita”, “dualism”, “Brahman/Parabrahman”, “Saguna Brahman”, “Nirguna Brahman”, “subject”, “object” and “transjective”.