Naturalism is the philosophical belief that everything arises from natural properties and cause; natural laws are the rules that govern the structure and behavior of the natural universe; and, the changing universe, at every stage, is a product of these laws. The supernatural has no bearing or purpose in nature.
With the exception of pantheists, who believe that Nature and God are one and the same thing, theists challenge the idea that nature contains all of reality and natural laws may be viewed as so-called secondary causes of god(s).
There is no doubt that the naturalists have hijacked modern science in spite of the fact that many of the fathers of scientific disciplines believed in a creator or supernatural agency that intervened in the course of natural law. For example, the empirical evidence indicates that the First Law of Thermodynamics is a natural law that governs, and has always governed the Universe. Matter and energy can be neither created nor destroyed in nature so therefore, it would be unnatural for matter or energy to create itself. Naturalist, on the other hand, believe that it did happen in order for the Universe to exist, thereby exposing themselves to the belief in miracles.
Stephen Hawkins, renowned naturalist, theoretical physicist, and cosmologist of Cambridge University claims that “the universe is a machine governed by principles or laws that can be understood by the human mind, the discovery of which has been mankind’s greatest achievement. . .But what’s really important is that these physical laws, as well as being unchangeable, are universal, applying not just to the flight of the ball, but to the motion of a planet and everything else in the Universe. Unlike laws made by humans, the laws of nature cannot ever be broken. . .”
While it’s true that the laws of nature exist and are crucial in science, the empirical evidence indicates that laws of nature do not write themselves. Paul Davies, astrobiologist at Arizona State notes that Hawking sidesteps the question of how the laws of nature could write themselves into existence. “You need to know where those laws come from. . .”
Ironically, honest evolutionists have long admitted that naturalism seems to require miracles. Robert Jastrow, a famous evolutionist, said that “science has no satisfactory answer to the question of the origin of life on earth. Perhaps the appearance of life on earth is a miracle.” Scientists, reluctant to accept that view have limited choices; “either life was created on the earth by the will of a creator outside the grasp of scientific understanding, or it evolved on our planet spontaneously, through chemical reactions occurring in nonliving matter lying on the surface of the planet.” The first theory “places the question of the origin of life beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, it is a statement of faith in the power of a Supreme Being not subject to the laws of science. The second theory is also an act of faith, to assume that the scientific view of the origin of life is correct, without having concrete evidence to support that belief.”
Sr. Francis Crick, who codiscovered the double helix structure of DNA conceded that “an honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us could only state that in some sense the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.”
The late evolutionary anthropologist, Loren Eiseley in The Immense Journey, on the question of spontaneous generation, wrote “With the failure of these many efforts, science was left in the somewhat embarrassing position of having to postulate theories of living origins which it could not demonstrate. After having chided the theologian for his reliance on myth and miracle, science found itself in the unenviable position of having to create a mythology of its own: namely, the assumption that what, after long effort, could not be proved to take place today, had, in truth, taken place in the primeval past.”
In summation, naturalists must believe in unnatural occurrences to explain the Universe – so they believe in miracles – without a miracle maker.
Source: There’s No Such Thing as a Naturalist, by Jeff Miller, Ph.D, originally published at Apologetics Press
