Naturalism in the Mirror of Religion

This essay explores three ways for speaking of God in the context of current discussions of naturalism within philosophy of religion and theology. The first is the expressivist theism proposed by the philosopher of mind Owen Flanagan; the second is a ground-of-being theism laid out in detail by the analytical philosopher Mark Johnston. While both these proposals situate concepts of God within the framework of naturalism as usually defined, the third proposal, an infinity-based theism, places naturalism in the context of wider philosophical concerns. Basic to this view is the naturalist principle of continuity (»synechism«). Accordingly, God and the world of creation are not to be treated as two disjunct realities: God is neither an extraneous addendum to the material world, nor can the infinite God be reduced to a predicate of Nature. Thus there exists a wide philosophical space between standard naturalist claims of ultimate explanation on the one hand, and varieties of theism that understand God to be a separate supernatural entity outside of the realm of nature, on the other.