Direct YouTube link:
https://youtu.be/VfyJxy05yA0
Materialism, Naturalism and Transcendence — Introduction to Part One, 1-1
A conversation between Dr Nora Nourisefat and Dr Aydin Areta

Naturalism holds that nature and the material world are the ultimate source of everything that exists, that only natural laws and forces operate in the universe, and that ultimately everything can be explained through these laws as they are discovered by scientific method. Naturalism can therefore be understood as both the metaphysics and ontology of materialist philosophy.

Those committed to a naturalistic metaphysics hold that reality is nothing but matter; that consciousness and awareness are merely secondary by-products of brain activity; that everything that exists is ultimately reducible to fundamental particles; that mind has no independent external existence; that living beings are wholly mechanistic and have arisen through chance and natural selection; and that the material universe is fundamentally unconscious.

When Francis Crick, one of the two scientists associated with the discovery of DNA’s structure, died in 2004, his son said at the memorial ceremony that what had driven his father throughout his life was neither wealth nor fame, but the determination to drive the final nail into the coffin of vitalism and to show that behind the complex machine of life there was no designer other than inanimate nature itself.

Although the nature of life, mind, and even matter itself remain scientifically unresolved questions, naturalism insists that it already knows the form that their final answers must take and that those answers cannot fall outside its explanatory paradigm. Karl Popper described such a position as “promissory materialism”: it rests upon the promise of discoveries that have not yet been made. The difficulty is that many believers in this idea do not recognise that what they hold is not a scientifically demonstrated fact but a philosophical dogma.

This recording comprises the first twenty minutes and introductory section of the first conversation devoted to examining and criticising some of the central metaphysical claims of naturalism. Further parts of the conversation will gradually be shared over the coming days and weeks.