Materialism, Naturalism and Transcendentalism — Introduction, Part 1 (Video Version)

This session introduces naturalism critically and begins with a distinction: science as a method of inquiry is not identical with naturalism as a metaphysical position. In the form under discussion, naturalism holds that nature is all that exists and that phenomena are ultimately explicable through natural laws and forces. Its stronger versions approach ontological materialism: fundamental reality is material, and no independent transcendent or non-material dimension is required.

The speaker’s objection is not to the success of science. It concerns the point at which the success of scientific method is converted into a conclusion about the totality of being. The fact that many phenomena have received natural explanations does not, by itself, demonstrate that everything real must be reducible to a material explanation. From this perspective, naturalism becomes a metaphysical presupposition when it is treated as settled before open philosophical and scientific questions have been resolved.

Francis Crick appears as an example of a strongly reductionist programme seeking to explain life and consciousness without vital forces or non-material entities. The seminar does not deny the value of biological research. Instead, it argues that progress in explaining neural or molecular mechanisms does not automatically settle philosophical questions about the nature of consciousness, matter, or life itself. This is where the idea of “promissory materialism” becomes important: if a complete explanation is unavailable today, future science is assumed to deliver one in exclusively material terms. The speaker argues that when such a research expectation becomes certainty about the future, it exceeds what current empirical evidence has established.

Part of the discussion turns to public figures associated with the New Atheism, including Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. The criticism is not directed simply at atheism. It concerns the use of one interpretation of science as though it had already settled wider philosophical questions about reality as a whole. The speaker distinguishes scientific and philosophical atheism and suggests that the latter may rely on naturalistic assumptions that themselves require argument.

The history of science is then used as a caution against metaphysical closure. At various moments, scientists have believed that the existing framework of physics was approaching completion, only for later developments to transform fundamental concepts. The point is not that established science is therefore unreliable. It is that confidence in scientific method should be distinguished from certainty that the ontology associated with a particular historical scientific picture is final. The seminar also rejects an overly simple narrative of permanent warfare between science and religion, noting figures such as Newton for whom scientific inquiry and religious belief were not mutually exclusive.

The session finally contrasts two metaphysical pictures: the universe as a closed system in which nothing beyond the natural chain is possible in principle, and an open picture that does not exclude transcendence in advance. The seminar does not claim that openness itself proves a transcendent reality. Its more limited argument is that empirical science may not, by itself, be able to close that metaphysical question. The purpose of the introduction is therefore neither anti-scientific nor a defence of ignorance. It is to preserve the conceptual boundary between scientific findings, philosophical interpretation, and final claims about what kinds of reality can exist.