Naturalism Under Pressure
Is philosophical naturalism coherent on its own terms?
How to use this guide
This guide is built for a 45-60 minute small-group conversation about "Naturalism Under Pressure." Open with prayer, read the framing aloud, and use the questions below to surface what people actually think before you walk through the case. Aim for honest engagement over consensus.
Facilitator tips
- Read the lesson before the meeting; you do not need to be an expert, just a guide.
- Resist the urge to fill silence. The best discussions follow long pauses.
- When someone raises an objection you cannot answer, write it down and follow up next week.
- Close with a single takeaway from each member, not a doctrinal summary.
What we're studying
Naturalism (the thesis that only the natural world exists) is the default worldview of much modern academia. But it faces serious internal tensions around the reliability of reason itself (Plantinga's EAAN), the existence of consciousness, the applicability of mathematics, and the existence of objective moral facts. A robust worldview evaluation examines whether naturalism can fund the goods it assumes.
The case in brief
Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) runs: evolution selects for survival, not truth. If naturalism is true and our faculties evolved, the probability that our faculties are truth-tracking is low or inscrutable. But if our faculties are not truth-tracking, we cannot trust them — including the belief that naturalism is true. Naturalism thus undermines the rational grounds for believing naturalism. Additionally: consciousness resists reduction (the "hard problem"); mathematics' uncanny applicability to physical reality is unexplained; objective moral values hang in causal vacuum. Each is a live tension.
What if someone says...
"Truth-tracking faculties are adaptively useful in many domains."
Useful in some domains (immediate predator-spotting) but not obviously across abstract domains like metaphysics. The argument does not require proving our faculties are unreliable — only that from naturalism, we cannot be confident they are reliable.
"Consciousness will be explained by future neuroscience."
The hard problem is a conceptual, not empirical, gap. More data about brains does not address why physical processes are accompanied by any inner experience at all.
Discussion questions
- Can our faculties be trusted if they are purely adaptive?
- What would it take for consciousness to be fully explained by brain states?
- Does naturalism make the world we actually experience more or less intelligible?
- [Small group] Where in your own life does this question feel most pressing?
- [Small group] Who do you know that wrestles with this — and how could you talk with them about it this week?
Going deeper
- Warranted Christian BeliefAlvin Plantinga · 2000 · Religious epistemology
- Where the Conflict Really LiesAlvin Plantinga · 2011 · Science and religion
- Scaling the Secular CityJ.P. Moreland · 1987 · Philosophy of religion