Naturalism is a reductio ad absurdum approach that evaporates for lack of further or sufficient iterations. It presumes that we have at least found the pathway, even if we don’t know the destination, and while that may turn out to be true, it’s gratuitous for now and should not be voiced to preclude other possible routes.

One approach I take with naturalism is to ask this question: Define Life. If there is hesitation in the reply, it speaks to how little we understand the most ubiquitous phenomenon on our planet, much less the remainder.

Another notion I retain for this question of human destiny, knowledge-wise or otherwise, is that the Universe is physically beyond us right now. Distances are so great, that we must for the next century at least regard it as being little more than wallpaper, as pretty as it might be.

The consequence of this fact is that we have an interval between now and the advent of the Singularity – a century at most – to consolidate ourselves as a species, to become practicing Humanists, to use this last available interval to stabilize our planet toward sustainability. I advocate the colonization of Venus as a suitable sidepot, as a catalyst for youth.

That’s my handle on things and I’m sticking to it. Can I interest you in a little world federalism in the near-future…?

Attempting to define all of reality purely in naturalistic terms is to live in denial. The scientific community must eventually face the reality that naturalism has definite limits, beyond which there will always be ongoing mysteries.

The crisis of methodological naturalism is that it will always be based on finite human understanding, knowledge and insights. And is therefore forever limited. For this reason everything in science is regarded as tentative, and never the final word. And because science can never be the final word it will never be in a position to explain the universe in ultimate terms.

The reality is that all of science ultimately rests on phenomena that have no naturalistic answer, and probably never will have. Scientists don’t have the foggiest notion were the universe came from, nor the origin of the universes mathematical regularity, nor the cosmological constants, nor the laws of nature, nor even the origin of life. And no scientist has even the remotest notion of what energy or matter really is in the ultimate sense.

All that science has attained is still only a miniscule fragment of the whole truth. As acknowledged by David Gross, the 2004 Nobel laureate, “each answered question raises twenty unanswered questions.” Physicist Ronald Cole-Turner concurs, ‘’On the grand scale, the cosmos is hidden, almost mysterious. On the tiniest scale, the matter that makes up the cosmos is counter-intuitive. Cosmology is enigmatic while quantum physics is…well, pretty weird. “Quantum weirdness,” in fact, is now the accepted term. It refers not to inadequacies in quantum theory but to the problems we face in making sense of it at the level of everyday experiences.”

We can add to this the loopy logic associated with the naturalistic definition of science. For while natural law is declared to be the gatekeeper as to what is science, and what is not, the origin of the gatekeeper itself, natural law, has absolutely no naturalistic answer, and may never have. This is rather like appointing an unidentified alien to guard planet earth from all unidentified aliens, particularly God.

Methodological naturalism faces another credibility crisis, particularly in regard to the scientific communities mindless rejection of intelligent design. All of science operates on the reality that we can only apply logic, reason and intelligence in science because we, of necessity, live in a universe the clearly manifests intelligence, regularity and predictability. How can anyone do science on any other basis? And why would any scientist argue against this self-evident reality. If you are a scientist that finds it difficult to see any “intelligence” or “real design” in the world that surrounds you, then what sort of universe do you live in, and what is the basis of your scientific investigations?

The bottom line is that we live in a dependent dying universe running down towards heat death and maximum entropy, where usable energy, information and order will be finally dissipated, with nothing left to wind the universe up again. All this means that our “dependent” dying universe demands a “non-dependent” self-existing cause. The alternative to this is an infinite regression of dependent causes where nothing ever has the capability to bring itself into existence, in which case nothing would exist, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

God is both a philosophical and scientific necessity, and needs to be an option considered in science education in terms of the broader phenomena on which all of science is founded. The religion of philosophical naturalism and atheism currently being imposed on science education is only half the story, and ultimately delusional.