Nature Is Enough (Loyal Rue)
OVERVIEW
If you start from a position of naturalism, the belief that there is only the natural world – no Gods, no souls, no afterlives – then how do you answer the following questions: “What is the meaning of life?”, “Where does morality come from?”, and “Can naturalists be religious?” These answers, stripped of supernaturality, are explored in Nature is Enough: Religious Naturalism and the Meaning of Life by philosopher Loyal Rue. (The answers are, in short: life, life, and yes).
What is the meaning of life? Why is meaning natural?
We can learn a lot about meaning by examining lives that appear to have less of it. The German del Muselmann (concentration camp prisoner) demonstrates to us that meaningful lives must have telos – a goal, purpose, or intentionality; a meaningful life must include the ability to strive toward something and not be a mere plaything of environmental forces. Next, the myth of Sisyphus (our favourite boulder pusher) reveals that we must also want to achieve our goals; the only way we can imagine Sisyphus happy is if we assume he gets personal satisfaction from his boulder pushing. Fools show us that goals should be achievable (not like teaching flowers to sing), and villains demonstrate that they should also be morally justified. A meaningful life, then, would require our active participation in moving toward purposes that are morally good, that are achievable, and that we’ll also derive pleasure from achieving.
The nature of teleological phenomena has historically had three proposed explanations: inherentism (meaning is inherent, to be found), inventionism (meaning is the construct of subjective imagination and social negotiation, to be invented), and reductionism (meaning is an illusion, every so that dynamic can be reduced to a because of explanation). Inherentism is the perspective of most theists – God gives humanity its purpose, and we must submit to God’s agenda to have meaningful lives. We evolved to prefer this teleological reasoning; it’s our intuition that meaning is an essence possessed by the world (our brains prefer so that causality). Inventionism says meaning is constructed by the mind – that humans are not intended for anything, that we decide what is meaningful. The third approach, reductionism, says that atoms and particles don’t have meaning, so neither do we.
Rue doesn’t subscribe to any of the above wholly, but there are aspects he likes from each. He aligns with inherentism in that he agrees meaning is an objective property of living systems because purposes and the pleasures of pursuing them are fundamentally embedded in us. It is the inherent nature of living things to pursue continued viability and to want to do so (viability is an ultimate value). But, Rue aligns with inventionists that meaning can’t be absolute or eternal, and that all other proximate goals of humans (excepting, perhaps, the penultimate human goals of personal wholeness and social cohesion) are indeed subjective, are contingent and contextual. Lastly, he would agree with the reductionists that everything is made up of atoms and particles, but he doesn’t agree that all phenomena are just “piled up simplicities.” He much prefers emergentism in this respect, that the dynamics of teleology (so that causal influences) are emergent properties of living systems. Goals, purpose, agency, intentionality, and meaning emerge from the interactions of physical matter (the neurons and neurotransmitters in our brains, for example), but cannot be reduced to physical matter… they are emergent phenomena that constitute a novel reality (like how the properties of oxygen and hydrogen alone do not explain the buoyancy that emerges from their interactions).
Rue has upheld that meaning is in the world (insofar as we’re describing the ultimate goal and ultimate value of living systems: viability), in the mind (insofar as we’re describing all other proximate human goals and values) and emerging from physical matter (but not reducible to it). In this, Rue has given us an entirely natural explanation for emergent meaning and purpose, which exist on a spectrum from inherent and essential to invented and optional. No God or supernaturality required.
In short, if you want the best of 1) ultimate, 2) penultimate, and 3) proximate meaning: 1) stay alive, 2) actively pursue goals that are “personally satisfying and socially constructive,” and 3) pursue any other goal you fancy that is achievable and morally good (or at least neutral).
What is human morality? Why is morality natural?
When hunter-gatherer groups of humans are small, all that’s needed for social cohesion are social emotions (like gratitude, sympathy, anger, resentment, etc.). The regulation of the group cohesion is implicit and preconscious, like an inherited algorithm (and one we see in other pro-social species). But when humans started cooperating with other groups, when the groups got big, we needed explicit rules; social emotions were no longer enough to govern the requisite moral conduct, were no longer enough to maintain a happy balance between self-interest and group-interest. All of culture and all of our wisdom and religious traditions have been attempts to negotiate this balance, to organize us in a way that affords personal wholeness (e.g., happiness, self-knowledge, health) and social cohesion (e.g., harmony, justice, equity). And that’s what morality is, an implicit and evolved set of social emotions that had to become codified into an explicit, externalized set of rules, standards, and norms because our groups got large and our interactions too numerous to rely on genetic conditioning alone. Moral conduct is not supernatural, it’s an extragenetic feature necessitated by our social complexity.
Take a step back. Morality is, then, a telos of viability. Animals need food and water and shelter to survive, to remain viable, but pro-social species like humans also need friendship, compassion, tolerance, justice, and generosity. They need group interest to overlap with self-interest. Morality is not God-given, but it is scripted in all the same. Just like the cooperation of bees and ants is directed toward survival, morality is a manifestation of this same purposefulness – externalized and symbolic and complex, yes, but still natural.
What is religious naturalism? How can religion be natural?
We have a natural account for how we got here (see “Our Story” in The Sacred Depths of Nature), a natural account for meaning, and a natural account for morality. But can naturalism be a religion? For Rue, “religion” doesn’t have to mean belief in the supernatural nor aversion to religious sensibilities or metaphysical claims (the metaphysical claim of naturalism is that everything is natural). Rue says something is sacred if it is “inviolate and worthy of deep reverence,” and a religious or spiritual person would be someone who takes sacred things, things of ultimate concern, to heart. He proposes that nature is such a sacred thing, something that has inherent value (because to live is to value, and to value is to be alive; living and valuing are fundamentally intertwined).
Religious/spiritual people have certain attitudes, valenced beliefs “that are infused with appraisals of value and existential meaning, beliefs that have non-trivial consequences for the way a person relates to something or someone.” A religious theist believes in God, takes God seriously, takes God to be sacred, supreme, and sovereign – takes God to heart. A religious naturalist takes nature to heart… takes nature to be sacred, supreme, and sovereign. A religious naturalist takes nature to be the most significant and vital thing. This religious attitude changes their “teleological center of gravity,” orient them toward goals of sustainability and solidarity with other living things, goals that have (we’ve now seen) supreme value. A naturalist, therefore, is more than capable of having religious sensibilities, of finding within the natural world things that are sacred and worthy of reverence. They share a compelling story of how we got here and how we’re connected, a natural cosmological narrative. They conceive of morality as the telos of viability, the purposefulness of living things toward living – all living things, by virtue of their living, want to carry on. They see this purposefulness to be scripted in, and so their lives too have purpose, have a point, have a meaning. This understanding gives them a clear path to virtuousness: a life that is dedicated to life. This understanding gives them piety, devotion and duty. And, finally, this understanding engenders gratitude, humility, and awe in the face of everything, of the magnitude of the universe and the improbability of our existence – the miracle of there being any life at all.
What is this if not religion? What is this if not wisdom? Nothing more than this world needed, nothing more than this world mattering.
IN SUM:
Is this book entirely secular? Yes.
If I had to describe the book in one sentence? Why naturalism can be a religion, why non-theists can be religious.
Who should read this book? Every atheist who wonders “is this all there is?”