Exploring the Borderlands

Recent books on atheism and religion have been the focus of much debate recently, which I think is a good thing. It’s no surprise that the debate is dominated by traditional religious believers on the one hand, and those who hold to a traditional materialist strain of atheism on the other. Of course, there is a wide, if seemingly less populated, territory between these views. I think the truth lies in the border regions.

If one is a realist, as I am, about first-person experience and the existence of some degree of freedom, then materialism is inadequate. On the other hand, one’s worldview must be shaped by valid inferences from the success of science. Because of this, I find traditional supernatural entities and interventions highly implausible, and have in the past characterized my own worldview has an enriched or expanded version of naturalism.

My more recent ruminations on modal realism and abstract entities have led me to consider that my realist commitments may actually require a necessary ground of possibilities underlying and penetrating our contingent concrete world. While at the end of the day labels aren't important, it seems as if a commitment to the idea that reality extends beyond our world in this way may get me expelled from the naturalist club.

I’m very reluctant to name this necessary existent “God”, since that unavoidably summons up a cluster of attributes and associations which go far beyond my commitments. But there is no getting around the fact that I may be moving into the vicinity of theism.