RE: Simple recipe for the creation of life itself, etc

John E. Rylander (rylander@prolexia.com)
Tue, 21 Dec 1999 22:35:11 -0600

> JR>Steve quoted the EB:
> >
> >SJ>"...So long as all of reality is natural, no other
> >>limitations are imposed. Naturalists have in fact expressed a
> wide variety of
> >>views, even to the point of developing a theistic naturalism."
> >>("naturalism", Britannica.com, Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1999.
> >>http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/6/0,5716,56426+1,00.html).
>
> JR>This is a strange and interesting quote. I've never heard of any
> >philosopher speaking (seriously or otherwise) of "theistic naturalism",).
>
> Well John has heard of it now! Indeed that was the point of the quote.
> TEs/ECs used to dismiss the term "theistic naturalism" as a
> fiction invented
> by Phil Johnson, but now it has been used in *Encyclopaedia Britannica*,
> that line of defence is no longer open to them.

You'll notice that the meaning used by the EB article refers to God as a
natural object. That's not what Johnson is talking about at all.

> AFAIK Johnson pioneered the term:

Johnson coined yet another meaning. So there are three so far:

(1) Standard/Incoherent: God (in the ordinary sense) exists, but only nature
(in the ordinary sense) exists.
(2) EB (quoting someone or other): God exists; but only nature exists, God
being another purely natural entity. [Again, this could be a strange way of
saying "pantheism", or it could be that God is just a complex organism,
or..., but a very non-std defn of "God", "nature", or both. It's a free
country.]
(3) Johnson: God exists, and but never intervenes in nature. [Given
Johnson's polemical irascibility, it sure seems, IMHO, he meant to connote
(1) simply as an insult to those whom he labels.]

Only (1) would be standard philosophical usage, AFAIK, based on the std
defns of "theistic" and "naturalism". (Of course, no one uses the ordinary
words in tandem because they're incoherent that way.) But people are free
to make up their own definitions, so long as they're very clear about it.
But given that (1) utterly dominates ("theistic" and "naturalism" are
extremely common words in philosophy), I'd suggest to coiners of (2) and (3)
that they find other words simply to avoid completely needless confusion
(and offense).

John