Religious naturalists say all divine or sacred things are natural. A unifying framework is presented for religious naturalism. Nature has five religiously significant levels of organization. These are nature as a whole, the universe, solar system, earth, and body. Each level involves power, cyclicality, complexity, and evolution. These levels take their religious contents from the Zygon group, the World Pantheist Movement, the New Atheists, the New Stoics, and the Burners. Religious naturalists have also taken ideas (...) from the Wicca, the Green Sisters, and the Evolutionary Christians. Rituals can be performed at each level. Linkages between all complex things and the cycles of nature entail a positive soteriology. No gods are involved in this religious naturalism. (shrink)

Part I: The birth of religious naturalism -- Philosophical religious naturalism -- Theological religious naturalism -- Analyzing the issues -- Interlude religious naturalism in literature -- Part II: The rebirth of religious naturalism -- Sources of religious insight -- Current issues in religious naturalism -- Other current religious naturalists -- Conclusion: Living religiously as a naturalist.

Religious naturalism and three scientific revolutions: Introduction -- The cosmological revolution -- The evolutionary revolution -- The ecological revolution -- Inwardness and awareness in nature: Introduction -- Inwardness of life and inwardness of mind -- Mind and consciousness in nature -- The range of conscious awareness on earth -- Presumptive rights and conflicts of rights: Introduction -- Rs of the thou of nature -- A scheme of presumptive natural rights -- A fourth R of the thou of nature (...) -- Conflicts of rights -- Hunting and fishing : Introduction -- Hunting -- Fishing -- Responses to the charge of impractical idealism -- Eating and wearing: Introduction -- Using animals for food -- The vegetarian response -- Using animals for apparel and other purposes -- Other areas of responsibility and concern: Introduction -- Experimenting on animals -- Rodeos, circuses, zoos, and aquariums -- Endangered species and despoliations of natural environments -- The human population explosion -- The threat of global climate change -- A new moral and religious consciousness: Introduction -- Empowerment in religion of nature -- Objections and replies -- Principles and prescriptions. (shrink)

Although its roots go back at least to Spinoza, religious naturalism is once again becoming a self–conscious option in religious thinking. This article seeks to (1) provide a generic notion of religious naturalism, (2) sketch my own “minimalist” variety of religious naturalism, and (3) view the science–religion dialogue from both of these perspectives. This last will include reflection on the nature of scientific practices, the contributions of religious traditions to moral reflection, and (...) Ursula Goodenough's “religiopoiesis.”. (shrink)

Religious naturalism refers here to a view of reality, and it will be contrasted with versions of supernaturalism and of atheistic naturalism. Naturalistic religion refers to certain varieties of religion, especially some inspired by the universality of science and the need for a global ethics. In this essay I explicate why a religious naturalist need not advocate a naturalistic religion. Rather, a religious naturalist can build upon the heritage of religious traditions and be open (...) to, but at the same time be agnostic about, the idea of a nonnatural ground of reality. The religious naturalism I defend has been criticized from various directions: one reviewer in this journal considered it too much indebted to the traditions, and hence “reactionary” and supernaturalistic; another considered it too minimalist in its religion (“virtually nonexistent”) as a consequence of the preference for a too sober version of naturalism. My distinction between religious naturalism and naturalistic religion may answer some of these objections. (shrink)

I first offer some reflections on the term religious naturalism. I then outline how moral thought might be configured in the context of religious naturalism. It is proposed that the goal of morality is to generate a flourishing community and that humans negotiate their social interactions using moral capacities that are cultivated in the context of culture. Six such capacities are considered: strategic reciprocity, humaneness, fair–mindedness, courage, reverence, and mindfulness. Moral capacities are contrasted with moral susceptibilities, (...) fueled by self–interest, and brought to the fore in times of stress and humiliation. The essay is in two parts. I first respond to Jerome Stone's query as to the nature of religious naturalism. This is followed by the text of my presentation at the 2001 AAR meeting. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to explore where and why religious naturalism differs from its rivals, and also to consider some of the challenges religious naturalism faces. I argue that religious naturalism is best conceived as a reaction against both theists who are religious and naturalists who are atheists: the best option is taken to be a naturalist who is religious. Nevertheless, it is quite difficult to say more exactly what claims (...) the view contains. In fact, it is argued, three forms of religious naturalism must be distinguished and contrasted with their rivals, which are taken to be non-religious naturalism, scientific naturalism, theism (including panentheism), divine transcendentalism, religious agnosticism, and religious relativism. (shrink)

Three questions are addressed. First, concerning the definition of naturalism, I accept the characterization by Rem Edwards (1972) but insist on a materialist or physicalist interpretation of these features. Second, the distinctive characteristic of my religious naturalism is an argument that although a theological position based on a physicalist ontology is constrained by physicalism, the ontology itself does not dictate theological content. Theological content can break free of ontology if this content is valuational rather than ontological. Such (...) a valuational theism becomes possible when Rudolf Bultmann's and Fritz Buri's method of existentialist interpretation is wedded to Henry Nelson Wieman's naturalist conception of God. The knowledge of God in events of grace, therefore, is rooted in moments of creative transformation that are themselves always transformative. This approach makes possible a better approach to the problem of objectivity than Bultmann could achieve. Third, concerning the chief issues facing religious naturalism today, I argue that religious naturalists should more forthrightly confront the issue of ontological materialism and that the most pressing issue concerns thinking out more fully the religious or theological content to be ascribed to such a position after the nature of naturalism is resolved. (shrink)

Accession Number: ATLA0001712114; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 108-123.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 121-123.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

In his 1992 book The Minimalist Vision of Transcendence, philosopher and theologian Jerome A. Stone developed an epistemological stance in which "experience, understanding, and knowledge are seen as transactions between what we call the subject and the object" (3). From this epistemological stance, writes Stone, follows the hermeneutical image that shapes his most recent work, Religious Naturalism Today: The Rebirth of a Forgotten Alternative: "This book is like a portrait.… Unlike most portraits, however, the portraitist is clearly stationed (...) within the group being portrayed" (3). In Stone's insightful, generous, and fair-minded portrayal of the figures among whom he stands, readers of the American Journal of .. (shrink)

Religious naturalism takes very seriously the meanings inherent in both a scientific understanding of the world and a religious orientation to life well lived. It rejects—as implausible and incompatible with science— the supernaturalism that has dominated Western religious traditions. But can one or more of the varieties of religious naturalism satisfy the fundamental religious needs or yearnings for meaning that have typically been responded to within supernaturalistic worldviews? A challenge facing all types of (...) religious naturalism, if any are to take hold, is to engage these religiously colored needs and yearnings with coherence and integrity.Religious belief and practice typically seem to have more to do with .. (shrink)

This paper provides a survey of contemporary religious naturalism. It presents reductive and non‐reductive versions of religious naturalism, and some arguments in favour of this naturalistic perspective. Finally, it discusses three crucial demarcation issues that contemporary religious naturalism faces.

Loyal Rue suggests that religion is not about God as such but about the cultivation of personal and social well-being. Religion may employ cultural resources that include concepts of supernatural agencies, but religion's essential functionalities are not dependent on that particular resource. I largely endorse Rue's view of religion and employ Rue as a guide to thinking through its consequences for the future of Christianity. For Rue, two challenges face Christianity: the erosion of confidence in personal-god concepts and the ecological (...) crisis engulfing the planet. In the face of these twin momentous changes, I suggest ways in which certain cultural tropes in the Christian matrix will rise to the fore and others will erode. (shrink)

There are two main ways to develop practices in religious naturalism. The first way is to practice within some traditional religion. Since those religions involve the worship of divine persons, which religious naturalists reject, religious naturalists must develop non-literal or fictional styles of participation in those religions. The second way is to develop new naturalistic religions. Since these will not be religions of worship, they will be religions of self-realization. Self-realization includes physiological, ethical, and spiritual self-realization. (...) The goal of spiritual self-realization is an ideal self whose concern includes all things and which is therefore existentially unified with nature. Techniques for self-realization include Stoic and Buddhist meditative practices, transformational festivals, and the use of entheogens. (shrink)

Zygon®, Volume 56, Issue 4, Page 1058-1069, December 2021.

This article opens with two generic definitions of religious naturalism in general: one by Jerome Stone and one by Rem Edwards used by Charley Hardwick. Two boundary issues, humanism and process theology, are discussed. A brief sketch of my own “minimalist” and pluralist version of religious naturalism follows. Finally, several issues that are, or should be, faced by religious naturalists are explored.

We Americans put a lot of stock in ingenuity. We admire people who come up with better mousetraps or with better ways to predict economic cycles. William James, in his early essay "Great Men and Their Environment," was the first American pragmatist to suggest that there are interesting analogies between the roles that ingenious people play in social change and bearers of genetic variations play in biological evolution.(1) He proposed that the categories in terms of which we conduct various cultural (...) activities start as idiosyncratic "brainstorms" in the heads of individual human beings, much as Darwin theorized that species start as genetic variations in ancestral organisms. When these mental variations occur in a suitable environment, they may end as new forms of science, morality, art, or religion. Such new ideas enable their bearers to cope with the world differently, and perhaps more profitably, than their ancestors did before them. Social progress when it occurs is a function of the meliorative power of this fortuitous human creativity, not of anything preprogrammed with its own logic or method. (shrink)

Religious naturalism is an emerging construct that relies greatly on science and yet affirms attitudes and practices that are distinctly religious in nature. This article explores the meaning of the term as it is used by various proponents, contrasts it to some similar constructs , and examines some objections andoutstanding issues from within the science‐religion community: postmodernist objections; whether religious naturalism is sufficiently respectful of traditional religious expression; and whether religious naturalism seeks (...) to be a descriptive or a prescriptive enterprise or both. Overall, religious naturalism is affirmed as a potentially productive new variant of naturaltheology, one that can preserve religious sensibilities without relying on supernatural constructs while maintaining a basic affirmation of other religious traditions. (shrink)

While the topics of emergentism and religious naturalism have both received renewed attention in the past two decades, the recent publication of several books and numerous articles arguing for emergentism and its religious significance suggests that they are converging in interesting ways. Indeed, religious naturalists such as cell biologist Ursula Goodenough, complexity theorist Stuart Kauffman, and philosopher Loyal Rue have been important voices in this conversation. While they cannot be easily classified as religious naturalists, biological (...) anthropologist Terrence Deacon and theologian and philosopher Philip Clayton have also made significant contributions. (shrink)

In Black Lives and Sacred Humanity: Toward an African American Religious Naturalism, Carol Wayne White sets out to develop a new religious ideal for African American culture by bringing two unlikely partners, African American religiosity and religious naturalism, into conversation. This is an ambitious project given the prominent role that supernaturalistic theism plays in African American religiosity and the paucity of attention that contemporary religious naturalism has given to cultural issues such as race. (...) She attempts to bridge the two through the concept of “sacred humanity,” a radical version of religious humanism, which, she argues, is foreshadowed in African American religious tradition on the one hand... (shrink)

This work presents a conception of Hume's overall philosophical stance which is derived from a focus on his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and The Natural History of Religion. A broad context is provided by frequent references to A Treatise of Human Nature and to An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding as well as to other relevant essays and letters written by Hume. Religious Naturalism is a complex tapestry woven of aesthetic, ethical, epistemological and metaphysical elements. The religious element (...) in Hume's writings, which some commentators see as a transcendent position, is interpreted as an immanentist religiosity akin to that of Spinoza and Einstein. Hume's three "strong natural beliefs" in "self", objects and causality, come together as a metaphysical faith in the ultimate reality of a shared cosmos. Hume's aesthetic response is expressed as a sense of the sublimity of the cosmos even in the midst of skeptical doubt. In Hume's religious naturalism his epistemological skepticism casts doubt on and tempers his metaphysical faith. It is shown that Hume's overriding ethical concern was to further the happiness of humanity by replacing the "pernicious superstition" of supernaturalism with an immanentist position which affirms the inexplicable presence of an eternal cosmos. This position is what is here termed Religious Naturalism. (shrink)

The Promise of Religious Naturalism has binocular vision: (1) it offers readers a searching comparative study of several of the leading contemporary exponents of religious naturalism, and (2) it tests the very notion of religious naturalism for its ability to support religious inclinations and moral imperatives in a time of social and ecological disarray. The four religious naturalists Hogue especially focuses upon are Loyal Rue, Jerome Stone, Ursula Goodenough, and Donald Crosby. Hogue (...) ably shows how each of these thinkers employs a religious variation on the common theme of naturalism. He describes his approach as being “appreciatively critical,” but his appreciation seems more evident than his criticism. His .. (shrink)

"Naturalism" is still often identified with a reductive worldview that identifies the final real constituents of the world with the deliverances of the natural sciences—or perhaps only of physics. In the last thirty years, however, there has been a concerted effort among analytic philosophers to distinguish between that reductive "strict naturalism" and a new "liberal naturalism" that does not deny that mental states, human agency, and moral norms are also natural realities. (For liberal naturalism, see, for (...) example, the essays collected by Mario de Caro and David MacArthur in Naturalism in Question [Harvard... (shrink)

This essay is an appreciative engagement with Karl Peters's Dancing with the Sacred (2002). Peters achieves a naturalistic theology of great power. Two themes are covered here. The first is how Peters gives ontological footing for a naturalistic conception of God conceived as the process of creativity in nature. Peters achieves this by conceiving creativity in terms of Darwinian random variation and natural selection combined with the notion of nonequilibrium thermodynamics. He gives ontological reference for a conception of God similar (...) to Henry Nelson Wieman's idea of creative transformation. The second theme is how Peters succeeds in translating this nonpersonal conception of God into a powerful view of naturalistic religion that can shape a religious form of life. The key is that Peters's God can be understood as present in experience. Peters provides naturalistic interpretations of grace and the cruciform structure of creativity; the latter addresses the problem of evil in a nuanced fashion. I conclude with three critical comments about Peters's environmental ethics, his use of the notion of mystery, and his failure to have a robust conception of human fault or sin. (shrink)

This chapter deals with the socially oriented, pragmatically naturalist conception of religious faith John Dewey developed in A Common Faith and elsewhere, as well as Dewey’s influence on later pragmatist and naturalist currents in the philosophy of religion. In particular, Dewey’s distinction between “the religious”, on the one hand, and actual historical religions, on the other, is explained and discussed. According to Dewey--the most important classical pragmatist following James--the religious aspects of experience can be appreciated without metaphysical (...) commitments to anything supernatural. Dewey’s pragmatism thus seeks to emancipate “the religious” from the dogmatism and supernaturalism typical of traditional religious metaphysics. Dewey’s relation to Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion, and the role played by metaphysics and the criticism of metaphysics in both, are also examined. (shrink)

In response to my “How to Make Naturalism Safe for Supernaturalism: An Evaluation of Willem Drees's Supernaturalistic Naturalism” (Rottschaefer 2001), Willem Drees maintains that I have misunderstood his purpose and views and have failed to make the case against his view that naturalism is intrinsically limited. In this response, I comment on these concerns.

Religious naturalism is distinct from supernatural religion largely because of metaphysical minimalism. Certain varieties of religious naturalism are more minimalist than others, however, and some even eschew metaphysics altogether. But is anything lost in that process? To determine metaphysics’ degree of relevance to religious function, I compare the soteriology of the “ontologically reticent” Minimalist Vision of Jerome Stone to that of the ontologically rich Religion of Nature of Donald Crosby. I demonstrate that for these varieties (...) of religious naturalism: (1) metaphysics influences soteriology; (2) metaphysical minimalism limits soteriological potential; and (3) metaphysics enhances soteriological potential. These conclusions lead me to assert the relevance of metaphysics to religious function, specifically for these varieties of religious naturalism, as well as to urge investigation into religious experience and quality as they may relate to metaphysics. (shrink)

In this essay, I introduce religious naturalism as one contemporary religious response to anthropogenic climate change; in so doing, I offer a concept of hope associated with the beauty of ignorance, of not knowing ourselves in the usual manner. Reframing humans as natural processes in relationship with other forms of nature, religious naturalism encourages humans’ processes of transformative engagement with each other and with the more‐than‐human worlds that constitute our existence. Hope in this context is (...) anticipating what possibilities may occur when human organisms enact our evolutionary capacities as relational organisms who can love, engaging in multilayered processes of changing behaviors, values, and relationships that promote the betterment of myriad nature. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that, although Alvin Plantinga’s Felix Culpa theodicy appears on only two pages of his recent book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism (2011) (i.e. 58-59), it is of pivotal importance for the book as a whole. Plantinga argues that there is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and monotheism, and that there is superficial concord but deep conflict between science and naturalism. I contend that the weakness of the Felix (...) Culpa theodicy lends support to the view that there is more than superficial conflict between science and monotheism, and offer an alternative response to the challenge of evil which suggests that there might be, after all, concord between science and (religious) naturalism. (shrink)

Zygon®, Volume 56, Issue 4, Page 1070-1086, December 2021.

Nature as Sacred Ground: A Metaphysics for Religious Naturalism is the fifth book on religious naturalism that Donald Crosby has published since 2002, and it must be seen in that context. Religion of Nature makes the claim for the religious and metaphysical ultimacy of nature, Living with Ambiguity: Religious Naturalism and the Menace of Evil explores possible responses of religious naturalism's to natural and human evil, The Thou of Nature: Religious (...) Naturalism and Reverence for Sentient Beings argues for giving moral consideration to all sentient beings, and More Than Discourse: Symbolic Expressions of Naturalistic Faith discusses the role of nondiscursive symbols... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Note of Interpretation: Theistic Finitism as an Aesthetics of Religious NaturalismAndrew Stone Porter (bio)In our cosmological construction we are, therefore, left with the final opposites, joy and sorrow, good and evil, disjunction and conjunction—that is to say, the many in one—flux and permanence, greatness and triviality, freedom and necessity, God and the World. In this list, the pairs of opposites are in experience with a certain ultimate (...) directness of intuition, except in the case of the last pair. God and the World introduce the note of interpretation.—Alfred North Whitehead1Theistic finitism, the position that God is not omnipotent, is the most tenable solution to the problem of evil—but it also necessitates a slide toward immanence. Among the ranks of the finitists we find philosophers such as William James,2 process thinkers such as Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne,3 theological personalists such as Edgar Brightman (and, Rufus Burrow argues, his pupil Martin Luther King, Jr.),4 feminist disability theologians like Julia Watts Belser,5 and popular religion writers such as Harold Kushner.6 Like many others, Kushner found in finitism not an answer to an abstract theological puzzle, but an existentially necessary salve for the despair that nearly overtook him when his three year-old son was diagnosed with a terminal degenerative disease. No loving, all-knowing, all-powerful creator would ever allow such [End Page 70] a thing to happen, Kushner reasoned. If God is not all-powerful, then God need not be the author of our pain, but a friend who hurts with us as we bear it. Rather than sadistic puppeteer, a finite God becomes “the fellow-sufferer who understands.”7 As Jürgen Moltmann put it, “the one who cannot suffer cannot love either. So [God] is also a loveless being.”8 Or, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer reflected as he awaited execution in a Nazi concentration camp, “Only the suffering God can help.”9However, when one strips away divine omnipotence, one must also bid adieu either to God’s omniscience or creator-hood: for an omniscient creator, crafting the world with full knowledge of how everything would unfold, would be ipso facto omnipotent. We are left, then, with the following alternatives: we could posit a God who pressed the “create world” button not knowing what would happen (which seems irresponsible, calling into question God’s goodness)—as Tim Bayne puts it, “If future contingents fall outside the scope of God’s knowledge, then creation was a massive gamble.”10 We may share Albert Einstein’s famous distaste for a God who plays dice with the universe. The other alternative is that God’s knowledge and power are partial, that the Divine is merely one being/force among many. But if God is “just a stranger on the bus, trying to make his way home,”11 then in what sense can we say that God is God at all?This paper offers a construal of theistic finitism as a form of religious naturalism with an aesthetics of empathetic solidarity. That is, when we relinquish belief in God’s omnipotence, instead imagining that God is struggling and suffering along with us, we relinquish as well belief in an overbearing “supernatural realm” or “order” governing/underlying all things. To see God in this way, as Whitehead says, is to “introduce the note of interpretation.” And that note, I suggest, is a musical note, specifically a blues note.12 To call the loving [End Page 71] friendship we experience “God” is an aesthetic choice, an informed way of interpreting life in order to move through it with companionship, tenderness and care. A naturalistic religiosity, in Carol Wayne White’s phrasing, “can be a mode of reflecting on, experiencing, and envisioning one’s relationality with all that is.”13 In this way theology becomes, as Belser puts it, “a grammar of the imagination.”14 As a blues aesthetics of empathetic solidarity, theistic finitism may be considered a form of religious naturalism particularly well-suited to our present moment, mired as it is in cascading crises and careening into catastrophe. I suggest that, as young spiritual seekers exit churches in search of more meaningful community... (shrink)

The version of religious naturalism sketched here is called naturism to distinguish it from conceptions of religious naturalism that make fundamental appeal to some idea of deity, deities, or the divine, however immanental, functional, nonontological, or purely valuational or existential such notions may be claimed to be. The focus of naturism is on nature itself as both metaphysically and religiously ultimate. Nature is sacred in its own right, not because of its derivation from some more–ultimate (...) class='Hi'>religious principle, state, being, beings, or order of being. Humans, their cultures, and their histories are conceived as integral parts of nature, manifestations of potentialities that lie within it and have been actualized by biological evolution. While there is no purpose of nature, the natural order contains beings capable of purposive behavior. With this purposive behavior, and the goals and ideals implicit in it, humans have the capacity to give significant direction to their ongoing cultural evolution and to discover and maintain their appropriate place within the community of creatures. (shrink)