The crucial difference between a supernatural and a natural worldview is this: the former embraces the primacy of mind, and the latter denies it. The crucial distinction is not about God, but about mind.
In other words, the atheism resulting from a natural worldview doesn’t merely reject divine mind behind existence, it rejects any role for mind—or its patina (information, intelligence, universals, concepts, cognition, etc)—behind existence. Did mind come into existence later on? Absolutely. But it wasn’t there originally. That’s naturalism.
But atheism based only on doubt and not on naturalism leaves a role for intelligence behind existence. It rejects God, but doesn’t reject the possibility of the God’s-eye view. And so, although it is atheism, it’s atheism within an overall supernatural worldview.
Many atheists hold this position: rejecting God but not rejecting the God’s-eye view (or at least the possibility of the God’s-eye view).
Why?
Primarily it’s an unwarranted fear that science requires the possibility of a God’s-eye view. And this fear is the result of recognizing that what scientists attempt to construct is just that: a God’s-eye view of existence.
It’s called objectivity and it’s the goal of scientific thought.
But the possibility of constructing a God’s-eye view crashed and burned when Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species. Objective thought as a goal didn’t crash and burn, but as something achievable, as an actual possibility, it disintegrated into flotsam and smoke.
And this was because evolution eliminated the rationale for postulating intelligence behind existence. It exposed us as biological beings, as fundamentally bodies rather than minds. After Darwin, primacy of mind could be—almost had to be—rejected. And because of this, a coherent natural worldview became achievable once again.1
The educated world is only beginning to catch up.
Coherent natural worldviews were articulated by pre-Socratic and later Greek philosophers, as well as the Charvaka in India. I’ll write more about these in the future.
This was first published in my Substack, Preface to Atheism—https://dwightlyman.substack.com/p/primacy-of-mind
