Religious naturalism
[3] Advocates have stated that it can be a significant option for people who are unable to embrace religious traditions in which supernatural presences or events play prominent roles, and that it provides "a deeply spiritual and inspiring religious vision" that is particularly relevant in a time of ecological crisis.
[8] As this does not include a view of a personal god who may cause specific actions or miracles, or of a soul that may live on after death, religious naturalists draw from what can be learned about the workings of the natural world as they try to understand why things happen as they do, and for perspectives that can help to determine what is right or good (and why) and what we might aspire to and do.
[10][11] It can include... As Jerome Stone put it, "One way of getting at what we mean by religion is that it is our attempt to make sense of our lives and behave appropriately within the total scheme of things.
With this, learning about nature, including human nature, (via both academic and artistic resources and direct personal experiences) is seen as valuable—as it can provide an informed base of understanding of how things are and why things happen as they do, expand awareness and appreciation of the interdependence among all things, prompt an emotional or spiritual sense of connection with other people and forms of life in all of nature, and serve as a point of reference for considering and responding to moral and religious questions and life challenges.
[33] In this (based on what can be understood through methods of science), the cosmos began approximately 13.8 billion years ago as a massive expansion of energy, which has been described as "the Big Bang".
Due to natural forces and processes, this expansion led over time to the emergence of light, nuclear particles, galaxies, stars, and planets.
[34] Life on Earth is thought to have emerged more than 3.5 billion years ago[35]—beginning with molecules that combined in ways that enabled them to maintain themselves as stable entities and self-replicate,[36] which evolved to single-cell organisms and then to varied multi-cell organisms that, over time, included millions of varied species, including mammals, primates, and humans, living in complex interdependent ecosystems.
It is also seen as having a potential to unite all humans with a shared understanding of our world, including conditions that are essential to all lives,[38] as it is based on the best available scientific knowledge and is widely accepted among scientists and in many cultures worldwide.
With this, all of what we think, feel, desire, decide, and do is due to natural processes and, after death, each person ceases to be, with no potential for an eternal afterlife or reincarnation.
[41][42] Similarly, recognizing that all forms of life are: and in recognizing and appreciating Earth as a rare site, in a vast cosmos, where life exists, and as the environment that is essential for our lives and well-being, this planet and its life-enabling qualities is seen as being of ultimate concern,[43] which can prompt or warrant a felt need to respect, preserve, and protect the varied ecosystems that sustain us.
[44] Values are seen as having accompanied the emergence of life—where, unlike rocks and other inanimate objects that perform no purposeful actions, living things have a type of will that prompts them to act in ways that enable them (or their group) to survive and reproduce.
Evolutionary roots of this can be seen in groups of primates and some other types of mammals and other creatures, where empathy, helping others, a sense of fairness, and other elements of morality have often been seen.
[50] Advocates of religious naturalism believe that, as they offer perspectives that can help to show how things really are in the physical world, and which things ultimately matter, and as they can contribute to development of religious attitudes, including humility, gratitude, compassion, and caring, and enhance exposure to and appreciation of the many wonders of the natural world, perspectives from religious naturalism can contribute to personal wholeness, social cohesion, and awareness and activities that can contribute to preservation of global ecosystems.
Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983), founder of the Jewish Reconstructionist movement,[60] was an early advocate of religious naturalism.
[63] Shortly thereafter, H. H. Dubs wrote an article entitled "Religious Naturalism: An Evaluation",[64] which begins "Religious naturalism is today one of the outstanding American philosophies of religion..." and discusses ideas developed by Henry Nelson Wieman in books that predate Dubs's article by 20 years.
Stone wrote The Minimalist Vision of Transcendence explicitly "to sketch a philosophy of religious naturalism".
Mike Ignatowski states that "there were many religious naturalists in the first half of the 20th century and some even before that" but that "religious naturalism as a movement didn't come into its own until about 1990 [and] took a major leap forward in 1998 when Ursula Goodenough published The Sacred Depths of Nature, which is considered one of the founding texts of this movement.
Stone (Dec. 2008 release) that presents this paradigm as a once-forgotten option in religious thinking that is making a rapid revival.
Contested issues are discussed including whether nature's power or goodness is the focus of attention and also on the appropriateness of using the term "God".
[71] Chet Raymo writes that he had come to the same conclusion as Teilhard de Chardin: "Grace is everywhere",[72] and that naturalistic emergence is in everything and far more magical than religion-based miracles.
A future humankind religion should be ecumenical, ecological, and embrace the story provided by science as the "most reliable cosmology".
The current discussion often relates to the issue of whether belief in a God or God-language and associated concepts have any place in a framework that treats the physical universe as its essential frame of reference and the methods of science as providing the preeminent means for determining what Nature is.
Stone, and Ursula Goodenough are discussed by Michael Hogue in his 2010 book The Promise of Religious Naturalism.
