Now your first sentence is: “Naturalism is the view that nothing exists beyond the natural world and that only physical laws operate in our world, i.e. that also humans are purely physical beings.”.
Again, simply incorrect. Naturalism says that all the ontologically existing objects are physical in nature. It does not deny the existence of immaterial “entities” like attributes, relationships and activities. Also it does not deny the existence of “concepts” and “abstractions”, it only denies the ontological, independent existence of the so-called “abstract objects”. It does not deny the existence of subjective categories like “heavy” or “beautiful”. It does not deny the existence of “emotions” either. However it denies the independent, ontological existence of these categories. But none of these immaterial entities are “active”. They themselves cannot influence the physical universe - though ACTING on them certainly can.
So the second problem is that you fight against a “ghost-enemy”. Your comments?
There are a number of issues with this depiction of what Al does, unfortunately, for you, these are major ones.
One problem is that you are begging the question by defining “ontological” to be identical to “natural,” at the start. You claim naturalism states “all ontologically existing things” are “physical in nature,” - which is fine, as a claim - but to establish it, as a claim, you simply go on to state dogmatically that abstract objects do not exist “ontologically,” but concede they “exist” in some manner. Well, that manner of existing (ontologically) as you describe it is precisely the same claim as stating they do not exist physically, but do exist in some form or other. Which is simply to assume “ontological” means “physical,” thus begging the conclusion.
So you concede abstract entities do “exist” they just don’t exist physically. Uh, huh. And that shows what, exactly?
Ontological does not mean “physical” but to use it as if it does is not proving anything. And to use a begged claim as a premise without substantiation does not serve to bolster an argument for making a case that ontological does mean physical because that is precisely what you are supposed to be demonstrating in the argument where you have used the conclusion as the main premise. Question begging, pure and simple.
This is quite apparent where you concede abstract objects do indeed “exist,” but don’t really exist ontologically. Which means, I suppose, nothing more than they don’t exist physically. You don’t demonstrate that merely by assuming it to be true.
Now, you do make another claim that purports to support the above and makes the tautological use of “exist” a tad less obvious. You state that immaterial entities are not “active.” Here, again, the distinction is elusive. Are forces material? Even at a very basic level, it is difficult to think of gravity, for example, as a physical object. It is not merely an abstraction, but it is not a physical entity in any strict sense, either, although it does affect physical entities. Electromagnetism or magnetism are, likewise, forces and do not have “ontological” status in the way you suppose. They are certainly “active” and effect change in the natural order. It is not clear that these forces are, indeed, physical in nature, although it might be true to say they are embedded in the natural order.
Another difficulty is that the latent potentiality of physical entities does not “exist” in any physical sense, but that potentiality does, in fact, determine a great deal about what does and does not come about in the physical order.
The piano in front of me contains within its realm of possibility the capacity to create certain sounds. Those “sounds” exist immaterially at the moment as the potentiality or “limitations” of the piano’s capacity. Those limitations are formal ones, not material. Yet, I would insist that they are just as “ontologically” real as the piano itself. In fact, they are the limitations that make the piano what it is, ontologically speaking. Ergo, the formal structure of the piano exists and has ontological priority in such a way as to be necessary to make the piano what it is, physically speaking. The piano would not exist “physically” had the formal possibilities for the piano not existed in an ontologically “prior” way.
Ed Feser makes the point that “A cause is intelligible as a cause only insofar as it is intelligible in itself.” I suspect this comes pretty close to Al’s point in his paper that you are attempting to show to be misconceived.
To claim everything “ontologically” reduces to “naturalism” is to propose that things do not, ultimately, need to be intelligible or explicable and, therefore, need not be “true” in any sense of the word. The word “true,” if it means anything, must mean “understood, meaningful and known for certain by an intelligence.” If things are not ultimately intelligible in themselves, there is no sense in which they can ultimately be “true.” To be “true” supposes that an intelligent agent can apprehend and determine with certainty the significance and meaning of an ontological entity - its “isness,” - what it is - so to speak.
Continued…
. First, I did not actually say that only “scientific” evidence counts, because I disagree with such a blanket proposition. Depending on the subject of the proposition, we need an epistemological method to find out if that proposition is true or not. I subdivide the realm of propositions into several categories: