In the previous post, we arrived at a critical conclusion: God cannot be a product of human reorganization because humans have never created anything that exceeds the constraints of nature. If humans cannot create transcendent concepts, and yet we possess awareness of a transcendent God, then our awareness of God can only be explained through revelation.

This conclusion will not sit well with those committed to a naturalist worldview. The naturalist response is predictable: Where's the evidence? To be fair, it's a reasonable question.

But the question itself reveals a deeper problem. Naturalism, as a framework for understanding reality, contains significant flaws that are often overlooked by its proponents. Before we turn to the Biblical record of God's revelation, we must examine these flaws. The critique is not intended to dismiss naturalism entirely—it has significant explanatory power within its scope. But its scope is limited, and its claims often exceed its reach.

Naturalism is inherently circular in its reasoning due to its definitions. It employs nature's properties, behaviors, and attributes to explain the properties, behaviors, and attributes of nature.

Humans, as part of the same biological system as other living and non-living entities, use nature to understand the origins of life, including their own. This results in circular conclusions because humans, composed of the same fundamental building blocks as the rest of the universe, employ these building blocks to explain the universe's workings.

Thus, it is unsurprising that expected results are achieved in a closed system where humans, as an emergent property of matter, are explaining matter. So, when naturalists claim that natural phenomena have natural causes, is it any wonder why they see what they want to see?

Circular reasoning is a logical fallacy in which the conclusion of an argument is assumed in one of the premises. It is a type of argument that is always true, regardless of the truth values of its components. In other words, circular reasoning is an argument that cannot be false.

Consider these examples:

Circular reasoning is undesirable when someone is trying to convey a novel idea but derives their terms from synonymous concepts. The shared meaning of words in public discourse is accomplished by representing each word with a more fundamental set of ideas to build upon. Therefore, if you are attempting to get buy-in on new terms, then you certainly cannot claim novelty if the concept is predicated on synonymous terms.

"A woman is a woman" is unclear because it doesn't establish how you know that to be true. Because this verbiage makes no case for a fundamental meaning to the word woman, we cannot even know what woman is a pointer to. It has no weight and can be easily dismissed as noise.

"Truth is truth" is unclear because we have no means to understand first what is truth. What does it point to? What underlying realities is it abstracting? We must dismiss this statement as useless.

The phrase "love is love" abstracts nothing. It points to nothing more fundamental to itself which the audience can use to decide if they agree with the terms. It, therefore, is also useless and must be dismissed.

All of these examples demonstrate why circular reasoning is useless in conveying fundamental truths or novel information. Then, is it ever useful to say, "natural phenomena have natural causes?"

It is reasonable to say that nature is a system. Its components appear to work together and not against each other in an ordered fashion. It appears to have rules that are perceivable and predictable. These rules govern the system's processes. From these rules other phenomena arise.

That being said, these observations are made as residents of the system, not as external observers to it. This presents a challenge in defining nature in a way that does not invoke itself.

So, when we use the catch-all term "nature" to describe a set of properties, behaviors, and attributes of a system that we can observe, how can we define that system from a perspective that we cannot observe? This position makes the definitions positively circular. This is a problem for metaphysical questions to which nature will have no answer because it cannot establish terms more fundamental to itself.

Naturalists often refute such metaphysical postulations as unnecessary because there appears to be no reason for such questions to exist at all. Of course, anyone could come to that conclusion when you derive all of your answers from a position of circular logic. Unfortunately, just because naturalism explains nature well, as it ought to by definition, does not mean that all questions must necessarily fit within that framework, or that any questions that don't aren't worth listening to or answering. After all, such a position would be not only incredibly ignorant, it would be exceedingly dogmatic and incurious—two postures that are contradictory to the pursuits of science.

Strictly philosophically speaking, it is always easier to prove a positive than a negative. In the case of this series, the core of the argument is that the conceptualization of the supernatural exists, which is a positive statement. While there is no claim in this series that this affirmative statement is proof of the supernatural, the conceptualization of phenomena that exist outside of the naturalist framework begs plenty of questions.

The naturalist rebuttal to the believer in the supernatural is just as silly as the postulation of the supernatural is to the naturalist. Believers in the supernatural know the supernatural doesn't readily make itself available to human observation at the demand of the natural. In contrast, the supernatural is, by definition, not observable through an empirical lens. It's no surprise, then, that the naturalist does not find the concept of the supernatural in naturalist terms. In fact, if believers in the supernatural could conjure up supernatural constructs in embodied terms, then that would be natural by definition.

It should come as no surprise when the naturalist finds no evidence for the supernatural according to naturalist terms. Let's be clear. The absence of evidence is not proof of a negative. Presumably, that's not what naturalists are arguing. It's an obvious outcome when naturalist terms cannot prove negatives of non-naturalist positions. If it could, it would be a violation of their own terms. It would also be strange if naturalists could yield explanations of the supernatural in their own terms as well, as that would violate the terms of the supernatural.

In conclusion, when all natural phenomena have natural causes, then it's no surprise that nature will always explain itself; that is until it can't. In a closed system, nature can't explain its own origins without invoking itself. This is an explicit recursion. Being intellectually honest, if the assertion is that nature explains its own origins, then this is inherently not an empirical conclusion because that would put humans as outside observers to the origins of the universe. Inference and deduction are powerful tools, but that is unequivocally not empirical proof. It does, however, satisfy naturalist explanations to seemingly natural phenomena. Interestingly, naturalists are comfortable with this contradiction of their own terms.

Some might claim that human ingenuity can create supernatural concepts through pure abstraction. However, this claim encounters a significant issue: it violates naturalism's own terms.

If humans can create transcendent constructs purely through imagination, this explanation fails to address the cause of such imagination. Naturalism posits that all natural phenomena, including human thought processes, have natural causes. Thus, the sensory origins of such thoughts cannot be entirely explained through strictly empirical means.

Cognitive sciences have established that human thought is generated from direct experience or external stimuli. Abstract thinking, imagination, and daydreaming draw from past experiences or external stimuli stored in memory. Consequently, even the most fantastical concepts in pure imagination are not devoid of external stimuli.

If human thought in the abstract is not fundamentally sourced from external stimuli, then it originates from sources that are not empirically verifiable, posing significant challenges to naturalism's claim that natural phenomena have natural causes. If segments of human thought lack external causes, they remain within the realm of subjective experience and are not empirically validated beyond the mechanisms that produce them. Therefore, certain thoughts might lack a natural cause, suggesting the existence of natural phenomena—thought—that have no natural cause.

If human thought can conceptualize the supernatural, what then is the external stimulus for such thought? Unfortunately, validating the causality of concepts that predate empirical instruments or philosophies is inherently challenging. Nevertheless, we can apply contemporary understanding of human thought to historical contexts, namely that thought arises from external stimuli. The conceptualization of a supernatural entity as the cause of all creation is distinct from merely observing natural phenomena like lightning or thunder and extrapolating to a creator of all matter. This leap to a higher cause beyond nature itself is unprecedented in human thought, with no historical basis for humans reorganizing the properties, attributes, and behaviors of nature to ascribe them to a higher cause than nature itself.

Emergent Theory is a conceptual framework within various scientific, philosophical, and complex systems disciplines that explains how higher-order properties, behaviors, or patterns arise from the interactions and relationships of simpler underlying components. These emergent properties are not predictable solely from the characteristics of the individual parts but manifest at a collective level through dynamic interactions and processes.

As an example, the Big Bang Theory attempts to explain the origins of the structure of the universe as we observe it. While scientists often make attempts to use reductionist approaches to understand the origins of the universe, the theory fails to predict the emergence of complex life forms from the fundamental building blocks of the universe. Reducing these complex life forms to their constituent parts does not predict or explain their existence, yet they exist.

This presents a challenge for naturalism in that there are natural phenomena that have no verifiable natural causes. Naturalists will necessarily inject the word "yet." However, empirical evidence does not deal in hypotheticals, or what may potentially be as evidence for its claims. Therefore, the introduction of "yet" is a particularly dogmatic posture.

Interestingly, and perhaps ironically, it is in these spaces that naturalists are most likely to inject emergent theory where there are gaps in knowledge. This shall appropriately be named the emergence of the gaps.

The framework of revelation and reorganization does not suffer the same circular flaw as naturalism because it doesn't define itself using natural terms. When the framework postulates that God has revealed himself to us, it does so from a position that is grounded in a simple observation. If natural phenomena have natural causes, then naturalism by its very definitions is disqualified from either confirming or denying supernatural conceptualizations because it ignores them entirely. It is not disqualified because it concedes to the supernatural. It is disqualified because it claims ignorance to the supernatural.

That being said, supernatural conceptualizations exist, yet you cannot use naturalist terms to confirm or deny the origins of supernatural events. You can only use naturalist terms to explain the neurological and physiological origins of those terms, yet we know that spontaneous conceptualizations of the supernatural have no basis in reality, because by definition, naturalism and its basis in natural causality cannot leave room for the conjuring up of supernatural terms. This is not a constraint given by those who claim supernatural cause; it is a self-imposed limitation by naturalists.

In a twist of fate, the naturalists have found themselves in a position where their attempts to empirically validate their naturalist claims clashes with the reality that they cannot. The scope of inquiry and the time elapsed since the instantiation of the universe has surpassed their empirical purview. In an effort to maintain natural causes, they create self-referential claims, tautologies, and dogmatic assertions—the very posture they lambast the religious for. They tell stories of the way things ought to be instead of the way things are simply because they've molded natural explanations into a framework that only explains things in natural terms.

The closed system of naturalism invokes itself to explain itself. We've reached a place where naturalism is unable to conclusively state that all natural phenomena have natural causes. It appears that statement is valuable in finite contexts.

There is a hierarchical relationship between what is observed and what is hypothesized. You cannot hypothesize without an impetus to do so. Therefore, the mere action of observing a phenomenon can spawn a series of hypotheses, even if some hypotheses are derived from further observations from derivative events.

The relationship between novel natural phenomena and conscious observers is such that the conscious observer's happening upon novel natural phenomena has nothing to do with the observer's intentions. It has everything to do with the intersection of conscious observers and a sequence of events.

This frame of reference is revelation, fundamentally speaking. The interaction with the natural world can result in unpredictable outcomes. Unpredictability and unfamiliarity are the essence of novelty. Therefore, we can say that in naturalism the hypotheses that are generated about the functions of nature are derived from our embodied experiences with them, not in spite of those experiences. If our intersection with the natural world is either familiar or predictable, this is by definition not novel. Nature tells us about itself through our interactions with it, thus falling in the camp of revelation. Reductionist approaches to natural phenomena follow that pattern.

The revelation and reorganization framework does not oppose naturalism. It explains its explanatory power. It gives reason for why naturalism works so well within its scope. And it gives cause to the things that pure empiricism and naturalism cannot explain.

With the limitations of naturalism established, we can now turn to the Biblical record. If God has revealed himself to us—and we have established that our awareness of God cannot be attributed to human reorganization—then how has he done so? The Bible provides a unique answer to this question, one that demonstrates God interacting with his creation through both sensory and spiritual means.