It has been said that nature is all there is. A scientific account of the world is the only knowledge we have as everything can be explained in terms of natural causes and laws so the spiritual and supernatural don’t exist. We are all a product of random cause and effect responses for which we have no control and ultimately there is no purpose. Taken to its logical conclusion, this is true. But is it?
But the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.
1 CORINTHIANS 2:14
Naturalism describes a universe without purpose and meaning where everything is the result of mechanical cause and effect responses. Mechanisms engage in meaningless activity for no reason. Whether a mechanism exists or not is meaningless and if a mechanism were to react in a particular way that would generate a particular set of outcomes, those outcomes would be meaningless. By what means then could we consider the manifestations of nature to be anything other than meaningless? Indeed nature in and of itself as a purely objective reality is meaningless and if that’s all there is, then meaning is impossible. Yet meaning does exist.
Given that meaning cannot exist in and of a meaningless reality, it must be an intrinsic aspect of the mechanism itself. At the micro level, science reveals mechanisms as a complex design that facilitate development and reproduction so by its very nature, the mechanism operates in accordance with that purpose. Given that science observes and describes what is seen, it observes and describes purpose.
If parameters for knowledge are then brought to bear upon the interpretation of those observations that only consider mechanical cause and effect responses, those parameters would direct a mode of inquiry that would ultimately lead to meaninglessness. By eradicating purpose from the equation, the scientific inquiry has therefore been streamlined into a method of interpretation it doesn’t reveal and in doing so, knowledge is controlled as aspects deemed beyond understanding and uncontrollable are eliminated. The very nature of the scientific inquiry however incorporates the uncontrollable as we can never know that we have seen everything, unless we stop looking. Could the impetus for control then lie elsewhere?
The notion of a seemingly unidentifiable and therefore uncontrollable entity that is all powerful, all knowing and as such considered controlling and judgmental who’s every whim humanity is enslaved may be deemed unpalatable. Yet spiritual experiences and supernatural events incorporating mystical creations have often served to fulfill the subjective needs of the individual or group for the purpose of power and control. There has however been a course of spiritual experiences and supernatural events that have served to reveal a causal agent for the existence of the meaningful, an agent that facilitates development and reproduction, a knowledge base anchored in that purpose which science observes and describes, engendered by its very nature producing much much more than meaningless mechanical cause and effect responses.