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CIAO DATE: 5/5/2007
Mere Economic Science: C. S. Lewis and the Poverty of Naturalism
David J. Theroux
March 2007
Abstract
For many years, much of the sciences, both natural and social (including economics), has been dominated by a naturalist (or modernist or structuralist) worldview that generally assumes that the universe and life are purposeless and that mankind is simply a more complex, material version of all else in the natural world. In other words, an individual human is viewed as no more and no less than a system of molecular processes determined by natural physical laws. In this system, all human endeavor and ideas are determined solely as the product of a mechanistic, causal process of physical events.
The philosopher Dallas Willard describes naturalism as a form of monism: “It holds, in some order of interdependence, that reality, knowledge and method . . . are of only one basic kind. That is, there are not two radically different kinds of reality or knowledge or method. [Naturalism] is fundamentally opposed to Pluralism, and most importantly to Dualism as traditionally understood (Plato, Descartes, Kant).” True to this form of monism, “[t]he one type of reality admitted by it is that of the sense-perceptible world and its constituents. All knowledge is, for it, reducible to (or in some manner continuous with) sense perception, and all inquiry essentially involves sense perception, directly or indirectly.” And despite the current preference for “‘the scientific’—the organization of data around empirically underdetermined hypotheses” over the “sense-perceptible,” “[the scientific] is understood to constitute empirical research and, hopefully, to yield empirical or descriptive knowledge.” Naturalism thus “staggers back and forth between physicalism (materialism) as a general ontology and first philosophy, and outright physics-ism or scientism (which need not take the form of physics-ism)—often, though not always, trying to derive physics-ism from scientism and then physicalism from physics-ism. This continues up to the present.”
