Introduction

Evolutionary naturalism has been traditionally identified with empiricism and materialism, in opposition to the metaphysical speculations of the movement's theological antagonists. Typical in this regard was the definition of the movement given by James Ward in his Gifford Lectures, which was cited by Frank Turner in Between Religion and Science:

As Turner stressed in his gloss on this definition, scientific (or evolutionary) naturalism repudiated supernaturalism and constructed its interpretation of man, nature and society from the theories, methods and categories of empirical science rather than from rational analysis. In temperament it was secular; in philosophy, empiricist. It held that the scientific method was the only means of acquiring true knowledge, and this method in turn gave support to three theories which were eagerly embraced by the scientific naturalists: Dalton's theory of the atom, the law of the conservation of energy, and the Darwinian theory of evolution.