2.1 Religious Feelings in Response to Nature’s Sacredness

One possible view is to accept that the practical content of religious naturalism is no more than a set of nature-friendly moral ideals. Calling commitment to those ideals ‘religious’ may then be justified in so far as it is accompanied by subjective feelings and attitudes towards nature of the kind valorized in religious traditions, such as awe, reverence, and gratitude, as well as by a tendency to describe the world itself in terms correlated with such feelings. Religious naturalists speak, for example, of nature’s sacredness, holiness, or, in some cases, of its being divine or containing divinity. Feelings of reverence towards nature are thus viewed as subjective responses to something of great worth attributed to the natural world itself.

This idea of a religious response to the sacred worth of, or in, nature can be interpreted philosophically in two contrasting ways. The first – more obvious – way is to hold that human responses of wonder, reverence, and thankfulness are responses to what is objectively ‘there’ in the natural world itself, independently of whether or not humans experience and respond to it. On this ‘realist’ account, humans ought to respond to nature in religious ways; reverence and gratitude are the apt or right responses to nature’s intrinsic sacred worth.

Realism about values in general is, however, a common target of philosophical scepticism, especially amongst those who think of themselves as committed to naturalism: how could anything have worth other than in relation to its being valued by conscious beings with desires and preferences? Naturalist ‘value-anti-realism’ comes in several varieties – for example, non-cognitivism, for which (roughly) evaluative utterances express preferences or implicit commands rather than truth-claims, and fictionalists who hold (roughly) that evaluative facts are useful fictions.Footnote ⁶ Some naturalists would accommodate evaluative facts by noting that, for example, the disposition to produce (under certain conditions) human religious feelings and attitudes is a real enough ‘response-dependent’ property of features of the natural world. But that property falls short of the property of requiring such responses from minds with a human-type psychology, which is what is needed if, as a full-blooded realist will insist, nature (or some key feature of it) has sacred worth intrinsically, independently even of the very existence of humans or similar beings. A religious naturalism that adopts a less than fully realist interpretation of the religiously significant worth that resides in nature is, we suggest, religious only in a relatively ‘thin’ sense. A ‘thicker’ grade of religious naturalism regards human attitudes of reverence towards nature as apt responses to the sacred value that nature has intrinsically. On this fully realist view, what is revered in nature is revered because it is sacred; it is not sacred because humans have religious feelings towards it.

Taking nature’s sacredness to be a real intrinsic property yields a grade of religious naturalism that is ‘thicker’ in the sense that it is metaphysically bolder than alternative less fully realist views. The question arises whether this bolder metaphysical commitment coheres with a naturalist stance. Perhaps a naturalist can be religious only by being metaphysically cautious and taking nature’s sacred worth to be something humanly conferred on nature, or, anyway, something non-intrinsic whose reality is essentially linked to actual and potential human responses? We’ll return to this question later, since the answer depends on what ‘naturalism’ may be taken to mean – and that’s the focus of the second pole of our conceptual investigation of the idea of a religious naturalism (see Section 3). For now, we’ll continue with the first pole, exploring further how to understand the religiousness of a religious naturalism that takes a fully realist religious view of the sacredness of nature.

2.2 Religious Naturalism: ‘Grounding’ an Eco-Morality

Religious naturalisms that take nature (or some aspect of it) as their religious object typically affirm an ‘eco-morality’ which includes nature-friendly moral ideals (that is, ideals about how humans should relate rightly to their natural environment and its resources, as well as ideals about right relationships amongst humans). ‘Thicker’ forms of religious naturalism take the ‘moral realist’ view that their ideals are ‘objectively’ right, and not just right relatively to human preferences or social and cultural traditions, as ‘moral anti-realists’ hold. In addition – and this is important – fully realist religious naturalisms claim that the objective rightness of nature-friendly ideals is ‘grounded’ in ultimate reality. They hold, that is, that it is because nature ultimately possesses the religiously significant worth that it does that a specific objective eco-morality applies.

An appeal to ‘ultimates’ is a characteristic feature of religious worldviews.Footnote ⁷ But what exactly does it mean to say that the ideals of eco-morality have ultimate grounds in the sacred worth of nature? Broadly speaking, the idea of an ultimate is the idea of a certain kind of limit – to put it colloquially, an idea about ‘where the buck stops’. Religious claims about ultimates are claims about ‘where the buck stops’ explanatorily – namely, in something whose ultimate reality can explain why other things are as they are, while needing no explanation beyond itself for its own reality. Realist religious naturalism treats nature’s sacredness as just such an ultimate, from which both right attitudes and right ways of human living in the natural environment derive.

There is a contrast, then, with purely ethical attempts to ground the ideals of an eco-morality. Secular or humanist naturalists may claim that they can derive an adequate environmental ethics – for example, on the basis of broad utilitarian considerations that include the utilities of future generations and of sentient beings other than humans.Footnote ⁸ It’s a pertinent question whether a religious naturalism that affirms the ultimate sacred worth of nature offers more secure foundations for eco-morality than any purely ethical theory such as utilitarianism. To answer that question, and to make it intelligible how a religious perspective on nature’s ultimate reality could ground an eco-morality, we would need some account of what ultimately constitutes nature’s sacred worth – a topic we’ll consider later (see Section 4). It’s enough for now to appreciate that one kind of religiousness that a religious naturalism may exhibit is the kind of religiousness that not only affirms a value-realist morality but also grounds that morality on the foundations of a religious account of ultimate reality.

2.3 Natural Reality as Ultimately Favourable to the Pursuit of an Eco-Morality

We have distinguished relatively thin, metaphysically cautious, forms of religious naturalism from thicker, metaphysically bolder forms. ‘Thin’ religious naturalisms take nature’s sacredness to be essentially related to human responses, yet something in which it is important to believe because this has beneficial consequences for human flourishing in harmony with the environment. On a ‘thin’ view, eco-moral ideals are not ‘grounded’ in any intrinsic features of ultimate reality. Even if some value-realist view is taken of those ideals themselves, a ‘thin’ account takes nature’s religiously significant features to be either mere projections of human attitudes, or, anyway, dependent on actual or potential human responses to reality. By contrast, ‘thicker’, fully realist, forms of religious naturalism (if they are possible) would offer a metaphysics of ultimate, but still ‘natural’, reality from which the correctness of its eco-ideals and the aptness of religious attitudes towards nature derive. This would yield for religious naturalism something beyond its purely moral content – namely, a secure basis for moral ideals in the nature of ultimate reality.

But religion characteristically plays a further role in affirming that reality is, so to speak, ultimately favourable to the pursuit by human beings of (what it takes to be) the right moral ideals. Religion tells us that the way things ultimately are makes it reasonable to commit ourselves to living in accordance with certain moral ideals. It tells us that we may pursue those ideals hopefully, even when faced with obstacles and failures. Religions that fulfil this function posit a metaphysics of ultimate reality that grounds not only certain ideals but also the hope that living in accordance with those ideals is the path to human fulfilment (that is, to the satisfaction of our ultimate interests, not just individually but also as social groups within the wider environment). Sticking to the right ideals is often costly, requiring us to confront adversaries, and to set aside other desires – maybe, at the extreme, to the point of sacrificing one’s life. Furthermore, we often fail to meet our ideals though we still endorse them, even when following them would have been easy enough, and we may come to despair at our own weakness, self-absorption, and moral failures. Obstacles to pursuing our ideals come from within ourselves as well as from outside. In grounding the hope that trying to live by its ideals is the path to human fulfilment, a religious metaphysics of ultimate reality that performs this function provides a soteriology – a means for ‘salvation’ from the obstacles that threaten to undermine our ultimate human fulfilment. (Soteriology and salvation are to be understood here in a broad sense, not confined to Christian concepts such as sin and redemption, heaven and hell.)

In considering, then, what functions an ideal religion might serve in human existence, we may expect it to offer a metaphysics of ultimate reality that not only grounds moral ideals but also hope for ultimate human fulfilment through pursuit of those ideals and, as well, the means of ‘salvation’ from obstacles to that fulfilment. We’ll describe as robustly religious those perspectives that make bold metaphysical claims of this kind. After considering different understandings of what may be meant by naturalism (Section 3), we’ll go on (in Section 4) to consider how an outlook on reality which is still meaningfully naturalist can also be robustly religious by affirming an ultimate reality that grounds hopeful pursuit of an eco-morality.

2.4 A ‘Religion of Nature’?

Before proceeding, though, it’s worth raising the question whether religious naturalisms of the kind we’ve been discussing so far – namely, those that ascribe religious worth to nature or some key feature of it – would have to be associated with an actual religion, a ‘religion of Nature’, one might say. Some who see religious naturalism as a religious attitude towards nature insist that it is not ‘a religion’ (see, e.g., Hogue, Reference Hogue2014: 6). Some even hesitate to call it ‘religious’: Crosby (Reference Crosby2003: 119), for example, prefers to call his version of religious naturalism ‘naturism’, because, for him, ‘Nature in and of itself is … religiously ultimate’. And Goodenough (see Reference Goodenough2023: 102) suggests that ‘spiritual naturalism’ may be a more accurate term for the perspective described in her book The Sacred Depths of Nature. It’s a common feature of the decline of traditional religious affiliation in ‘Western’ societies for people who want to retain something valuable from the religion they now reject to say that they are ‘spiritual’, but not ‘religious’. Being ‘spiritual’ somehow strikes people as not implying belief in anything supernatural in the way that being religious is usually assumed to do. And being spiritual also gets understood largely as a private thing, not requiring the membership of communities and institutions that is typical of traditional religions, nor engaging in their communal rites and observances.

It is an interesting question whether the practice of a religious outlook on reality must essentially be linked to a communal religious movement. Do religious naturalists need a ‘religion of Nature’? Some who answer ‘no’ may, as just noted, downplay the religiousness of their stance. That may be because they sense that a genuinely religious stance would involve belonging to a religious movement that confers a shared identity. Being religious entirely by oneself seems difficult if not impossible: spiritual practices, even of solitary hermits, typically relate to the shared tradition of some communal fellowship. Perhaps, though, the fellowship to which one relates as a religious naturalist need have few if any of the usual trappings of religion, consisting in only a virtual community of the like-minded.Footnote ⁹ But if a religious naturalism is to fulfil the functions needed to be robustly religious, then some of the ‘trappings’ of religion may be practically very helpful, if not essential – for example, disciplined routines and communal rites focused on what is held to be of ultimate worth.Footnote ¹⁰ The question then arises where a ‘religion of Nature’ may already exist – or else, if it needs a fresh start, where resources may be found for developing its practices and beliefs. Religious naturalists often distance themselves from some aspects of their own inherited traditions, yet find other aspects inspirational for filling out a religious naturalist stance. We’ll take up in Section 5 the question of what a robustly religious naturalism might draw from existing traditions – even to the extent of remaining within a tradition while developing or rediscovering its naturalist potential. But now we’ll pursue our conceptual inquiry into religious naturalism by moving on to its second pole – namely, the question of what the naturalism of religious naturalism may mean.

3.1 ‘Nature is All That There is’: Naturalism as ‘One-World-ism’

Naturalism is connected with the idea of ‘the natural world’. In some contexts, the ‘natural’ world is contrasted with the ‘human’ world, the world of society and culture. No such contrast is intended here. Rather, speaking of the ‘natural’ world – of which humans and human societies and cultures are a part – here implies a contrast with the possibility of a world which is not natural because it is ‘above’ nature (super-natural) or ‘beyond’ nature (supra-natural). The Abrahamic religious traditions, with their concept of God as creator and the natural world as God’s creation, are widely understood as ‘supernaturalist’ – that is, as committed to the idea of a supernatural order distinct from, though interacting with, ‘the natural order’. Religious naturalism may thus be understood to mean a religious worldview that rejects any ontological order beyond or above the natural world, and therefore holds that there is no world but the natural world. Defending the possibility of a religious naturalism accordingly depends on successfully explaining how an identifiably religious perspective could accept that, as Crosby (Reference Crosby, Meister and Copan2013: 744) puts it, ‘Nature in some shape or form is all there is now, ever has been, and ever shall be’.

But what does it mean to say that ‘Nature is all that there is’? A straightforward answer is that this claim affirms a ‘one-world’ ontology as against the ‘two-world’ ontology familiar from a standard understanding of Abrahamic theism. According to that standard understanding, God is a personal being who is the creator ex nihilo of all else that exists. God is thus an uncreated being. God must therefore belong to a distinct ontological category from the natural world of created beings. On this account, then, naturalism amounts to the one-world-ist claim that there is no other world but the one natural world, no beings other than natural beings. (This claim may be qualified as applying only to concrete as opposed to abstract reality by those who hold that abstract entities, such as numbers and propositions, need to be accepted as real though they don’t belong to the contingent natural world.)

Religious naturalism can therefore mean a religious perspective which affirms the ‘one-world’ ontology of a single natural world. Such a perspective views existence as a unified whole. That’s a religiously appealing idea, suggested, perhaps, by the etymology of ‘religion’ (if that term does derive, as often claimed, from the Latin religere, ‘to bind together’). As Wittgenstein avers in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ‘Feeling the world as a limited whole – it is this that is mystical’ (Reference Wittgenstein1961 [Reference Wittgenstein1922]: §6.45). Pantheist religious sensibility expresses the same idea, identifying the divine not as the mere sum total of existents but as their constituting an ‘all-inclusive unity’.Footnote ¹²

This one-world-ist formulation differs from the formulation of religious naturalism with which we began. That formulation characterized religious naturalism as a matter of having religious attitudes towards nature and taking the natural world itself (or some aspect of it) as the object of ultimate religious worth – a view which, from now on, we’ll refer to as naturist.Footnote ¹³ What is the relation between these two kinds of religious naturalism – naturist and one-world-ist? It seems possible to be a one-world-ist religious naturalist without being a naturist religious naturalist. That is, a religious perspective might hold that there is no world but the natural world without taking the natural world (or anything in it) as its object of ultimate religious worth. This would be the case, for example, for a worldview that retains the Abrahamic concept of God on some alternative to the standard understanding noted earlier in this section, yet without identifying God with Nature or any part of it. (For more on one-world-ist religious naturalisms that are not ‘naturist’, see Section 5.3.)

Naturist religious naturalists characteristically also hold the one-world-ist conviction that the natural world, which provides the object of their religious attitudes, is all that there is or could be. That’s hardly surprising: if the ultimate object of your religious concern is Nature or within nature, you have no religious reason to posit anything beyond nature. One-worldist religious naturalism is thus best seen as a genus of which naturist religious naturalism is a species, leaving it open that there may be other species of one-world-ist religious naturalism whose object of ultimate religious concern is neither nature as a whole nor any core feature of nature.

3.2 Specifying ‘the Natural World’

Just what is meant by ‘the natural world’? We’ve used the phrase often, but without fully specifying its meaning. One-world-ist naturalism – the thesis that there is but one world, namely, the natural world – makes a determinate claim only given a specification of what the natural world is. And the possibility of (various forms of) one-world-ist religious naturalism needs to be judged relative to assumptions about what the natural world, on a given specification of it, may and may not include. What specification of the natural world may we give, then, without already building in any religious assumptions (such as identifying nature as God’s creation, as in Abrahamic theism)?

A religiously neutral place to start would seem to be with the idea that the natural world is the world as disclosed to human beings through our sensory experience. That includes, of course, not only our external perceptions but also our inner reflections and proprioceptions: we humans are ourselves part of the world disclosed to us in sensory experience. May we identify that experienced world as the natural world, which the naturalist says is ‘all that there is’? Hardly! Our sensory powers are limited, so there may be more to reality than we have it within our powers to perceive through the senses. That’s an important truth – but it opens a Pandora’s box of potential appeals to non-sensory modes of intuition and revelations of spiritual and religious reality. Unless some limits may be placed on such appeals, the possibility is undermined of a shared, religiously neutral, conception of ‘the natural world’.

A (‘Western’) scientific approach promises to keep the lid on this Pandora’s box by rescuing a determinate, supposedly neutral, conception of the natural world. Under a scientific approach, what belongs to the natural world may readily be extended from what we may immediately perceive to include things perceivable only with the assistance of instruments such as microscopes and telescopes. In addition, scientific explanatory theories typically posit theoretical entities (subatomic particles, for example) – and these, too, may be regarded as belonging to the natural world. Such theories remain tethered to what we can perceive, since they may be confirmed only on the evidence of our publicly checkable sensory perceptual experience.

A determinate conception of ‘the natural world’ thus emerges – namely, as the world experienced in sensory perception and able to be further understood only through empirically well-confirmed explanatory theories in the empirical sciences (including psychology and the social sciences, as well as the ‘harder’ sciences, biology, chemistry, and physics). Empirically well-confirmed scientific theories may be interpreted either in a realist or an anti-realist (‘instrumentalist’) way, according to whether the entities they posit are treated as real entities or only as useful tools for predicting and explaining observable phenomena.Footnote ¹⁴ Even on an instrumentalist account well-confirmed scientific theories enlarge our understanding of what the natural world is like beyond what we can perceive of it (if these theories ‘work’, the world, whatever it is like ‘in itself’, must be such as to make the relevant instrumental models of it apt).

One way of determining what counts as the natural world, then, is as the world as we sensorily perceive it enhanced only by what scientific theorizing can disclose – to the extent, that is, that the posits of such theorizing are confirmed in experience. If the natural world under that determination is the only world there is, then nothing is concretely (as opposed to abstractly) real unless its existence and properties are in principle knowable empirically through observationally-based methods of scientific inquiry. This claim is widely referred to as scientific naturalism.

Sensory perceptual-based methods of scientific inquiry deserve to be accepted as reliable routes to knowledge of reality – assuming, anyway, that an adequate response can be given to external world scepticism, and that suitable qualifications are made about the limits of empirical knowledge. Those qualifications include, first, that empirical, scientific, knowledge deals in probabilities rather than certainties; second, that scientific knowledge is in principle fallible, revisable in the light of future experience; and, third, that the development of bodies of scientific knowledge is conditioned by their historical and cultural situatedness. With all that said, we may affirm that science does convey understanding about what our world is like. But it’s a distinct and bolder claim to hold that reality consists only in the ways those sense-based scientific routes to knowledge understand it – even when that claim is qualified as applying only to concrete reality.

Scientific inquiry is, of course, methodologically naturalist. Methodological naturalism specifies intrinsic limitations on the kinds of hypotheses that count as scientific. Properly scientific hypotheses must be empirically testable – testable, that is, against in principle publicly checkable sensory-based observations. Furthermore, properly scientific hypotheses treat the world we experience through sensory perception as ‘causally closed’. This is the ‘one-world-ism’ that is intrinsic to the scientific method: any hypothesis about what causally explains some phenomenon in the world is intrinsically a hypothesis about some features of, or events or processes that occur in, that very same world.

However, science’s methodological naturalism does not entail the ontological conclusion that there is nothing more to (concrete) reality than is disclosed by empirical scientific methods. Nor can empirical scientific methods themselves confirm such a claim. To upgrade methodological naturalism into an ontological thesis by claiming that there is nothing concretely real beyond what would feature in a notionally completed natural scientific description of the world is to go beyond empirical science into contestable metaphysics. It is therefore apt to refer to this thesis as ‘metaphysical naturalism’. As John Haught (Reference Haught2003: 770) succinctly puts it, ‘Methodological naturalism maintains that as far as scientific knowing is concerned, nature is all that there is. Metaphysical naturalism, on the other hand, goes much farther, insisting that nature is literally all there is.’

Metaphysical naturalism uses the science-based conception of the natural world to specify what there is when ‘nature is literally all that there is’. Of course, there is more to be said about exactly what limits the science-based conception places on what can count as belonging to the natural world. In particular, the question arises whether metaphysical naturalism implies physicalism – namely, the thesis that everything concretely real is physical in the sense that there is a true description of it in the language of fundamental physical theory (at least in principle, even if no such purely physical description could actually be accessed). If the scientifically disclosable world is taken to be causally closed at the level of fundamental physical reality, then the metaphysical scientific naturalist will be a physicalist in the sense just defined, ruling out the Cartesian view that consciousness belongs to a distinct non-physical ontological order somehow interacting with the bodily, physical, order. For present purposes, it’s not important to go into the question whether a properly scientific naturalism could accept mind/body dualism. But it is important to note that metaphysical scientific naturalism doesn’t need to deny ‘immaterial’ realities, even if it does entail physicalism. This is because it may be accepted that physical reality, in its complex developed forms, has emergent properties – such as life, consciousness, and agency – and that there are autonomous sciences (biology, psychology) that deal with properties at these emergent levels and whose content cannot be reduced to purely physical content, even though what ultimately constitutes living and conscious beings are complexly organized physical systems.Footnote ¹⁵

3.3 Religious Naturalism and Scientific Metaphysical Naturalism

How do religious naturalisms stand in relation to the metaphysical scientific naturalist claim that the natural world – which naturalism claims is all that there is – is nothing more or less than the world as science can know it to be?

As noted in Section 1, one main motivation for religious naturalism is a desire for forms of religion that ‘take science seriously’. Religious naturalisms, then, need a worldview which coheres with well-confirmed empirical scientific theories. This constraint entails that, since scientific theoretical accounts of the world change and develop, and could never reach any state of final certainty, religious naturalisms cannot take any stance that could not adapt to shifts in scientific understanding. Accordingly, religious naturalisms may make posits about ultimate reality only if taking them as foundational could not in principle conflict with scientific developments.

Religious naturalists share with metaphysical scientific naturalists the claim that our world is one world: they are, as already argued, one-world-ist naturalists. Science itself can’t rule out two-world-ist metaphysical schemes. That can be done only by taking a certain metaphysical stance, as do some (though by no means all) philosophers of science – namely, those who are metaphysical scientific naturalists. Religious naturalists take the metaphysical stance that there is no (concrete) world but the natural world. And some – but only some – religious naturalists take a further step by committing to the metaphysical scientific naturalist understanding of what the natural world is. These religious naturalists often see this commitment as itself a religious one: it is the natural world existing by itself just as science can reveal it that inspires their awe and reverence.Footnote ¹⁶

Metaphysical scientific naturalists do not generally accept that the feelings they may have about nature involve anything religious. Nevertheless, their worldview is sometimes presented in quasi-religious ways, and may be associated with movements sociologically similar to religious ones – for example, the ‘brights’ network, and the ‘evolutionary consciousness’ movement inspired by the works of Richard Dawkins.Footnote ¹⁷ Anything genuinely religious in these movements should (for self-consistency) involve only the thinner, less realist, forms of religion that remain within the limits of metaphysical scientific naturalism. The more that a ‘spirituality’ is associated with a scientific naturalist view of the world, the more pressure there seems to be on keeping within those limits. For example, Dawkins extols gratitude as an apt response to the chanciness of our individual existence on Darwinian evolutionary assumptions – although, of course, he doesn’t think there is anyone or anything to which we owe our thankfulness. But if Dawkins’ ‘gratitude spirituality’ extends to the idea that gratitude is an apt human response to intrinsically real features of the natural world, it implies a realist stance that breaks with metaphysical scientific naturalism and could count as naturalist only in some broader sense.Footnote ¹⁸

And there is conceptual space for broader notions of naturalism that have an expanded view of what can count as ‘within’ the one natural world. One-world-ist naturalism does not entail metaphysical scientific naturalism. The one world that we can know through sensory perceptual-based scientific methods may also include real features which cannot be known in that way. A one-world-ist naturalism can thus be an ‘expansive’ naturalism.Footnote ¹⁹ For example, Graham Oppy (Reference Oppy2018) takes naturalism to be expansive enough to be value-realist – that is, to include the ‘mind-independent’ reality of values, something that metaphysical scientific naturalism seems to rule out, allowing that values have real existence only essentially in relation to valuing minds. Oppy argues that naturalism, though it may admit mind-independent values, cannot admit any religiously realist metaphysics. For Oppy, naturalism entails that there are no non-natural causal agents or non-natural causal regulative structures, but (on his view) a religiously realist metaphysics requires belief in just such agents or regulative structures.

Fiona Ellis (e.g., Reference Ellis2014, Reference Ellis and Draper2019, Reference Ellis2020, and Reference Ellis, Caro and Macarthur2022) goes further than admitting mind-independent values as belonging to the one natural world. She promotes a version of ‘theistic expansive naturalism’, which opens the door wider to include religious realisms that enhance the one natural world yet without positing any concrete supernatural ontological order.Footnote ²⁰ That’s the degree of expansion needed to make space for the more robustly religious naturalism we have earlier described – namely, a religious naturalism that posits a one-world metaphysics of ultimate reality that grounds, not only nature-friendly moral ideals but also the hope that pursuit of those ideals, despite adversities and failures, is the key to human fulfilment in harmony with the wider environment.

3.4 Taking Science Seriously: A Constraint on Expansive Naturalism

There is conceptual space, then, for an expansive one-world-ist religious naturalism with a non-supernaturalist metaphysics that functions to ground ideals and support some form of soteriology. But how expansive could a religious worldview be while remaining meaningfully ‘naturalist’? What kinds of ‘expansions’ are admissible? One-world-ism doesn’t seem sufficient for naturalism: one might imaginatively populate the one natural world with many enchanted things that go beyond anything a naturalist could admit yet without implying any radical supernatural/natural dualism.

As we’ve noted, to be ‘naturalist’ a worldview must not only be one-world-ist, it must also take science seriously. But what does this additional condition mean? Taking science seriously must at least imply proper respect for empirical evidence in settling factual matters. But how are we to show that proper respect? A common assumption is that to do so requires committing to the truth of the foundational claims of a worldview only to the extent that the available evidence supports their truth.

Now, the practical impact of following that rule depends on what may be admitted as relevant evidence. Scientific methods require evidence to rest on checkable perceptual observations. If that’s the sort of evidence that’s required, the scope for religious worldviews that take science seriously seems narrow. It’s true that, during the European Enlightenment, empirical arguments for God’s existence were championed – in particular, the ‘design argument’. This has been revived as the ‘new’ teleological argument which argues for the existence of a supreme intelligence from the ‘fine-tuning’ of the Universe’s physical constants to allow for the emergence of conscious intelligent life. In the Enlightenment, the project of empirically ‘proving’ God’s existence was known as ‘natural religion’: it’s the subject of David Hume’s critique in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Reference Hume and Gaskin1993 [Reference Hume and Gaskin1779]). The success of ‘natural theology’ (as it is now more commonly known) continues to be disputed. But, even if, say, the argument from fine-tuning succeeds (which we believe it does not),Footnote ²¹ the supreme intelligence whose existence it made empirically probable would – simply as a consequence of science’s methodological naturalism – count as something within the closed causal system of the natural world, and that would arguably limit its specifically religious significance.

If a naturalist worldview that ‘takes science seriously’ must confine itself to empirically confirmed foundations, then a naturalist worldview could be religious only in the ‘thin’ ways consistent with metaphysical caution. But a less restrictive interpretation may be placed on ‘taking science seriously’. Certainly, empirical evidence must be respected in settling factual questions; but taking science seriously also involves recognizing its limitations. One limitation is that, though it’s ‘Western’ science that naturalists typically want to take seriously, bodies of experience-based knowledge are found also in non-Western traditions and Indigenous cultures. Given that all scientific knowledge is in principle open to revision and paradigm change, some ‘non-Western’ knowledge currently thought less than ‘properly scientific’ might come to be more integrated into a future scientific view of the world.Footnote ²²

A second limitation, highly salient for religious worldviews, is that claims about how reality ultimately is – in itself, independently of how we experience it – cannot in principle be settled just by appeal to empirical evidence. Nevertheless, these are factual claims.Footnote ²³ If, as widely agreed, factual claims cannot be settled a priori, it follows that claims about ultimate reality may be accepted only if it is sometimes reasonable to commit to the truth of a proposition ‘beyond the evidence’ as a matter of faith.

Now, some (‘evidentialists’) will insist that faith going beyond the evidence is always unreasonable. For them, both ‘scientistic’ commitment to the idea that the natural world has to be just the scientifically knowable world, and commitments to any of the various religious expansions of that world, are equally irrational and ‘ideological’. Of course, religious believers may find their beliefs supported by their personal, subjective, experience. But this type of evidence is a matter more of emotional and spiritual than sensory perceptual experience, and it counts as evidence only when already interpreted from a ‘believing’ perspective. Religious beliefs are supported by religious experience – and that can be vitally important for continued religious commitment. But this kind of evidential support is not scientifically adequate because it doesn’t count as independent evidence acceptable as such from the point of view of any inquirer.

Commitments to the truth of metaphysical claims about ultimate reality therefore require a faith venture. In ‘The Will to Believe’, William James proposed a justification of faith in just this sense – as practical commitment to truth-claims without the support of adequate scientifically admissible forms of evidence. James (Reference James1956 [1897]: 11) restricted justified faith to claims whose truth ‘cannot by its nature be decided on intellectual grounds’ (our emphasis). He thought it reasonable to take a stance on existentially vital questions such as the objective reality of values, and the meaningfulness or purposiveness of existence, even though intellectual arguments and scientifically admissible evidence could not even in principle settle the truth on questions like these. These kinds of questions are what Willem Drees calls ‘limit’ questions (see, e.g., Drees Reference Drees1996: 18) – questions about the ultimate nature of the whole of reality, its existence and structure, questions on which religion characteristically ventures substantive answers.

Commitment to a religious naturalism of a robust, metaphysically adventurous, kind would therefore require justification as a faith-venture, since its metaphysical content would augment a purely scientific view of reality. This needn’t open Pandora’s box, however, because James’s restriction can be applied: venturing ‘by faith’ is admissible only on vital questions in principle unable to be settled by intellectual weighing of relevant evidence. All ‘ordinary’ factual questions are to be left unsettled if the evidence doesn’t decide. A reasonable faith-venture must therefore be consistent with scientific resolution of all those questions that can be settled in this way. Religious one-world-ist naturalisms accept this constraint – and for good one-world-ist reasons. If the world of our experience is one, ultimately unified, world, then our understanding of what it is like and how it works should itself be integrated. The answers we accept by faith to religiously salient ‘limit’ questions, though necessarily going beyond well-confirmed scientific understandings of reality, must nevertheless cohere with those understandings.

3.5 Taking Stock

We’ve now explored both poles of our conceptual investigation into the possibility of religious naturalism. In Section 2, we saw that the religiousness of religious naturalists could be more or less metaphysically restrained or ambitious. On a restrained account, a ‘thin’ religious naturalism may rest its religiousness on religious feelings towards the natural world, with a property such as nature’s sacredness understood as a projected or response-dependent property. Or, towards the more ambitious end of the spectrum, a robust religious naturalism may posit an ultimate reality that grounds nature-friendly values and makes it reasonable to pursue them, despite adversities, in the hope that so doing will lead to ultimate human fulfilment.

In Section 3, we noted that the natural world – the world we belong to and experience through our senses – may be further specified as the world known through scientific methods. Metaphysical scientific naturalism says that ‘nature is all that there is’ means that the natural world is neither more nor less than the world as can be known to science. We have argued, however, that one may be authentically naturalist by accepting that there is only one world, the natural world, without also accepting that science is the final arbiter of what belongs to that one natural world.

Religious naturalism has to strike a viable balance between its religious and its naturalist commitments. Metaphysically cautious and religiously restrained religious naturalism remains within the constraints of metaphysical scientific naturalism. But there is conceptual space for a bolder robustly religious naturalist metaphysics that augments a scientific view of the world yet remains naturalist – first, in affirming that there is only world, the natural world, and, second, in taking science seriously by going only beyond, not against, what our best scientific understanding of the world conveys. Commitment to such a robust religious one-world-ist naturalism – which may, or may not, be ‘naturist’, in taking Nature itself, or some core aspect of nature, as its religious ultimate – would require a faith-venture. But such a venture may be reasonable, given that it would provide an overall practical orientation to reality which grounds pursuit of nature-friendly ideals in the hope of human fulfilment, and is consistent with what our limited scientific methods tell us about our world.Footnote ²⁴

If we are right in our claim that there is conceptual space for an expansive naturalism that is religiously robust in the sense we’ve described, the question then arises whether that conceptual space is occupied. What kind of content could a metaphysically robust one-world-ist religious naturalism have?

4.1 Inherent Natural Purposes – Extendible to the Whole of Reality?

We have argued that a robust religious outlook posits an ultimate reality that grounds moral ideals plus the hope that commitment to those ideals can provide ultimate fulfilment and ‘salvation’ from obstacles that oppose it. Typically, religions richly specify their ideals at a practical level, providing teachers and exemplars of virtuous living, prophets who warn of lapses, and habitual practices that point a path towards fulfilled individual, social, and ecological living. Religious worldviews thus presuppose that human existence is meaningful and purposive.Footnote ²⁵ But they also typically recognize humanity’s dependence on the wider environment, and see the natural world itself as purposive. In some religious worldviews there is the idea that the natural world exists for an overall purpose – and that idea, we think, can provide a foundation for a more robustly religious naturalist understanding of ultimate reality.

But could the natural world have an inherent overall purpose without anything beyond it capable of conferring a purpose upon it? The idea of inherent natural purposes is familiar from Aristotelian naturalism, which has been undergoing a contemporary revival in ethics and ethically-driven metaphysics.Footnote ²⁶ According to Aristotelian naturalism, things in the world have natures specific to their kinds, and, for each kind, there is a good whose realization is constituted by the fulfilment of the telos or purpose of a thing of that kind. In this Aristotelian teleology there is no implication that the ends or telē of natural things are the purposes of some creating mind or organizing intelligence. This kind of inherent teleology is therefore compatible with naturalism – in an expansive one-world-ist form, anyway. (Metaphysical scientific naturalists won’t admit Aristotelian natures or natural ends, though they may allow that Darwinian evolutionary theory supports some natural teleological claims – for example, the claim that the purpose of the heart is to pump blood.)

Neo-Aristotelian moral thinking applies this kind of naturalism to human existence, deriving the virtues as the dispositions for thought and action needed for realizing the telos of humanity, which is described as ‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing’ (translating Aristotle’s eudaimonia). Aristotle identifies this as both our ‘most final’ end and our supreme good. Aristotelian naturalism is not generally regarded as religious, though neo-Aristotelian moral thinking does appeal to something ultimate (as is typical for religiously based ethics). For the neo-Aristotelian, goodness of character and rightness of behaviour are rooted in what’s needed to realize humanity’s telos. Ethical ideals thus derive from what it is, ultimately, to fulfil the purpose of being human.

Inherent teleology of this Aristotelian kind may be deployed for a more distinctively religious – and religiously naturalist – role. Inherent teleology could be all-encompassing; that is, there might be an ultimate purpose inherently attaching to being real as such. On this bold proposal, existence is seen as purposive in the sense that there is an overall ultimate telos whose realization is what everything real is ultimately ‘for’ – and which constitutes the good for reality as such and as a whole. On such a view, the different purposes of, and the different goods for, each specific kind of thing are somehow integrated into the overall ultimate purpose of, and the ultimate good for, reality itself and, thus, the whole natural cosmos.Footnote ²⁷

This vision – of an ultimate cosmic teleology – seems capable in principle of providing foundations for a robust religious perspective on ultimate reality which supports moral ideals and hope for fulfilment in pursuing them. Reality’s ultimate purpose as posited by an all-encompassing inherent teleology would have to be the supreme good. The telos for something of a given kind is a conditioned good, and there can be things for which achieving their conditioned telic goods in a given circumstance would not be good (knives being used as murder weapons is a classic example). But the good for reality as such would be the supreme unconditioned good (since anything real that might be supposed to condition that good must itself exist essentially for the sake of that very same good). Thus, the right ideals for human existence will be the ideals that promote humanity’s contributing to and participating in realizing that supreme good. Furthermore, living by those ideals will amount to living in accordance with reality’s ultimate purpose, thus potentially grounding human hope for fulfilment by so doing. Of course, to get a sense of the viability of such a metaphysical basis for ethical ideals some specification for the supreme good will be needed – an issue we’ll pursue in Section 5. But, first, we’ll say more about the coherence of the idea of inherent cosmic purpose and how it may fit an expansive one-world-ist religious naturalism.

4.2 Naturalist Reservations about Ultimate Cosmic Purpose

Visions of ultimate cosmic teleology are often roundly rejected by religious naturalists. As Crosby (Reference Crosby2003: 118) says, for example: ‘Nature has no overarching, all-inclusive purpose or goal.’ He adds ‘while nature has no purpose, there is abundant manifestation of purpose within nature, i.e. in the outlooks and actions of purposive beings’. The reasons for this rejection are understandable.

For one thing, Aristotelian teleology may seem scientifically ruled out altogether ever since Newtonian physics displaced Aristotelian physics. It is commonly assumed that the shift to a mechanistic view in which final causes were subsumed under efficient causes resulted in the overall demise of teleology in science. However, contemporary natural science is still open to teleology, especially in biology, and perhaps even in physics.Footnote ²⁸

But, even if there are scientific uses for the idea of things being ‘for’ some purpose, the idea of an ultimate purpose for reality as such is not something science could either confirm or disconfirm. If nature is all there is and we are part of nature, there could be no vantage point from which we might discern an overall purpose for reality. There could be no boundary that somehow contains nature and from (or outside of) which one might get a ‘God’s eye view’. So, the idea of an overall cosmic purpose can have no status as a meaningful scientific hypothesis. This is one reason why naturalists (including, seemingly, most religious naturalists) reject the notion of an overall cosmic purpose, thinking that it makes no sense.Footnote ²⁹

However, from a specific religious perspective the inherent directedness of everything upon an ultimate telos might be coherently ‘read into’ what science does confirm about the world. It is widely thought that such a vision of cosmic teleology belongs solely to the Abrahamic monotheist traditions. And those traditions are widely understood as positing a supernatural being who is creator of the cosmos. It is usually assumed, as Dubs (Reference Dubs1943: 263) puts it, that ‘without conscious foresight there can be no true purpose’. On this assumption, there can be a cosmic purpose only if there is a supreme agent who produces the cosmos to achieve that agent’s intended purpose. But if the cosmos is all that there is, there can be no agent existing independently of and ‘prior’ to it. This is the second main reason why naturalists (again, including most religious naturalists) reject the notion of an overall cosmic purpose.Footnote ³⁰

For the idea of a cosmic purpose to be religiously useful, it must somehow be disclosed to humans as a purpose relevant to human existence. This doesn’t imply that the purpose has to be wholly human-focused. Indeed, a truly cosmic purpose would presumably have to be wider than purposes achievable solely within human existence: in that sense it would be ‘ananthropocentric’, to use Tim Mulgan’s (Reference Mulgan2015) term. However, Mulgan’s ‘ananthropcentric purposivism’ leaves it open that cosmic purposes have nothing to do with human existence. But that seems excluded if a metaphysics of cosmic purpose is to ground an account of ultimate reality that functions religiously to support not only moral ideals, but also the reasonable hope that humans may find ultimate fulfilment in pursuing them.Footnote ³¹ A viably religious ‘purposivism’ would have to posit some disclosure of humanity’s place in the ultimate cosmic purpose. But that may (necessarily) be only a limited disclosure of what that ultimate purpose is – sufficient for the practical understanding humans need to contribute to, and participate in, its fulfilment. That disclosure, as already noted, cannot be made by scientific inquiry. Typically, religious traditions treat the purpose of human existence (or, at least, the practicalities of ‘chiming’ with that purpose) as something needing ‘special’ revelation that occurs in particular historical circumstances – for example, through human or angelic ‘messengers’. The claimed revealed truths are then held to be accessible now only through authoritative traditions and writings – which need interpretation and are thus open to being contested. Prima facie, however, epistemologies of special revelation don’t fit with worldviews that take science seriously, so, on the face of it, a ‘purposivist’ religious naturalism would need an alternative, naturalist, way of accessing that purpose and human ways of relating to it. (In Section 5 we’ll discuss further how a religious naturalism might specify an overall cosmic purpose.)

An all-encompassing teleology has its appeal, yet naturalists may feel that this route to a more robustly religious perspective is beyond their reach because (or so they fear) it is bound to violate their essential one-world-ist stance. Loyal Rue (Reference Rue2004: 364f) captures this dilemma. In his view, a satisfying religious naturalism needs a ‘root metaphor’ that integrates evolutionary cosmology and eco-centric morality. However, as he says, ‘the problem with specifying a root metaphor for religious naturalism has to do with specifying a goal or purpose (telos) for the natural order’. That notion seems just what is needed, yet (as Rue and others see it) naturalism rules it out. As Charley Hardwick (Reference Hardwick2003: 112) says of ‘so-called’ religious naturalists who posit cosmic teleology, they are ‘nostalgically try[ing] to smuggle something from the theist tradition into the metaphysical basis for their religious affirmations … giving up God but then trying to salvage teleology or final causality’. His implication is that no such salvage is possible.

These reservations, we suggest, take insufficient account of the religious naturalist potential of the idea of a cosmic purpose arising from the inherent directedness of reality upon a telos which is the good for reality as such, and thus the supreme good. We’ll pursue that suggestion by discussing, in the next subsection, the prospects for a euteleological religious naturalism. In recent work (Bishop and Perszyk, Reference Bishop and Perszyk2023), we outlined and defended a one-world-ist metaphysics we call euteleology. We did so in the context of seeking an adequate alternative to the standard understanding of God as literally a personal being who is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good (‘the personal omniGod’). But we granted that euteleology might provide sound foundations for other religious worldviews which do not use the concept of God. Euteleology is worth considering, then, as a foundational metaphysics for religious naturalism – especially since, as just noted, some religious naturalists identify a cosmic teleology as something they could do with but (probably) can’t have.

4.3 Euteleological Religious Naturalism

Euteleology holds that reality as such and as a whole has a purpose which is the good for reality, and thus the supreme good (‘eu’ = well, good; ‘telos’ = end, purpose). Furthermore, euteleology holds that the contingent Universe exists ultimately because it realizes reality’s purpose – in the sense that the Universe contains states of affairs which fulfil that purpose (by realizing that end, or telos). For euteleology, the purposiveness of reality – its directedness on concretely realizing the supreme good – is inherent: there is directedness upon an end, but no Director who produces the world for that end. Euteleology is thus explicitly one-world-ist, and its basic claims necessarily go beyond but not against a scientific understanding of reality. Its metaphysics thus qualify as potentially foundational for a religious perspective that is (expansively) naturalist.

Now, as our discussion of Aristotelian naturalism indicates, there’s nothing incoherent about the idea of a naturally inherent purpose. Something’s having a purpose is not conceptually restricted to the idea of its having been intelligently designed or produced to contribute to achieving a consciously chosen end.Footnote ³² Still, euteleology’s prospects as a naturalist metaphysics need defence against the common objection that there can be no cosmic purpose without a supernatural Purposer. As directed against euteleology, that objection maintains that being real can’t inherently involve directedness upon an ultimate telos (the supreme good), since there can be an ultimate telos only if there is a creator who creates everything real in order to contribute to achieving that end. In reply, we argue that the objection faces a version of Plato’s famous ‘Euthyphro’ question.Footnote ³³ Does the Creator choose to create for a certain purpose because fulfilling that purpose is the supreme good for reality, or is reality’s overall purpose and supreme good what it is just because the Creator chooses that purpose in creating? If you are a value realist – that is, you think that the supreme good is ‘objectively’ what it is – you will answer that it is the former: the Creator sees what the supreme good is, and creates a world in order to make that goodness concretely real. But in that case, the notion of what’s inherently the good for reality is prior to, and presupposed by, the Creator’s creatively acting to realize that good.

We conclude, then, that it is coherent to hold that reality is inherently purposive, and thus that the Universe has an inherent cosmic purpose, provided that value-realism is itself coherent. However, the insistence that there’d be no cosmic purpose without a supernatural Purposer remains unchallenged on an anti-realist (‘subjectivist’ or ‘relativist’) view which holds that values can exist only through valuings by beings with minds. If there were a supernatural Intelligence, anti-realists will say, the cosmos could exist to realize an overall purpose; but the Euthyphro-type question would then get the opposing (‘theistic subjectivist’) answer that the cosmic purpose is the supreme good because it is the purpose the creating Intelligence (‘God’) chooses. Of course, naturalists rule out any such supernatural Being. But typically, as well, naturalists rule out a cosmic purpose, holding that the only purposes there can be in nature come onto the scene late in the evolutionary story. As Crosby (Reference Crosby2007: 497) puts it, ‘[p]urpose is an emergent phenomenon not a primordial one’.Footnote ³⁴

That stance overlooks the fact that, for an expansive one-world-ist naturalism that accepts value-realism, the notion of a primordial inherent purpose for reality itself is coherent. It might still be thought, though, that a ‘eutelic’ natural Universe couldn’t exist without something to bring it into existence, and thus that appeal would still need to be made to supernatural agency. Naturalists therefore typically hold that the Universe, though containing purposes within it, exists overall as a matter of sheer brute contingency. The trouble is that viewing the Universe’s existence as brutely contingent doesn’t sit easily with being religious. Accepting brute contingency at the ontological foundations clashes with religiously realist perspectives which hold the Universe to be valuable and ‘meaningful’ in itself, not merely as conferred by human imagination. These ‘thicker’ religious perspectives thus take it that, though the Universe’s existence is contingent, it is not a sheer brute contingency because there is an ultimate explanation for the contingent existence of anything at all (rather than nothing), and, indeed, for the existence of a Universe of the kind that we experience it as being.

But how could such ultimate explanations for contingent existence be possible? Many naturalist philosophers would dismiss them out of hand. Ultimate explanation is impossible, they would claim, because explanations have to stop with something that remains, at least for the time being, unexplained. That is entirely true for ordinary causal explanations. But religious explanations that posit an ultimate and overall meaningfulness for existence cannot be satisfied with resting on brute contingencies: they need to rest, somehow, on ‘how things have to be’, and not just on ‘how things are’. Religious ultimate explanations of existence, then, cannot be ordinary causal explanations. Ultimate explanations must rely on positing some transcendent form of causation which can apply to the unique case of the whole of contingent reality.

To give content to an ultimate explanation, then, one must rely on some analogous extension from some mundane ways of understanding why something exists. Consider, for example, the theological ultimate explanation in the Abrahamic traditions, explaining the Universe as a creation by a creator whose existence is necessary. Since, on this account, the Universe does not arise from any pre-existent ordered material, ultimately explaining it as a creation involves analogous extension from our ordinary understanding of an agent’s intentionally producing something from something else within the mundane causal order. The intelligibility of this theological ultimate explanation rests wholly on the force of analogy, and, for that very reason, cannot be made theoretically precise. No one could fully comprehend how the causation posited by an ultimate explanation such as this actually ‘works’ (such explanations are thus, in that sense, ‘incomprehensible’).

What kind of ultimate explanation could a – suitably expansive – naturalist perspective admit? The case can be made that the euteleological explanation that the Universe exists ‘because it does what it’s for’ provides a religious naturalist ultimate explanation for existence. ‘The Universe exists because it fulfils the purpose of its existence’, or ‘because it realizes its own telic good’ (which is equivalent), is not an ordinary causal explanation. If it were, it would effectively be saying, absurdly, that the Universe pulls itself into existence by its own bootstraps. But this euteleological explanation is an ultimate explanation, positing a transcendent form of causation whose ‘workings’ can’t be grasped and which is intelligible only by analogy with some familiar form of explanation. And we do sometimes explain why something exists in terms of its ‘doing what it’s for’. Tools and artefacts exist because they serve their ends, and the same applies to biological functions – for example, hearts have the function of pumping blood, and exist because this is the function for which they were selected through processes of natural selection. Of course, in cases like these ‘it exists because it does what it’s for’ is only part of the full explanation: some process (involving intelligent action in the case of tools and artefacts, though not in the case of functioning animal organs) has to bring about the thing’s existence. Still, if you didn’t recognize that the thing fulfils its purpose, your understanding, not merely of what it is, but also of why it exists, would be incomplete. Certainly, recognizing that something is achieving its purpose is enough to assure you that it doesn’t ‘just happen’ to exist. That kind of (partial) explanation of something’s existence provides the basis, then, for thinking, by an analogous extension, of the entire Universe as existing ultimately only because it fulfils its purpose.

Ultimate explanations for existence should not, we think, be regarded as produced by theoretical reasoning (through a supposed metaphysical ‘higher science’). Rather, they should be regarded as posits recommended for acceptance in the context of our practical reasonings about how to live well in the world. (We echo here a key theme from Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy.) That practical and ethical context is where religion operates. Religious worldviews offer an overall stance on the kind of reality in which we find ourselves – on questions about what really matters, what we may hope for, and what makes those hopes reasonable even when commitment to what really matters is fraught and costly. Satisfying answers to these questions seem to need ultimates posited as holding necessarily – foundational values, and a stance on ultimate reality that secures these values and makes it reasonable to pursue them in the hope of their fulfilment. Such a stance cannot leave it as brute that the Universe exists; there needs to be an ultimate explanation that ‘makes sense of’ contingent existence.

We think that euteleology includes transcendent features which yield these kinds of ultimates, yet without infringing a one-world-ist stance, since the transcendent features are not transcendent beings. The transcendent foundation of euteleological metaphysics is the necessity of reality’s being inherently directed upon realizing its telos, the good for reality as such and as a whole, and thus the supreme good. The nature of this telos determines what really matters: the mind-independent values are what they are because reality is what it is, namely inherently directed upon its telic good.Footnote ³⁵ Euteleology’s ultimate explanation for the Universe’s existence – namely, that the Universe realizes the purpose for which it exists – implies that reality’s telic good is actually contingently realized within the Universe. In turn, this implies the existence of powers able to realize reality’s telos, powers which are within the natural world: whatever their religious characterization, they operate consistently with natural powers as known to science.

Euteleological metaphysics, then, has the potential to support an expansive naturalism with religious hope-grounding, broadly soteriological, functions.Footnote ³⁶ Our description of a euteleological religious naturalism remains schematic, however, until something substantive is said about what reality’s telos is – a topic we take up in Section 5.

4.4 Comparing Alternatives

In this final subsection on religious naturalism and cosmic purpose, we’ll consider alternatives to the euteleological approach just sketched. As we’ve seen, there can be ‘thinner’ forms of religious naturalism that keep to the constraints of metaphysical scientific naturalism. Some religious naturalists expand their naturalism to include value-realism, but proceed no further. But for those who expand their metaphysics to provide grounds in ultimate reality not only for real values but also for the hopeful pursuit of those values, what alternative is there to the euteleological approach?

John Schellenberg deals with notions of transcendence and ultimacy in the context of advocating ‘evolutionary religion’. Schellenberg holds that, for all we know, humanity is only at a very early stage of religious consciousness, so that there is enormous potential for religious development.Footnote ³⁷ As noted earlier (Section 2.2, note 6), Schellenberg characterizes religious development as involving beliefs about metaphysical, axiological, and soteriological transcendence, and he describes as ‘ultimist’ belief-systems which posit something transcendent in all three of these respects. Could there be an ultimist religious naturalism? Well, not if (as Schellenberg often seems to imply) ultimism requires the necessary existence of a triply transcendent being (since such an entity would be supernatural and so infringe one-world-ism). But if a perspective can be ultimist by having suitably integrated metaphysical, axiological, and soteriological ultimates that do not imply the existence of any concrete entities beyond the natural world, then euteleology is just such an ultimist naturalism – assuming, that is, that euteleology’s basic metaphysics can be filled out in a religiously satisfactory way, which is our topic for Section 5.Footnote ³⁸

Pantheism may be thought to offer obvious prospects for a robust religious naturalism. But how does pantheism relate to euteleological metaphysics? A religiously viable pantheism regards the whole of reality not simply as a sum total or collection of things but as a unified whole.Footnote ³⁹ Now, reality can be a unified whole only if there is some principle of unity that integrates its vast diversity. What could that unifying principle be other than the directedness of everything real upon an overall, ultimate, telos as posited by euteleology? There may be other possibilities: perhaps the unifying principle could be purely aesthetic, or perhaps the principle could be the ‘genealogical’ relatedness of everything with everything else (as implied, for example, by the centrality of whakapapa in the Māori worldview – to be discussed further in Section 5.2). But, in any case, it is clear that a eutelic Universe would be a unified whole in virtue of its having and realizing an overall purpose; and it is therefore justifiable to regard a pantheist option as amongst the possible ways of developing euteleological religious naturalism. Obviously, pantheism will appeal specifically only when significance is attached to using a concept of God: we’ll return to consider options such as Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura in a wider discussion of religious naturalisms that are in some way theistic (Section 5.3). In that context, too, we’ll consider panentheist options – according to which the world is somehow ‘in’ God, though God is ‘more than’ the world – given that some panentheisms can be understood in a one-world-ist naturalist way.

Panpsychism – roughly, the thesis that consciousness is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality – has recently attracted attention in analytic philosophy of mind.Footnote ⁴⁰ Some may urge that euteleology must itself be panpsychist because they think that reality’s being inherently directed upon the realization of the good requires that everything real must be, in some rudimentary sense, ‘minded’. But we remain unpersuaded, since it seems to us that there is no a priori reason to exclude the possibility that matter may exhibit reality’s inherent directedness upon the good.

But there are many varieties of panpsychism which develop the idea beyond the claim that everything is conscious in some rudimentary sense: could any of these provide an alternative to a euteleological religious naturalism? Philip Goff (Reference Goff2023: 131) favours a form of panpsychism in which the Universe itself is conscious ‘as something that recognizes and responds to considerations of value’. He adds: ‘On the view we can call “teleological cosmopsychism”, the Universe is essentially driven to try to maximize the good.’ Goff offers this proposal as his preferred explanation for there being a cosmic purpose, faith in which serves religious functions. In its content, then, Goff’s account seems similar to euteleology, though Goff goes further in the direction of a theoretical explanation for cosmic purpose. He thinks that his teleological cosmopsychism best explains the fine-tuning of the fundamental physical constants for the emergence of life by hypothesizing that ‘the Universe fine-tuned itself’ (132).Footnote ⁴¹

Eric Steinhart (Reference Steinhart2023) has proposed an ‘atheistic Platonist’ religious naturalism that is also similar to euteleology.Footnote ⁴² His proposal supports objective values and posits an overall purpose for the Universe, which Steinhart takes to be a multiverse. But, by contrast with Goff, Steinhart (Reference Steinhart2023: 15) takes ultimate reality to be mindless and denies that purpose requires an intelligent purpose-giver. Far from being a conscious mind that fine-tunes itself, the Universe’s fine-tuning results, according to Steinhart’s Platonism, from ‘a mindless cosmic optimization algorithm’. This ‘atheoplatonist’ ultimate explanation for existence is an extreme axiarchic one, as in the theories of John Leslie (Reference Leslie1979) and Nicholas Rescher (Reference Rescher1984), who hold that its goodness alone is what ultimately explains why anything exists. Thus, Steinhart (Reference Steinhart2023: 17) says, the ‘abstract laws of value-maximization (that is axiological laws) entail the existence of concrete things’.

Euteleology also seems similar to Thomas Nagel’s (Reference Nagel2012) proposal for ‘a naturalistic teleology’. Nagel suggests that in addition to physical laws of the familiar kind there are underlying natural teleological laws directed upon the emergence of life. Teleology would then inform the Universe’s development throughout its evolution, rather than being a purely emergent feature, as Crosby (Reference Crosby2015: 101), responding to Nagel, claims it must be. Nagel’s proposal looks more straightforward than the theoretical speculations about naturalist cosmic purpose made by either Goff or Steinhart.Footnote ⁴³ Euteleology, too, need not make any such theoretical speculations – it simply posits that the Universe has, and realizes, an overall telos that is the good for reality as such, and is, therefore, the supreme good. Unlike Nagel, euteleology explicitly offers a one-world naturalist religious metaphysics. As we said in Section 4.3, we think of metaphysics in a Kantian way, not as arrived at by theoretical reasoning, but rather as making posits about ultimate reality that can be recommended for acceptance as an overall practical orientation in our seeking to live well in the world. A euteleological stance on reality is thus viable provided that all we know about the Universe (in our necessarily limited way) can coherently be interpreted in terms of the Universe’s having, and realizing, an ultimate purpose which is inherent in reality as such. Euteleology’s metaphysical posits must thus be consistent with, though they necessarily go beyond, our best empirical scientific understanding of the world. Whether a euteleological religious perspective is viable will require some specification of reality’s inherent purpose, or, at least, what it implies for human existence – an issue we’ll turn to in Section 5. Our point now is that euteleology, as a foundation for a religious naturalism, can remain content with our best scientific cosmological theories as they stand (noting that whatever specification is given of reality’s telos and its implications will have to be consistent with these theories). Euteleology has no need to engage in theoretical cosmological speculations, as Nagel, Goff, and Steinhart do, about how it could actually ‘work’ that the cosmos has a purpose without a Purposer. These views give hostage to fortune by resting a naturalist view of cosmic purpose on speculative cosmological hypotheses. Euteleology avoids that trap.

A further distinguishing feature of euteleology emerges from comparing it with theories such as Goff’s and Steinhart’s which seem to seek something within the natural world which plays the same role as an Intelligent Designer – in particular, by selecting the values of the fundamental physical constants within the (very) narrow range needed for conscious life to be possible within the Universe. These theories, though naturalist, thus effectively remain within the ‘deist’ Enlightenment paradigm of a purposive Universe having to arise from an initial agent or agency that ‘sets it up’ so as to realize its given purpose. Euteleology, by contrast, takes everything that exists as inherently directed upon the supreme good as its purpose, and existing – ultimately – only because that purpose is actually realized in concrete existence. This may be viewed as a ‘naturalization’ of the classical theist paradigm in which everything that exists in the Universe does so only through God’s action, not merely in initiating, but also sustaining its existence. This is a ‘naturalization’ in the sense that euteleology has no being or entity in its fundamental ontology that can be identified with God. As we’ve noted, we hold the (controversial) view that euteleology (despite holding that God is ‘no-thing’) is an apt metaphysics for Abrahamic theism. That view fits with the idea that classical theism is – surprisingly to many analytic philosophers – itself a religious naturalism (a point we’ll return to in discussing theist naturalisms in Section 5.3).

Our discussion of naturalist theories of cosmic purpose in general has been brief. But we hope to have said enough to conclude that there is good reason to pursue the possibility of a robust religious naturalism by understanding it as having euteleological foundations. Our next step is to consider how one might build on those foundations.

5.1 A Naturalist Conception of an ‘Integrative’ Supreme Good

Any naturalist account of the overall purpose and supreme good will have to hold that it may be realized within the one, natural, world. This contrasts with religious perspectives that locate the fulfilment of reality’s purpose in a guaranteed final consummation in which the natural, historical, order passes away, and perfect goodness is achieved incorruptibly in a supra-natural eternal order of existence. Naturalists reject any such picture, even if, in the style of Hegel (Reference Hegel, Pinkard and Baur2019 [Reference Hegel, Pinkard and Baur1807]) or Teilhard de Chardin (Reference Teilhard de Chardin and Appleton-Weber1999), eternal perfection is understood as emerging as the necessitated ultimate stage of the Universe’s development. The natural Universe evolves and develops, and may be more fundamentally ‘process’ than ‘substance’, but, on a one-world naturalist view, it does not evolve inevitably into an incorruptible final stage. Euteleological religious naturalism understands the fulfilment of reality’s inherent purpose as obtaining, not in some trans-historical eschaton, but in certain kinds of natural conditions. The fulfilment of reality’s telos is thus in multiple manifestations or realizations of that supreme good. Those realizations are contingent – they come about and they pass away – though the supreme good itself is transcendent over (‘more than’) its actual realizations.Footnote ⁴⁴ And there’s no basis for limiting how many such realizations there may be.Footnote ⁴⁵

But what are those natural conditions which fulfil the Universe’s overall purpose? For euteleology to support a religious perspective that grounds an adequate environmental ethics, they must be conditions which realize the values underlying that kind of eco-morality. These values may be characterized broadly as the flourishing of natural ecosystems, of humans and other living species, and of the wider physical environment. If the Universe’s realizing its overall purpose is achieved in such flourishing, it seems to follow that, whatever it is in itself, the supreme good (the good for reality as such) should be understood as an essentially integrating or integrative good – as we’ll now explain.

Euteleology’s basic axiom is that everything real is ‘eutelic’: everything real inherently exists for the sake of realizing the good for reality as such, the supreme good. Whatever that supreme good is, it must be something to whose realization every kind of thing, functioning as it should, can contribute in the ways characteristic of its kind. This integrating function of the supreme good fits well with the idea that the supreme good is itself an integrative good, rather than a single uniform good hierarchically elevated over other goods. The good for reality as such and as a whole would then amount to the goodness of a way or ways of relating and/or being related that makes room for a wide diversity of different goods while unifying them within an overall harmony. The practical and ethical salience of such an integrative supreme good would then depend on human understanding of what that integrative mode of relating is like in human lived experience, and how, in practice, it brings into a proper balance sometimes competing concerns for the many different goods that humans can recognize as goods for themselves, for other species, for ecosystems, and for the Earth itself. Indeed, it may be beyond human mastery to understand theoretically the essential nature of the supreme good (it may, in just that sense, be ‘incomprehensible’): instead, our limited and open-endedly developing understanding of what the supreme good is may depend on what we take to be paradigm examples of its manifestation in human experience.

What more may we say – even in a limited and open-ended way – about what this integrative, relational, supreme good could be? As noted earlier (Section 2.4), religious naturalists may find it useful to draw for content on existing religious and cultural traditions. Perhaps existing traditions can throw light on the nature and practical implications of the supreme good a euteleological naturalism may posit. In any case, we’ll now turn to a discussion of how much help existing traditions may be in providing resources for a viably functioning robust religious naturalism. We’ll begin (in Section 5.2) by discussing resources that may be drawn from pagan and Indigenous worldviews which seem to be both one-world-ist and affirming of nature-friendly values.

5.2 Lessons from Indigenous Worldviews

It’s not surprising that ‘Western’ thinkers drawn to the idea that the natural world is sacred should be attracted to pagan worldviews displaced in Europe by Christianity, but existing still in revived contemporary forms, such as Wicca.Footnote ⁴⁶ Similarly attractive are the Indigenous worldviews of peoples colonized by European powers – worldviews now treated with respect by those committed to an intellectual ‘decolonisation’ which seeks so far as it can to abandon deep assumptions about the superiority of the colonisers’ cultures over those of the Indigenous peoples. These Indigenous and pagan worldviews typically treat human existence as highly integrated with the natural world.Footnote ⁴⁷

Since Aotearoa/New Zealand is our home, we’ll take te ao Māori (the Māori worldview) as an example, relying on sources from those who have standing within Māori culture.Footnote ⁴⁸ In te ao Māori, human whakapapa (genealogy) and indeed the whakapapa of all creatures traces back to the Earth Mother (Papatūānuku) and the Sky Father (Ranginui) themselves. There are higher powers, atua, the children of Papatūānuku and Ranginui, of whom Tāne (god of forests and birds) took the lead in prising his parents apart to create the space where creatures may dwell. All beings, including higher powers and energies on which human life depends, are thus interrelated.Footnote ⁴⁹ This integrated understanding of human life within the natural world supports the kinds of values of conservation and sustainability that religious naturalism will typically seek to affirm. It’s true that a well-known Māori whakatauki (proverb) emphasizes the importance of humanity.Footnote ⁵⁰ But the integration of humanity with the wider natural world entails that there can be no deep conflict between caring for people and caring for the natural environment – after all, people are part of that environment, and have whanaunatanga (kinship) with all that dwells within it. Māori thus affirm the values of kaitiakitanga (guardianship), with tangata whenua (people of the land) having the authority to exercise that guardianship over the environment in the area to which they are ancestrally related.

It doesn’t follow, of course, that te ao Māori is itself a religious naturalism. It is culturally inept to ‘read into’ the Māori worldview anything religious in the common ‘Western’ sense of a specific ‘department’ of human life, to be distinguished from ‘the secular’ or ‘the scientific’.Footnote ⁵¹ Nevertheless, the holistic character of te ao Māori does fulfil a characteristically religious function in providing a practically salient overall interpretation or framework for human life in the world.

From a Western perspective, Māori ritual behaviours that relate to the atua such as karakia (translated as ‘prayers’) and the rituals relating to tapu and the lifting of tapu, will tend to get classified as religious and be regarded as implying belief in ‘the supernatural’. Similarly, Māori writers often speak of physical and spiritual ‘realms’ or ‘worlds’, and this might easily be taken to imply a commitment to two-world-ism. But the highly integrated perspective on reality found in te ao Māori and widely characteristic of Indigenous worldviews generally is not consistent with accepting an order of concrete existence that is radically distinct from the natural order.Footnote ⁵² Te ao Māori is – in the terminology we’ve been using – one-world-ist. True, it involves ‘belief in’ spiritual forces and higher powers or energies, but these belong within the one integrated reality to which human life and experience belongs. Thus, mauri (life force, energy) is ‘the bonding element that knits all the diverse elements within the Universal “Procession” giving creation its unity in diversity’ (Māori Marsden, Reference Marsden and Royal2003: 44). The atua might be said to be ‘supernatural’ in the sense that they are beings or energetic forces greater than, or ‘above’, humans and other animals; but they are definitely not supra-natural in the sense that they belong to a distinct ontological order ‘beyond’ nature (as a personal deity whose agency produces the entire natural order would do).Footnote ⁵³ Similarly, Māori beliefs about their tīpuna (ancestors) don’t invoke a radically separate supra-natural order. According to some Māori traditions, the wairua (spirits) of the dead dwell in Hawaiki, and they voyage to it in a waka (canoe) from a specific place of departure (Spirits Bay), and so return to the place from which Māori are held to have sailed to New Zealand. There’s not so much a blurring of spiritual or mythical and physical or geographical reality here, as, from this Māori perspective, a stance towards reality for which such distinctions are not fundamental.

Religious naturalists may identify in an Indigenous worldview such as te ao Māori not only nature-friendly values but also the kind of integrated one-world expansive naturalist stance that they seek to affirm. Indigenous worldviews themselves do not, however, seem to use the idea of a cosmic purpose, or the euteleological notion of a supreme good whose realization in the world ultimately explains existence. Indigenous worldviews seem not to deal in ultimates, at least not explicitly. There is a Māori tradition of a supreme reality, Io – though it is controversial whether this tradition may reflect an incorporation of Christian missionary ideas rather than something authentically Polynesian.Footnote ⁵⁴ Nevertheless, we think that euteleological religious naturalists may find encouragement in Indigenous worldviews such as te ao Māori for the idea that the supreme good which these religious naturalists posit is essentially an integrative good – an overall harmony of beings in the one natural world, into which humanity can fit, when we live wisely and well.

Finding encouragement for the idea of an integrative supreme good is different, of course, from actually attributing that concept to an Indigenous worldview – a further step requiring considerable caution. Analytical philosophers who deploy their own theoretical concepts in analyzing Indigenous worldviews can understandably be received (though perhaps often mistakenly) as assuming that Indigenous perspectives are ‘valid’ only when shown to be ‘essentially’ equivalent to, or indicative of, some ‘developed’ ‘Western’ view.Footnote ⁵⁵ No such assumption of the intrinsic superiority or centrality of any one historical/cultural intellectual tradition can be warranted if philosophy is to belong, as it surely does, to humankind as a whole. Philosophers must be able to engage in conversations aimed at satisfying a shared love of wisdom while properly respecting the limitations of their own historical/cultural situation and the plurality of ways in which human cultures have cognitively and intellectually framed human experience of reality and human life in the world. We dare to believe that this can be done – though no philosopher will find it easy to overcome hidden prejudices and avoid stereotypical over-simplifications, especially of traditions that are, consciously or unconsciously, being treated as ‘other’. Comparisons of concepts as between different worldviews – especially when there’s a history of colonialist oppression and power imbalances – thus need to be considered sensitively. To rule them altogether out of order, though, would be a mistake, apart from anything else because it would preclude the contribution concepts from Indigenous worldviews may make to wider philosophical understanding. Thus – to return to the specific question at issue – we’re prepared to suggest that the concept of a cosmic purpose which is an overall integrative good is implicit in te ao Māori.Footnote ⁵⁶ But we make that suggestion as (sympathetic) outsiders; on the question whether this suggestion could be accepted as authentic to te ao Māori, we defer to those with an insider’s standing in mātauranga Māori (Māori knowledge).

Indigenous worldviews are naturalist in the one-world-ist sense, but some may question whether they take science seriously – something a robust religious naturalism needs to do. We think that considering an Indigenous worldview such as te ao Māori throws light on the wider context of this constraint. The root of this requirement is that our metaphysical religious posits should cohere with our best experientially-based understanding of our world. In an integrated worldview such as found in te ao Māori or in Native American worldviews, purely factual empirical knowledge isn’t consciously separated out from experientially-based knowledge generally: experiential knowledge is essentially relational – concerned with how things are and how things should be related, and thus essentially focused on how humans should live in the world and relate rightly to all else that exists. Knowledge of facts and values are not conceived as categorially separate departments of knowledge, as in analytical philosophy.Footnote ⁵⁷ As we have emphasized, contemporary religious naturalists (of the more robustly religious kind) want a perspective that ‘fits’ with, though it necessarily goes beyond, a (‘Western’, empirical) scientific understanding of the world. Thus, their desire to integrate religion with science is matched with an equal desire to reintegrate science with religion. Robustly religious naturalists, that is, think that a ‘non-religious’ scientific worldview (the worldview of the metaphysical scientific naturalist) is inadequate. Indigenous worldviews, we are suggesting, hold out the prospect that such a re-integration is possible – and it does indeed count as re-integration to the extent that one has the sense (as many ‘Westerners’ do) that, in encountering Indigenous worldviews, we are making contact again with something very similar to our own ancestral understandings of the world.

5.3 Religious Naturalisms and Existing Religious Traditions

It is a common objection to the practical viability of a religious naturalism that it lacks communal institutions, practices, and rituals. Yet, as Crosby (Reference Crosby2002: 156) points out, ‘There is already a fertile field of potential materials – ideas, values, precepts, stories, myths, symbols, rituals, and the like – in existing religious traditions from which a religion of nature can draw in developing beliefs, evocations, objectives, and practices appropriate to itself’. In the previous subsection, we argued that attention to Indigenous worldviews may support a robustly religious naturalism that posits an integrative supreme good as the ultimate telos for the sake of which everything exists. In this subsection, we’ll consider how existing religious traditions may supply content for a euteleological religious naturalism’s understanding of the supreme good and what it is, in practice, to live with the faith that reality is inherently directed upon realizing that supreme good.

The question of how religious naturalisms may enhance their viability by drawing on existing religious traditions is a large topic which could not be tackled in general. Rather, those with an insider’s understanding of Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, and so on, might consider what resources from their own traditions may support a religious naturalism (and, in particular, one based on the idea of reality’s inherent purposiveness).Footnote ⁵⁸ Those interested in religious pluralism might be motivated to consider whether the idea of an overall purpose and supreme good inherent in ultimate reality is a trope expressed in different ways in different religious traditions. On the face of it – from our own Judaeo-Christian influenced perspective – ‘non-Western’ religions do not explicitly use the idea of a supreme good which it is the Universe’s purpose to realize. But, as we’ve suggested for Indigenous worldviews, perhaps such an idea is implicit in some non-theist religions. Taoism, for example, seems explicitly one-world-ist, but not euteleological. Nevertheless, a euteleological interpretation might perhaps be placed on Taoism by taking the ultimate telos and supreme good to be just the very exercise of the Qi, constantly achieving and then disrupting the balance between Yin and Yang.Footnote ⁵⁹ As we’ve said, there’s a project about resonances with religious naturalisms (of various forms) for each existing religious tradition. In this subsection, we’ll confine ourselves to remarks about religious naturalist potential within the Abrahamic theist traditions.Footnote ⁶⁰

That focus may initially seem unpromising, since religious naturalists usually eschew God-talk. As Charley Hardwick (Reference Hardwick2003: 116) remarks, ‘having stated their naturalism, [religious naturalists often] think they must then reject their own religious traditions on the assumption that those traditions are essentially and necessarily anti-naturalist’. But this, as Hardwick says, tends to leave them with little to say religiously – and, he adds, it is not evident that the monotheist traditions really are as profoundly anti-naturalist as often assumed. Some religious naturalists do indeed deploy the concept of God, and some continue to see themselves, furthermore, as adherents to a theist tradition, finding that this is needed for a naturalism that isn’t religiously too thin. Their ‘theistic naturalism’ may require understanding the theist traditions in revisionary and unorthodox ways (as it may appear to some of their fellow adherents, anyway). Still, religious naturalists of this ilk will often insist that their inherited theist tradition is best understood as a religious naturalism that promotes a general human duty to respect, care for, and restore nature as God’s creation.

Our discussion of Indigenous worldviews made it clear that an integrated one-world-ist worldview can accommodate small-g gods. Humans and higher (‘supernatural’) beings can belong together within the one world ‘system’. But can the Abrahamic God also belong within that one system: can there be a (one-world-ist) naturalist conception of God? Not if the Abrahamic God must be literally understood as a personal being who is creator of all else that exists. Such a being would be an uncreated, supra-natural, being belonging to an ontological category distinct from the natural, created, world. That’s how, on this picture, God’s transcendence is understood: God’s immanence within creation typically gets cashed out in terms of God’s knowledge of and power over created beings. The God-world ‘relation’ is thus rather one-sided, and divine agency includes ‘special divine acts’ (miraculous interventions) in the natural world – something that doesn’t sit well with religious naturalists who ‘take science seriously’.

But this ‘personalist’ conception of God and of the God-world relation may be contested from within Abrahamic theist traditions. There are interpretations of theism as offering a religious expansive naturalism. For example, Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura (God or Nature) rejects a supra-natural understanding of God’s being, situating divine agency wholly within the natural world.Footnote ⁶¹ Spinoza has standardly been interpreted as a ‘pantheist’ (i.e., as identifying God with the world). Whether or not this is the best understanding of Spinoza’s conception of God,Footnote ⁶² pantheism has certainly been an option for some. There are different sorts of pantheism.Footnote ⁶³ Demian Wheeler (Reference Wheeler, Crosby and Stone2018) argues that there are naturalistic versions of it. He discusses three examples: Spinoza, Loomer, and Corrington, before recommending his own ‘apophatic pantheism’. These versions are all one-world-ist naturalisms, but it is doubtful whether they can sustain the more robust religious functions. Unsurprisingly, pantheism has no difficulty with divine immanence, but divine transcendence seems to disappear from the picture.Footnote ⁶⁴

Theological innovation in the twentieth century has yielded some understandings of Abrahamic theism which may sustain interpreting it as an expansive one-world-ist naturalism. Whitehead’s process metaphysics has inspired process theologies, which typically understand God as co-evolving with the creation, in a give-and-take relationship with creatures. God’s power is not all-controlling but is rather the power of love which ‘lures’ and empowers rather than dominates.Footnote ⁶⁵ Process theologians often identify their view as panentheist: they affirm that, though God is ‘more than’ the world, in some sense the world is ‘in’ God and God is ‘in’ the world.Footnote ⁶⁶ Religious naturalism is thus supported at least to the extent that Nature is caught up in the sacredness of the divine, and even, on some views, constitutes ‘God’s body’.Footnote ⁶⁷ However, panentheist accounts qualify as one-world-naturalist only if they don’t understand God as a supra-natural being. Many process and panentheist views fail this condition.Footnote ⁶⁸ Arthur Peacocke aims for a viable Christian panentheist naturalism by ruling out any divine supernatural intervention in the natural order. Since Peacocke retains God as a personal being, however, a distinct supra-natural ontological order is still implicated.Footnote ⁶⁹ Christopher Knight (Reference Knight2005 and Reference Knight and Clayton2007) suggests adopting the notion of inherent teleology found in Maximus the Confessor’s (neo-)Byzantine understanding of God’s action and presence in the world. This account is one-world-ist, since it avoids the idea of an external agent or force leading created things to their ends: rather, the divine Logos, present in every created thing, is the source of the world’s inherent teleological dynamism.

‘Ground-of-being’ theologies – inspired by Paul Tillich, and holding that God is not ‘a’ being but ‘the ground of being’ – have, like most process and panentheist views, also been generally excluded from the family of naturalisms.Footnote ⁷⁰ But if God is not strictly a being or an entity in Tillich’s ontology, his ground-of-being theology may cohere with an expansive, but still one-world-ist, naturalism. Ground-of-being theologies do run afoul of certain definitions of ‘naturalism’ – in particular, the Stone-Hardwick-Edwards definition (cited earlier, Section 4.2, note 30) which commits naturalism to holding that the natural world’s existence as a whole necessarily has no need of explanation beyond itself. But this definition expresses an overly restrictive notion of ‘naturalism’, too much in thrall to metaphysical scientific naturalism. The possibility of an expansive one-world-ist naturalism is overlooked, and a religious naturalism is assumed to be essentially ‘naturist’ in identifying Nature or something within it as religiously ultimate.Footnote ⁷¹ We should admit as expansive religious naturalisms, then, ‘non-naturist’ views which posit a transcendent religious ultimate but without implying the existence of any transcendent being beyond the natural world – for example, Niels Gregersen’s (Reference Gregersen2014) ‘infinity-based’ view, according to which God, though not existing as a separate entity, is the ultimate reality rather than Nature. Our own euteleological understanding of theism (on which more later in this section) is also a case in point.

Anyway, as already noted, some contemporary religious naturalists do deploy the concept of God. Henry Nelson Wieman was an early twentieth century example. For Wieman (Reference Wieman1946), value is a real force in the world, not reducible to human projections. Wieman rejected the notion of a personal God, but did not dispense with God-talk, using ‘God’ as a symbol for the ‘serendipitious creativity’ within the natural world. Wieman says (Reference Wieman1946: 17), ‘there is a creative process working in our midst which transforms the human mind and the world relative to the human mind … transformation by this process is always in the direction of the greater good.’ Wieman influenced Gordon Kaufman and Karl Peters, both of whom also speak of God as the creativity of the world (see, for example, Kaufman Reference Kaufman2001 and Peters Reference Peters2002). Peters (Reference Peters2022: 23) says:

It isn’t entirely clear how ‘realist’ is the understanding these religious naturalists have of their God-talk. Talk of ‘God’ as a symbol might suggest underlying anti-realism, but it could also indicate being broadly in the apophatic tradition whereby God is definitely real, but God’s essence is incomprehensible to us. More recently, Ellis’s expansive naturalism allows, utilizing Christian resources, for a clearly realist theist religious naturalism. While Ellis doesn’t directly address the notion of an overall purpose for reality, her approach is consistent with it.Footnote ⁷²

In discussing what the ‘en’ in ‘panentheism’ might mean, Gasser (Reference Gasser2019) argues that it is best understood in an agential sense. God is in the world by creating and sustaining it; the world is in God by being the sphere of divine activity. The upshot of Gasser’s analysis is (as he points out) that the sharp distinction usually drawn between classical theism and panentheism collapses. One consequence seems to be that if there are varieties of panentheism that can provide a viable religious naturalism, so too might classical theism. And this should not be surprising, too, if Knight is on the right track in arguing that the early Church Fathers and Eastern orthodox traditions have the resources available for a viable form of (theist) naturalism.

It emerges, then, that the classical theist understanding of the Abrahamic traditions may itself aptly be regarded as a religious naturalism. That may seem strange, especially to analytic philosophers, who typically assume that theism is virtually definable as holding that God is literally a personal being, who must then be ontologically distinct from the natural world.Footnote ⁷³ For classical theists, God is, as Anselm says, that than which a greater cannot be thought (where the relevant kind of greatness is greatness in being and in worth, taken indissolubly together). God cannot therefore be ‘a’ being belonging to any category or kind of thing, for God is that which gives being to all the kinds of things that there are. God may be addressed in personal terms – indeed, Anselm’s Proslogion is an address to God – and sacred writings, creeds, and teachings use personal language about God to make truth-claims. But God should not be understood literally as a personal being, nor as any kind of being at all. Our understanding can only gesture at what God is – for example, by saying with Aquinas, that God is ‘Being itself’ (ipsum esse subsistens), though this doesn’t capture the ‘essence’ of God, which is beyond our comprehension. For classical theism, then, in an important sense, God is ‘no-thing’.Footnote ⁷⁴ God absolutely transcends all God’s creatures, yet God does not relate to them as something – some thing – other than them. Rather, God is ‘immanently’ present with[in] every creature whose existence God sustains, and thus within the entire natural world, forging an indissoluble tie between love of God and love for the natural world. Since God’s immanence in creation fits with a transcendence over it that doesn’t amount to the transcendence of a supra-natural being, the classical theist picture of reality is one-world naturalist.

Classical theism thus has excellent credentials as an expansive religious naturalism that grounds ethical concern for other species and ecosystems. This conclusion is sustained by the evidence of Hebrew scriptural teachings about the need for humanity to care for and restore the creation, and by creation-centred spirituality, especially in the tradition of Saint Francis of Assisi, in Christianity.Footnote ⁷⁵ We’ll conclude this subsection, then, by illustrating how a euteleological religious naturalist within the Judaeo-Christian tradition may understand the nature of reality’s telic end and supreme good. That such a good would be an integrative good fits with theist emphasis on the order of the creation. It also fits with the Christian notion of love (agapē) as the highest value: indeed, agapē is a leading Christian candidate for the status of the supreme good, for the sake of which everything real exists.

For agapē to fit this role, the Christian naturalist will need to champion the idea that agapē is an integrative good which consists in right relationship, harmonious and just (or well-ordered) – a notion that extends beyond God-to-human and human-to-human relationships to all creatures quite generally. Discussions of agapē for almost a century now have been heavily influenced by Anders Nygren (Reference Nygren1932 and Reference Nygren1938/9). Nygren drew a very sharp distinction between agapē and eros (with apparently no discussion of philia, usually translated ‘friendship’), and also saw agapē as essentially self-sacrificial. In our view, agapē requires proper self-regard (recall the phrase that modifies the second ‘great commandment’, ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’). Agapē is also compatible with erotic relationships of the properly mutual kind. Sometimes, self-sacrifice may be required for right relationship, but it’s mistaken to see agapē as necessarily careless of self-regard. Martin D’Arcy (Reference D’Arcy1947: 245), for example, thought that in agapē there is a ‘perfect correspondence between taking and giving, self-regard and self-surrender’, and he grounds agapē in the mutual love of the Trinity. Feminist ethicists have gone further in stressing a need for proper self-regard and have explored mutuality as the most appropriate image of Christian love.Footnote ⁷⁶ According to Susan Bratton (Reference Bratton1992: 4), ‘Christianity clearly holds love to be the source of right relationship toward both God and one’s neighbor; yet it remains unclear how Christian love should be extended toward the environment.’ Classic works on Christian love such as Nygren’s don’t address this issue.

Bratton discusses some contemporary attempts by theologians to deal with the implications of Christian love for environmental ethics, as well as some key Biblical texts that give strong support to the idea that (divine) agapē (as well as the covenant-love of the Old Testament) extends toward or applies to nature, not just to humanity. She then argues that agapē can apply to human love of nature, and is indeed preferable to eros. (There is a danger that eros towards nature, understood as wanting to possess and use it, with no mutuality, and so no agapē, leads to the exploitation and denigration of nature – though perhaps agapē is consistent with an ‘aesthetic’ eros directed at the beauty of the natural world.) In Bratton’s view, agapē is the right attitude for a Christian to have towards nature. What we are suggesting is that a Christian religious naturalist may understand agapē as the supreme good, given the broadest possible account of agapē as right relationship. One advantage of such an account is that the essence of the supreme good remains – as we noted earlier seems fitting – incomprehensible, in the sense that humans cannot gain theoretical mastery of it. Instead, the emphasis is thrown onto practical acquaintance with instantiations of agapē in human experience. And, when agapē is given its broadest scope in a Christian naturalism, there will be the recognition that agapē can be instantatiated (or not) in human relations with other species and with ecosystems. The tradition (as it develops) may enlarge its stock of narratives with exemplars of agapeistic relationships (or their lack) between humans and their wider natural environment. For the Christian naturalist, humans have the potential to instantiate and participate in the supreme good, but the supreme good should not be seen as open solely to human fulfilment.Footnote ⁷⁷