Naturalism.org

Although post-modernism is rightly criticized for its claim that science is simply a white, male, Western privileging of certain culturally-bound discourses, the anti-foundationalist turn in philosophy is congenial to science and naturalism. The articles in this section take an anti-foundationalist, mildly culturally relativist stance in debates about religion, rationality, morality, and human rights, while respecting science as the arbiter of factual claims about the world. 

By providing a unified picture of ourselves embedded in nature, culture, and biology, naturalism serves as the basis for enlightened social policies. Naturalism holds that persons are not self-created, but owe their successes and failures to the conditions into which they were born and developed. Therefore, major social and economic inequalities cannot be justified on the basis that individuals strongly deserve their status.

What would it be like to discover yourself a fully natural creature, completely embedded in the world science reveals? It would mean discarding any remnant of supernaturalism about who you are. Just as a thorough-going naturalist discounts the existence of god or the supernatural “up there,” so too she discounts the existence of anything supernatural “in here” inside the person, for instance a soul or immaterial mental agent.

"Indeed, one of the important challenges to us as a species is how we can figure out ways of dealing with our inability to conform our behavior to our long-term best interest."

- Steven Hyman, neurobiologist, director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT, and former director of NIMH, interviewed by Bill Moyers.