Should We Accept Naturalism As A Default Position On Reality?

I had been having a discussion debate with an atheist online and they claimed that naturalism, ad nauseum, was the default position. This is such a typical response to the idea that naturalism is a position to be held, not something we observe in the world. In fact, some philosophers have proposed something called provisional naturalism, which is an attempt to identify naturalism with an observed process not a lens through which one sees the world. And yet, naturalism is impossible to define from such a perspective without employing the terms materialism, physicalism, or more importantly mechanistic reductionism, or simply mechanistic naturalism. This last feature of naturalism suggests that all things logically in the world are mechanistic in nature and that they are machine-like, a series of causally related dominoes in a string of dominoes whose nature can be entirely defined by said process. The slippery slope with regards to naturalism is the idea that ‘we all’ agree that nature exists. What this is tantamount to saying is that the world is natural, and by natural we mean mechanistic. But again this is a presupposition and not observed. We assign the term ‘natural; pregnant with this definition of mechanistic reductionism surreptitiously, and then by sleight of hand and a bait-and-switch, the atheist will say once someone agrees the world is natural (assuming the more discursive definition of everything having a nature) then by Occam’s Razor Divinity, God, or spirituality as features in the world are unnecessary for any causal or even descriptive relevance and thus should be dismissed. However, as shown here, there is a discursive naturalism that everyone agrees with. For instance we all agree everything has a nature. I would like to argue at one point that even this premise is not true. But for sake of argument even if it is true it doesn’t entail the sort of naturalism the atheist mechanistic reductionist is attempting to assign some default position. Therefore naturalism is a presupposition and cannot be appealed to via Occam’s Razor and thus putting the burden of proof, which from such a convenient position of switching definitions and moving the goal posts that atheists seem to have the upper hand to the untrained eye, is not held by the atheist. I would like to make a point about methodological naturalism, which many atheists suggest is evidence that naturalism is the default position. For instance, this term is often used to describe the situation to where scientists will treat phenomena ‘as if it only has naturalistic features’ reductionistically and this is how science is done. Yet this is misleading given that scientists do not treat phenomena as if it is naturalistic, rather they identify phenomena, isolate it as best as they can from other phenomena that will disrupt the experiment, place it in situations that will elicit a response that exposes the phenomenon’s tendency to act a certain way, carefully observes the phenomenon’s behavior, records the information, and publishes the results. Now, the only element of naturalism here is the scientist’s philosophical interpretation of the experiment and his presuppositional attitude towards the world in which he holds prior to performing the experiment in the first place. I have often found that the enterprise of science is attractive to atheists since it is self-guided and an opportunity not to understand what the world is like but how one can control the world. This is attractive to atheists. And likewise atheists since they deny agency or intentionality as existing in the world, since if it did this would mean that they would have to contend with a higher will than their own, are attracted to professions and studies where they can assert their own will as opposed to being affected by a higher, more fundamental intentionality that may expect them to model their own actions after it. Now to Schellenberg’s argument in its nuts and bolts on the hiddenness of God. Here it is in a nutshell. If there is a God, he is perfectly loving. If a perfectly loving God exists, reasonable nonbelief does not occur. Reasonable nonbelief occurs. No perfectly loving God exists (from 2 and 3). Hence, there is no God (from 1 and 4). Ok, agreed with 1. However, 2 has a loaded term ‘reasonable nonbelief.’ What does this mean? As far as I can tell, it means that one can employ reason to come to the conclusion that they are not convinced by the evidence that God exists. A couple of problems here. For one, I don’t think God cares if we believe in His existence. Rather He seems more concerned with the deontic obligation of the noumenal. Or in layman’s terms, the moral obligations He has written on our hearts. Parsing this out is another issue. But none the less this is reminiscent of the parable of the two sons in Matthew 21. God is concerned with what we do, not with what we say. Belief therefore is concerned with a response to the character of a person, not with an intellectual ascent to a proposition. Now as far as the reasonableness, this again assumes that one reasonably comes up with the conclusion that God does not exist. Perhaps it isn’t reasonableness but plain stubbornness, sophistry, excuses. We can’t know since reasonableness as exhibited by a person is impossible to test for or observe. After all, even a lie detector can be fooled if the person really believes the proposition. And so, I am not buying the premise that reasonableness necessarily can lead to unbelief. And this bears on premise 3. Therefore I find this argument unsound and dismiss it.