Sci Naturalism's Unintended Link to Xianity

Scientific Naturalism and Christian Theology

Come from the Same Roots of Causality

I

Free will and the will that is not contra-causal are the subject of the metaphysics of naturalism. Metaphysical Naturalism (MN) accepts free will, denying--where scientific naturalism (SN) asserts--that free will needs to be "contra-causal" to be called free.

It is not, nor can it ever be, contra-causal. To wish it so, to want it so, to propose that it must be so before it can be called free is to contradict the very nature of naturalism's epistemic roots.

What is "contra causality"? To have contra-causal will, you would have to have the power to move the wind and the stars; the power to control your genetic pool--before you are conceived; the power to manipulate your environment by supernatural means (since we are obviously able to manipulate it by natural means, yet this isn't good enough for SN, which denies anything supernatural); and to manipulate the behavior and activities of every minute detail of reality that touches your own existence.

Because you do not and cannot have this power, SN says free will is not free because it is always influenced by something; the wind, the stars, your genetic pool, your environment, your prior actions, and the behavior and actions of all other people who have ever lived and who are living now, and whether or not you have a sore toe, a headache, have had too much caffein, alcohol, or milk--or are in need of some, and whether you are depressed, or manic, etc.

Even normality as measured by the strictest determinations of medicine and psychiatry effects us, according to SN, in such manner as to prevent our will from being free will. Normality no matter how it is determined is still the effect of all the previous causes of the being of any human.

In short SN asserts that the butterfly effect prevents what would otherwise be independent and free will, i.e., the freedom to think or not, and what to conclude from thought, and how to conclude it. The phrase "butterfly effect" is a "reference to the [ ] theory that a change in something seemingly innocuous, such as a flap of a butterfly's wings, may have unexpected larger consequences in the future, such as the path a tornado will travel."

We are caused by the flapping of all the butterflys' wings, whether those wings are literal, or metaphorical.

So while you may believe you are exercising free will, SN says the "you" that exists at the moment of exercising your will shows proof that "we are fully caused creatures" by all things that have gone before. "Naturalism holds that everything we are and do is connected to the rest of the world and derived from conditions that precede us and surround us," it says. [see same link as above]

The most notorious concept of our being "fully caused" is called, in Christianity, by the name "Original Sin." Christianity has always believed in "full causation" of the human being through Original Sin, but gives it an "out" through "redemption." For this reason Christianity believes in free will.

SN states its aim as being the obliteration of anything but scientism in its metaphysical description of the state of being human, yet it supports the most illogical of all epistemologic arguments of Christian theology, proving that even SN cannot escape epistemological mistakes that put it on par with the worst logic of supernaturalism. What SN does it takes away the ability to be "redeemed" from our "full causation" by removing the concept of freedom from the concept of will power.

SN does not disprove the Christian epistemology of Original Sin, it upholds it by using the same logic of "full causality"!

But in its defence, it must be explicitly stated that SN denies anything supernatural. It cannot therefor uphold the idea of Original Sin as a religious concept, but by using the very logic of Christian theology it gives Christianity very good reason to support the epistemology of SN while denying its metaphysics, in the very same way SN denies the metaphysics of religion.

Scientific Naturalism is Not Scientifically, But Epistemologically, Wrong

II

While it is entirely true that humans are shaped by such things as their gene pool and their environment, and by all the other things that science is beginning to teach us about our biology, this does not constitute what SN calls "full causation." It is not necessary for the will to be able to change these things for the will to exist as free will. Free will does not mean independence from existence.

Yet it is the independent, libertarian will that SN says is not free because it is not free from the reality of reality. "Naturalism," it say explicitly, "is the understanding that there is a single, natural world as shown by science, and that we are completely included in it."

Of course we are "completely included in it." While religion argues that we are also included in a supernatural world, it does not deny being "included" in the physical world. As a matter of fact, being released from this "complete inclusion" in the natural world is the goal of religion. SN seeks to bind us to it with no power to "fully cause" our own metaphysical existence.

SN does not state that the will is impotent. To the contrary, it states that since we know, or can know, the elements of reality that "fully cause" us to be who we are, that we can somehow control our lives better through of will power that it describes as "not free."

SN is a humanist movement. It supports "compassion" for criminals in their treatment and sentencing: compassion, not justice. Criminals are still human, have the capacity to learn from their wrongs and from their time incarcerated. Most will get out of prison. Ignoring "compassion" for justice does not mean going back to bread and water, chains and leg irons, beds of straw, lack of proper medicine, or anything that is not proper in the treatment of humans who have the free will to become better for the justice of their sentence. Proper treatment is justice, not compassion.

What SN means by "compassion" is stated this way: " Seeing that we are fully caused creatures - not self-caused - we can no longer take or assign ultimate credit or blame for what we do. This leads to an ethics of compassion and understanding, both toward ourselves and others. We see that there but for circumstances go I. We would have been the homeless person in front of us, the convict, or the addict, had we been given their genetic and environmental lot in life." [emphasis added]

This is all true, except for the "credit and blame" part. If the credit and blame are moral attributes of action, it is never true that they do not belong to us. If they are attributes of the chaos of reality over which we have no control, it is metaphysically unthinkable to assign credit or blame.

It is a case of barking up the wrong tree for SN to take note of "being fully included" in reality. No one has ever, to my knowledge, denied this. SN denies that we are included in any sort of super naturalism, and with that idea, metaphysical naturalism is in complete agreement.

If the unstated, implicit, and possibly unconscious goal of SN is some form of humanism be it termed "philosophical", "modern", or "secular", then it is not an honest doctrine, since it states its goal this way: "By understanding consciousness, choice, and even our highest capacities as materially based, naturalism re-enchants the physical world, allowing us to be at home in the universe." SN is a doctrine to "re-enchant" the world!

If its goal is to free us from supernaturalism, it forgot to "fully include" humanity in the reality of the fact that we would be absolutely nothing if not for reality itself. "In order to control nature, one must learn to obey nature."

It is in obeying nature that we find our will is free, and it is that freedom that has taken us out of the "inclusion" of being strictly bound to the earth, and opened the gateways to being "included" in the rest of the universe.

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Objectivism v. Determinism is Romanticism v. Naturalism

The Metaphysics of Determinism

Determinism is the doctrine that every fact in the universe is guided entirely by law. As such, it is a metaphysical proposition that denies or invalidates or ignores the laws of the workings of human thought. It does so by categorizing the laws of deduction and induction as "fully caused" by genetics, environment, memes, and other cancelations of free thought, i.e., free will.

Determinism, then, is the denial of free will on the grounds that life exists! Psychologically it means that the will is not free but determined by mental states and at the same time by physical conditions, since the former cannot exist without the latter.

Daniel Dennett would have us believe that free will exists, even when he himself believes it does not. He says is necessary for men to believe in the belief of free will so that determinism will not cause them to think they have no will at all! [1]

Such belief in the belief of free will is "designed to prevent any plunge into pessimism that determinism might engender among those who suppose we must have free will for life to be worth living." 3 Strikes Against Fatalism

This is not something men must be taught overtly or learned as knowledge through empirical experiences.

"You can much more easily believe that it is proper, that it is good and virtuous and beneficial, to believe that the Ultimate Cosmic Sky is both perfectly blue and perfectly green. Dennett calls this 'belief in belief'." Eliezer Yudkowsky; http://www.overcomingbias.com/2007/07/belief-in-belie.html

Yudkowdky was not making of fun of Dennett's theory of "belief in belief." "I think even Dennett oversimplifies how this psychology works in practice," he writes.

"Many religious 'believers,' Dennett argues -- and he doesn't mean just politicians at Sunday morning services -- don't so much believe in the metaphysical claims of their chosen religion as commit to a 'belief in belief.' Most Christian believers in God couldn't articulate the Ontological or Cosmological proofs for God that are advanced in Christian tradition." http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2007/03/daniel-c-dennetts-breaking-spell.html

Deterministic adherents of scientific naturalism (SN) do not believe man has free will; they believe in "determinism," the idea that men are "fully caused", i.e., "entirely the product of genetics and upbringing..." [Tom Clark; Naturalism.Org]

I have been making the case for months in this blog that Clark, Dennett, Susan Blackwell and dozens of others are wrong. I have given many arguments as to why they are wrong. I have not said before today that they are wrong metaphysically, but they are correct in one respect so far as epistemology is concerned.

Let's begin with this quote, the same quote Tom Clark uses to defend this deterministic theory of the causes of man:

"The [belief in the] lack of free will, sometimes called determinism, maintains that peoples' decisions are the result of an unbroken chain of prior occurrences; each action is caused by the previous one; individuals don't really have choices." – news story from The Vancouver Province, 2/28/08.

Clark is no where near being an anomaly within the large and influential brotherhood of SN. As a matter of fact, besides the many well-known names listed on his website, Clark told me, "There are several contemporary philosophers that also take this view, among them Derk Pereboom, Tamler Sommers, Joshua Greene and Bruce Waller."

The reason that the determinism found in SN is wrong--and you must understand that determinism is the entire basis for their system of beliefs, that their castle is built on this acre of sand--is because it isn't metaphysically of any consequence.

To paraphrase Ayn Rand (whose Objectivism scientific naturalists abhor), it is a nightmare view of existence to believe the unbroken chain of prior occurrences must be "the constant and primary concern of their lives." The Ethics of Emergencies; "The Virtue of Selfishness"; Rand

Why do I say it is the constant and primary concern of their lives? Because of what Clark says in many other places in his various web pages. To quote:

A) "When hearing about determinism, or the idea that we are fully caused to be who we are, people often jump to the conclusion that if this were true they would lose power and control. This is demoralizing. [ ] This conclusion, of course, is mistaken. People and their wills aren’t disempowered when we explain them in terms of antecedent causes." [Not their "wills"; merely their "free" wills.]

B) "Getting clear about this is crucial, since science is in the process of dismantling the myth of the ultimately self-made self." [italics added]

C) "But it’s important to see what’s demoralizing isn’t the empirically and logically well-supported conclusion that we don’t have contra-causal, libertarian free will..."

D) [Determinism's critics] "cannot articulate a clear, scientifically defensible account of how contra-causal, libertarian free will might work."

E) "Human beings act the way they do because of the various influences that shape them, whether these be biological or social, genetic or environmental."

Clark doesn't mean in E) that we incapable of thinking and making decisions about those influences; his point is, we can't escape those influences. Well, duh!

There is much more, on almost every page. I think, however, that a defensible account, as Clark calls for, does not rely on science. The right answer does not require science. Why? Because the science that Clark and others use has nothing to do with the metaphysical value of having and using whatever will they admit we do have.

What they do with their empirical science, which by the way seems to be acceptable truth, is apply it to the subject of our wills as non-contra-causal. Basically, contra-causal means that we can overcome whatever it is that causes us to make a decision, such as answering a ringing phone, taking a sick child to the doctor, eating when we are hungry, sleeping when we can no longer keep our eyes open, etc.

Clark, Dennett and the other determinists are epistemologically correct in this proposition. Mean are not free to escape the fact of existence and of everything that happens in existence. But to make it the essential fact of a doctrine is to give metaphysical equality to both the choices we freely choose to make when we choose to make them, and to the non-contra-causal causes that force us to choose to make a choice or not. The freedom which the determinists admit we do have is a metaphysical positive force, and the things that are prior to choice, things which we cannot change, can only be explained as causes when they are prior to being.

Since "fully caused" is the deterministic proposition that "being" is a "process", man cannot have "being" without the necessity of making choices. His "being" at this very moment has more metaphysical force in existence than the natural forces that brought him to make his choice. Those natural forces can only be explained in terms of his "being." It cannot be explained the other way around, since two or more men may arrive in the same place through different choices made against the backdrop of different natural forces.

In other words, the natural forces over which we have no control, which are deterministically said to "fully cause" us, can only be explained by the result achieved by our choice, which is to say that "being" is the definition of the causes. The causes are not the definition of the "being."

A woman from the roughest neighborhoods of Detroit, and the pampered son of a Houston oilman, can both end up in the same place, let's say Hollywood, and that will be the state of their being. That state cannot be attributed to the "non-contra-causal causes" because they would have gotten there anyway, if that was what they envisioned for their "being," i.e., for their existence.

But the correct response to being "non-contra-causal agents" is to say that without those things which we cannot contra-cause, there would be no such thing as life itself. Determinism seems to be a straw man argument that because we cannot contra-cause the factors of life that "fully cause us to be who we are," that we are somehow supposed to see ourselves in a different light--which is exactly the point of their entire base of philosophical literature. They want us to see ourselves in a different light, both epistemologically and metaphysically.

I'd like to know what the point of that is. I still cannot figure out why knowing that we rise because the cock crows and wakes us, or that we eat because we are hungry, or that we rob a store because we think we have no other choice in a desperate need for cash, is supposed to make us think differently about ourselves.

I think these are things we've always known. Victor Hugo proved it with his novel "Les Miserables", described this way in Wikipedia:

"The story starts in 1815, in Toulon. After five years of imprisonment in the bagne of Toulon for stealing bread for his starving sister and her family..."

So, in 1862 Hugo was telling a story--with overt moral lessons he wanted to demonstrate--that people do things because they need to (steal bread); because they stupidly steal (silver) from the Bishop of a church; that they accidently steal (a child's coin) when they don't know it; that they are forced to sleep on the street when innkeepers refuse to allow felons (the bread theft) at the inns; that people can turn their lives around and do good for others only to have it ripped away from them by petty officials and civil unrest and mistaken identies and by loved ones who mistake your actions for poor character rather than for a poor raft of choices that life forced one to make.

Dagny Taggart committed manlaughter with a gun at point-blank range against a poor slob of a military guard who had no idea of the mess he was in--because he didn't have the power to contra-cause the mess he was in. Neither did Dagny have the power to contra-cause the fact that she was forced to kill the young man. But, without such forces of life, there would be no "being." Rand and Hugo knew that when they wrote in the Romantic style. They used what will their characters possessed to create the beings that they were, and that they were to become.

The fictional writings and the art of the determinists is rightly called "Naturalism."

As Rand stated, "...that which you call 'free will' is your mind’s freedom to think or not, the only will you have, your only freedom, the choice that controls all the choices you make and determines your life and your character." Galt’s Speech, For the New Intellectual

Without the forces of life itself which you cannot "contra-cause," there would be no choices at all to make. The poor guard had the power to think or not: Dagny gave him the choice twice, and when he refused "to think", she killed him without a second thought of her own. Dagny was acting Romantically; the guard was acting Naturalistically. See where it got him?

Who needs science to demonstrate that nothing can be contra-caused, that nothing should be contra-caused, and that determinism is metaphysically impotent precisely because nothing should be contra-causable?

Anything that is out of your control is non-contra-causable in its nature.

But just because each of us is "fully caused", as deterministic scientific naturalism would have us call ourselves, does not mean this: "It may strongly seem as if there is a self sitting behind experience, witnessing it, and behind behavior, controlling it, [but] this impression is strongly disconfirmed by a scientific understanding of human behavior." [ibid Clark]

So, now there is no "self", but there is experience; there is no "self" but there is behavior which has something "controlling it". What could it be if not "self"?

But I have to admit, never in my life did I ever think my will was divorced from existence; in other words, I never believed it was "free" will in the sense that determinists want to prove it is not free.

If Hugo, and Rand, and I and millions or billions of others already know our "free" will is not "free" of reality, what's the point of arguing it?

[1] Chapter Eight, "Belief in Belief" in "Breaking the Spell"; Daniel Dennett

If you think Obama

is definitely going to win,

you might want to read this:

Signs Pointing To A McCain Victory

Berg lawsuit over Obama citizenship dismissed; didn't have standing

Previously Federal Suit to Determine Obama's U.S. Citizenship; Obama Hires Terrorist Organization to Defend Him

The Philip Berg lawsuit against Barack Obama in which he claimed that BHO wasn't eligible to be president due to not being an American citizen has been tossed. According to judge Barclay Surrick, Berg didn't have standing, saying:
If, through the political process, Congress determines that citizens, voters, or party members should police the Constitution’s eligibility requirements for the Presidency, then it is free to pass laws conferring standing on individuals like Plaintiff. Until that time, voters do not have standing to bring the sort of challenge that Plaintiff attempts to bring in the Amended Complaint. MORE 24Ahead.com



The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists is the SM of
The Free Assemblage of Metaphysical Naturalists LLC.
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism TM,
The Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger TM, and
Academy of Metaphysical Naturalism Blogger Extra TM are the educational arms of the LLC and are:

© 2008 by Curtis Edward Clark and Naturalist Academy Publishing ®

mailto:freeassemblage@gmail.com

http://freeassemblage.blogspot.com/

Determinism Vs. the Individualistic Naturalism of the Soul

The Soul is Naturalistic and Individualistic
“Humanism is a progressive philosophy of life that, without supernaturalism, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.” Tom Clark http://www.centerfornaturalism.org/presentations.htm

Responsibility to aspire to the greater good? Well, then I'm glad I'm not a commie naturalist. I am not even implying that Tom Clark is a collectivist in any way, shape, or form. I don't know the man's politics. But after all, "the greater good" is Communism, as opposed to "promoting the general Welfare," which is American Constitutionalism. And that is a not a parsing of the terminology. So why use such terminology?

While Marx said violence in and of itself is not a good thing, he admitted it may at times be necessary to achieve a greater good. But the promotion of the general welfare requires the protection of the individual from violence initiated by others. The use of State sanctioned violence "when necessary" is the tyranny of the rulers over the ruled--for the ostensible benefit of those who are ruled.

And ostensibly, the "humanist naturalism" Clark promotes is because he wants to "affirm our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good of humanity.” So we have an ethical responsibility, Clark is saying, to look for personal fulfillment no where but in the squelching of individuality. If we were to look for it in the affirmation of individuality, it would destroy the ethics.

Why do I take the critical and extreme path of making the Clark look like an anti-individualist? Because he speaks in the most general of "mushy" soft terminology so that he can not be pinned down as to just what he means--unless you read between the lines."[W]e [need to] live in the light of the empirical truth about ourselves; we don’t need another way of knowing that [which] applies to personal concerns or ultimate concerns. This simplifies things."

What is this "empirical truth" that is opposed to "personal concerns?" According to some of his highly esteemed contributors, the empirical truth is "memes" and "genes" and "environment." Clark mentions the environment on this website; no where did I see him bring in the rest of the "empirical truth" his well-known members insist are real.

Why should personal concerns not be of importance? Because personal concerns get in the way of the common good, without which we can have no ethically personal self-fulfillment!

Naturalism," he says, "affords superior prediction and control of our environment and ourselves, since in dropping the soul and free will we get rid of the fictional supernatural agency that blocks true explanations of phenomena." How does the state, or an organization, "control" the environment for "the common good" which is made of people who ought to have no personal concerns except those of the common good?

Clark admits his naturalistic world-view is probably for the 25th Century because it will take a lot of "education"--or should it be called "re-education"--before we see the idealism of which he dreams. So it may be assumed he does not advocate State-promoted violence in order to accomplish any of his goals. But others of his world-view, those who are also looking at "the common good," do not feel this way. As I wrote in a column last week, the "WeCanSolveIt" campaign that is all over TV is a direct offshoot and is supported by Al Gore's environmental campaign. That can only mean government controls, since he isn't talking the 25th Century; Gore is talking ten years.

Tom Clark's vision of "progressive humanistic naturalism" defines free will as "supernatural." If individuals do not have free will, what do they have that Clark defines as "natural"? He says what is "natural" is that we are "fully caused to want what we want, and to be who we are."

Everything he says is obfuscation. "Fully caused" means that what we "want" and "who we are" are the result of things not in our control, those pesky memes and genes and environmental factors that "fully cause" us. "

"If we reproduced the exact circumstances that obtained at a given time and place, the same behavior would arise: so, in any given situation, we couldn’t have done otherwise, on this view. This means we can’t take ultimate credit or blame for what we do."

He means, if you had something to do all over again, went back in time and encountered the same circumstances, you never would have thought of a different course of action. This is not because in going back we are repeating history. It is because "we are not the ultimate originators of our behavior, but simply the most proximate cause, and other causes surround us in time and space." In time and space we are fully caused by things not in our control, which affect our choices, thereby leaving "free will" to be not only "supernatural" (to be explained below,) but leaving free will to be anything but free.

Why are we not the "ultimate originators of our behavior"?

"According to [the] sciences, we are more or less deterministic, organic, evolved systems, fully embedded within natural causality; so the bottom line is that the empirical debate about free will is essentially over."

There again, Clark uses that non-differential phrasing that means nothing. He says we are "more or less" deterministic. Which is it? And why are we deterministic, if indeed we are? Because the "other causes that surround us in time and space" determine who and what we are for us.

He says we are "organic, evolved systems." That is stating the obvious. We are not rock or gas; we are organic. Does this help his argument? It merely gives it a weightier preponderance of overspeak.

He says we are "fully embedded within natural causality." I'd venture to say we could not be half embedded, or one-tenth embedded, or two-hundred percent embedded. But what does it mean to be embedded "within natural causality?"

Clark uses that phrasing over and over as some sort of mantra, trying to dispell the soul as something man is predisposed to think of as supernatural. It is his goal to "embed" us so deeply into the "natural full-causality" of our determined lives as un-free members of the "common good" that individualism and the knowledge of what we call soul--no matter what it turns out to be be--is dismissed by us as the equivalent of mythology.

"Thanks to neuroscience, there are vastly fewer gaps these days in which the soul can hide." The soul is not an empirical existent, as Clark leads us to infer, something he says we believe is supernaturally reified and existing as something separate and apart from the biology of the human body, floating around it, causing our bodies or our minds to do things while we go on blindly believing that we have free will in order to fulfull the agency of the soul.

It is true that anyone with a belief in traditional religion believes something along these lines. Even Deists believe it. But naturalists don't have to give up defining a "soul" we know exists even by any other name they may choose to give it. We naturalists don't believe it is supernatural. So we naturalists don't believe it is "implanted" supernaturally or otherwise. We believe something exists that has been called soul and is defined as supernatural, but is not supernatural and is the result of our biology. We don't have to search off the beaten track for "memes" and "genes" and environmental agents as "causes" of behavior which are unchangable even if we went back in time to do something all over again.

The soul is precisely that which Clark claims neuroscience dispells: the neurological mechanics of the human organ in its entirety, the act of consciousness looking in upon itself and "feeling" its position in the world, knowing it must decide right from wrong on the basis of extant circumstances.

On that account he is correct; we must make all our decisions based on extant circumstances, on things that we have no control over, such as the light turning red when we're in a hurry to get to work but forcing us to stop, for example. We have no free will to run the light? Why not? We have no free will to calm down by saying the Serenity Prayer? Why not? We have no free will to explode with road rage and scream obscenities at the light and the city that put it there, and at the people going in other directions who didn't have to stop? Why not? Why don't we have the free will to act otherwise than we would have?

Adherents of determinism like him say that determinism is disbelieved by people such as myself because of three lies, "God, immortality, and free will [ ] joined together in a religious narrative, founded in medieval theological dogma [. ] The narrative goes like this: the universe is governed by an all-powerful benevolent spiritual entity – God – who implants a spiritual essence into people at some point following conception. It is this spiritual essence, the soul, that gives people two unique gifts – gifts they did not get from evolution and do not share with any other animal or plant. These two uniquely human spiritual God-given gifts are free will in this life and immortality in the next. According to traditional religion, it is because we have souls that we can transcend the influences of genes and environment, and even triumph over death itself, as our souls fly back up to heaven." Robert Gulack http://www.ethicalfocus.org/index.php?mpage=34/Free_Will.htm

Well, that was not the naturalistic world view of the soul before St. Augustine, but the pre-Augustinian Naturalists did not believe that the soul was implanted by the ruler of the universe. They were well aware of what we now call the "tabula rasa" mind, and that as the mind fills with metaphysical entities, so grows the soul based upon our evaluation of the specific entities we have come to comprehend. They did believe the soul was supernatural, and that it was transcendal of time and space.

They did believe the soul "flew back up to heaven," or some such nonsense as that. But if neuroscience is proving that there is no "implanted" entity we can wrap our minds around, it certainly is proving that what we can wrap our minds around is the idea that emotions are caused by the firing of neurons and the resultant chemical and electrical reactions in our central nervous system.

I've always said the soul is nothing more than the manifestation of the central nervous system, a manifestation of which we are aware within our cognitive capacities. But manifestations can be positively identified, and if the firing of neurons when we are faced with a decision, and the resultant firing of more neurons when we make that decision, can be located within our being it does not have to have the identity of "supernatural" when everything that exists as its cause is necessarily "natural." It is for the greater good of mankind that we identify the soul as individualistic, and neither "contra-causal" or "compatibilist", except that the harder I look the less luck I have finding an actual denotation of either phrase as it relates to free will. "Contra-causal" seems to be a floating abstraction not found in dictionaries but imbued with the anti-virtue of leaving man powerless.

The soul is natural, as natural as the fingernails on your hand, and was no more put inside you at conception by something that supercedes "natural" than your fingernails were implanted supernaturally. But they both exist.

I think Clark has things backward, but for the life of me I don't know how he got it that way. Since our souls are not supernatural, since they are nothing but neurons firing and the resultant emotional responses, then doesn't that indicate individualism, rather than "being one" with nature?

But whether the determinist takes it as "oneness" or or the metaphysical naturalists such as myself takes it to support individualism, neither idea leads to the ethical conclusion that "personal fulfillment [is to] aspire to the greater good of humanity." That aspiration is a very individualistic choice, and has nothing to do with causes which may be out of our control.

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