Top 100 Naturalism's Quotes
#1. Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.
Philip Johnson
#2. I see. I imagined that he was cast out of all decent society".
"If society were really decent, he would have been
George Gissing
#3. Mathematics began to seem too much like puzzle solving. Physics is puzzle solving, too, but of puzzles created by nature, not by the mind of man.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer
#4. If you go too far with naturalism, there is no need to even organize; just look ... and paint what you see until the canvas ends.
David Hockney
#5. Science preceded the theory of science, and is independent of it. Science preceded naturalism, and will survive it.
Arthur Balfour
#6. I suppose the spiritual trance is harder to break than the religious one because the delusion is more difficult to distinguish. You have a quasi-cloud of ideas that include wonderful concepts of openness and altruism without the blatant anthropomorphism of religion.
Christopher Zzenn Loren
#7. I believe the defenders of intelligent design deserve our gratitude for challenging a scientific world view that owes some of the passion displayed by its adherents precisely to the fact that it is thought to liberate us from religion. That world view is ripe for displacement ...
Thomas Nagel
#8. Our religious systems have taught us to "train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it." (Proverbs 22:6) I couldn't disagree more. How about, "feed a child what it needs, so when it gets grows up, it will "be" its own unique unpredictably creative self.
Christopher Zzenn Loren
#9. The question of naturalism is a fallacy, it does not exist ... The photographic image replaces naturalistic experience.
Sid Grossman
#10. We must trust to nothing but facts: These are presented to us by Nature, and cannot deceive. We ought, in every instance, to submit our reasoning to the test of experiment, and never to search for truth but by the natural road of experiment and observation.
Antoine Lavoisier
#11. All the work of the crystallographers serves only to demonstrate that there is only variety everywhere where they suppose uniformity ... that in nature there is nothing absolute, nothing perfectly regular.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon
#12. They valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them. Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves, they loved themselves and attended to their natures -
A.S. Byatt
#13. Scientific naturalism is a story that reduces reality to physical particles and impersonal laws, [and] portrays life as a meaningless competition among organisms that exist only to survive and reproduce.
Philip Johnson
#14. Why is it that showers and even storms seem to come by chance, so that many people think it quite natural to pray for rain or fine weather, though they would consider it ridiculous to ask for an eclipse by prayer?
Henri Poincare
#15. When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslaving chains of Naturalism.
Marcel Duchamp
#16. naturalism, alone among all considered philosophical attempts to describe the shape of reality, is radically insufficient in its explanatory range.
David Bentley Hart
#17. In our greatest universities, naturalism - the doctrine that nature is all there is - is the virtually unquestioned assumption that underlies not only natural science but intellectual work of all kinds.
Philip Johnson
#18. Let me make this radiantly clear - if you believe in spirits and the metaphysical world, your biology will create the illusion that these things are real.
Christopher Zzenn Loren
#19. The complexity of the simplest known type of cell is so great that it is impossible to accept that such an object could have been thrown together suddenly by some kind of freakish, vastly improbable, event. Such an occurrence would be indistinguishable from a miracle.
Michael Denton
#20. Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#21. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.
Flannery O'Connor
#22. Our species is angry on a deep level. We know something has been wrong for a long time. We are tired of being thrown the scraps. This is primal, guttural; the scream of an exhausted humanity who will not take no for an answer.
Christopher Zzenn Loren
#23. ...in principle, one can predict everything in the universe solely from physical laws. Thus, the long-standing 'first cause' problem intrinsic in cosmology has been finally dispelled.
Li Zhi Fang
#24. The question rather is how we should do science and theology in light of the impending collapse of Enlightenment rationalism and scientific naturalism. These ideologies are on the way out. They are on the way out.
William A. Dembski
#25. The greatest impact of the Darwinian revolution...was that it completed the liberation from superstition and fear that began in the physical sciences a few centuries before. Man, too, is a natural phenomenon. [in "The evolutionary concept of man", 1972, p. 35.]
George Gaylord Simpson
#26. The embryological record is almost always abbreviated in accordance with the tendency of nature (to be explained on the principle of survival of the fittest) to attain her needs by the easiest means.
Francis Maitland Balfour
#27. I profess to learn and to teach anatomy not from books but from dissections, not from the tenets of Philosophers but from the fabric of Nature.
William Harvey
#28. But as the girl timidly accosted him, he gave a convulsive movement and saved his
respectability by a vigorous side-step. He did not risk it to save a soul. For how was he to
know that there was a soul before him that needed saving?
Stephen Crane
#29. We have yet to encounter an observable astronomical phenomenon that require a supernatural element to be added to a model in order to describe the even ... Observations in cosmology look just as they can be expected to look if there is no God.
Victor J. Stenger
#30. If you believe in evolution and naturalism then you have a reason not to think your faculties are reliable.
Alvin Plantinga
#31. I have a horror of tags and labels. I don't understand, for instance, how people can talk about Bergman's "symbolism". Far from being symbolic, be seems to me, through and almost biological naturalism, to arrive at the spiritual truth about human life that is important to him.
Andrei Tarkovsky
#32. I am really not of the school of naturalism. I like style, and you can use more style in theater than in film roles. I love to sink my teeth into a part.
Marisa Tomei
#33. Natural Sciences are all about fascinating causality.
Abhijit Naskar
#34. Man is a product of nature, a part of the Universe. The Universe is operated under exact natural laws. Man is a product of millions of years of evolution. He adapts himself to the laws of nature or he perishes.
James Hervey Johnson
#35. Naturalism is a methodological rather than a metaphysical view. It's because I am a naturalist, actually, that I am sceptical about physicalism.
Tim Crane
#36. There is nothing ideal in Nature, because it was not created by some sort of ideal Almighty Being with perfect peerless craftsmanship. Nature as it is, has evolved through millions of years out of the biological drive for survival.
Abhijit Naskar
#37. I think I'm trying to write truthfully about life, and naturalism, or the way people normally talk in movies, is a convention. It's not the way people talk in life at all.
Wallace Shawn
#38. Open yourself to the natural and become a human again.
Bryant McGill
#39. Eat beautiful foods, which are nutritionally dense, wholesome and natural.
Bryant McGill
#40. The second advantage claimed for naturalism is that it is equivalent to rationality, because it assumes a model of reality in which all events are in principle accessible to scientific investigation.
Phillip E. Johnson
#41. Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly and quite reverently: Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?
Stephen Crane
#42. I'm a novelist by trade and my job is to write a story rather than reconstruct actual events.
Sara Sheridan
#43. And we will lie down on the ground and have conversations with the grasses and the flowers.
Avijeet Das
#44. For if a man by magical arts and sacrifices will bring down the moon, and darken the sun, and induce storms, or fine weather, I should not believe that there was anything divine, but human, in these things, provided the power of the divine were overpowered by human knowledge and subjected to it.
Hippocrates
#45. If modernist naturalism were true, there would be no objective truth outside of science. In that case right and wrong would be a matter of cultural preference, or political power, and the power already available to modernists ideologies would be overwhelming.
Phillip E. Johnson
#46. No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules?
Robert J. Sawyer
#47. God may normally work through ordinary means. But he is not limited by them. That is why all the military muscle in the world cannot itself guarantee victory, and all the secularization, postmodernism, naturalism, and paganism in the world cannot by themselves prevent revival. Let God be God.
D. A. Carson
#48. Biologically speaking, you are the child of Mother Nature, and neurologically speaking, you are the heirs of immortal bliss.
Abhijit Naskar
#49. Love and Divinity are both gifts from Nature, fraught with the highest bliss.
Abhijit Naskar
#50. There is no indisputable proof for the big bang," said Hollus. "And there is none for evolution. And yet you accept those. Why hold the question of whether there is a creator to a higher standard?
Robert J. Sawyer
#52. No human, no matter how ancient, or how popular, can be above the laws of Nature.
Abhijit Naskar
#53. The injured captain, lying in the bow, was at this time buried in that profound dejection and indifference which comes, temporarily at least, to
even the bravest and most enduring when, willy nilly, the firm fails, the army loses, the ship goes down.
Stephen Crane
#54. When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.
Stephen Crane
#55. Because to me, what is interesting about this movie [Real Steel] is its combination of relationship naturalism with. It's like a single conceit movie. The world and the people are very much the way we know them to be, but this sport has evolved.
Shawn Anthony Levy
#56. For Nature is accustomed to rehearse with certain large, perhaps baser, and all classes of wild (animals), and to place in the imperfect the rudiments of the perfect animals.
Marcello Malpighi
#57. The world of strict naturalism in which clever mathematical laws all by themselves bring the universe and life into existence, is pure (and, one might add, poor) fiction. To call it science-fiction would besmirch the name of science.
John C. Lennox
#58. The daringly explicit absurdity of the evolutionary process - its unstoppable, messy, painful, indifferent knocking on random doors - is, arguably, precisely how a malevolent architect devoted to maintaining His anonymity would go about His business, painting Creation with impenetrable naturalism.
John Zande
#59. I love my early movies, but naturalism is an artist's early style. Now I want to deal with feelings, dreams, an acceptance of irrationality.
Irvin Kershner
#60. Homosexuality is nature's way of keeping the population in check.
Abhijit Naskar
#61. The witch theory of causality, and how it was debunked through science, encapsulates the larger trend in the improvement of humanity through the centuries by the gradual replacement of religious supernaturalism with scientific naturalism.
Michael Shermer
#63. If we understand our own times, we will know that we should affirm the reality of God by challenging the domination of materialism and naturalism in the world of the mind. With the assistance of many friends I have developed a strategy for doing this ... We call our strategy the wedge .
Phillip E. Johnson
#64. Our unfathomable evolutionary past paints a picture vastly more immense than any spiritual story could ever create because it is raw and real, violent, dirty and beautiful - and because of that - it's spectacular!
Christopher Zzenn Loren
#65. In naturalism, man is actually very insignificant, but arrogates to himself stupendous power. In Christianity, man is actually the apex of created significance, but is called to see it in abject humility.
Ravi Zacharias
#66. Realism and Naturalism rely mostly on the eye of the flesh. Abstract, conceptual and surrealistic art rely mostly on the eye of the mind. Great works of art rely on the eye of contemplation, the eye of the spirit.
Alex Grey
#67. Biology is run by intricate cellular mechanisms. Cellular mechanisms are run by Nature. Thus, the more we attempt to understand Nature, the more we get closer to our existential properties.
Abhijit Naskar
#68. There is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism.
Alvin Plantinga
#69. Our public schools arbitrarily define science as explaining the world by natural processes alone. In essence, a religion of naturalism is being imposed on millions of students. They need to be taught the real nature of science, including its limitations.
Ken Ham
#70. Science makes people reach selflessly for truth and objectivity; it teaches people to accept reality, with wonder and admiration, not to mention the deep awe and joy that the natural order of things brings to the true scientist.
Lise Meitner
#71. Since science is essentially objective, involving the study of how things actually are, "materialism" would therefore seem to be its antithesis, since its starting point is the desire to impose upon the natural world a particular and limited way of looking at it.
Melanie Phillips
#72. Naturalistic atheism debunks itself. It has no power to explain even some of the most basic principles of the universe and existence. It cannot even explain how its own claims can be reasonably believed.
Lewis N. Roe
#73. Naturalism by its purpose engineers the displacement of the miracle and puts in its place explanations that defy reason. Those who smirk at His walking on water have forgotten the miracle He has already performed in the very composition of water. Think
Ravi Zacharias
#74. We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.
Ben Okri
#75. If you are to suppose that natural reasons are the cause of everything, then it can only lead to the conclusion that consciousness is an illusion.
Lewis N. Roe
#76. He has no theistic beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos provokes in
Richard Dawkins
#77. The importance of awakening to our evolutionary origins is paramount because irrational ideas about "who we are" fuel our sense of separateness
Christopher Zzenn Loren
#78. Naturalism aimed at giving the primitive wishes full play but failed because these wishes are too primitive, too infantile, too inconsistent with themselves to be satisfied even by the greatest license.
John Desmond Bernal
#79. It's part of my job to maintain the emotional reality and the naturalism even when the atmosphere is contrived.
Michel Gondry
#80. Will be but corpses dressed in frocks,
who cannot speak to birds or rocks.
Gary Snyder
#81. Once the wounded child awakens to its human self, a primal scream emerges from the depths of denial like the Kraken released from its underwater prison.
Christopher Zzenn Loren
#82. Believers can have both religion and science as long as there is no attempt to make A non-A, to make reality unreal, to turn naturalism into supernaturalism. (125)
Michael Shermer
#83. I do think that it is legitimate to talk of goals and functions in nature, and that these things can be made sense of in naturalistic terms. There is nothing at all contrary to naturalism in the idea of goal-directed systems.
Hilary Kornblith
#86. We do not have bodies - we are bodies! What could possibly be wrong with that form of consciousness? It is all energy anyways.
Christopher Zzenn Loren
#87. Nature creates curved lines while humans create straight lines.
Hideki Yukawa
#88. As opposed to a movie [Real Steel] where everything feels fantastical, it was really important to me, and I recognise it's not the first movie with robots in it, but that blend of naturalism in performance, writing and design with the futurism of this sport. That was the idea.
Shawn Anthony Levy
#89. I love acting, especially if it's a fantasy of some kind, where it's not just realistic, it's not naturalism.
Gene Wilder
#90. I always considered Ray Harryhausen's work so fine that it was way out of my league: in terms of realism and naturalism, in terms of animal movement.
Nick Park
#91. The tyranny of maternal duty is not new, but it has become considerably more pronounced with the rise of naturalism, and it has thus far produced neither a matriarchy nor sexual equality, but rather a regression in women's status.
Elisabeth Badinter
#92. That's the peculiar thing about nature," explained Mr. F., "it guards it's rarest treasures with greatest care.
William Pene Du Bois
#93. I don't understand why people don't use improvisation, especially in comedy films, but also, for me, you get more naturalism, and that's why I like the naturalistic performances and strange rhythms and the way that people genuinely interact captured rather than sort of very mannered performances.
Alice Lowe
#94. Materialism sets us free from sin-by proving that there is no such thing as sin. There's just antisocial behavior, which we can control with measures like laws and educational programs.
Phillip E. Johnson
#95. In terms of making TV drama, not everything has to make sense. In cinema, you usually strive for reality and a natural environment, but in TV, it's more acceptable to do something crazy and break with naturalism.
Takashi Miike
#96. C. S. Lewis depicts another source of our misconceptions about Heaven: naturalism, the belief that the world can be understood in scientific terms, without recourse to spiritual or supernatural explanations.
Randy Alcorn
#97. HAPPY: All right, boy. I'm gonna show you and everybody else that Willy Loman did not die in vain. He had a good dream. It's the only dream you can have
to come out number-one man.
Arthur Miller
#98. If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes ... it cuts its own throat.
C.S. Lewis
#99. But if naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. Therefore, all thoughts would be equally worthless. Therefore, naturalism is worthless. If it is true, then we can know no truths. It cuts its own throat.
C.S. Lewis
#100. 'Batman Begins' came out and it was really successful, and it had gritty naturalism. And suddenly ... I can't tell you how many movies I was pitched where it was, 'We want to do what you did with 'Batman' but with 'Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,' or whatever.
David S.Goyer