Quotes About Naturalism

#1. Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.

Philip Johnson

#2. 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

#3. Science preceded the theory of science, and is independent of it. Science preceded naturalism, and will survive it.

Arthur Balfour

#4. The question of naturalism is a fallacy, it does not exist ... The photographic image replaces naturalistic experience.

Sid Grossman

#5. 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

#6. When the vision of the 'Nude' flashed upon me, I knew that it would break forever the enslaving chains of Naturalism.

Marcel Duchamp

#7. naturalism, alone among all considered philosophical attempts to describe the shape of reality, is radically insufficient in its explanatory range.

David Bentley Hart

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. If you believe in evolution and naturalism then you have a reason not to think your faculties are reliable.

Alvin Plantinga

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. There is superficial conflict but deep concord between science and theistic religion, but superficial concord and deep conflict between science and naturalism.

Alvin Plantinga

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. We have fallen into this very mean description of humanity. Naturalism in fiction is too reductive in its definition of human beings.

Ben Okri

#30. He has no theistic beliefs, but shares the poetic naturalism that the cosmos provokes in

Richard Dawkins

#31. 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

#32. It's part of my job to maintain the emotional reality and the naturalism even when the atmosphere is contrived.

Michel Gondry

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. Given AC as a rival to naturalism, there is an additional burden of proof for a naturalist ontology that quantifies over sui generis emergent properties such as those constitutive of consciousness. After

William Lane Craig

#36. Naturalism attempts to fortify itself against God by altogether shutting Him out of public life, social policy, the courts, and eliminating all biblical influence in morality and ethics.

John F. MacArthur Jr.

#37. I don't bill myself as an atheist but as a naturalist. Naturalism is a belief system. A lot of scientists bristle at that. We all have to believe we can find the truth. Evidence is my guide. I rely on observation, experimentation and verification.

Greg Graffin

#38. Evolutionary naturalism takes the inherent limitations of science and turns them into a devastating philosophical weapon: because science is our only real way of knowing anything, what science cannot know cannot be real.

Phillip E. Johnson

#39. Naturalism teaches one of the most important things in this world. There is only this life, so live wonderfully and meaningfully.

Greg Graffin

#40. Visit a typical science classroom and you will discover far more than empirical facts being taught. The dominant worldview among scientific intellectuals is evolutionary naturalism, which holds that humans are essentially biochemical machines.

Nancy Pearcey

#41. 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

#42. Obviously we know Bill Hader is funny and charming, but my question is, can he do raw humanity and naturalism? I think so.

Mark Duplass

#43. I wish to confound all these people, to create a work of art of a supernatural realism and of a spiritualist naturalism. I wish to prove ... that nothing is explained in the mysteries which surround us.

Joris-Karl Huysmans

#44. I love acting, especially if it's a fantasy of some kind, where it's not just realistic, it's not naturalism.

Gene Wilder

#45. Modernist discourse [ ... ] incorporates semantic devices - such as the labeling of theism as 'religion' and naturalism as 'science' - that work to prevent a dangerous debate over fundamental assumptions from breaking out in the open.

Phillip E. Johnson

#46. 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

#47. 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

#48. I'm supposed to be the guy who hates naturalism.

Robert Wilson

#49. When you are playing an egomaniac running a fantastical ship, you don't want him to be too suburban. Naturalism doesn't work on the high seas.

Geoffrey Rush

#50. All Jews, however, in proportion as they are one with the leaders and rulers of their race, will oppose the influence of the supernatural Life of Grace in society and will be an active ferment of Naturalism.

Denis Fahey

#51. Anyone who has set out to invent a purely imaginary story knows that the whole thing is fantasy, from beginning to end; there must be a sense of magic created about the most restrained of naturalism.

Russell Smith

#52. 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

#53. A lot of people inspire me. I'm a huge movie buff. From studying and watching movies, over and over again, directly influential are Terrence Malik and his naturalism, Robert Altman and his exploration of improvisation, and Judd Apatow, in terms of his comedic process.

David Gordon Green

#54. We are not compelled in naturalism, or even in materialism, to ignore immaterial things; the point is that any immaterial things which are recognized shall be regarded as names, aspects, functions, or concomitant products of those physical things among which action goes on.

George Santayana

#55. Scientific naturalism has proven incapable of accounting for a whole range of human experiences, from simple self-awareness to love.

James Carroll

#56. 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

#57. To accept Naturalism is to reject such entities as Cartesian minds, private visual and tactual spaces, angelic beings and God.

David Malet Armstrong

#58. I like a naturalism to my dialogue and my comedy. I would rather have a few jokes sail by that might be more subtle than have every single joke hit hard. I would rather the comedy come out of character as opposed to feeling forced. Even if you're giving some laughs up for it.

Jon Favreau

#59. Methodological naturalism is a "ground rule" of science today which requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify

Robert T. Pennock

#60. 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

#61. If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes ... it cuts its own throat.

C.S. Lewis

#62. Both theism and evolutionary naturalism are attempts to understand ourselves from the outside

Thomas Nagel

#63. American naturalism is what my indulgent actor side loves: a bit of Tennessee Williams, a bit of Clifford Odets, August Wilson - I would just love to tackle some of that.

Emilia Clarke

#64. We're looking for a certain kind of realism or naturalism, and we go about it in different ways, but I think we're all striving for the same end result, which is to capture the patterns of conversations and how people interact in a very realistic way.

Joe Swanberg

#65. 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

#66. '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

#67. Empiricism in the sciences is a method; naturalism in philosophy is a metaphysics; and the latter neither follows from nor underlies the former.

David Bentley Hart

#68. There are unprecedented numbers of movements for human rights and freedoms. But the dominant worldviews in academia, like materialism and naturalism, deny the reality of freedom, reducing humans to robots. So where does the concept of human rights come from?

Nancy Pearcey

#69. [W]hile you believe in and construct your supra- and extra-natural God, you believe in and construct nothing else than the supra- and extra-naturalism of your own self.

Ludwig Feuerbach

#70. Evolutionary naturalism offers an explanation of our knowledge that is seriously inadequate, when applied to the knowledge-generating capacities that we take ourselves to have.

Thomas Nagel

#71. Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism; and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.

Hu Shih

#72. Naturalism, therefore, can never be anything more than a guiding prejudice, an established principle only in the sense that it must be indefensibly presumed for the sake of some larger view of reality;

David Bentley Hart

#73. To me documentary photography means making a picture so that the viewer doesn't think about the man who made the picture. At its esthetic core is very old tradition in art: naturalism. And its purpose is to document all facets of social relationships.

Aaron Siskind

#74. Naturalness onstage is just as much an artifice as naturalism in the novel

Julian Barnes

#75. I see. I imagined that he was cast out of all decent society".
"If society were really decent, he would have been

George Gissing

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. 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

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. Shallow men believe in luck or in circumstance. Strong men believe in cause and effect.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

#87. The meaning of fiction is not abstract meaning but experienced meaning.

Flannery O'Connor

#88. 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

#89. ...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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. Natural Sciences are all about fascinating causality.

Abhijit Naskar

#96. 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

#97. 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

#98. Open yourself to the natural and become a human again.

Bryant McGill

#99. Eat beautiful foods, which are nutritionally dense, wholesome and natural.

Bryant McGill

#100. Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly and quite reverently: Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?

Stephen Crane