RELIGION AND THE INTELLECTUALS
121
B.
Naturalism and Religion.
One must distinguish between faiths and Faith. Every co–
ordinated pattern of human thought or behavior requires a faith,
i.e. one or more absolute presuppositions without which it wants
not to exist or take place in that way. E.g., a natural scientist as a
scientist presupposes that there is a world of nature which is a
world of events which cannot be produced or prevented by anybody's
art, that this world is made up of many different realms, each com–
posed of a class of things peculiar to itself to which events of a
peculiar kind happen but that, nevertheless, the peculiar laws of these
realms are modifications of universal laws according to which all
movements and events in spite of all differences agree in happening.
None of these presuppositions is
.a
demonstrable proposition
but without them there would be no natural science as we know
it, e.g. to a person who believed that natural events were caused or
prevented by personal magic, science would have no rationale and
to one who believed that the world of nature was not real but an
illusion, science might be possible but only as a frivolous amuse–
ment like solitaire.
One cannot call such presuppositions hypotheses which are
temporarily entertained till their truth or falsehood is established,
for a scientist cannot seriously entertain the possibility that his life–
vocation is absurd.
As
distinct from a faith which applies to some specialized ac–
tivity, there is the Faith by which a man lives his life as a man,
i.e. the presuppositions he holds
in
order that 1. he may make
sense of his past and present experience; 2. he may be able to act
toward the future with a sense that his actions will be meaningful
and effective; 3. that he and his world may be able to be changed
from what they are into something more satisfactory. Such a faith
can only be held dogmatically, for in man's historical and mortal
existence, no experiment is ever identically repeatable.
Naturalism as it is used by the editors is used as a term for a
religious Faith.
It
is necessary to know which particular kind of
Naturalism is being referred to, for there are as many kinds as
there are sciences. Historically, natural religion has taken its presup–
positions successively from mathematics, physics, biology, psychology
and history, and applied these analogically as key-concepts for ac-
