The Crazy Contradictions of Naturalism

Daniel Dennett, who once suggested religious persons might have to be kept in cages, and Brian Leiter, who writes tirelessly of the frightening Texas Taliban (which is all about people who send their children to fight the Taliban, but are somehow themselves Talibanesque), have come together in an advocacy group called The Center for Naturalism. Both are esteemed academicians, which gives an aspiring academician like me great pause.

What immediately struck me about the group is that it commits to the same bizarre reasoning employed by their forebear John Dewey. They tell us that we are the product of random forces and that there is no meaning to life, BUT then go on to make policy prescriptions for the good life! On the same page, Dewey could explain our meaningless rise from microbes and then go on to promote a just industrial order! What?!!!

Leiter and Dennett's group does the same thing. From their webpage:

Because it replaces traditional free will with a causal understanding of human development and behavior, naturalism has significant implications for social policy. For an overview, see the Policy page. The CFN’s policy areas include, but are not limited to:

Criminal justice – A naturalistic understanding of the causes of criminality helps undercut retributive attitudes favoring the death penalty and punitive prison conditions, while building support for alternative sentencing and policies that address the conditions which generate crime and recidivism. Realizing that but for the luck of circumstances, any of us could standing in the criminal’s shoes, generates compassion for offenders as well as for victims. See Criminal Justice page and the Council on Crime and Causality initiative.

Social and economic inequality – Since on a naturalistic understanding, persons are not self-made, but owe their successes and failures to the conditions into which they were born and developed, major social and economic inequalities cannot be justified on the basis that individuals strongly deserve their status. CFN supports policies that will increase the material and psychological well-being of those who are unlucky in life, and that reduce the extreme disparities in income and opportunity so characteristic of our society. See for instance the Progressive policy implications of naturalism.

For some reason I've yet to discern, the resort to meaningless ends in left-wing politics rather than nihilism. It doesn't make any sense and somewhere Bob Dole reminds us that he knows it, we know it, and the American people know it.