Rival Maps: Naturalism, Secular Humanism, and Postmodernism Steelmanned

The Summary They Would Sign

Lesson 4.3 walked the Christian worldview through its four movements — creation, fall, redemption, restoration — and insisted that you state it precisely enough to be tested rather than merely inherited. It closed by asking whether you could articulate what you believe well enough that a thoughtful critic would know where to aim. Hold your answer. This lesson runs the same discipline in the opposite direction, and it is harder, because the position on the table is one you do not hold.

Here is the standard, and I want it to be what you remember when you have forgotten every name in this lesson. I call it The Advocate's Signature. Write a one-page summary of a position you reject and hand it to the most capable person you know who holds it. If she says, yes, that is my view, you have earned the right to argue. If she says, that is not what I believe, then whatever you were arguing with was a figure you built to be knocked down.

This is not my invention. Anatol Rapoport proposed rules for critical commentary that Daniel Dennett later popularized in Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking: re-express your target's position so fairly that he thanks you for the phrasing, list every point of agreement, mention what you learned — and only then rebut. Dennett, an atheist, published those rules for an audience that already agreed with him. The discipline is not partisan.

It is also not merely good manners, and Scripture speaks first here. Peter tells believers to be ready to give a defense — apologia, a courtroom word — but the sentence does not stop there. The NASB 2020 renders it: 'but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you, but with gentleness and respect' (1 Peter 3:15). The 1995 edition has 'gentleness and reverence.' Either way, the manner is not an accessory to the command. It is inside the command.

Paul models the working version in Athens. Acts 17 puts him in front of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers — rival schools with developed accounts of the world, not a crowd of the uninformed. He walks their city, reads their inscriptions, notices an altar to an unknown god, and quotes their own poets back to them: 'for in Him we live and move and exist, as even some of your own poets have said' (Acts 17:28, NASB) — a line traceable to the Greek poet Aratus. He had done the reading. He engaged them on their ground and let the claim be judged.

Proverbs supplies the epistemics without decoration: 'The first to plead his case seems right, Until another comes and examines him' (Proverbs 18:17, NASB). Your position sounds excellent when it is the only one in the room. That is not evidence of its truth. That is evidence that you are alone.

Now the executive stakes. A mayor of New York governs eight million people who hold every worldview in this lesson and appoints commissioners who hold them. If his working model of a naturalist is a shallow person avoiding God, or of a progressive academic a nihilist who denies facts exist, he will misread the room and design policy against an opponent who is not there. That is an intelligence failure, and it is disqualifying.

Steelmanning is not agreement and it is not relativism. It does not ask you to hold your convictions more loosely, only more accurately. I will present three rival maps as their best cartographers drew them. Then, and only then, we evaluate — using criteria Lesson 4.5 will run on my own position without exemption.

Naturalism at Its Strongest

Naturalism is the view that the natural world is all there is — no supernatural entities, and whatever exists is in principle continuous with what the sciences investigate. Notice what that is not. It is not the claim that life is meaningless, that morality is arbitrary, or that naturalists are hiding from God. Serious naturalists reject all three, and if your argument depends on them, you are not arguing with naturalism.

The positive case begins with theoretical economy. Graham Oppy frames the comparison as a contest between total theories judged by the ordinary virtues we use on any theory: fit with the data, simplicity, explanatory scope, and the avoidance of unnecessary commitments. His contention in The Best Argument against God and across Arguing about Gods is that naturalism posits strictly fewer kinds of things than theism, and that theism buys nothing with the extra commitment that naturalism cannot get otherwise. If two theories account equally well for the evidence and one carries a smaller ontological bill, the smaller bill wins. That is not a hostile principle imported to defeat religion; it is what led physics to drop the luminiferous ether. Oppy is worth studying for how he argues, too: he does not claim theists are irrational, only that on the balance of theoretical virtues naturalism wins, and he grants that reasonable people weighing those virtues differently land elsewhere.

The second pillar is the track record. For four centuries, looking for natural mechanisms rather than agency has produced an extraordinary yield: germ theory, plate tectonics, the double helix, general relativity, antibiotics. Explanations that stopped at divine agency have repeatedly been replaced by explanations that did not, and the traffic runs overwhelmingly one way. A method that keeps working is telling you something about the world it works on. Sean Carroll's poetic naturalism presses that point while insisting — against the caricature — that meaning and moral seriousness are real features of human life, described at a different level than particle physics.

The third pillar, and the one that should cost a Christian the most sleep, is the evidential force of suffering. William Rowe's 1979 paper asks you to consider a fawn burned in a forest fire, dying alone over days, unobserved by any human being — suffering that appears to serve no outweighing good anyone can identify. His argument is probabilistic, not deductive: if we can find no good that would justify such suffering, that is some evidence, though not proof, that there is none. Rowe coined the term friendly atheism for his own position — a theist can be entirely rational in believing what Rowe thinks is false. Paul Draper sharpened it differently in a 1989 paper in Nous, comparing theism not to nothing but to a rival hypothesis of indifference: the biological distribution of pain and pleasure, tied systematically to reproductive advantage including in creatures with no moral life, is more probable if the universe is indifferent than if a perfectly good God superintends it.

A fourth argument runs alongside it. J.L. Schellenberg's Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason poses the problem of nonresistant nonbelief: there are people open to God, who would believe if they had sufficient reason, and who do not. If a perfectly loving God desires relationship with them, their nonbelief is difficult to account for.

The intellectual history is more honest than the popular version too. J.L. Mackie's 1955 paper in Mind advanced the logical problem of evil. In The Miracle of Theism he later conceded that Alvin Plantinga's free will defense had shown that version fails as a strict inconsistency proof, remained an atheist, and shifted to probabilistic ground. The argument was refined, not abandoned. His argument from queerness in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong — that objective, prescriptive moral facts would be metaphysically strange entities — ends in an error theory he states openly.

That is naturalism with its best foot forward: fewer commitments, a formidable explanatory record, and two evidential arguments no one has dissolved.

Secular Humanism at Its Strongest

Secular humanism is smaller and more specific than naturalism, and confusing the two is the most common error here. Naturalism is a metaphysics. Secular humanism is a life stance — how to live, given that metaphysics. The American Humanist Association's own 2003 statement, Humanism and Its Aspirations, describes it as a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism or other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good. The Amsterdam Declaration, first adopted by the international humanist movement in 1952 and updated in 2002 and again in 2022 as Humanists International's current defining statement, says much the same.

Read those documents rather than descriptions of them and what strikes you is the moral seriousness. This is not a philosophy of shrugging but of obligation without a commanding God: because no one else is coming, the responsibility to reduce suffering falls entirely on us, in the only life anyone is guaranteed. Paul Kurtz, who drafted A Secular Humanist Declaration in 1980, argued that ethics is an autonomous field of rational inquiry rather than a department of theology.

The moral philosophy is not thin. Peter Singer's 1972 paper on famine, affluence, and morality argued that if we can prevent something very bad without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we are obligated to do it — an argument with no theological premises that has since redirected serious money and careers toward the world's poorest people. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum built the capabilities approach, which asks not what a society's average income is but what its members are able to do and to be — objective human goods advanced without theistic grounding, now built into how development is measured worldwide.

There is a historical achievement here too, and it should be stated precisely rather than generously, because inflated credit is its own disrespect. The clean case is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Its drafters — Eleanor Roosevelt chairing, with Charles Malik, P.C. Chang, Rene Cassin, and John Humphrey among them — held incompatible metaphysical views and knew it. Rather than paper over the disagreement, they deliberately grounded the rights in no particular metaphysics, so a Confucian, a Thomist, and a secularist could each sign and supply his own reasons. Jacques Maritain, a Catholic who worked on the associated UNESCO inquiry, observed that they could agree about the rights provided nobody asked why. Secular humanists were central to it.

Now the harder question. Critics — I am one — argue that secular humanism's confidence in universal human dignity is an inheritance from the tradition it left, and that the metaphysics it retains cannot carry the weight it places on it. Tom Holland develops the historical half of that claim at book length in Dominion. It is a serious thesis, contested by serious historians — and a reminder that abolition, civil rights, and public health each drew on deeply religious and deeply secular actors. A leader who tells that history as a single-team victory is doing recruitment, not history.

But here is the part left out when that argument is made badly, and leaving it out fails the standard I set at the start of this lesson. Secular philosophers have not ignored the grounding problem; they have worked on it directly. Erik Wielenberg's Robust Ethics defends non-natural moral facts that exist necessarily and require no God — part of the furniture of reality the way mathematical truths are. Derek Parfit's On What Matters argues for objective normative truths on non-theistic grounds. You may judge those attempts unsuccessful. I lean that way. What you may not do is claim they were never made. The secular humanist has noticed the problem, and written more about it than most of his critics have read.

Postmodernism, Accurately — Which Requires Saying What It Is Not

I have to begin with an admission. The word postmodernism is used more loosely, and more often inaccurately, than any other term in this module. In political speech it functions largely as an epithet, deployed by people who have not read a page of the authors it names. If you have heard it defined as the belief that there is no such thing as truth and everything is just power, you have heard a summary none of the major figures would sign. Correcting that failure of the Advocate's Signature test is most of the work here.

These thinkers were not a movement and did not agree. Jean-Francois Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty held substantially different views and criticized one another. Foucault distanced himself from the label outright; Derrida spent years objecting to what was attributed to him. Treating them as one school is like treating Aquinas, Luther, Kierkegaard, and Barth as one school because all four were Christians.

Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition, written in 1979 as a report on knowledge for a Canadian government council, gave the term its most cited definition: postmodern means incredulity toward metanarratives. That is not a claim that truth does not exist. It is an observation about legitimation — that the grand stories a civilization uses to justify its knowledge and institutions, including inevitable progress through science and reason, had lost the power to compel assent. Looking at the twentieth century, that diagnosis is not obviously wrong.

Foucault's contribution is the analysis of power and knowledge as intertwined. In Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality he traced how classifications — of the criminal, the insane, the deviant, the normal — were produced inside institutions with interests in producing them, and then governed real people with real consequences. His claim was not that psychiatry is fake. It was that a claim to disinterested knowledge about a category of persons is never socially weightless. Anyone who has read the history of eugenics has seen that question earn its keep.

Derrida's deconstruction is the most misrepresented of the four. The notorious line from Of Grammatology, often rendered as 'there is nothing outside the text,' is better translated as there is no outside-text, and he spent years insisting it did not mean reality is unreal or that language refers to nothing. You may reject the program. You may not reject a version he explicitly disowned.

Richard Rorty most embarrasses the caricature. He denied that our beliefs mirror a ready-made world and preferred to talk about what is useful for human solidarity rather than what corresponds to reality-in-itself. But he was a committed reformist liberal who took Judith Shklar's line that cruelty is the worst thing we do as close to a first principle, and in Achieving Our Country he attacked the academic cultural left for retreating from politics into spectatorship.

I will not pretend there is no excess. In 1996 the physicist Alan Sokal submitted a deliberately meaningless paper studded with fashionable jargon to Social Text, which published it — a real embarrassment about editorial standards in a corner of the humanities. It is fair to cite that. It is not fair to treat one journal's failure as a refutation of Foucault's archival work.

Sandra Harding's standpoint epistemology belongs here too: beginning inquiry from the perspective of those a system disadvantages surfaces facts the dominant view is positioned to miss, a result she calls strong objectivity — a claim to more rigor, not less. Here, then, is the steelman a serious postmodern thinker would sign: claims to universal, view-from-nowhere knowledge have historically arrived carrying the interests of whoever was positioned to make them; who is speaking, from where, and for whose benefit are productive questions; and much of what a culture calls obvious is contingent and revisable. Notice that Alasdair MacIntyre — a Christian philosopher and no postmodernist — argues a structurally related point in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?. This critique is not exclusively a weapon of the left.

Now You May Evaluate

Having presented each map as its cartographers drew it, I owe you my assessment. Fair evaluation has a rule, and I want it visible first: any criterion I use on a rival I must be willing to have used on me in the next lesson, with no exemption for the home team.

On naturalism. The economy argument is genuinely strong, and the standard theistic reply is not that simplicity does not matter but that it is one virtue among several and can be outweighed by explanatory scope. Whether the smaller theory accounts for everything is a substantive dispute, not a rhetorical one. Three items strike me as carrying real cost for naturalism: conscious experience, which David Chalmers named the hard problem and addresses as an atheist rather than a theist; objective moral obligation, where Mackie's error theory and Alex Rosenberg's nihilism in The Atheist's Guide to Reality show some naturalists accepting the consequence while Wielenberg and Parfit dispute it; and the intelligibility of the universe to mathematics. On my own side, Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism is often deployed as though it settled matters. It does not, and many philosophers including theists dispute it.

On the evidential arguments from evil and hiddenness, I will not perform a resolution I do not have. There are substantial responses — skeptical theism, Plantinga's free will defense, Marilyn McCord Adams' work on horrendous evils, which argues from the incarnation and the cross that God participates in the suffering rather than merely permitting it. I find these serious. I do not find them painless.

On secular humanism. Its moral seriousness is real, its achievements are real, and its central instinct — that human beings must act now because the responsibility is ours — is one Scripture does not contradict. My disagreement is at the foundation, not the conduct: I hold that the equal, non-negotiable worth of every person is best explained by every person bearing the image of the God who made them, and that a purely descriptive account of what human beings are has difficulty generating what they are owed. That is contested by capable people who have written directly against it. What I will not do is argue it by implying that humanists are morally unserious. The evidence runs the other way.

On postmodernism. The diagnostic tools are valuable and I use them. When someone tells me a policy is simply objective and evidence-based, asking whose interests the framing serves is a good question, and I ask it of my own side too. Where I get off is the point at which the critique becomes global — where the claim that all knowledge claims are entangled with power is advanced as a universal truth immune to the same analysis. That is a real coherence problem, and it lands on the popular version far more than on Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida, or Rorty, who mostly avoided the self-refuting formulation. Note the cost of the weak version too: a leader who cannot say a thing is true, and not merely useful to say, has no ground to stand on when he has to tell a powerful person no.

Which returns us to the office. A mayor of New York will sit across a table from a naturalist epidemiologist, a secular humanist lawyer, a Foucault-reading organizer, a Haredi rabbi, an imam, and a Pentecostal bishop, sometimes in the same week. Every one of them bears the image of God, and that is not a sentiment; it determines how you speak when the cameras are off. Governing them requires knowing what they believe, accurately enough that they would sign your account of it, and being able to say I think you are wrong without communicating I think you are beneath me. Most leaders manage only the second sentence.

So do the work. Choose a person, not a category. Write the page. Send it. Ask only whether you got them right, and resist every urge to argue. Bring what comes back to Lesson 4.5, where we run the four tests on my position first.