Ah, yes. This was a bit of a mistake on my part because at this point in the article I do not distinguish between the naturalists and the materialists and simply conflate the two and assume the reader knows what I’m talking about. So yeah, not great writing haha.
To be clear, in the post when I speak of naturalism I am referring to the belief that the natural order is all there is to reality. Nothing exists beyond the natural realm.
Materialism, on the other hand, is a subset of naturalism. Materialism affirms naturalism, but also asserts that only the material exists and therefore, the platonic universals I was advocating for in the article cannot exist.
A naturalist can agree with me that platonic universals like goodness, numbers, etc. are all real, but disagree with me that these things are rooted in God. They could simply say that they are aspects of the natural order, no transcendent unmoved mover required. This can get you closer to actual meaning under an atheistic worldview, but it also creates other major problems, one of which is this absurd coincidence that our consciousness just so happens to be able to interpret these real concepts despite consciousness arising from blind evolutionary forces. Naturalism has a big problem there.
The materialist naturalist, though, would say things like goodness, justice, numbers, triangularity, etc. are all fictions in the mind of the conscious being. They don’t actually exist in any concrete sense.
Either way, I think both of these are metaphysical positions, or maybe you could say ideological or philosophical positions, because neither are something that you can determine through a testable scientific method. The same goes for theism. They’re all metaphysical (or above the realm of the physical) positions for reality as a whole. You can’t do science for them. You can only reason toward them.
With all of that said, my problem is that all too often a materialist evolutionary psychologist will first assume his ‘materialism’ and then do ‘science’ around that presupposition by creating complex stories to explain how and why we developed these fictitious concepts such as goodness, moral truths, and beauty and so on — because they need them to not exist in the real platonic sense for materialism to be true. (This can also end up being a big Genetic Fallacy). To me this is not much different than the Creation Scientist who develops a theory of how the speed of light was faster than it is now during a time subsequent a version of the big bang because he needs the universe to be roughly 6,000 years old. It’s pseudoscience to justify a metaphysical claim.
I hope that clears things up but if not please do not hesitate to ask for more clarification. Also, sorry I’m so longwinded.
