The Religious Availability of Philosophical Naturalism
For Whom is it Relevant?
“This book embraces philosophical naturalism—the belief that nature is all there is and that there is no supernatural realm or supernatural type of influence.”
So writes David Conner of his new book, Physics, Information, and Meaning. His claim is not that nature is static, unsurprising, or disenchanted. It is not mechanisic. To the contrary, nature is a creative organic whole within which we live and move and have our being. He understands God as “the total cosmic matrix” of nature itself rather than as a supernatural agent outside nature.
As I pick up the book, reading its endorsements, the publisher's description, and the excerpts below. I find myself asking some demographic and linguistic questions.
Who might drawn to such a vision? What are their ages, genders, classes, and ethnicities? What do they mean by nature, God, and the supernatural? And how might those words resonate differently across religious traditions, cultures, and generations?
I am especially interested in the demographic questions. Down the street from me in one direction lives a biochemist who is deeply interested in whether, and how, religion can be reconciled with science. She wonders whether religious ideas can be credible in a world understood through chemistry, biology, physics, and evolutionary theory. Can purpose, value, consciousness, and religious experience be understood as real features of nature rather than as illusions or supernatural additions to it? Can belief in God be reformulated without contradicting scientific knowledge? And can science help us rethink inherited religious ideas without explaining away everything that religious people find meaningful?
Down the street in another direction lives a musician who loves to speak of the supernatural dimensions of religious life. The whole idea of religion without supernaturalism would not appeal to him at all. By supernatural, however, he does not mean interventions by an otherworldly power. He means touches of transcendence experienced while listening to music—moments of beauty, mystery, and wonder that seem to exceed ordinary categories.
Both may be receptive to Conner’s vision, even though they approach it through different experiences and use different vocabularies. The biochemist asks whether religion can be intellectually credible in a scientific age. The musician asks whether language shaped by science can still honor experiences of mystery and transcendence.
There is one other group I think about as I pick up Conner’s book. It consists neither of biochemists seeking a reconciliation of religion and science nor of musicians who use supernatural as a poetic name for touches of transcendence. It consists of billions of ordinary people, from many cultures and walks of life, who believe in a supernatural God with a will and purposes of God’s own—a God who hears prayers, offers guidance, acts in history, and sometimes intervenes in miraculous ways. I am thinking especially of religious Jews, Christians, and Muslims. For many, belief in supernatural revelation and presence is more than an abstract doctrine. It is a lived source of hope, courage, consolation, moral direction, and communal identity.
How might they respond to Conner’s proposal? Would they find his “total cosmic matrix” an illuminating way of understanding God, or would it seem to leave out the divine agency and personal presence central to their faith? Might some embrace his vision while continuing to pray to a God who listens and responds? Might others regard philosophical naturalism as incompatible with what they most deeply believe and experience?
Any demographic inquiry into religious naturalism must consider this immense and internally diverse population, including the many people whose religious lives are shaped by science but who still believe in a God who acts with purposes of God’s own.
Interestingly, as shown by the pioneering work of Chad Bahl and Thomas Oord, process theology influenced by Whitehead can support such a view. Drawing partly on another process thinker, David Ray Griffin, Bahl and Oord develop what they call “process naturalism.” Like Conner, they reject supernaturalism. As they make clear, process theology understands God as natural rather than supernatural—as a supreme expression of nature, organically conceived, rather than an exception to it. God has purposes, responds to creatures, receives their experiences, and acts in every moment by offering possibilities for healing, creativity, and life
This God does not intervene by suspending natural laws or exercising unilateral control. Divine action takes the form of persuasion rather than coercion: an inwardly felt lure toward possibilities that creatures remain free to accept, resist, or partly realize. Process theology therefore offers a position between classical supernaturalism and strictly non-theistic naturalism. It can affirm a personal and purposive God who acts within nature, even while questioning images of miraculous intervention from outside the natural order.
Whether this view belongs within philosopical naturalism depends, of course, on how broadly we define nature. It also depends on whether the very word "supernatural" can have different meanings in different contexts. Surely the word "supernatural" can be used by some as a way of naming the sometimes amazing influence of a personal God in the world.
These are the questions I bring with me as I pick up Conner’s book: For whom is the book written? Who is its audience? For whom are “philosophical naturalism” and “religious naturalism” available, persuasive, and inspiring options?
These are not primarily questions of truth. They are questions of relevance. Implicitly, they are also an appeal for flexibility in our use of language and for sensitivity to the different experiences, needs, and vocabularies people bring to religious life. Language that liberates one person may alienate another. The word naturalism may reassure the biochemist, while supernatural may speak more deeply to the musician or the person who prays to a purposive God. The challenge is to listen carefully enough to understand what people mean by their words before deciding where they agree or disagree.
- Jay McDaniel, 9/18/2026
Physics, Information, and Meaning
"What is the essence of life? Human experience can be viewed as a series of choices, purposive activities, and emotional states. Even our most trivial actions are prompted by some goal.
Our experience also includes emotions—joy, sadness, pleasure, anxiety, and so on. Even boredom is a type of emotion. But what is the meaning of all this? Those who know anything about science are likely familiar with the idea that reality is based ultimately on particles and physical forces. Modern scientific worldviews seem to offer no explanation for decisions, goals, feelings, and meanings.
This book argues against the materialistic-mechanistic-reductionistic response to science. Physics itself—especially special relativity and quantum mechanics—can be interpreted in ways that support, rather than negate, humanity’s experience of choices, values, and meanings. The process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and others is introduced as a useful tool. However, Whitehead’s thought is presented not as a preexisting philosophy that is imported to the interpretation of science, but as a set of ideas that Whitehead derived from his own knowledge of relativity and quantum theory. The book’s final two chapters offer ideas about religion that are compatiblewith the worldview that has been described."
Our experience also includes emotions—joy, sadness, pleasure, anxiety, and so on. Even boredom is a type of emotion. But what is the meaning of all this? Those who know anything about science are likely familiar with the idea that reality is based ultimately on particles and physical forces. Modern scientific worldviews seem to offer no explanation for decisions, goals, feelings, and meanings.
This book argues against the materialistic-mechanistic-reductionistic response to science. Physics itself—especially special relativity and quantum mechanics—can be interpreted in ways that support, rather than negate, humanity’s experience of choices, values, and meanings. The process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and others is introduced as a useful tool. However, Whitehead’s thought is presented not as a preexisting philosophy that is imported to the interpretation of science, but as a set of ideas that Whitehead derived from his own knowledge of relativity and quantum theory. The book’s final two chapters offer ideas about religion that are compatiblewith the worldview that has been described."
Excerpts from Physics, Information, and Meaning
The aim of this book is to describe the physical world in such a way as to show that physical nature is the source of goals, purposes, valuation, and meaning. In what follows, nature in its entirety is understood as holistic and organismic. The source of nature’s complexity and holism is depicted not as some supernatural Being or spiritual principle. Rather, nature is said to be all there is. There is no supernatural source behind or beyond the universe. On the other hand, nature does turn out to be a great deal more creative and complex than the reductionistic, mechanistic conception of particles and forces to which modern science has often limited its attention. Instead, the premise of this book is that science itself—particularly special relativity and quantum mechanics—points to the principles upon which holism and meaning are based.
David E. Conner, Physics, Information, and Meaning: How Nature Creates Complexity, Purpose, and Values (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2026).
In this chapter and in chapter 3 I develop several ideas pertaining to two topics: the nature of matter and the nature of information. These two chapters serve as a prelude to our consideration of two subjects: the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. The claim that relativity and quantum theory can and should inform our thinking about the humanities and the social sciences may seem odd, but it is based on three underlying postulates. The first is that, from a philosophical standpoint, relativity and quantum mechanics are not merely an update or an addendum to prior science, as they have sometimes been understood. Rather, relativity and quantum mechanics call upon us to adopt an entirely new understanding of reality—a profoundly innovative worldview or metaphysics. Parenthetically it should be noted that in this book metaphysics does not refer to the counter-rational ideas of the New Age movement but to the area of philosophy dealing with the analysis of reality and the basic principles of existence. Metaphysics is regarded as one of the four main branches of philosophy, the other three being epistemology, ethics, and logic. Since this book embraces philosophical naturalism—the belief that nature is all there is and that there is no supernatural realm or supernatural type of influence—when I use the word metaphysics, the word cosmology can usually be substituted, if cosmology is understood in the philosophical sense and not as a subject of specialized study in astronomy. The second postulate is that relativity and quantum mechanics require us to discard, once and for all, the age-old notion of matter. Of course the traditional concept of matter continues to have practical value in many settings, but as a key to understanding the nature of reality, matter must be abandoned.
David E. Conner, Physics, Information, and Meaning: How Nature Creates Complexity, Purpose, and Values (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2026).
Endorsements for Physics, Information, and Meaning
“In Physics, Information, and Meaning, David Conner provides a compelling alternative to the mechanistic materialism that pervades modern scientific theories and erects artificial divisions between matter and mind, particles and purposes, empirical facts and personal meanings, natural history and human history. Drawing on experiments in special relativity and quantum mechanics as well as the process philosophies of Heraclitus, Bergson, James, and Whitehead, Conner argues that the physical world is a complex, holistic, and organismic network that traffics in information and is productive of feelings, decisions, goals, and values. Faith, theology, and experiences of the divine also arise naturally in the world. The final two chapters make a vigorous and impassioned case for a religious naturalism, a wholly naturalistic but spiritually evocative vision of reality that hallows the sacred depths of the universe and imagines God not as an anthropomorphic being beyond nature but as the ‘total causal matrix’ of nature itself. This book is a tour de force—and a must-read for anyone interested in nonsupernaturalistic interpretations of religion and nonreductionistic accounts of science.”
—Demian Wheeler, Sophia Associate Professor of Religious and Theological Studies, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities
“Physics and physical science are in a great transition, as the widely accepted paradigm of gravitational cosmology has receded and is being replaced by new models and scientific thinking about the universe. David Conner’s book will be perfect for those who want an accurate, detailed, sophisticated, but not overly technical, picture of how process thinkers and other progressive researchers see the recent changes in contemporary physics and cosmology. For those who see the physical universe as a clue to greater questions of meaning, and deeper concerns of value, this book is a sober and reliable guide to nature, writ large. It is especially relevant to those who want an informed account of how our studies of the natural world should form our thinking about the social, cultural, and philosophical order of our ‘world,’ and not just the universe itself.”
—Randall Auxier, Professor of Philosophy and Communication Studies, Southern Illinois University