A Limited Middle Ground

I found Clark’s pragmatic empiricism interesting and a good middle ground between supernaturalism and naturalism. Pragmatic empiricism is the idea to use what is useful and what works. The idea is that naturalism and supernaturalism have too many unrealistic ideas, and that pragmatic empiricism is a medium ground between both worlds. This allows society and humans to agree on what they see and hear which is easier to believe and understand rather than unrealistic ideas. Pragmatic empiricism doesn’t get into explanations of unexplained events and ideas. This is a limited version of a naturalistic view, in comparison of the supernatural world views. Instead of trying to answer everything, pragmatic empiricism answers questions with sensibility.

Pragmatic empiricism is supposed to be a middle ground between naturalism and supernaturalism, but it seems as though this theory supports naturalism more than it does supernaturalism. Clark’s pragmatic empiricism does not give supernaturalism a fair share in his theory. All arguments must relate to this world, according to pragmatic empiricism, which immediately removes the supernatural argument. It is clear that this “middle ground” does not take a fair combination of both naturalism and supernaturalism.

I found it interesting how Clark removed supernaturalism from his pragmatic empiricism theory. I wonder if humans will still have the same morals and ethics as they do now, if supernaturalism was eliminated. It is clear that supernaturalism supplies our society with many morals that we have. Will our government alone be able to provide us with the same moral and ethics that we receive from the supernatural world? But, where do people that do not believe in the supernatural world learn about morals and ethics, from government alone? One could argue that supernaturalism is not the only way that someone can learn about morals because atheists and agnostic people have morals just like people who believe in a supernatural world. But religion has been around since the beginning of history and its fundamental ideas have seeped into governments all over the world. Our government is the perfect example, although some people deny that religion plays a role in our government, this could be where our government gets its foundations for morals and ethics. So because the supernatural world does provide our society with a positive influence, I believe that it should not be completely eliminated in the search for a common ground between supernaturalism and naturalism.