Sean Carroll and poetic naturalism

Sean Carroll is the most articulate philosophical naturalist working today. The Big Picture (2016) defends "poetic naturalism," the view that physics describes everything that exists and that meaning, value, and ethics are constructed by minds rather than discovered in the cosmos.

The Christian engagement does not deny the rigour of Carroll's framework. It points to four pressures: the question begging at the foundation (Carroll defines reality in physicalist terms before defending the move), the Bayesian method cuts both ways (the prior is doing all the work), the constructed morality position cannot ground moral obligation, and the "many ways of talking" move dodges the hard problem of consciousness.

Where Carroll is right and apologists should concede: arguments from gaps in current physics are weak; apologetics that tie God to outdated cosmology damages itself when the cosmology updates.

Carroll's framework is internally coherent and serious. The site does not claim to refute it, only that the data favours theism on the same Bayesian terms Carroll accepts in form.

Reading

• Sean Carroll, The Big Picture, 2016.
• Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God, 2017.
• David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God, 2013.
• David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 1996.