Scientific naturalism

Scientific naturalism is the view that reality consists entirely of the natural world accessible to scientific inquiry. It treats scientific methods as the best route to knowledge about that world.

Metaphysical naturalism: The view that everything that exists is part of the natural world, with no supernatural entities. It states the ontological commitment that scientific naturalism adopts.
Theism: Belief in at least one god or deity. Theism commonly posits a divine reality that scientific naturalism excludes.
Enlightenment: An eighteenth-century intellectual movement emphasizing reason, criticism, and inquiry into nature and society. Its confidence in rational inquiry helped establish natural explanations as intellectual ideals.
Physicalism: The view that everything is physical or depends entirely on the physical. It is a prominent naturalist account of what ultimately exists.
Hard problem of consciousness: The problem of explaining why physical processes are accompanied by subjective experience. It challenges accounts that aim to explain minds entirely through natural processes.
Methodological naturalism: The rule that scientific explanations invoke natural causes, without deciding whether supernatural entities exist. It limits scientific method without making the stronger claim about all reality.
Deism: The belief that a creator made the universe but does not intervene in it. Deism allows a supernatural origin while often accepting natural laws afterward.
Charles Darwin: The English naturalist whose theory of evolution by natural selection transformed biology. Evolution offered a powerful account of biological complexity without special creation.
Philosophy of mind: The philosophical study of consciousness, thought, perception, and their relation to the body. Naturalism asks how mental life can arise within the natural world.
Explanatory gap: The apparent gap between physical descriptions of brain activity and explanations of subjective experience. It marks a persistent difficulty for naturalist theories of consciousness.

Linked from 10 pages