Battlegrounds of Natural History: Actualism

Actualism is a fundamental assumption of secular natural history. It replaced the Christian view of causality through providence, and it asserted an absolute physicochemical and geological continuity. Though often confused with uniformity and uniformitarianism due to secular obfuscation, actualism, at root, is a method of geology that limits historical processes and events to observed present-day causes. Actualism fails as an absolute explanation of historical causality: it cannot be precisely defined, it surreptitiously assumes unjustified metaphysical positions, and its secular formulations fail logical and empirical truth tests. Only when justified as a contingent manifestation of providence does it avoid these problems. However, that formulation is of little help in deciphering the rock record, because it was largely shaped by nonactualistic discontinuities. of natural history (Figure 1). Having addressed the first, naturalism (Reed and Williams, 2011), this paper addresses the second, actualism. Actualism emerged from the optimistic idea of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that science (modeled after Newtonian physics) could unlock Earth’s past. But today’s climate is different. Christians object to its underlying materialist philosophy, and atheist philosophers, who have embraced postmodern relativism, object to its presumed positivism. This situation reinforces the necessity of assessing fundamental assumptions and methods—all serious intellectual battlegrounds. Errors here have led to many misconceptions. The solution lies in a reevaluation of basic axioms. Some creationists have begun this task (Klevberg, 1999; Lisle, 2009; Reed, 2001; Reed et al., 2004; Reed and Williams, 2011), but much remains to be done. Delayed and weak efforts in this work have resulted in (1) fuzzy positivism, (2) “methodological” naturalism, and (3) “scientific” history. Although positivism as a philosophical school is defunct, its spirit lives on in the smug superiority of today’s science. Methodological naturalism is an unnecessary accretion * John K. Reed PhD, Evans, Georgia, [email protected] Emmett L. Williams PhD (1934–2011), Alpharetta, GA Accepted for publication April 2, 2011 Creation Research Society Quarterly 2012. 49:135–152.