Dr Fiona Ellis: Naturalism and Transcendence

Parallel paper presented at the Heythrop Summer Conference, 'Let Him Easter in Us', 6th July 2018.
Lynne Baker and John Cottingham have expressed reservations about whether any form of naturalism could accommodate the transcendent. Baker claims that if naturalism is true then there is nothing outside the natural world, and hence, that ‘nothing is transcendent’. Cottingham describes my expansive naturalist position as a ‘radical immanentism’. I have argued to the contrary that expansive naturalism can accommodate God, and that this means that naturalism can accommodate the transcendent. I want to spell this out a bit, and to press the question of where this leaves the distinction between my theistic position and John’s.