Day 2 Notes on Heaven: Naturalism

"Another source of our misconceptions about Heaven:  naturalism--the belief that the world can be understood in scientific terms, without recourse to spiritual or supernatural explanations."--C.S. Lewis

Naturalism is where my sinful, human brain wants me to go to explain the reason for life...for everything.  I love science and much science is founded on principles based on that which we can see, feel, touch, experiment and reason with.  Going out of the bounds of my senses, can feel like I am moving away from the concrete and toward the imaginary.  This of course is a dangerous way to reason because it says that if I cannot see God, touch Him, experience Him, etc, then He is not real but imaginary.  There are many things far away from my sight or experiences in life, but just because I cannot see them doesn't mean they don't exist.  I could never leave Minnesota and think that the world ended beyond the state lines.  I could think that because I have never seen a mountain in this state that they couldn't exist somewhere else.  This of course is fallasy.  So too is our thinking on heaven.  Many times it is easy to think heaven doesn't exist because I cannot imagine a place with life apart from what I know.  Here are my notes on naturalism that have helped me and hopefully help you too.  (Again, notes taken primarily from Scripture and Randy Alcorn's book on Heaven).

*The essence of naturalism--whatever they cannot perceive with their senses must be imaginary.
*The blind must take by faith that there are stars in the sky.  If they depend on their ability to see, they will conclude there are no stars.
*We are not designed to live in a non-physical realm (we are incapable of even imagining such a place).
*We are not (as Plato supposed) merely spiritual beings temporarily encased in bodies.

1 Corinthians 2:9-13
We can know what God prepares for us--God has revealed it to us by His Spirit
Colossians 3:1
God commands us to set our hearts and minds on Heaven (--not divert our attention from it because we believe in our misguided thoughts of Heaven).

"Most of us find it very difficult to want Heaven at all--except in so far as Heaven means meeting again our friends who have died.  One reason for this difficulty is that we have not been trained:  our whole education tends to fix our minds on this world.  Another reason is that when the real want for Heaven is present in us, we do not recognize it."--C.S. Lewis