Secular naturalism cannot ground gratitude toward nature because nature lacks intention

Evidence

All this, however, brings us back to square one, to the initial problem against which Bardsley has argued. If the natural systems have no bad intentions, then they cannot have good ones either, simply because they cannot have intentions at all; and the absence of any intention is detrimental to the argument in favor of feeling gratitude. We are also back to a dumb nature to which we paradoxically ought to be grateful just on the grounds that it is sustaining us, accidentally. There is no place in Bardsley’s argument, or in any secularist argument that I know of, for a philosophical demonstration that the natural is nonaccidental, that it is a world created, by someone or something, by design. But even if we were to acquire a sense of gratitude despite this impediment (gratitude whose force has undoubtedly been significantly diminished by Bardsley’s argument itself), we would still be showing gratitude to a dumb and stupid entity nonetheless, a stance that in turn considerably diminishes the rationality of our behavior. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 492

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A genuinely dense argument: the secular position that strips nature of intention also strips it of the ground for moral gratitude, producing a paradox where we owe gratitude to a ‘dumb and stupid entity’ — the structural bind is worth sitting with.
• XREF: Connects to Max Weber’s disenchantment of nature and to environmental philosophy debates about intrinsic value vs. intentional design. — connects to: The absence of divine design obliges us to act without hoping for cosmic outcomes — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 16; Enlightenment advances not to liberation but to a mythless compliance with nature. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1384; Honoring wildness requires critical self-consciousness, non-use, and gratitude — William Cronon, The Trouble with Wilderness; or,…, 85