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Frank Visser, graduated as a psychologist of culture and religion, founded IntegralWorld in 1997. He worked as production manager for various publishing houses and as service manager for various internet companies and lives in Amsterdam. Books: Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion (SUNY, 2003), and The Corona Conspiracy: Combatting Disinformation about the Coronavirus (Kindle, 2020).

The Return of the Sacred

A Critical Look at Spiritual and Sacred Naturalism

Frank Visser / ChatGPT

Introduction: The search for a new spirituality

Something interesting is happening at the intersection of science, philosophy, ecology, and spirituality. Increasingly, thinkers who no longer accept traditional religious supernaturalism are nevertheless reluctant to embrace a purely secular, disenchanted worldview. They want to recover something that religion historically provided: a sense of wonder, belonging, purpose, moral orientation, and participation in a reality larger than the individual self.

This search has acquired several names: spiritual naturalism, religious naturalism, sacred naturalism, and, more recently, metamodern spirituality. Although these approaches differ considerably, they share a common ambition: to recover the meaningful and transformative dimensions of religious experience without returning to supernatural explanations.

Nature, rather than God conceived as a supernatural person, becomes the ultimate context of human existence. Evolution replaces divine creation, cosmology replaces sacred history, ecological interdependence replaces supernatural providence, and human consciousness becomes a natural phenomenon through which the universe acquires the capacity to reflect upon itself.

There is much to appreciate in this development. The traditional opposition between scientific understanding and religious sensibility was never entirely necessary. One can be scientifically literate, philosophically naturalistic, and profoundly moved by the existence of the universe.

But there is also a problem. In attempting to restore the sacred, some contemporary advocates seem unwilling to accept the full implications of their own naturalism. They reject supernaturalism while retaining much of its vocabulary, metaphysical ambition, and explanatory function.

The central question is therefore not whether nature can inspire spiritual feelings. Obviously it can. The question is whether the language of the sacred, transcendence, cosmic purpose, and spiritual evolution adds genuine understanding to our naturalistic worldview—or merely reintroduces religious assumptions under more contemporary terminology.

1. From religious naturalism to sacred naturalism

Religious naturalism is not a new invention. Its intellectual genealogy includes figures such as Baruch Spinoza, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Dewey, and more recent philosophers and theologians who have sought to reconcile religious sensibility with a naturalistic understanding of reality.

Its contemporary appeal is understandable. Many people have abandoned conventional religious institutions without abandoning their need for meaning, community, ritual, and existential orientation.

The distinction between rejecting supernaturalism and rejecting everything traditionally associated with religion is important. A naturalist need not regard awe, reverence, gratitude, contemplation, or ethical commitment as irrational simply because these experiences have historically been cultivated in religious settings.

Indeed, one of the strongest arguments for religious naturalism is that it takes human religious experience seriously without automatically accepting the metaphysical explanations traditionally attached to it.

The recent revival of this discussion is visible in several developments. Wayne Mellinger's work on Dionysian religious naturalism seeks to develop a more embodied, ecological, ritualistic, and communal form of naturalistic religion. The Religious Naturalist Association has been exploring how such a worldview might develop into an actual living tradition rather than remain an intellectual orientation.

In September 2025, John Bishop and Ken Perszyk published Religious Naturalism through Cambridge University Press. They defend an expansive naturalism that seeks to accommodate religious ideals, ecological morality, and human fulfilment while maintaining that the natural world is the only concrete reality.

These developments suggest that religious naturalism is becoming more intellectually organized and increasingly interested in practical expressions of spirituality.

The important question, however, is what exactly is being added to naturalism.

2. The problem of making nature sacred

Calling nature sacred can mean several different things.

It can mean that nature deserves our respect, that ecosystems possess value beyond their immediate usefulness to human beings, that life is astonishingly complex, or that our existence is embedded in evolutionary and ecological processes that vastly exceed our individual concerns.

All these meanings are defensible.

But sacredness can also be understood as an intrinsic metaphysical property of the universe, something that exists independently of human attitudes and gives nature a special ontological status.

Here the philosophical problems begin.

What makes nature sacred in this stronger sense? Is sacredness an objective feature of the universe, comparable to mass, energy, or biological organization? Or is it a human evaluative response to the natural world?

These are not equivalent propositions.

If sacredness is a human response, it can be explained through evolutionary psychology, cultural development, emotional attachment, and the human capacity for symbolic representation. Such an explanation does not diminish its importance.

If sacredness is instead an objective property of the cosmos, its existence requires an argument. Merely describing nature as sacred does not establish that it possesses a metaphysical quality beyond the natural phenomena we already understand.

There is a danger here of moving unnoticed from an ethical or existential statement to an ontological one.

We should not confuse the claim that nature deserves reverence with the claim that the universe itself possesses a spiritual dimension.

The first can be defended without the second.

3. The metamodern reconstruction of spirituality

One particularly interesting development is the attempt to reconstruct spirituality through metamodernism.

Metamodern thinkers generally seek to move beyond what they regard as the limitations of modernist reductionism and postmodernist deconstruction. They want to recover meaning, depth, transcendence, and shared purpose without simply restoring premodern religious beliefs.

Brendan Graham Dempsey has become an important representative of this tendency. His work explores the reconstruction of spirituality after postmodernism, including new conceptions of the sacred, participatory meaning-making, and evolutionary approaches to religious imagination.

In March 2026, Dempsey published an academic paper in the journal Religions, entitled "Towards a Metamodern Theology: The DEPTH Model."

The model stands for developmental, emergent, participatory theology of harmonization. Its ambition is to reconcile elements of traditional theism with modern and postmodern insights, proposing a conception of God that is both immanent and mutable but also ontologically real.

This is an ambitious project. It recognizes that simply dismissing religion as an outdated collection of supernatural beliefs leaves important existential and cultural questions unanswered.

Nevertheless, the appeal to emergence and participation needs careful examination.

Emergence is a legitimate concept in contemporary science. Complex properties and patterns can arise from interactions among simpler components. Biological organization, consciousness, and social institutions are frequently discussed in emergentist terms.

But emergence does not automatically establish cosmic purpose, divine creativity, or spiritual intentionality.

The fact that higher-order organization emerges from lower-level processes does not demonstrate that the universe is directed toward increasingly meaningful or spiritually significant outcomes.

Nor does human participation in the construction of meaning establish that meaning is an objective property of cosmic evolution.

Metamodern theology risks conflating three distinct developments: the emergence of complexity in nature, the emergence of consciousness and cultural meaning, and the human interpretation of these developments as expressions of a larger spiritual purpose.

They may be related, but they are not interchangeable.

4. The return of cosmic purpose

One of the most consequential developments in contemporary sacred naturalism is the renewed interest in cosmic purpose.

For a long time, scientific naturalism was associated with a universe without inherent direction. Evolution had no predetermined destination, biological complexity emerged through natural processes, and humanity was not the intended culmination of cosmic history.

This picture has increasingly become unsatisfactory to some spiritual naturalists.

They want to retain evolutionary science while recovering a sense of directionality. The universe is no longer merely a sequence of physical events but a developing whole in which increasing complexity, consciousness, cooperation, and eventually spirituality represent significant developments.

There is nothing wrong with recognizing historical patterns of increasing complexity under particular conditions. The evolution of stars, galaxies, planetary systems, living organisms, nervous systems, and human societies provides an extraordinary story of cosmic development.

The difficulty begins when descriptive patterns are interpreted as evidence of an overarching purpose.

Three propositions need to be distinguished:

1. Complexity has increased in certain domains of cosmic and biological evolution.
2. Some evolutionary developments have produced increasingly sophisticated forms of information processing, cognition, and social organization.
3. The universe is intrinsically oriented toward consciousness, spiritual realization, or some ultimate form of wholeness.

The first two propositions have substantial scientific support, although they require qualifications concerning the particular systems and measures involved. The third is a much stronger metaphysical proposition.

It does not follow from the first two.

This distinction is particularly important when spiritual naturalists invoke complexity science, thermodynamics, self-organization, or evolutionary theory to support their larger worldview.

Scientific theories can explain how order and complexity emerge under particular conditions. They do not automatically establish that the universe wants to produce consciousness, that evolution has a spiritual destination, or that humanity participates in a cosmic project.

The vocabulary of emergence can easily become a substitute for the older vocabulary of divine providence.

Where traditional religion spoke of God's plan, contemporary spiritual naturalism sometimes speaks of cosmic creativity, evolutionary intentionality, or the universe's self-transcendence.

The terminology has changed, but the explanatory burden remains.

5. Eros, creativity, and the problem of spiritualized evolution

This issue is particularly familiar from the work of Ken Wilber.

Wilber's evolutionary spirituality proposes that evolution is not adequately explained by conventional mechanisms such as mutation and natural selection. He introduces Eros as an intrinsic cosmic impulse toward greater depth, complexity, and consciousness.

In his more recent formulations, particularly Finding Radical Wholeness (2024), Eros is presented not merely as a metaphor for evolutionary creativity but as an actual force of self-organization and self-transcendence.

This is an important example of the temptation facing sacred naturalism.

There is an understandable desire to interpret the evolutionary history of the universe as something more meaningful than a succession of contingent physical events. But introducing a cosmic force of creativity does not solve the explanatory problem unless its existence and operation can be independently established.

What does Eros actually explain?

If it means that complex systems sometimes organize themselves into more elaborate structures, then it is unnecessary as an additional causal principle. We already have scientific accounts of many such processes.

If it means that nature possesses an intrinsic tendency toward higher forms of consciousness, then evidence is required that distinguishes this hypothesis from ordinary evolutionary processes.

And if it is invoked whenever complexity, novelty, or consciousness appears, it risks becoming an all-purpose explanation that cannot be independently tested.

The same problem applies to expressions such as cosmic creativity, evolutionary spirituality, and the universe awakening to itself.

These expressions may have considerable poetic and existential appeal. But poetry should not be mistaken for an explanatory mechanism.

A naturalistic spirituality would benefit from acknowledging that evolution is both creative and destructive, both constructive and wasteful, and sometimes produces complexity only to eliminate it again.

Extinction is as much a part of evolutionary history as the emergence of consciousness. There is no established scientific reason to regard the latter as the predetermined objective of the former.

A genuinely naturalistic spirituality should be able to embrace this contingency without inventing an invisible principle to guarantee a meaningful direction.

6. Spirituality as experience rather than metaphysics

There is, however, a much stronger direction in which spiritual naturalism could develop.

Instead of trying to establish that the universe itself possesses spiritual properties, it could concentrate on the actual human experiences traditionally described as spiritual.

These include awe before nature, the dissolution of ordinary self-centeredness, profound aesthetic experience, contemplative attention, compassion, ecological belonging, and the transformation of one's priorities.

Such experiences are real, even if their traditional supernatural interpretations are mistaken.

Neuroscience, psychology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology can investigate their origins, functions, and consequences. Such explanations do not necessarily undermine their existential significance.

Understanding why music moves us does not make music less beautiful. Understanding the neurological mechanisms of love does not make love an illusion. Likewise, explaining the psychological and evolutionary foundations of religious experience does not make the experience itself worthless.

This suggests an important distinction between spirituality as a mode of human experience and spirituality as a theory about the ultimate structure of reality.

The former can be developed within naturalism without much difficulty. The latter requires considerably more philosophical work.

The distinction also helps clarify the meaning of transcendence.

One can transcend one's ordinary ego, personal interests, immediate concerns, and limited perspective without transcending nature itself.

A person who experiences profound unity with the natural world need not conclude that consciousness has entered a supernatural dimension or that an invisible spiritual reality has revealed itself.

The experience may be psychologically transformative without being metaphysically revelatory.

This is perhaps the most promising possibility for a naturalistic spirituality: recovering the depth of human experience without turning that experience into evidence for an additional cosmic ontology.

7. Ritual, community, and the institutional problem

Another recent development is the recognition that naturalistic spirituality cannot remain an exclusively intellectual enterprise.

Traditional religions have never consisted solely of doctrines about God or the afterlife. They have provided rituals, celebrations, mourning practices, communal identities, ethical commitments, and shared narratives.

Naturalistic alternatives need to address these functions if they want to become more than philosophical positions adopted by isolated individuals.

Wayne Mellinger's Dionysian religious naturalism is particularly interesting in this respect. It explores how ritual, ecstatic experience, artistic expression, ecological awareness, and communal practices might contribute to a naturalistic religious culture.

Similarly, the Spiritual Naturalist Society has been developing an increasingly explicit understanding of spiritual naturalism as a lived orientation rather than simply a philosophical definition.

Its September 2026 Convergence gathering, entitled "Beyond 'What Is Spiritual Naturalism?'," illustrates this shift. The emphasis is moving from explaining the concept toward exploring how it can be practiced and embodied.

This is a sensible development.

But it raises another question: does naturalistic spirituality really need to become a new religion?

It certainly needs opportunities for community, reflection, celebration, and shared ethical commitment. Yet the institutionalization of these activities does not necessarily require religious language or religious authority.

Environmental organizations, philosophical societies, secular humanist communities, artistic movements, and contemplative groups already provide many of these possibilities.

The challenge is not simply to reproduce religious institutions without supernatural beliefs. It is to discover which functions of religion are genuinely valuable and which are inseparable from its historical baggage.

A naturalistic community should be particularly careful not to replace traditional religious dogmas with new metaphysical orthodoxies.

If a community begins to insist that the universe possesses an intrinsic spiritual direction, that consciousness is the purpose of evolution, or that cosmic creativity is an objective force, it may simply have exchanged one set of unproven beliefs for another.

8. The ecological promise of sacred naturalism

Perhaps the strongest practical argument for sacred naturalism concerns the ecological crisis.

Modern societies have frequently treated nature as an exploitable resource, something external to human interests and available for unlimited economic appropriation.

A spiritual or sacred conception of nature can challenge this attitude.

It can encourage people to recognize their dependence on ecological systems, appreciate the intrinsic value of other forms of life, and understand humanity as one participant in a vastly larger web of biological relationships.

The language of sacredness can be morally productive here.

It can express a commitment that goes beyond calculating the immediate economic benefits of conservation. A forest, a river, or a species may deserve protection even when doing so provides no obvious short-term advantage to human beings.

But once again, we should distinguish the ethical usefulness of a concept from its metaphysical truth.

We do not need to establish that nature possesses a supernatural or cosmic sacredness to justify protecting it.

Ecological interdependence, evolutionary continuity, biodiversity, animal suffering, and the conditions necessary for future human and nonhuman flourishing provide substantial reasons for environmental responsibility.

Indeed, there is a danger that spiritualizing ecological concerns can distract from their material and political dimensions.

Climate change, habitat destruction, pollution, and biodiversity loss are not primarily failures of spiritual consciousness. They are also consequences of economic systems, technological infrastructures, political decisions, consumption patterns, and unequal distributions of power.

A new ecological spirituality may inspire people to act, but it cannot substitute for scientific knowledge, political organization, and institutional reform.

Sacred naturalism will be most convincing when it connects reverence for nature with concrete ecological responsibility rather than treating spiritual transformation as a solution in itself.

9. The danger of conceptual inflation

One recurring weakness of contemporary spiritual naturalism is its tendency to accumulate concepts without sufficiently clarifying their meaning.

Words such as sacred, transcendence, emergence, participation, depth, wholeness, and cosmic creativity are attractive because they evoke dimensions of experience that conventional scientific language does not necessarily capture.

But their evocative power can also conceal conceptual confusion.

Consider the word transcendence. Does it mean going beyond one's ordinary psychological limitations? Developing more inclusive moral perspectives? Discovering previously unknown dimensions of nature? Or participating in a cosmic reality that transcends the physical universe?

These are radically different claims.

Likewise, what does it mean to say that the universe is becoming conscious of itself? It can be a poetic description of the emergence of human consciousness through evolution. But it can also suggest that the universe possesses some kind of overarching subjectivity or purpose.

The first proposition is uncontroversial. The second requires a substantial philosophical argument.

The same applies to the language of participation. Humans undoubtedly participate in the creation of meaning, culture, and values. But does this participation reveal an objective cosmic purpose, or are we projecting our own aspirations onto the evolutionary process?

The danger is that spiritual naturalism may become a collection of suggestive metaphors that are never translated into sufficiently precise philosophical propositions.

This is particularly problematic when its advocates claim to have overcome the limitations of both scientific reductionism and traditional religion.

Overcoming reductionism does not require embracing metaphysical speculation. Recognizing that human experience cannot be adequately described at the level of elementary physics does not establish the existence of spiritual forces or cosmic intentions.

There are many levels of natural reality, from physical and chemical processes to biological organization, consciousness, culture, and civilization. Recognizing their relative autonomy and complexity is entirely compatible with naturalism.

We should not confuse an enriched understanding of nature with an expansion of nature into an undefined spiritual domain.

10. What about secular humanism?

There is an alternative that deserves more attention in these discussions: secular humanism.

Humanism has long attempted to address precisely the questions that motivate contemporary spiritual naturalism.

How do we construct meaningful lives without supernatural guarantees? How do we develop ethical commitments without divine commandments? How do we cultivate wonder, solidarity, creativity, and compassion without assuming that the universe has a predetermined purpose?

These questions do not require religious answers.

Human beings are meaning-making animals. We construct narratives, develop moral frameworks, establish communities, create works of art, and pursue projects that extend beyond our individual lifetimes.

Our values are human achievements, but that does not make them arbitrary or insignificant.

We can value biodiversity because we understand the evolutionary history of life. We can defend human dignity because we recognize the capacities and vulnerabilities of conscious beings. We can appreciate the cosmos because scientific knowledge has revealed its extraordinary history.

And we can experience existential wonder without interpreting that wonder as evidence of a hidden spiritual dimension.

This is not necessarily a less profound worldview.

Indeed, there is something intellectually attractive about accepting that the universe does not owe us a purpose, while recognizing that we nevertheless have the capacity and responsibility to create meaningful lives.

The absence of cosmic guarantees need not produce nihilism. It can produce maturity.

Secular humanism also avoids a particular problem facing religious naturalism: the temptation to make the universe responsible for supplying the meaning that human beings themselves must create.

Nature provides the conditions of our existence. It does not necessarily provide a moral instruction manual.

This distinction should not be regarded as a limitation. It is an invitation to take human responsibility seriously.

11. Towards a more rigorous naturalistic spirituality

What would a philosophically defensible spiritual naturalism look like?

First, it would take scientific naturalism seriously. It would not introduce additional cosmic forces, purposes, or levels of reality merely because existing scientific explanations seem existentially unsatisfying.

Second, it would distinguish clearly between empirical discoveries, philosophical interpretations, and existential commitments. A scientific account of self-organization is not automatically evidence for cosmic creativity. The emergence of consciousness does not establish that consciousness is the universe's ultimate purpose.

Third, it would acknowledge the evolutionary contingency of human existence. We are extraordinary products of natural history, but there is no established reason to believe that evolution was directed toward producing us.

Fourth, it would take spiritual experiences seriously without assuming that their traditional metaphysical interpretations are correct. Awe, transcendence, mystical unity, and self-transformation are legitimate subjects for scientific and philosophical investigation.

Fifth, it would develop ethical and ecological commitments that translate reverence for nature into practical action.

Finally, it would remain open to uncertainty. A naturalistic worldview should not replace the certainties of traditional religion with equally confident declarations about cosmic purpose, universal consciousness, or evolutionary destiny.

Its intellectual strength should lie precisely in its willingness to distinguish what we know, what we reasonably infer, and what we merely hope.

Conclusion: Nature needs no supernatural embellishment

The contemporary revival of spiritual and sacred naturalism addresses a genuine cultural and philosophical need.

Many people want something more than a mechanistic description of the universe. They want to experience their existence as meaningful, to recover a sense of belonging to the natural world, and to develop ethical commitments that extend beyond individual self-interest.

These are worthwhile aspirations.

But we should be careful about how we pursue them.

The rejection of supernatural religion does not automatically require the reconstruction of religion through an enlarged metaphysics of nature. Nor does the recognition of evolution, complexity, emergence, and consciousness require us to attribute cosmic intentions to the universe.

There is a considerable difference between finding nature sacred and claiming that nature itself operates according to a spiritual principle.

The first is a potentially profound human attitude. The second is a metaphysical hypothesis requiring evidence and argument.

This distinction is particularly important for the emerging metamodern spirituality movement, which sometimes appears eager to recover everything that modernity and postmodernity supposedly discarded: transcendence, depth, purpose, myth, participation, and the sacred.

But perhaps some of these things were discarded for good reasons. The task is not to restore them wholesale under a naturalistic label. It is to determine which aspects can survive critical scrutiny.

There is no need to choose between a spiritually impoverished scientism and a scientifically embellished religion.

We can acknowledge that the universe is astonishing without claiming that it is trying to astonish us. We can celebrate evolution without assuming that it has a destination. We can experience transcendence without leaving nature. And we can regard life as precious without believing that the cosmos itself has assigned it a sacred purpose.

Perhaps the most mature form of naturalistic spirituality would therefore be one that gives up the ambition to make the universe religious again.

Nature is already extraordinary. Its history is sufficiently remarkable without the addition of invisible spiritual forces, cosmic intentions, or metaphysical guarantees.

The real challenge is not to discover a supernatural meaning hidden inside nature, but to develop the human capacities through which we can recognize, appreciate, understand, and responsibly inhabit the natural world.

That may not satisfy those who want a new cosmic religion. But it could provide something more valuable: a spirituality that does not have to compromise its intellectual honesty.