Wright once said, “I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.” The case of nature religion suggests that many people place nature alongside science and religion as an important authority—think of, for instance, how much we tend to trust products that are natural, the ways many people regard nature as a source of spiritual insight, or the notion that a society based on the principles of nature would be in much better condition than it is now.
These notions build upon long-standing historical traditions: the tradition of natural law—descending at least from Saint Thomas Aquinas of the thirteenth century and arguably reaching back to Aristotle—in which standards of morality are related to the nature of the world and of humans, and the rather different tradition of naturalism, which regards nature as a substitute for God in explaining physical and human reality nature is an elusive and abstract category, perhaps more of a subliminal authority.
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