ABSTRACT
Whether willingly or unwillingly, virtually all people interact with institutions. Nowadays it is commonplace especially in Western cultures to encounter attitudes that are disinterested, dismissive, or openly antagonistic towards religious institutions. The fact that certain ideas may tend to support certain values is, of course, no sufficient reason for believing that those ideas are true. It would not be a sound argument to advocate one type of religious naturalism over others merely because that type is deemed to be well-suited to religious purposes. The reconstruction of religious beliefs, however, is primarily intellectual in character. The concept of nature took on new preciseness because of the work of Isaac Newton, whose mathematical treatment of objects both terrestrial and astronomical led to the notion that the total causal matrix of the universe can be explained solely in terms of the efficient causes.
