Naturalistic Worldview

The naturalistic worldview (a.k.a. metaphysical naturalism and scientific materialism) is a philosophical worldview, according to which there is nothing beyond natural elements, principles, and relations, such as those studied by natural sciences. In other words, there neither exist nor could exist any entities which lie, in principle, beyond the scope of scientific explanation. Hence, the naturalistic worldview, in itself, says absolutely nothing about the beginning or an end of the world. For example, easily the most famous scientific materialist of the ancient world was Democritus (460 – 360 BC), who thought that everything is a product of atoms moving, colliding, and sticking together in empty space (Stumpf, 1975). Moreover, Democritus thought that instead of being created at some point in time, the atoms were eternal (Stumpf, 1975); which would suggest that Democritus did not believe that the world can have a beginning or an end.          

References

Stumpf, S. E. (1975). Socrates to Sartre: A history of philosophy (2^nd ed.). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.