Why Philosophical Materialism Undermines Human Reason
I recently had the displeasure of running across a post on Rod Dreher’s blog where Dreher had made reference to an internet discussion hosted by Stanley Fish of Terry Eagleton’s new book on the silliness of contemporary atheism. Fish had in this discussion given his own public unmasking of the epistemological naivete of philosophical materialism. A bunch of people who seem to crosspost one another so as to gang up against theists in comment boxes had put together a string of comments attempting to dismiss Eagleton and Fish. Their comments were, as is usually the case with these people, embarrassingly ignorant and shallow.
I decided to enter into the fray, pointing out to these sadly ignorant atheists that the implicit assumption of philosophical materialism or naturalism would, if its implications were truly understood, lead to skepticism of all forms of knowledge. Of course, many atheists tend to presume that science undermines Christian faith. They view themselves as the upholders of reason and science against the obfuscations of Christian belief. Little do they realize that the scientific materialism that they have embraced, in whatever particular form it may take with them, undermines the valid achievements of human reason altogether, including the achievements of science. Atheism, in other words, and not religious faith, undermines science.
Needless to say, my comment was met by blank incomprehension and by evasion. It tended to annoy these shallow atheists, mostly trained in engineering methods but not in the exercise of human reason as applied to ultimate issues. Unfazed by their ignorant and uncomprehending dismissals, I have decided to demonstrate here, in a series of posts, why it is that the embrace of philosophical or scientific materialism must lead ultimately to a skepticism toward all knowledge. I shall demonstrate, in effect, that postmodern relativism is the inevitable outcome of believing that the only things in the world that are real are those entities that are in principle capable of being discovered by modern scientific investigation.
I’ll take as my starting point for this demonstration the philosophy of the great British Empiricists Bishop Berkeley and David Hume. Berkeley and Hume, in the 18th century, were the first to see the problem for human knowledge that comes with assuming that matter in its various forms is the only reality.
Berkeley saw the problem and was thereby led to reject the dogma of modern materialism that physical nature is composed entirely of material substances whose only reality is extension in space (res extensa) or geometrical shape. This doctrine had been upheld by Descartes, Bacon, Hobbes, Galileo, Newton, and Locke. It assumes that our perceptions are caused by that which is in fact imperceptible. Berkeley realized that this dogma must lead to a denial of the objective validity of human perception and knowledge. He argued, in order to counteract this materialist presupposition, that there is in fact nothing in nature that goes unperceived. All of physical nature is perceived: by humans, angels, and the mind of God. The imperceptible, in his view, is not the cause of the perceptible. Rather, all things are caused by the infinite perceiver: God himself (who does not go unperceived to himself).
Berkeley’s understanding of perception has generally been castigated as a form of subjective idealism. He has been accused of denying the objectivity of the world external to human perception. This is the standard reading of him. In fact, he did no such thing. He argued that the world that we perceive is the world as it is in itself. It is real, but it has its basis in the perceiving (read: knowing) mind of God. He argued that one must reject the reality of purely material substances if one is to uphold the objective validity of human perception. Louis Dupre has rightly said of Berkeley’s position that it is, like Cardinal John Henry Newman’s 19th century epistemology, a form of spiritual empiricism, not of subjective idealism. Berkeley, unlike the subjective idealists and scientific materialists, upholds a doctrine of epistemological realism. He holds that we really perceive the objective world and that we can really come to know it.
Be that as it may, it is Hume who is the key figure of modern thought because he shows better than any other modern philosopher outside of Kant (on whom Hume was the decisive influence) the despair and skepticism to which scientific materialism must lead if its implications are rightly understood. Hume saw the validity of Berkeley’s insight that if material substances are the cause of all that we perceive then our perceptions cannot possibly put us in touch with objective nature. Hume realized this, but unlike Berkeley he did not come to reject the doctrine that material substances are the only principles of physical nature. He accepted the materialist doctrine and took it to its logical conclusion. He chose skepticism over Berkeley’s intuitive realism.
Hume understood that philosophical materialism implies a doctrine of perception that sees all human experience as rooted entirely in material processes (a doctrine that Alfred North Whitehead would later label “sensationism”). All human experience, if material substances are the sole reality of physical nature, must be caused entirely by material sensory impressions striking our sensory organs. Hume realized, like Berkeley before him, that if the striking and beating of material processes on sensory organs is the objective correlate of experience, then our perceptions must be internally generated ideas in the mind and not gateways to the objective world. How could it be otherwise? The colors, sounds, tastes, smells, etc., that we experience are not what is real in nature. What is real in nature is the bumping and striking of material substances whose whole reality can be encapsulated in mathematical formulas. The experience of the redness of an apple, for instance, is an illusion of our inner ideas. What is objectively real in the experience of an apple is its material or sensory basis: the light frequencies that extend from the material substance of the apple striking, in consecutive fashion, the human eye and optic nerve. These give us sensory impressions in our brain that our mind’s eye contemplates and turns into perceptual realities that bear nothing in common with the material sense impressions in themselves. The infinite array of human perceptions is qualititatively different from these purely material sensations. Yet, only the sensations are objectively, publicly real. The sensations are “primary” or real qualities. The perceptions are “secondary” or imaginary qualities.
This led to quite a dilemma for Hume. Refusing to reject materialist substantialism, he had to assume the existence of two separate worlds: one is the real world outside of perception that is mathematically describable, and the other world is the world that we perceive, a world of fragrance, and color, and beauty — a world that is felt in emotion and expressed in art, and religion, and poetry, but that does not correspond to the world-in-itself. The world of human culture is merely one of expressed ideas of impressions. It does not express the world as it objectively exists in time and space. Indeed, Hume was quite despondent over this situation. When he played the role of philosopher he found himself isolated, much as would later happen with Nietzsche:
I am first affrighted and confounded with that forlorn solitude, in which I am plac’d in my philosophy, and fancy myself some strange uncouth monster, who not being able to mingle and unite in society, has been expell’d all human comerce, and left utterly abandonded and desolate…I call upon others to join me, in order to make a company apart; but no one will hearken to me. Every one keeps at a distance, and dreads that storm, which beats upon me from every side. (A Treatise of Human Nature, Oxford, 1960, 264, 269)
Many “concretely-minded” Anglo-Americans in our day view such expressions of dread with a wink and a nod, seeing Hume as an exaggarator, or as a bit cracked. But Hume is a greater “agent of truth” than they. He is more perceptive and honest. He has considered the full consequences of the philosophical materialism that he has adopted. He realizes that if matter is the only ultimate reality then the world of common human experience, the world of human discourse and cultural achievement (including science), is nothing but a subjective illusion. And this should indeed shake one to the core of one’s being, if one truly understands or is truly honest.
Kant, originally a physicist who was himself “shaken from his dogmatic slumbers” by Hume, realized that science required a defense of its universal validity in the face of the dilemma of materialism that Hume had exposed. How did Kant “rescue” science? That will be the topic of my next post.
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Even thinking about modern philosophers past Locke gives me a migraine even when I don’t have one to begin with, but you’re missing a fundamental problem:
Most “scientific atheists” really have their epistemology screwed up. A few weeks ago, I engaged in a lengthy combox debate with an atheist (who refused to express his own views) who was under this confusion.
They think that “reason” and “empiricism” are both coterminous with “scientific method”, and that scientific method is only defined by a strict laboratory experiment.
So, this person, for example, was insisting he would only accept the Bible (he kept harping on the parting of the Red Sea) if it could be proven by strict “scientific” evidence. I pointed to archaeological evidence, and he denied that was “scientific” enough for him.
Comment by JC — May 29, 2009 @ 10:47 PM
Thank you for taking up this subject – I look forward to the next installment.
Comment by Jim S — June 3, 2009 @ 4:27 PM
I’ve oftern heard the argument that atheism is irrational because philosophical materialism is irrational.
However, I’m yet to hear a justification for why atheism as a worldview necessarily implies belief in philosophical materialism.
For example, even Dawkins (the supposed arch-atheist) doesn’t claim the absolute non-existence of a God. He merely says it’s very very very unlikely based on the presented evidence.
Comment by Matt — June 19, 2009 @ 9:02 PM
Matt,
Your invocation of Dawkins does not fit into your larger point. You ask for a justification for tying together atheism and philosophical materialism. One need not, you imply, be a philosophical materialist if one is an atheist.
However, you reverse things in invoking Dawkins. You imply that Dawkins may not be as much of an atheist as he is usually portrayed to be. That may be. I’m not sure. His philosophical position may be more agnostic than atheistic. One thing that I am sure of, though, is that Dawkins is a committed philosophical materialist: he vehemently denies the reality of formal and final causality in nature.
So, your example of Dawkins, contrary to your larger point, brings into the picture a person whose philosophical materialism may not necessarily entail atheism. Your larger point, recall, was just the opposite (that atheism need not entail philosophical materialism, or at least that you need to see some justification that it does).
Because of this confusion, I do not know what to make of your larger point. So, I will defer addressing until my final post in this series the issue of the connection of formal causality to the existence of God.
Comment by hierothee — June 21, 2009 @ 2:28 PM
My invocation of Dawkins was to show that your apparent definition of atheism is flawed.
Dawkins (like most atheists) is a functional materialist, but that’s not the same as being a philosophical materialist.
Dawkins holds the belief that supernatural entities are altogether possible. He says as much in The God Delusion. This is obviously not a philosophical materialist view. He merely considers such things very very unlikely, and remains an atheist because there exists no convincing evidence that such things exist.
Comment by Matt — June 22, 2009 @ 4:51 AM
Matt,
Thanks for commenting.
I’ll leave your first comment aside, as you seem to be making a different point or clarifying your point.
Functional materialism is a form of philosophical materialism. It is a species of a larger genus, not a distinct genus.
Dawkins is committed to the a priori conviction that there is no formal or final causality in nature. He argues that nature can be understood without these categories. This is a controlling philosophy for him (and others) and not a pre-reflective inevitability of rational investigation. This is to say that his functional materialism is not simply the inevitable outcome of inductive analysis of physical reality. The materialism of Dawkins is not simply a functional outcome of “how science is done.” It is a view of scientific method born of philosophical conviction.
Dawkins is dedicated to the unproven philosophical presupposition that the only entities that can be discovered in nature lack formal, inherent intelligibility, in the sense of an organic causality that is not reducible to material elements nor to a mere epiphenomenon of the causal interaction of these material elements. He denies as well purposeful movement toward ends: as most biologists do. Even so, he constantly contradicts himself in this regard. He imputes final causality to genes in his writings by giving them the (presumably metaphorical) character of personhood, such as purposeful volition. Moreover, his very act of arguing his claims implies the existence of formal and not simply material causality, for every proposition that we utter assumes formal intelligibility in nature and a correspondence between our minds and that intelligibility. This intelligibility must have a formal character because it is universal, transcending time and space. True assertions are not reducible to spatial location. This formal meaning must exist in nature and not simply in the human mind, otherwise we end up with the subjectivism, historicism, or psychologism of much modern European philosophy.
Meanwhile, Dawkins is trying to stamp out all religious education in Britain, so his atheism seems to be a bit more forceful, explicit, and positive in character than you are asserting.
As for the larger point of whether or not atheism implies philosophical materialism: in our cultural situation it mostly does, at least for those who think out their points of view. The philosophical alternatives for those who have rationally considered their atheism are all species within the genus of philosophical materialism. The exception is some radical forms of postmodern skepticism such as that of Derrida or Foucalt in France or Rorty in America. These skeptics presume to invalidate all forms of putatively rational assertion, whether scientific or not. Even so, Rorty said that he assumed some sort of godless, “atoms-in-the-void” scenario of reality to be true.
The most common form of atheism in our day is, of course, not rationally derived at all. It is a truly functional or practical atheism, a matter of pure indifference to religious questions. But this is not the so-called “functional materialism” of Dawkins. This common type of atheism, contrary to that of Dawkins, is in fact prior to and disconnected from rational assertion and philosophical conviction. It is truly a type of “this just is” attitude, based on cultural up-bringing. But this is not the type of atheism or philosophical materialism that I am considering in these posts. It is only rationally considered atheism that is important from a philosophical perspective. The other type of atheism is interesting from a sociological perspective, and theologians must account for it. But when one is arguing for the truth or falsity of a claim one has to bring to light those points of view that are rationally considered, not those that have simply been assumed as a matter of culture.
Comment by Hierothee — June 22, 2009 @ 10:57 PM
I’m afraid I must disagree with your premise.
When you say that “[Dawkins] argues that nature can be understood without these categories”, that’s true, but it’s not because of some philosophical position that renders the supernatural impossible.
Rather, it’s based on the observation that the supernatural is not necessary to understand nature. Rejection of the supernatural is merely the rejection of an unnecessary assumption.
Following on from that, I don’t see any hint of causality or volition, implied or otherwise, in Dawkins’ work. When he speaks about evolution as a process, it’s clear that the process is not in any way directed. It’s easy to get the sense that evolution’s path led inexorably to us, and from that imply that humans were its “intention”, but that’s just a bias borne of looking backwards from our position.
If I drive randomly to a random place, it makes no sense to then say that that place was my intended destination all along.
Humans are not a necessary outcome of evolution and no-one, least of all Dawkins, is suggesting they are.
Comment by Matt — June 23, 2009 @ 12:18 AM
Matt,
Formal causality and final causality in nature are not supernatural realities. They are “supersensual,” which means that they exist in nature but that one cannot come to know their existence by a brute and crude “taking a look” at the world or by pure experience. One comes to know them (as one comes to know anything) by intelligent judgment of one’s experience, not simply by “awareness” (whatever that could mean in a materialist context) of the brute chain of material realities striking and beating one’s sensory organs. This is what Hume understood so well, and the best Anglophone philosophers who followed him, such as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, each of whom recognized that materialism, with its concomitant reduction of human experience to the flow of sensations, is problematic for human knowledge, including scientific knowledge. They each knew this, but they refused to reject their materialist premises.
Formal causality is necessary to all scientific knowledge, even knowledge of genes and their causal influence. This is true even though science is historically predicated upon the rejection of formal causality. Form just is intelligibility. Formal causality is the exerting of the intelligible structure of physical realities on their very existence. Intelligibility is not simply a feature of the process of sensory data abstractly conceived, and this is what Hume understood so well.
Take for instance mathematics, which, as it has become cliche to assert, is “the language of science.” Mathematical formulations are not purely material or sensual realities. In physical science, one’s mathematical formulas or descriptions must correspond to the data of sensory experience if one is to have a sound understanding of things. But the formulas and their meanings do not exist merely on the sensory or material plane. A mathematical formula may describe material and sensory processes, but it is not reducible to these processes. It cannot be captured in the flow of spatio-temporal realities. It has universal meaning, transcending paricular moments of time, or places in nature, or human cultures. What type of reality is a mathematical formula then?
Mathematics captures part of the form of things, not the matter or the sensory dimension. Mathematics itself is based upon even more basic laws of reason: logical laws, such as the principle of non-contradiction. Everything that science does (and everything that Richard Dawkins says, by the way) is based upon this principle. Where does this principle exist? It is not a physical reality. It is not a subatomic particle, or an energy field. It has no mass, velocity, shape, size, weight, etc., except when it is enunciated as a proposition. But the principle is not reducible to the proposition that enunciates it. Is it a purely mental construct? If so, the postmodernists are right and all human discourse, including the discourse of Richard Dawkins, is reduced to meaninglessness.
There must be, alternatively to materialist or psychological explanations of logical laws such as the principle of non-contradiction, a different kind of explanation. Purely physical process cannot encompass the understandability of these laws. Physical processes are spatio-temporally confined and these laws are universal. There is an intelligibility to things in the world that we come to know through our intellectual judgments. There is more than a simply material actuality to them. We must be able to grasp this intelligibility. If not, we could not discourse with one another or do science. There is a realm of meaning, of understandability. Understandability is not reducible to physical qualities such as mass, velocity, and figure.
Can a purely material science explain how we instinctively operate by the principle of non-contradiction? Not without delegitimating itself. It can try to explain the principle of non-contradiction on the basis of neuroscience. But, then, the very chain of reasoning that is exemplified in the demonstration would itself be simply a structure of the brain and not an explanation. The principle of non-contradiction is implied in the very demonstration, the very foundation on which the demonstration exists. If the principle is simply a neural process or neural structure, then there is no convincing reason in the demonstration. There is simply brute assertion, the bumbing into one another of consecutive material impressions and sensations. There would be no point, then, in reasoning with one another. Demonstration would be futile because there would only be material processes randomly evolving and no coherent intelligibility to them that we could discern and make judgments about. Some people would be neurally configured to “understand” this (whatever it might mean to “understand” in a materialist context), and others wouldn’t be so configured. The only way that we could “teach” these others is to reconfigure their brains. It might be best, in fact, to kill them. Such an ethos fed eugenicism and modern genocide. I suspect that such an ethos exists in Daniel Dennett’s reduction of humanity into two groups: the “brights” and the “not-brights.” He has given up reason altogether in his putative demonstrations. He has reduced human discourse to the exertion of power.
I’m going to do a series of posts on formal causality, spelling out what the expression means, so I don’t want to go into it much more at this point.
I do wish to point out though that Dawkins most certainly does imply causality throughout his writings: material causality only. He describes genes as causal: indeed, he even seems at points to confuse the causality of genes with ultimate reductive explanation, though he’s smart enough to realize, I’m sure, in the full context of his writings, that the theoretical physicist and not the biologist has the last word on things in the hierarchy of science as currently construed.
And of course, to address your most recent point, Dawkins denies that evolution is directed. But my point is that he slips up all the time in his language and use of metaphors in describing the causal action of genes.
Comment by Hierothee — June 23, 2009 @ 2:10 AM
I’ll be interested in your posts on causality, but we’ve kind of wandered off-track from my original point.
My question was why atheism necessarioly implies philosophical amterialism. I maintain that one can be an atheist without being a philosophical materialist.
For example, suppose I accept the possibility that there is a supernatural realm. I can then (without contradiction) accept the logical underpinnings of science and note that in this theoretical supernatural realm, the scientific method would not be applicable.
However, I see no evidence that this supernatural realm intersects with our own at all, and I consider all the claims that they do (whether they be religious dogma or new-age metaphysical “energy” claims) to be unsubstantiated nonsense.
Comment by Matt — June 23, 2009 @ 3:04 AM
Matt,
Prescinding, then, from the question of what Richard Dawkins may or may not think, let’s just stick for a second or two to what you may or may not think.
Please clarify for me:
What do you mean by “supernatural”? How is this “possible” realm different from the “natural”? What does it mean, then, to speak of a “natural” realm?
Until I get clearer what you mean by this I cannot understand or respond to your proposed alternative to atheistic philosophical materialism.
Comment by hierothee — June 23, 2009 @ 8:52 PM
Good question.
The natural realm is the realm we can observe, measure, formulate inferences about and following on from that, confirm predictions that arise. It’s the realm in which the scientific method reigns as the primary source of knowledge.
The supernatural, by extension, is then any realm in which (or circumstance under which) the scientific method breaks down.
If such things impacted our natural world they would be observable as violations of the natural order. My atheism arises not from an a priori disbelief in such things, but rather in a lack of convincing evidence for their existence.
Comment by Matt — June 23, 2009 @ 11:44 PM
So, the natural realm is that which corresponds to a particular type of methodological pursuit of knowledge. I have a couple of further questions. You can choose to answer either one or both, or neither. Can you say anything more specific about the positive character of the entitites that are discovered by that method? Also, how can or have observation, measurement, or inference therefrom effectively proven that knowledge is reducible to observation, measurement or inference therefrom?
Comment by hierothee — June 24, 2009 @ 10:21 PM
In answer to the first question, the scientific method has proven itself to be the superior method of understanding the natural world.
By saying that though, I’m not claiming that it’s a meaning-defining pursuit, so I’m not sure that the entities discovered have a “positive character” in that sense.
What it does give us is information that can be, and is, useful, in terms of economic, artistic and humanist pursuits.
We know that it’s reliable because the information it provides is independently verifiable, and has time and time again provided a path to further knowledge and further understanding.
I think what you mean by your second question is how can we use science to prove science. The answer here is similar to the answer to the first question. If I were claiming science to be the source of some transcendent meaning then that might be a valid question, but I’m not making that claim. I’m merely saying that, based on years of experiece, science is the best method we have for determining and understanding the forces that drive natural phenomena.
Comment by Matt — June 26, 2009 @ 5:27 AM
Could you be more specific about the ways in which the information that modern science has given us have been useful to artistic and humanist pursuits? In many ways, science has proven to be quite anti-humanist: the exploitation of human labor in science-driven industrialized economies, the reduction of the human person to a mere mechanism, an ethos which is at the root of eugenics, which is itself the inspiration of modern programs of technological genocide(the holocaust, forced famines, and the like), the advent of nuclear weaponry, the despoilation of the physical environment, etc.
Regarding the second question, I am not asking how we can use science to prove science. I am asking how observation, measurement and inference therefrom can prove that knowledge is reducible to observation, measurement and inference therefrom. These are distinct questions. If you cannot prove that the only valid knowledge that can be gotten is through the restrictive method that you advocate then I don’t see why anyone should think it wise to follow you in this regard.
Regarding your point that you are not saying that science provides a transcendent meaning: you are in fact saying that science gives us information. What is the nature of this information? Is it simply a subjective phenomenon? If not, then you are in fact saying that science gives us access to “transcendent meaning.” That is, it gives us access to “entities” that are not simply mental constructs. Otherwise, this information could not be “useful.” It would simply be a fiction of our cultural imagination. And if it is simply a fiction of our cultural imagination (which is actually what postmodernists believe) then there is no reason why, in a different cultural context, we might not in the future choose to do away with science in favor of other “useful” fictions. Science has to validate itself philosophically. The culture may grow tired of it at some point(which has already happened in many quarters). If the culture grows tired of it, science, especially “Big Science,” will no longer be pursued. Science is not self-perpetuating. It requires a cultural commitment to it in order to be continued. But science itself cannot provide the justification for this commitment. Only philosophy can do that.
So, then, what is the positive character of this information that science gives us?
Comment by hierothee — June 26, 2009 @ 3:41 PM
Science has been an incredible force for humanism: two examples that spring immediately to mind are the fields of agriculture and medicine.
When you talk about exploitation using the fruits of science, that’s not actually science. That’s politics. It’s greed and misuse of knowledge. I could point to any number of similar atrocities committed directly in the name of religion, but it’s a bit early in the discussion to be invoking Godwin’s Law.
Besides, it has no bearing whatsoever on the truth or otherwise of scientific endeavour. The invention of the atomic bomb didn’t invalidate the work of Einstein. If it did, your GPS unit wouldn’t work.
As for art: on a purely functional level, we have the production of paint and ink, the printing press and digital technology which has allowed dissemination of art to the masses. At an artistic level we have the sense of awe and wonder at appreciating the beauty of the natural world, from the smallest atoms to the largest galaxies and everything in between, which has inspired poets and artists from Da Vinci on down.
Regarding your question about:
“… how observation, measurement and inference therefrom can prove that knowledge is reducible to observation, measurement and inference therefrom.”
… the answer is the same as that previously provided. To quote my earlier comment: “If I were claiming science to be the source of some transcendent meaning then that might be a valid question, but I’m not making that claim. I’m merely saying that, based on years of experience, science is the best method we have for determining and understanding the forces that drive natural phenomena.”
In answer to your specific point, I’m also not claiming that science is the only valid source of knowledge. I’m saying that science has proven itself objectively reliable over and over again. If you’re offering an alternative source of knowledge, particularly if it contradicts any results arising from science, then the burden of proof is on you to show that your method has similar or better objective results. Can you do that?
I know it’s easy to throw post-modernist arguments at science and say it all may be a figment, but in that case philosophy itself is no more useful. But it’s irrelevant anyway. There is an objective reality in science.
We could forget everything we know about science today, but eventually someone would re-invent the telescope and come to the same conclusions as Galileo.
You can’t make the same argument about any given philosophy, and you certainly can’t make the same argument about any given religion.
Comment by Matt — June 26, 2009 @ 7:37 PM
Matt,
Of course I’ve implied an alternative account of knowledge in this discussion: we grasp the form of things, I’ve said, in knowing. And, as I’ve implied, the form is causal. But the form is not reducible to the pure data of sensory experience. It requires reasonable judgment, not observation or measurement merely, not inductive inference, merely, to grasp the form and therefore the formal cause of things in the world.
This says something profound not only about physical nature but about the person who knows physical nature. On the one hand, this non-reductive appreciation of form tells us, in accord with our empirical observation, that only the person can do science, and the person is not reducible to the data of science. A region of pure mass/energy cannot do science. A subatomic particle, or a mere collection of them, cannot do science. The person is not just another thing in the world but a being capable of grasping the order of the things of the world. A computer does not grasp the order of the world. Only the person using the computer does.
On the other hand, material causality is not the only cause of things. Otherwise, it would be impossible for us to know anything. The burden of proof is not on me, then, but on the one who would dogmatically invoke science as if observation, measurement, and inference therefrom can prove that observation, measurement, and inference therefrom is the only path to knowledge. The presumption implicit in this limitation of knowledge is that material causality is the only realiy.
And you have indeed limited a priori reality and knowledge in our discussion to the material plane, however you may deny it. How? You will not give me anything concrete about the character of the entities that science deals with, because you want to assert that your thinking is not laden with a priori assumptions, so I’ll have to recover some ground in our discussion to show this.
Recall that you limited reality to the nature that is discoverable by science or that has been discovered by science. You said that you have no reason to assume that science will ever prove that there is anything in existence that is “supernatural.” Of course, you are quite right about that. Science cannot prove the existence of the supernatural because science only concerns itself with material causality. But why should we think that the only knowledge available to man exists entirely on the material plane that science deals with? Indeed, as I’ve implied, this is itself a repudiation of the special character of human knowledge. By next invoking the principle, that you have not since eschewed, that the only type of proof that we have access to is via observation, measurement and inference therefrom (a rather crude concept of the nature of modern science, by the way), that only this type of investigative procedure “works,” and that nothing else does, especially philosophy, you have further shown your assumption of the premise that only material causality is real.
And, by the way, you have made your argument on an entirely philosophical level, without proving it by observation, measurement, and inference therefrom.
As for your utilitarian argument, of course science can be made to work in a utilitarian way. It can be made to give us new and better technology. But technology is not a good in and of itself. You have to prove on another level that the technological pursuits that drive “Big Science” are in fact to the benefit of humanity. Some of them are, or may be (penicillin, air-conditioning, etc.). And some of them are not, or may not be (atomic weaponry, bioengineered viruses used as weapons of mass destruction, technological gadgets whose only value lies in increasing the modern consumerist urge).
Science cannot tell us if the technology it produces is good or bad. What scientific experiment can you devise that would tell us whether or not it is good to sterilize the poor through innovative new chemical sterilization procedures? Many scientists in the early twentieth century in America thought this would be a good thing. Many scientists today think that it is good to use genetic engineering to screen children in the womb. This sort of screening has led to the mass abortion of female children in China. Can measurement, observation, and inference therefrom tell us whether it is a good thing for a Chinese couple to abort their female child because they are allowed to have only one child?
Again, on your account, only observation, measurement,and inference therefrom can give us the truth about nature. If you did not think this, you would not conclude that there is probably no supernatural. After all, the only investigative procedure that works, you say, has not and probably will not discover it. You claim that there is no a priori assertion in this. Clearly, though, there is (the a prior assumption, namely, that material causality is the only causal agency in nature: this has to be assumed by you because this is really all that science can possibly discover, except for the aspect of the form of things that corresponds to mathematical description).
Your procedure cannot, a priori, tell me anything about the supernatural. But it also cannot tell me anything about the human good or about beauty. Your procedure cannot tell me, for instance, whether it is good that China is raising a population of children that is disproportionately male in its composition. Your procedure cannot tell me whether it is good or not that we should produce a sheep-human hybrid clone. Your procedure cannot tell me whether it is good or not that a country should stockpile nuclear weapons in order to deter military competition from foreign powers.
Your investigative procedure can also not tell me if a particular artwork or style of art is beautiful. Are we left, then, in a state of being unable to reason about these things, about the human good, or about the beautiful?
My vision of knowledge, in recognizing the formal differentiation and causality of things in nature, allows for the possibility for discussing in a rational manner the human good or the beautiful. I don’t have to assume that beauty is only a subjective impression, or that the good is just what a culture thinks at a particular time, because I don’t a priori reduce reality to what science is capable of discovering. Thus, I can legitimately stand in the tradition of moral discourse stemming from Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and can enter into discourse about whether, say, a Roger Maplethorpe photograph of sadomasochism has objective artistic value, or whether or not it is good that nuclear weaponry is proliferating into the Middle East. I can say, in consistency with the principle of knowledge that I adopt, that discourse about these sorts of things can be objective and true and not just opinion. I don’t have to rely on scientific observation or mathematical calculation in order to reason about things of politics, or ethics, or art. I can see that philosophy has a value that works, on its own level, irreducible to scientific investigation. Everything has its own irreducible form, and science does not deal with form (except, again, on the barest mathematical level), only philosophy does that.
And, as an added benefit of my account of knowledge, I can reason about the supernatural, whether it exists or not, without having to rely upon a methodological procedure that cannot even possibly discover its existence: just as the scientific method cannot discover the good or the beautiful.
One who restricts himself to the scientific method cannot reason about the good and the beautiful, and places us in the midst of the postmodern dilemma, and the postmodern thinkers (Heidegger, Derrida, Foucalt, and Lyotard) are much more prescient than the Anglophone thinkers, so ignorant of history and of human value, such as Dawkins and Dennet, because the postmodernists openly and consistently follow the logic of their materialist position to its ultimate conclusion of nihilism. It is, in fact, quite “easy,” as you say disparagingly, to place scientific materialism in a postmodern context, because nihilism is precisely the outcome of scientific materialism.
And your assertion to the effect that science just happens, that some other Galileo will inevitably just come along, seems to stem from an ignorance of the history of the thing. In the vsst expanse of human history modern science is only 500 years old, constricted to a small geographical origin, and took the cultural advent of the Christian Platonism represented in such figures as Copernicus and Galileo to bring it about. Most human cultures just assumed that the reality of physical nature was too mysterious and arbitrary to even try to understand it in mathematical or scientific terms. Again, science is not an inevitable by-product of material processes but a human accomplishment. Certain, perhaps unrepeatable, cultural conditions and assumptions had to exist before the modern scientific method could take hold.
And, really, all that I have said in this most recent comment is subsidiary to my main point in these posts: given the assumption of philosophical materialism (implicit in the assumption that only science can tell us what is, because science only discovers material realities), all human knowledge is invalidated, including scientific knowledge.
Reality, in other words, must be more and greater than what science can discover in order for science to take place and to work.
Comment by hierothee — June 27, 2009 @ 5:02 PM
I’m not claiming science provides “truth” about nature. I’m claiming that science reveals objective facts about nature. As noted scientist Indiana Jones once observed, facts are not truth.
I’m also not claiming that science could, or should, be used to describe art or beauty or morality. (To be honest it’s a little insulting that you felt you needed to make that rather obvious point at such length). Science is concerned only with the objective.
“Truth”, “art”, “beauty”, “morality” and the “reasonable judgment” you like to invoke are all, despite your protestations, subjective and will ever remain so.
(Having said that, it’s entirely conceivable to me that human appreciation of a piece of art could be reduced to a particular pattern of neurons firing in the brain. That even explains why it’s different for different people: different genetics and different life experiences lead to different neural pathways, requiring different stimuli to achieve the “appreciation” effect. If that happened, would your whole worldview collapse?)
Morality is simply something we evolved to maintain our communities and better survive in our world.
In response to the other examples you gave: proliferation of nuclear weapons? It’s bad because it makes me and my family less safe. Imbalance of genders in China? It’s bad because many men will be unable to find companionship, leading to human suffering. These are trivial examples. It’s strange to me that you feel you need to invoke some sort of absolute moral standard to justify your opinion of them.
But again we’ve wandered off track. You still haven’t answered my original question: why do you think the position of atheism implies philosophical materialism?
Couldn’t someone be an atheist and not a philosophical materialist?
Comment by Matt — June 27, 2009 @ 7:44 PM