Some thoughts on the subject after a chat with my fifteen-year old son about his debate with a classmate who argued for scientific materialism. One of the great things about having kids is how their questions force you to think through things again and to formulate answers for an audience who only takes you half seriously. So this is my attempt to answer his questions, for what it’s worth:
Science is a very limited discipline. It focuses only on developing mechanical explanations about how the natural world works. Any good scientist will tell you that science has no business in trying to interpret what its discoveries mean outside of mechanical explanations which are its proper domain. Science is concerned aboutt answering the How question, but has no business with the Why.
Thinking about Why–about questions of meaning–is the domain of philosophy and religion. There are some people who are understandably very impressed with the clarity and effectiveness of scienctific explanations about how the natural world works. And in reflecting on that have developed a philosophy–it’s called scientific materialism. Since science has been so good at devleoping clear and certain explanations about the physical world, people promoting this philosophy have tried to extend the basic limited assumptions of science to try to answer the Why question.
Since science limits itself only to phenomena that can be measured or weighed, they will admit no evidence into their project to answer the Why question in materialistic terms except what can be measured or weighed. And that pretty much from the get-go eliminates any question about the existence of God. Discussion about the existence of God is excluded from the outset, unless you can produce some physical evindence that proves he exists. It also eliminates any positive answer to the Why question because if Matter precedes Mind, the world is an accident–and we humans are accidents, too, and the fact that we have minds and self consciousness, well that’s an accident as well. So it boils down to believing the world is here for a reason or that the whole thing is absurd–that there is no ultimate meaning or purpose.
Scientific Materialism is just as much a belief system as any religion is. Materialists cannot prove that you’re wrong if you believe in God, and you cannot prove that they are wrong for believing that matter is the ultimate reality. So It comes down to a choice about which you think is more plausible, and it beats me why anybody would want to believe that things are fundamentally absurd if there’s no proof of it. But people are motivated to believe what they do for all kinds reasons. Materialists will tell you that they think they are being hard
headed and realistic, and that people who believe in God are like children who believe in Santa Claus. I guess it makes them feel superior or more grown up to think it, but it’s a pretty arbitrary way to look at things.In any event, Materialists are difficult to argue with because they think they stand on more solid ground, and if they are to be persuaded they are wrong, they demand concrete, material evidence. They argue that they are right because they can point to the material world and say that there is no argument about whether it exists or not, but that you cannot do the same for your fairy-tale spiritual world, which must exist if there is a God. They will demand that you show them the spiritual world—give them some evidence of its existence. I think there is evidence, but it’s not likely they’ll accept it since they exclude any evidence that cannot be measured and weighed.
Many people who have a hard time with relgion are people who have only had encounters with the worst examples of religion rather than the best. They think
that people who profess religious beliefs are hypocrites because they
behave just like everyone else–or worse. I don’t think there’s
any arguing that much evil has been done in the name of religion or by
people who were the public face of a particular religion, but that’s a straw-man argument. You don’t evaluate something by looking at its worst examples, but at its best. And most of the best men and women in history, even recent history—like Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Martin Luther King—were profoundly motivated by their religious beliefs and religious ideals.Materialists will then argue that you don’t have to believe in God to be good or to act in an ethical way. And that’s true. Beliefs are a head thing, and what one thinks is important, but it’s not as important as the inclination of the will. That’s a subject for another time. But I think it can also be said that most of the great ethical ideas have their origin in religion, and it’s hard to imagine if there were never religion that any kind of ethical ideals could have developed. They are hard to explain in purely materialistic terms, at least in any way that I find satisfactory. Materialists are the heirs of religious ethical ideas whether they believe in the religion that originated them or not. Materialists will try, but I think they have a hard time explaining on purely materialistic grounds the human spirit’s aspiration to the high ideals—to justice, goodness, beauty, compassion.
What is this self-conscious element in human beings that strives for those things—that strives for anything? The willpower and human intentionality that lies behind the greatest human symbol-making achiements in the arts, science, philosophy in my mind are completely different in nature from the random, groping dynamics that drive biological evolution. These are spiritual impulses and spiritual longings. If humans were nothing more than a sack of chemicals, why should they care about striving toward something higher? I have a hard time believing that any arrangement of chemicals, no matter how complex, would feel the urge to do that kind of work.
Materialists think they can explain all this in materialistic terms,
but that’s called reductionism. A reductionist is from my point of view like someone who is color blind
and who tries to explain everything in shades of in black, grey, and white. It’s not untruthful, but it’s missing something, and missing it makes all the difference. And the problem for the people who see things in color lies in that they cannot prove to colorblind people that there are colors; they can only describe the world as they see it, and hope their descriptions are convincing enough to be credible. But that there is color cannot be proven to someone who cannot see it.In my experience the people who are inclined to be materialists are rationalists who want complete certainty about what is true and not true. Their attitude is that if it can’t be proven true, then it isn’t true. But the fact of the matter is that there is very little that we know that is certain—even scientific truth is open to be changed if new evidence comes to light that shows current understandings were wrong. 150 years ago everyone thought Isaac Newton’s description of the way the cosmos worked was a scientific certainty; but 20th century physics turned the Newtonian understanding about how the physical world worked upside down.
Newton was right as far as he could go, but there is so much further to go. And I would say the same is true for evolutionary science. Whatever scientists in this field think they know for sure today is likely to be revised tomorrow. They are coming up with the best explanations they can within limits. But there is so much that they don’t know and don’t understand. Along these lines, there are arguments being made today, which would be difficult for me to explain without digressing too much, that the primary reality is Mind, not matter. Most of humanity through its history believed that Mind or Spirit was primary, and I think that eventually it will be what even most scientists come to think once again.
Some in physics do now, but most people in biology and evolutionary science have a hard time accepting that idea—although many biologists are religious believers and have no problem accepting Darwin’s explanation for the mechanics of evolution. Does that make them bad scientists? Of course not. These biologists just don’t buy the idea that evolutionary science is the same thing as a philosophical explantion for the meaning and purpose of life on earth. As I said above—science doesn’t deal with questions of meaning—philosophy and religion do.
The difference between being brain smart and being wise lies in having some common sense about what is likely to be true and what is not. It’s more important to develop ‘good judgment’ and good instincts about what is true or untrue rather than to obsess about being certain. We couldn’t live our lives if the only things we thought were true were things that could be proven true with scientific certainty.
Can we be certain that someone loves us? How do you measure it? How do you know for sure? People can say they love you and not mean it. It happens all the time. There are other clues and evidence, of course. And people with good judgment learn how to read the clues, but you can never be sure about what such clues point to with scientific certainty because there are just some things—probably most things–-that cannot be proven in that way. And yet it can be something you know, that you feel confident about, and it’s that kind of confidence that comes closest to what religious faith is. It can’t be proven scientifically, but you can feel a deep confidence about it.
Even if you have some level of confidence about it now, it will be frequently challenged in the course of your life, and in my experience that’s what pushes you to a deeper understanding about what it is that you truly believe. You can’t just accept that God exists, that he is good, that he loves you and cares about you just because someone in authority says so. You have to develop your own feeling of confidence about it. But that confidence is usually grounded in knowing that people you trust, smart people, honest, good people have themselves developed this confidence and live their lives in that confidence. Those are clues that need to be investigated. How they have developed that confidence for themselves is something that you need to discover for yourself.
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