A Brief History of Materialism
Part Two: A Knock-down
Man is a rational animal
Aristotle
By mid-C19 the new canals had expanded trade throughout the country and farm crops could move in bulk into the cities along with fresh milk for the first time. Railways speeded up the process even more. People might even aspire to days at the seaside or a visit to the Capital. The nation was being drawn into a unity. Steam-powered factories turned out consumer goods cheaply for all. Gas lighting arrived, and by the 1850’s researchers were rapidly developing the greatest marvel of all, electricity.
Books could now be printed and distributed more cheaply and, marvel of marvels, someone in a Birmingham terrace could get news from London and abroad via a daily newspaper; if he could read (or afford) it.
Science also developed new medicines, and improved public hygiene meant water-borne diseases gradually disappeared. Cheap chemical dyes created a more colourful world; steam-powered systems meant water on tap. And it was all due to ‘the scientists’, as named in 1833.
With every new invention, the stock of the scientist rose in the public eye. He improved the lot of the ordinary man, and made fortunes for the entrepreneurial middle classes and landowners. The comparison with The Church was devastating. It was Science that banished cholera from London, not The Church; the engineer made the railways, not The Church; the chemist made chloroform to ease Queen Victoria’s confinements, not The Church. Pie in the sky was no substitute for affordable clothing now. And it got worse for The Church, because science now examined the Laws by which Nature operated. Yes, Nature operated by Law, not by the whim of a bloke in a nightie with a fistful of boils and thunderbolts. And not just ‘Law’, but knowable Laws; and not just ‘knowable’, but as far as could be seen, these Laws were also both invariable and universal, meaning that they applied throughout the universe, now and forever, both past and future. God as Cosmic Fiddler didn’t get a look in any more.
This was very big stuff indeed. Despite all due scientific caution, these astonishing discoveries must have caused these early scientists to have become just a little cocky, it seems to me, and therein lie the roots of modern dogmatic Materialism.
Broadly speaking, two schools of thought developed in the 17th and 18th centuries: the Thinkers and the Feelers.
The Feelers said that we can only know the universe through our senses.
The Thinkers said ‘Collation, comparison, measurement, and experiment’ is the way to Truth as the senses can be very misleading. A stick poked at a fish in a pond appears to bend underwater, but when you pull it out again, it is not bent. Your senses will not explain this, but experiment might (and did).
Not surprisingly, Feelers tended to concentrate upon philosophy rather than science. The Thinkers did the science. Because they were devoted to Reason, they called themselves Rationalists.
§ Over the years, ‘Rationalist’ has been hi-jacked, so that it now means ‘Materialist’; which is most unfortunate since Materialism is not rational, as I hope we’ve agreed.
Descartes was the godfather of Rationalism. He so mistrusted the senses that he eventually claimed that ‘I think therefore I am’ was the only firm premiss he had from which to start his investigations. He was convinced that the universe could be explained in terms of maths and physics.
Newton followed him. He defined the Law of Gravity, and the Laws of Motion. But he wrote more on theology and the Old Testament prophecies than on physics. This feature of his work was played down by the Science world, which was already becoming steadfastly Materialist. Meanwhile, Newton predicted the end of the world in 2060.
§ Newton said his scientific work was done for the greater glory of God. His reasoning was that the beauty and balance of the mechanical universe showed that it must have been made by a Rational Being, and that God must thus exist, operating His universe according to an iron Law of Cause and Effect, shaping events from the beginning of Time until the end of Time.
Interestingly, Descartes began his work only after a series of inspirational dreams. He also made a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Loreto.
Rationalism led to the Enlightenment, when experimenters felt brave enough to trumpet Reason and Logic over not only Emotion and the Senses, but also The Church’s premiss of Revelation. Reason and Logic came to be associated with Materialism, because everything Rationalists mistrusted (like Emotion and the Senses) were non-Material and thus apparently un-examinable (meaning here ‘un-measurable‘; a crucial distinction) for reliable truth, and thus were to be regarded with caution. This, unfortunately, paved the way for them being eventually side-lined or ignored, or even denied completely; and Revelation was definitely ‘out’.
Chemical elements were now being discovered and classified at an ever-increasing rate. Nature was giving up her secrets: layers of organisation previously unsuspected, and ever more Laws, including the astonishing confirmation that Energy can never be destroyed, but merely transformed into other forms of Energy. So something could change at one level, but not change at another. As material things were examined more closely, Reductionism gained in power, particularly in chemistry, eventually leading to the outrageous idea that every physical item, from pebble to elephant might be composed of just a few dozen ultimate components. A breath-taking concept, leading to the notion that you can learn more about a thing by examining it in ever greater detail: by reducing it to its most basic elements. The hunt for the atom was underway. Hiroshima was only a couple of centuries ahead.
§ Reductionism has its uses, but it is a dangerous tool. In chopping up a frog you might learn about muscles and hormones and enzymes, and discover that electricity makes legs twitch; you might even discover the very molecules from which a frog’s body is made; but via this process you learn very little about the living frogness of a frog. You can easily not see the wood for the trees, and not even realise it.
My biology teacher had fallen for this Reductionist Fallacy in telling us we were just a few kilos of carbon, a spoonful of sulphur, and a pinch or two of iron. Now I understood why I found his claim ridiculous.
The Fallacy is remarkably widespread. Stephen Hawking, the astrophysicist, claimed that we people are ‘just a chemical scum on the surface of a moderate-sized planet’. Thus he would agree that he was just a chemical scum who might yet be in line for a Nobel Prize. Astonishingly clever, these chemicals. Well, the ones SH was made of, at least. But…I’m bigger than him and thus contain more chemicals. Why aren’t I cleverer than him, then? A Materialist would no doubt reply that this is because my brain randomly organised itself in a manner inferior to the way SH’s brain randomly organised itself. If you find this explanation less than satisfying, please look back at the London taxi driver study in Chapter 7.
The Reductionist method has led us to discover the presence of electricity and chemicals at the ‘deepest level of the brain’ (as opposed to the ‘deepest level of the Mind’, of course), but this does not logically mean that electricity or chemicals run the show. Association has never been proof of cause, as every scientist knows.
But both Thinkers and Feelers had a case, didn’t they? If you can’t trust your senses, where are you? All the universe would be a madhouse, which it patently is not. And observational science would be meaningless, too, being based upon sense-perception.
§ I’m going to call Materialist-Rationalists ‘Rationalists’ with a capital ‘R’, and ordinary rationalists, ie people who simply work by reason, with a small ‘r’. Hence, I personally am a rationalist and not a Rationalist.
§ From now on, if someone tells me that the senses are unreliable as a means of understanding anything about the universe, I will challenge him to undergo the Wet Fish Test. For this, he will stand in some public place, while I swing a ten pound cod across his chops, four or five times. I will then ask ‘Did your senses tell you anything at all about the universe? About the nature of force, for example?’ If ‘Yes’, I will suggest that his Hypothesis has been flawed by a dead fish. If ‘No’, we will continue the Test either until ‘Yes’, or until the fish has totally disintegrated, and he has staggered off, bleeding profusely, but proud that he did not give in to coercion.
Something else that bothered me was Descartes’ famous ‘Cogito ergo sum’: ‘I think, therefore I am’. But surely, you need to be conscious, before you can think? I have done a little meditating, and I know it is possible to sit quietly, ‘being’ without thinking. I think he’d have been nearer the mark saying ‘I am, therefore I think’. There has to be an ‘I’ to do the thinking.
And what sort of rationalism was it that declared, as Descartes did, that animals don’t have souls? How could he ‘rationally’ know? And how did he feel about the outbreak of dog-kicking that followed his declaration?
What seemed to be missing from both camps (ie, the Feelers and the Thinkers) was a proper recognition of the Intuition that connects us with what it pleases us to call ‘reality’. Remember the passage in Chapter 8 about adding up sums when tired? Things mean nothing until that inner connection has been made. You can stare at an anagram for hours until the Intuitive-Connective-Integrative solution ‘clicks’**. The ‘Eureka Moment’.
§ Every teacher knows that you can physically see the moment when the inner connection has been made in a child’s mind. It may take two minutes; it may take two weeks.. but you will know, the moment the student knows.
I think that it was probably during this period that the Thinkers became a little self-righteous and began to reject anything that would not succumb to Collation and Measurement. Feelings and sensations could not be measured; so they were sidelined and even rejected as unimportant or even unreal. This tendency matured, unpleasantly, early in the 20th century.**
Confidence gradually leaked over into arrogance and cockiness, it seems to me. Huge success in the material world dazzled the scientific geniuses of the day, so that inconsistencies in the interpretive philosophy became invisible. Thus Materialism became a Truth for them, and nobody, especially the Church, had a voice loud enough to challenge them. In terms of intellectual hygiene, the baby of logic was drifting dangerously close to the plug hole.
In Sweden, Linnaeus began classifying plants and animals via the now familiar two-part Latin names (eg Brattus vulgaris: the common child). He noted the similarities between lion/tiger, newt/lizard, man/ape, but saw no generative connexion. He saw only divine variation, each species created perfect and unchanging.
But other people were definitely thinking ‘Evolution’, as they occasionally had since the ancient Greeks. They took their cue from the New Geology. James Hutton, a contemporary of Linnaeus, proposed in 1788 suggestions which would explain a lot about geological formations. These theories were that rocks changed very slowly, in a consistent manner, comparable to the processes we see today; thus the Earth must be far older than Usher claimed, ‘… without vestige of a beginning and no prospect of an end.’
Sir Charles Lyell went on to show beyond reasonable doubt that Hutton’s Hypothesis of ‘Uniformitarianism’ was correct, especially as human remains had been found in strata that must have predated 4004 BCE. This came as another terrible shock to The Church. Could Usher really have been out by literally millions of years? First Copernicus, then the unstoppable rise of the Godless Rationalists, and now this…
Darwin went to Galapagos in the 1830’s, recording and collecting as he went. He took Lyell’s Principles of Geology with him. He became convinced that one species evolved into another, but it was twenty years before he dared to publish. In Origins he did not actually suggest that Man was descended from Ape, but he knew full well that his findings implied this, and that society and The Church, would react like a cornered tiger.
§ Darwin was not the first scientist to suggest Evolution as fact. The Theory of Natural Selection was suggested by William Wells in 1813, and by Patrick Matthew in 1831. And before both Matthew and Wells, Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus, wrote extensively on Evolution.
Meanwhile, in the twenty years between Darwin’s Beagle book of 1839 and Origins (1859), science and its brother in Law, technology, had been very busy and its reputation rose exponentially.
§ Between 1839 and 1859 the following discoveries and inventions occurred:
Schwann: Cells in animals
Beaumont: Chemical nature of digestion
Daguerre: Daguerreotype photography
Goodyear: Vulcanisation of rubber
Grove: The fuel cell
Owen: Coins the word ‘dinosaur’
Jackson: Discovers ether as anaesthetic
Agassiz: Connects glaciers with Ice Ages
Dana: Recognises phosphate as fertiliser
Mayer: Law of Conservation of Energy
Whitworth: Standard screw thread
Adams: Calculates the position of Neptune
Bois-Raymond: Shows that nervous system is electrical
Koelliker: Shows that all cells originate from one splitting egg
Manson: Connects mosquito with malaria
Faraday: Connects light with electromagnetism
Boole: Symbolic logic
Ludwig: Shows blood circulation is purely mechanical
Cohn: Shows plant/animal cytoplasm to be similar
Lamont: Sunspots shown to affect the Earth
Fizeau: Measures the speed of light
Snow: Shows that cholera is linked to dirty water
Pasteur: Shows that fermentation is due to yeast
Wilson: The first to note X and Y chromosomes
Mendel: Works out the laws of heredity
Other discoveries and inventions include: ozone, shrapnel, Sirius B, uranium, the Doppler Effect and red shift, the Assyrian and Maya civilisations, hygiene in cities and hospitals, Morse code, spiral galaxies, guncotton, laughing gas, the rubber tyre, nitroglycerine, chloroform, the sewing machine, rotary and web printing presses, hormones, the Burbank potato, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, anaemia, anthrax, the word ‘thermodynamics’, air raids (by Austrians on Venice), teletype, absolute zero, valency, kerosene, potential energy, Otis elevators, catalysts, the Bunsen burner, the seismometer, Neanderthalers, homeostasis, time & motion, experimental psychology, the electric lighthouse, the submarine Atlantic cable, and aerial photography.
Add to this the fact that non-nobs were gradually getting the vote. The concept of practical democracy was spreading, and people were beginning to get used to the idea that they didn’t have to accept exploitation and coercion any more. The previous iron rule by Church and King was wobbling. Busy days.
It was the timescale of hundreds of millions of years that the New Geology insisted upon which allowed slow selective processes to operate, that finally made acceptable Darwin’s version of Evolution by Natural Selection. It would never go away again, despite a desperate rearguard action by some of The Church’s more excitable members.
§ In 2008 The Church finally apologised to Darwin for ‘getting our first reaction wrong’. Still, even 150 years late, and lukewarm, it’s better than nothing at all, I guess. It took the Catholic Church 359 years to apologise to Galileo; then, five years later, the Vatican paid £3m for a new telescope. First they burn you, then they mock you, then they join you… but slowly. In fact, it would seem that the Vatican’s first reaction to Darwin was to dig its heels in and declare Papal Infallibility (1870).
New ideas can expect a tough time in being accepted. We see it over and over and over again in the history of science. But why? What on earth is to be gained by hanging on to a Belief that is clearly wrong? But I will guarantee that 95% of Materialists will not accept the simple logic this book contains. They will continue to be True Believers and Defenders of the Faith… just like The Church did in Darwin’s day. That’s what dogmas do to your powers of reason.
Darwinian Evolution was a devastating blow to The Church. Again, it seemed to have been shown, by reason, that it was simply wrong about something. First Copernicus; then the triumphs of scientific discoveries, and the social improvements that came from them; then the New Geology; and now Evolution; all blows against The Church’s unquestionable Truths. All The Church had to offer was ‘The Lord God made them all’, usually called Creationism, but without explaining how the world worked and was constituted. Science could explain, and then act, producing canned food; anaesthetics; sewing machines. People liked that.
The Church had ‘Hell and Damnation’, and ‘You are born prince or pauper, athlete or cripple, and will die peacefully or in agony, according to the Will of God Who Loves All’. People did not like that.
The Church was thrown into confusion. Throughout its history it had struggled, sometimes brutally, to maintain the purity (as it saw it) of Christ’s Gospel of Love and Peace and Fraternity. The popes knew that if not rigorously maintained, the Gospel would be diluted, polluted by the infiltration of other, usually old and pagan notions of multiple gods, involving animal sacrifice or worse. We can see this in modern Africa, where new Christianity and old juju/witchcraft are often interfused. New ideas can take a very long time to establish.
§ Three examples from C13 of the pressures The Church worked under:
*The English scientist-monk Roger Bacon published ‘certain novelties’ of thought in astronomy and optics. He estimated the distance to the stars to be 130 million miles, in clear contradiction of Church dogma. He was imprisoned, or side-lined, for 15 years.
*In Italy, followers of St Francis wrote that ‘the love and fear of God were everywhere extinct’. Friars were sent out to restore faith in The Church, if not actually in God.
*In 1209 the Pope called for a ‘crusade’ against the Cathars and their reincarnationist views. Arnaud, the Cistercian abbot-commander, wrote: ‘Today your Holiness, 20,000 heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex’. Hundreds were burned at the stake, rather than strangled because burning would destroy their body, and they would thus not qualify for resurrection. Perhaps worthy of the Jewish Yahweh, but not of the Christian Jesus. For ‘crusade’ read ‘jihad’. Same thing.
(What panicked the Pope was that Cathars thought This World was the evil creation of a dark power. Clearly the head of The Church could not tolerate this opinion, so mass murder was the obvious Christian thing to do.) ‘He who is near the Church is often far from God.’ French proverb.
It seems to me that it was at this point in the later C19 that science became dominated by Materialism.
A few scientists who were less inclined to crowing, and who valued Evidence over Dogma, did begin to investigate paranormal happenings but they were sidelined by the Materialist majority, who knew that they would be supported in putting up two fingers to The Church by the increasingly enfranchised rats’-nests of the cities’ poor, who had long despised The Church’s hypocrisy in preaching humility while bishops lived in palaces.
***
Here was the answer to why Science refused to consider paranormal events as being possibly real. It was down to a combination of adopting a bad Dogma, and then preferring that Dogma over any evidence that smacked of non-Materialism. The ‘MythBusters’ were the natural descendants of this narrowing of minds. As the Materialist Dogma/anti-paranormalism came about as a reaction to an over-zealous, and often persecutory Church, one might say that it’s all The Church’s fault that ghosts and the paranormal remain uninvestigated by Science. This would not be fair, though. The scientists chose Materialism over Reason of their own free will. But if The Church had not been so stubborn and even ferociously cruel when faced with incontrovertible scientific fact, perhaps science would have taken a different turn. Perhaps today we would have the Idealist science that we should have instead of a half-science dominated by an irrational Dogma.
It had taken years of reading and thinking, but I had now answered to my own satisfaction the question ‘Why does science not investigate spooks? ‘
To Science, spooks cannot exist for reasons of dogma;
therefore they do not exist;
therefore they need/should not be investigated.
Anti-science.
***
But I still wanted to find out what a spook was. Science was going to be no help; nor was Philosophy, at least no philosophy that I’d stumbled across so far, apart from the ultimate but vague requirements of Idealism; that left Religion…. Which spoke of a Holy Ghost, so that surely was a start? I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I had now to enter the fantasy world of harps and angels, and dungeons and dragons that Religion seemed to be. The discomfort I had first felt towards Richard Dawkins, then towards Materialists in general, and then to all scientists had now faded. Or, to be more accurate, it had become transferred to Religionists. After all, it was their arrogance and cruelty that had forced rationalists into corners over the centuries, so it was not surprising that rationalists jumped for joy when Darwin delivered what seemed to be the knock-out blow.
Things might have turned out a lot differently if the Men of God had been a little more reasonable and a little less self-righteous: a little more like Men of God, in fact.
But they preferred arrogance and an assumption of Rightness; and preferred to maintain this position of power rather than to consider that they and the scientists actually had a common cause in seeking Truth, so why not have some discussion to find points of agreement and work from there? But no: Belief overwhelmed reason and the possibility of Understanding, just as it had done in ancient Athens when the city fathers condemned Socrates to death for annoying them with his embarrassing questions. Plus ça change, as ever.
§ A useful guide, when trying to unpick complex threads, is Hanlon’s Razor: ‘Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.’
The Tale of the Kale
All I ask is that you will take heed whether what I say be just
Plato
§ This chapter may be regarded as an extensive recap. If you feel sure you’ve followed the points up to now, you can safely skip it. If you feel you’d like to go over a few points again, from a different angle… then read on…
In pursuing scientific method, it is vital to start with a watertight premiss. You must have a sure foundation, otherwise you will be liable to the Gigo effect (‘Garbage in; garbage out’: a computing term which applies to all forms of rational thought).
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