Why Materialism?
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free
Goethe
Work on our smallholding continued…
‘April’ had her first calf in the spring. A perfect little creature, but stillborn: immaculate hooves, nose, eyes… just no spark. What, I wondered, was that ‘spark’..? And where had it gone?
§ I was to see this ‘spark’ go from the eye of a number of animals, including dogs, sheep, and a cow. One second they are alive, but then the eye alters. It’s difficult to explain, but if you’ve experienced it you will know what I’m talking about. The heart may beat on for some moments longer, but the animal has clearly already died.
A few seconds ago this assemblage of ‘selfish genes’ was alive, but now it is not, although the genes remain precisely the same as they were a moment ago. Richard Dawkins scorns the idea of a ‘vital spark’, comparing it with the sparks emitted by a locomotive. This is another unapt analogy, whether the ‘vital’ spark exists or not.
The Blind Watchmaker had not helped me answer the question of why Science seems to be so opposed to anomalies of an apparently paranormal nature, like poltergeists, telepathy, etc, although I now suspected that the reason for (this ‘dogmatic?) rejection lay deep within the philosophy of science. Thus, I first needed to find a definition for materialism, and then look deeper into the principles of science, which meant broaching the swamplands of philosophy, isms, and ologies. Every writer I had read, from Berkeley to Nietzsche had left me more puzzled than when I started.
§ In my teenage days I borrowed Marx’s Capital from the village library. By the bottom of page one I had found three words I’d never seen before, and another six whose meanings I was unsure of. I turned the page. Someone had pencilled onto the top margin ‘Don’t bother, it gets worse’. I tried Marx again in my political years. This time I was older and a little more self-confident, but found that the jargon remained too slippery for me to grasp. I never did work out what ‘dialectical materialism’ was, other than a sort of cut-and-paste free for all, involving ‘materialism’. The m-word again. (Interestingly, ‘materialism’ isn’t mentioned in The Communist Manifesto either.)
The basic problem for philosophers, and for their long-suffering students, is what do words actually mean? You can’t explain a theory without using words, and you must be clear about what you want your words to mean.
This is not as easy as it sounds.
§ Take the word ‘window’. Can you define it, so as to include all windows and exclude everything that is a ‘non-window’? ‘A window is a hole in a house wall, filled with glass’ doesn’t do it, does it? Some windows are filled with plastic; some windows are not in houses; pre-Tudor windows were made of sheets of polished horn, and were portable. Is a skylight a window? Is a porthole? A mesh-filled panel in a tent? And what about a wall made entirely of glass? And a car windscreen?
You can have hours of fun trying this game of definitions. And I bet you eventually come to the conclusion that a word means only what we at this present moment agree it to mean. (Humpty-Dumpty’s problem was that he alone ‘agreed’ on what a word meant and a second opinion was not required: the world of paranoid delusion. Richard Dawkins risks sharing this when he says: ‘Words are our servants, not our masters’, presumably including the word ‘designed’, as previously noted.) And what will matter most in your final definition will not be the physical characteristics of a window (or a book or a nail) but its purpose. Note the intrusion of that non-material, intelligent quality of ‘purpose’ again.
So, bearing in mind how difficult it is to pin down meaning in a simple everyday word, what hope have we of coping with abstractions like ‘sense’ or ‘God’ or ‘soul’ or ‘being’ or ‘reality’, or even ‘I’… especially when the text may have been translated from a foreign language whose subtleties do not carry across perfectly?
§ An example of the trickiness of translation: the first line of the Lord’s Prayer is traditionally translated as ‘Our Father who art in heaven..’, but the language it was originally written in is apparently a much subtler tongue than English. According to Neil Douglas-Klotz, in The Hidden Gospel, the original Aramaic phrase of ‘Abwoon d’bashmaya’ might be equally well translated in four other ways:
# Thou, the One from whom breath enters being in all radiant forms…
# O Parent of the universe, from your deep interior comes the next wave of shining life…
# O fruitful, nurturing Life-giver! Your sound rings everywhere throughout the cosmos…
# Father-Mother who births Unity, You vibrate life into form in each new instant.
Consider the scientific and philosophical implications of these versions, which are missing from our traditional Bible version. ‘Resonance’ and ‘light’ seem to feature strongly, for a start.**
I did find a definition of the philosophical theory of Materialism (for which
I will now use a capital, to distinguish it from the everyday meaning of ‘obsessed with the things of the material world’.)
Materialism: the belief that everything in the universe began with Matter: Big Bang quarks and electrons > nuclear particles > elemental chemicals > gases, water, and rocks. Einstein showed via E=mc2 that Matter and Energy are interchangeable. Thus for a Materialist Matter/Energy, (including electricity, gamma rays, etc) and only Matter/Energy, is the creative cause of everything in the universe.
§ That simple-looking formula, E=mc2, conceals the fact that 1gm of Matter apparently contains more Energy than 20,000 tonnes of TNT. Don’t mess with it.
But if only Matter/Energy lies behind everything, what about Mind? And Life? And Consciousness? And ‘meaning’? Was Mind just Energy, like electricity? And Life? Prof Dawkins never mentioned ‘intelligence’ or ‘mind’ in his analogies.
***
I’d read a lot of pop science books by now and noticed that they had one thing in common with The Watchmaker: they avoided the concept of Mind whenever possible, and all seemed to take Materialism as a proven fact: in other words, as the sound foundation upon which all other theories might be safely built. One Scientist I heard on the radio, whose name I didn’t catch, said that 99.9% of scientists believed in Materialism.
However, in none of these books was Materialism proved to be a Truth or even discussed, though to my mind it was seriously questionable, as it seemed to require something from nothing: eg, Life from non-life.
I’d also come across claims such as ‘Scientists do not believe in God’; ‘No scientist takes the supernatural seriously’; ‘Telepathy is bunk’; and so forth.
§ But some scientists did believe in God. For example, Dr Francis Collins, the head of the Human Genome Project, who had become an adult convert to Christianity. Working in the same speciality as the atheistic Professor Dawkins, but a deliberate Christian.
These were all clearly Materialist statements, but what struck me most was how ‘Materialist’ and ‘Scientist’ seem to have come to mean the same thing. This was beginning to explain why Science wasn’t interested in spooks and flying plates and all the other Anomalies that Colin Wilson and Lyall Watson and thousands of others have reported. I could imagine that a spook or telepathy would be pretty difficult for a Matter-only philosophy to explain.
But my big problem was that I could not see how Matter/Energy (ie, rocks, gases, lightning, radiation etc, none of which are regarded as being alive) could produce out of themselves alone anything that might be called Life. Surely that would mean something coming from nothing? The Greater arising spontaneously from the Lesser? Wouldn’t that be ‘magic’, or ‘a miracle’… the very thing that science itself seems to despise?
I asked a palaeontologist friend to clarify things for me. I explained that I’d just read The Blind Watchmaker and had found several logical flaws in it. ‘I don’t see how Life can have spontaneously occurred just from chemicals’, I explained. My friend became impatient. Then he said, somewhat testily, ‘Making Life is easy….’ and went on to astonish me with long words about genetics. But it was ‘Making Life is easy’ that caught my attention. Really? Easy? It had been done then? And presumably many times if it was easy. Another gap in my knowledge. But at least I now knew roughly what I was looking for, and I knew what Materialism was.
But what is ‘science’, exactly? I consulted a few books and came up with this: “Science is a systematic means of investigation via Hypothesis, Evidence and Theory; a Hypothesis (a smart guess), when backed up by adequate Evidence (data amassed by observation or experiment), is promoted into a Theory (a provisionally accepted ‘truth’). Any Theory is held as the best available until some other Hypothesis, backed up by good Evidence, replaces it.”
A scientist seeks to explain an observed Effect by explaining its Cause and the Mechanism that links Cause to Effect. For example, Darwin suggested why there are so many species in the world thus: the Cause of speciation was lots of slightly variable infants being born into varying circumstances; the Mechanism was Natural Selection, which ensured that only ‘the fittest’ survived to breed more infants suited to the local circumstances, leading first to variegation and eventually to the Effect of a new species being formed. A classic case of the scientific process (whether the details and conclusions are accurate or not).
§ But progress from ‘science’ to ‘the public domain’ can be glacially slow. For example, the Flat Earth Theory only very slowly gave way to the Round Earth Theory in the popular mind, despite the fact that a Phoenician sailor had rounded the Cape in 600BC and certainly knew that the earth was not flat. Old Theories, dogmatically-held via culture, die a very slow death, as in the saying ‘I’ve made up my mind; don’t confuse me with the evidence’.**
Being a procedural mechanism, science should have no dogma except to insist that logic, reason, and the principle of Cause and Effect should not be violated. There was no mention of Materialism in any definition of science that I came across.
A general view of scientists is of people who spend their lives peering into microscopes or standing in front of blackboards full of Greek squiggles. But your doctor and dentist also think of themselves as scientists, as do engineers, meteorologists, psychologists, and technicians. So too, as I discovered, do yogis. Their reasoning is that they approach their business in a pragmatic, empirical, and systematic manner, questioning everything as they go, just as any other scientist does.
§ Pragmatic: addressing problems according to present conditions rather than obeying fixed theories, ideas or rules: ie, having no truck with dogma.
§ Empirical: evidence derived from observation or experiment rather than dogma. A popular view of yogis is of people who spend their whole lives trying to poke their toes up their nose. This is erroneous.**
An academic scientist will publish his findings in a journal like Nature, where like-minded researchers (his ‘peers’) will either support his findings and Hypothesis or rip it to bits. If it passes this peer review, it is likely to be accepted as a Theory: ie, the best explanation we have, so far.
That little phrase ‘so far’ is vital. No Theory is taken to be an absolute Truth. It is universally accepted that sooner or later some other, deeper and more inclusive Theory will overtake it. In other words, science should never get bogged down with a dogma: a ‘Truth’ of any sort. This is what made science such a breath of fresh air after centuries of religious dogmatic absolutism, where logic didn’t get a look in, and if the Pope said ‘jump’, you jumped or paid the price.
§ For example, Giordano Bruno, a priest, was burned at the stake with a nail through his tongue for jumping in the wrong direction.**
Now I felt I was beginning to see the way ahead. The most pressing problem seemed to be the question of how easy was it to make Life? And why hadn’t I previously heard of it from my (presumably Materialist) biology teacher?
Back to the books…
A Positive Alternative…
The one thing that scientists ought to be is humble, because they, more than anyone, know how little they can explain
Professor Steve Jones
I knew nothing about how to make Life, so I just kept reading what came to hand on the history of science, hoping that I’d strike lucky. The books I found offered no evidence for Life having been manufactured. They were pretty old books, however. I needed something more modern. But I’d had more luck on the philosophical front, finding a 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It was pricey, but it bought 28 beautiful leather-bound volumes of a thousand pages each. They would contain all I needed to know about the basics of philosophy, and a lot of early science history as well. I flipped through the volumes, noting any article I thought I should return to. There were hundreds, all the way from Abelard to Zwingli. It was going to take years…