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 read whatever came to hand on the history of science, hoping 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 for £30. 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.
A week later I met an ex-editor of a scientific journal. I suggested that Materialism looked very shaky, as it required what seemed to me to be magic, and could he help me? He explained evolution to me. ‘Yes’, I said ‘I understand all that, but what about the origin of Life? Life must have come into being before Evolution could take place. How does Materialism explain that?’ He smiled the smile of The Wise addressing The Foolish and spoke. I remember our exchange verbatim:
He: Chas… what you must understand is that everything is mineral.
Me: What? Even this conversation?
Let’s be clear: ‘Everything’ means ‘everything’… from stars to stones, to Life to Mind to Consciousness… to the very meaning of the words on this page. That is what ‘everything’ means. Stars and stones? Yes, mineral. But laughter, compassion, love, purpose, intelligence and meaning? All ‘mineral‘? I was bewildered. Had the scientist really said that? Did he mean it? He did not deny that a conversation was mineral. In fact he dismissed my query with a wave of the hand which in Imperial China would mean ‘End of Interview; Proceed at Your Own Risk’. How could a well-respected person talk such poppycock? I was a little angry.
But what a gift! First there was that Introduction which claimed that Darwin was ‘purely material’ in his views, which was quite untrue; then Richard Dawkins’ untrue claim concerning Darwin’s views, and his cavalier use of logic and metaphor; and now here was a third party making a palpably absurd statement. Materialists all… and no alternative in sight.
But surely there must be a rational alternative to Materialism? If not, the only options were that The Church’s waffle and obscurantism must be true, or that there was no explanation at all: that the Universe, and everything in it, including Life and ‘meaning’ itself, was just.. accident; just… stuff… though ‘meaning’ cannot be called ‘stuff’, by any stretch of Humpty Dumpty’s imagination.
§In a three-line nutshell…
*Did atoms accidentally create meaning?
*If so… out of what?
*If not…. what did?
But… that accidental view was precisely the Materialist point of view which seemed to require the magic of spontaneous creation of Life from non-life, Mind from non-mind, etc, and which, once adopted as Truth, led to such nonsensical claims as ‘everything is mineral’.
There had to be something else. Purpose, reason, logic, all exist in the Universe. They had to come from somewhere. And so did Life Mind and Consciousness.
Britannica helped a little. I checked out one more-or-less incomprehensible ism after another until I bumped into one that pulled me up short: Idealism…. which claims that Mind came first in the Universe, not Matter.
§ ‘Idealism’ is a confusing name, alas. I’ll spell it with a small ‘i’ for the everyday meaning of ‘living by high ideals’, and I’ll use a capital ‘I’ to mean ‘the Hypothesis that Mind (as in ‘ideas’) came first in the Universe’. I would like to call it ‘Mindism’ but that would just add to the mass of already confusing names out there.
No prospector tripping over a four ton nugget could have been as excited as I was. This was ‘non-materialism’, spot on. And not only was it a genuine alternative to Materialism, but it seemed to be that rare bird, one half of a genuine either/or choice. I spent weeks ensuring that I had fully understood it. Then I asked: ‘What came first in the Universe, Mind or Matter?’
| EITHER: | Matter/Energy came first and somehow gave rise to Mind from itself ALONE (the Hypothesis of Materialism). |
| OR: | Mind came first and somehow gave rise to Matter/Energy (the Hypothesis of Idealism). |
It really is an either/or. They are absolutely contradictory in their claims. One must be right and the other must therefore be wrong.
We can’t say ‘Well, perhaps Mind and Matter both came first, in parallel, so to speak’, because that would then admit that Mind was indeed a separate factor from Matter which is precisely what Materialism denies, when it claims that Matter alone lies behind ‘everything’, and thus, by definition, came before Mind. In other words, Materialism, by its own definition, will not allow for a parallel origination.
Similarly, we can’t say ‘Well perhaps neither came first, because they are both eternal, and have no beginning’, because again, that would be to admit that Mind is a separate entity from Matter, which Materialism denies.
§ But perhaps Mind and Matter originated in parallel, and Materialism is simply wrong about Matter being supreme? In this case, you must then admit that Materialism is wrong in insisting that Matter alone came first. You also have another serious problem, as a parallel origination means that both Mind and Matter must ultimately have had their origin in a Yet Higher Cause of some sort; again, anathema to Materialism.
Let us clarify how Materialism and Idealism square up. Firstly:
What came first in the universe?
A Materialist: ‘The Big Bang… a ginormous explosion of Everything, and all of it Matter/Energy’.
An Idealist: ‘Mind’.
What came before whatever it was that came first in the universe?
A Materialist: ‘We don’t know yet, and may never be able to know. But it must be something material, from which automatically derived all the Matter/Energy in the universe’.
An Idealist: ‘Mind’.
How can we explain the existence of Life?
A Materialist: ‘It arose spontaneously from Matter/Energy alone’.
An Idealist: ‘We can not explain it. Life and Mind are inseparable; they/it pre-existed Matter’.
How can we explain the existence of Mind?
A Materialist: ‘Mind arose spontaneously from Matter/Energy alone, via Life (see above)’.
An Idealist: ‘We can not explain it. Mind (Mind/Life) pre-existed the material universe’.
How can we explain the existence of Consciousness?
A Materialist: ‘Consciousness arose spontaneously from Matter/Energy alone, via Life and Mind (see above)’.
An Idealist: ‘We can not explain it. Consciousness is inseparable from Mind and Life, and pre-existed the material universe’.
How can we explain the existence of Matter/Energy?
A Materialist: ‘All Matter/Energy instantly appeared from a microscopic point in the moment of the Big Bang’.
An Idealist: ‘Life, Mind and Consciousness somehow produced all the Matter/Energy in the Universe, possibly via the Big Bang’.
Each ism is self-consistent in its claims.
- Materialism consistently requires something to arise from nothing: Life from non-life; Mind from non-mind; and Consciousness from nonconsciousness.
- Idealism consistently poses a mystery, or mysteries, depending upon how we relate Life, Mind and Consciousness to each other.
Of the two, Idealism, mystery or not, is the more rational philosophy because to require something to arise from nothing is anathema to the basic principle of science which requires a Cause for every Effect, and a new force for every change in the status quo.
§ We can’t use the metamorphoses of chemistry as an explanation. It’s true that if you mix a flammable metal (sodium) with a poisonous gas (chlorine) you get an eerie burning process leaving as a residue something you can sprinkle on your chips (salt).
This is remarkable, but it can be explained in terms of atomic and electron theory. The process is well-understood and infinitely repeatable.
But there is NO theory that can explain how unalive chemicals might, in principle, spontaneously assemble themselves into a self-replicating living entity which then spontaneously develops self-consciousness and goes on to write books on biology.
To maintain a Hypothesis which ignores Cause and Effect runs counter to the very principle of scientific investigation.
It was interesting that Materialism and Idealism could agree on the Big Bang Hypothesis, the difference being that for Idealism the Bang was a Mechanism linking Cause (Mind) to an Effect (the Universe/Matter), whereas for Materialism the Bang was simply a spontaneous event.
§ If you call the Big Bang a Cause and the Universe an Effect you then have no Mechanism. (You can’t count ‘expansion’ as a Mechanism, as a Bang is an expansion).
Idealism does suggest a Cause for the Universe but it is not specific. Mind was The Cause, but it does not define ‘Mind’. However, because it does not suggest a complete solution does not make this claim irrational; it is merely incomplete. ‘Very incomplete’, I hear you say, and I agree with you. But ‘incomplete’ has never meant ‘wrong’. Our understanding of the workings of the body, ecology, physics or the cosmos itself are ‘incomplete’, but that does not mean that our understandings so far are ‘wrong’. And as someone once said, ‘The greater the island of knowledge, the longer the coastline of ignorance’.
Secondly, there is nothing wrong with a mystery. Light was a mystery until Newton refracted it through a prism and made it slightly less of a mystery.
§ Light is still 99% mysterious, however. Ask any physicist.
Why some heavenly bodies seemed to go backwards in the night sky was a mystery until Copernicus investigated and explained it. And why some species thrive, while others die out was a mystery until Darwin suggested how body shapes come and go.
So there is no problem with Idealism offering only a mystery, or a bundle of mysteries. Mysteries attract intelligent and enquiring minds; and those enquiring minds are the ones that bring greater understanding to the world.
Idealism offers no explanation for the nature of Life Mind and Consciousness (‘LMC’), except that they are interconnected and ‘came first’. This means that LMC must have existed before the world, and before the Universe. Thus, LMC must have created Matter/Energy. Absurd!! But is it absurd? After all, we know that Mind creates. We use our minds every day to create cakes, emails, cathedrals, Large Hadron Colliders, and Richard Dawkins’ biomorphs. Mind-Will-Intelligence-Purpose- creates. That’s what it does.
So where is the problem with Idealism as a principle? True, it goes entirely against the Hypothesis of Materialism, but as Materialism is irrational surely this is a good thing? A candle in the dark? That’s how it felt to me.
I confess that I felt all the doubts that any open-minded scientist may be feeling at this point. But logic is logic. Materialism is untenable because it is paradoxical, and also breaks the accepted rules of scientific procedure.
§ ‘Paradoxical’ meaning ‘self-contradictory’, as in requiring chemicals that do NOT contain life to accidentally self-generate life from non-life and become living objects.
§ As a curio, what happens if we do accept the Materialist Hypothesis? …that chemicals accidentally came alive, and that these living objects accidently created Mind; that these mindful objects accidentally created Consciousness; and these conscious objects spontaneously created Self-conscious objects who use language and squiggles on a page to convey accidentally-created meaning to each other…
If we accept that, we must also accept this: ..that all the meaning in this book and in all the world, must have been contained within those few original chemicals which accidentally bumped into each other millions of years ago. If there was nothing but Matter/Energy in the beginning that same Matter/Energy must be the ultimate Cause of everything, ultimately including this sentence and your own emotional reaction to it. Furthermore, if these original chemicals banged into each other at random, it stands to reason that ALL those primordial chemicals must have contained ALL meaning (as above), because otherwise the few that banged together to spontaneously produce Life (then Mind, then Consciousness, then Self-consciousness, then meaning, love, joy, purpose, etc), must have been very special chemicals, being the ones that contained all the meaning (love, joy, purpose, etc) in the world for centuries to come, and nobody has ever suggested that the Big Bang produced a few special chemicals that contained meaning (or Life Mind or Consciousness, etc) in contrast to all the others.
This whole confection is the Materialist paradox re-stated: ie, that LMC arose accidentally from Matter/Energy which on the one hand did not contain LMC, but which, on the other hand, must have contained LMC, at least in some potential form.
This ‘paradoxical necessity’ breaks the fundamental rule of logic (The Law of Contradiction) which says that:
Something may not both be ‘x‘ and ‘not-x‘ at the same time.
How could an irrational and paradoxical system be ‘true’? Idealism really was the sole logical alternative to Materialism. I was thus forced to take it seriously. It rankled, though.
Deep down I was now beginning to feel the hot sticky breath of religious dogma and the Inquisition at the back of my neck, and had no wish to engage with it.
Could one make sense of Idealism without resorting to religious dogma? Clearly all religions are Idealist constructs, as they all require Big Mind (with many names) to come first in the Universe, but Christianity as I understood it appealed to me only to ‘believe’. This wasn’t an option for me, though. I needed to ‘understand’.
The Hitler Youth had ‘believed’ and inflicted murder upon millions; the Catholic Church burned people who disagreed with their belief just a couple of centuries ago in ‘Autos da Fé’…’Acts of (the) Faith’. And modern Islamist terrorists are driven by blind faith, and kill hundreds at random, including their fellow Muslims. ‘Faith’ and ‘belief’ were not for me at any price.
§ Faith is ‘Belief in action’, as one can have faith only in what one believes. Thus, as Belief is a more fundamental entity than Faith, I’ll be dealing only with Belief here.
Whatever, I would need to investigate religions and other philosophies.
But meanwhile, old-fashioned mulling brought some results. How could Mind make a Universe? I’ve got a Mind and I couldn’t make a Universe. This is not a logical response to the issue, though. If Mind did indeed create a Universe, then we are dealing here with a Supermind of some sort. How ridiculous is that?
Not at all, I would say. We all know that human intelligence varies enormously, from Plato to Pluto. And speaking of Pluto, so does animal intelligence. Man is smarter than a chimp, who is smarter than a dog (and all dogs vary), who is smarter than a chicken, who is smarter than a woodlouse, who may be smarter than a tapeworm, who presumably is smarter than a bacterium; who may be smarter than a virus. The point is: we already have plenty of evidence of a huge scale of Intelligence in our everyday world. At the one end we have the Einsteins; somewhere in the middle we have Einstein’s dog, who, smart though he might be, will never understand why The Boss spends hours scratching about on a blackboard instead of chucking him a stick;
§ Rico the sheepdog can fetch 200 items by name, as tested by the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Betsy can fetch 320 objects by name, or by being shown a copy, or simply by looking at a picture of the required object. There must be some people who can’t do that. Another dog called Chaser can fetch 1000 objects by name.
Alex, the African Grey parrot, could count to six, could identify fifty different objects and seven colours, and had a vocabulary of 150 words.
and at the lower end of the scale we have molluscs and insects, who, we might be sure, have no concept of what life is like for a human, just as we have little idea of what it is like to be a beetle. Further down the scale, we have no notion of the inner world of an amoeba. But all these creatures exhibit at least traces of intelligence. Spiders, for example, are smart enough to not run into ponds, and according to http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn15068 the humble amoeba shows evidence of being able to choose. (Well, of course… how else could it feed?)
So as we have no problem with a diminishing scale of Intelligence, we can have no logical reason to deny the possibility of an increasing scale of intelligence that would consider us as mere bacteria by their own intellectual standards.
§ A Materialist would have a hard time accepting this logic, as for him, Life Mind and Consciousness all arose spontaneously from the original Matter/Energy of the Big Bang; thus Man is self-evidently the highest form of LMC on the planet or possibly in the Universe, and any sort of non-Material Supermind capable of creating a universe is out of the question.
But, you might say, surely we would be somehow aware of these Superminds if they exist? Would we? Is the E. coli who lives and moves and has his being in your gut aware of you? Can he ever be? But perhaps more to the point, we can only become aware of things if we are looking in the right place. Materialist-Science refuses to look at ghosts, never mind the huge realm of other paranormal anomalies whose study might open up all sorts of doors, not least in the realms of physics, philosophy, psychology, communication, biology, and healing.
§ I have been shocked by the number of Scientists I have met who refuse to even look at impeccably gathered evidence for paranormal events which has been produced by other (sadly, ‘brave’) scientists.
Why this refusal to even look at the evidence? It can only be because of the assumption that Materialism is True, and thus all anomalies must, by definition, be false. There’s a sort of logic there but what of the faulty premiss? There’s a definite aroma of ‘dogma’…
If Mind came first in the Universe, then we must accept that Superminds actually exist, and that maybe one (or more?) of them is capable of knocking up an entire Universe in just six of our Man Days, so to speak.
§ ‘Days’ did not exist at the time of the alleged Creation, as a Day is an intellectual construct dependent upon Earth rotating on its axis. No Earth, no Day. So maybe we should propose a Supermind Day of, say, a trillion years, give or take. We might even like to consider the possibility that ‘Time’ itself is a man-made construct, in which case ‘Day’ has no meaning at all.**
It seems to me that the Days in the Genesis story refer essentially to a sequence, expressed in terms suitable for a non-intellectual tribal people to get the feel of. They could get a handle on ‘a day’ but not on ‘an aeon’, or a ‘nano-second’, say. In fact, the original Hebrew word ‘yom’ can mean ‘a period of indeterminate length’.
But, maybe I’d got it wrong, somehow… maybe my logic had gone awry somewhere, despite my endless ruminations and stand-up, out-loud, dialogues, pacing up and down the kitchen, asking rhetorical questions of a willing but increasingly bewildered dog.
Time for more delving… if I could find real evidence that Life had been created from non-life then I would have to re-think everything. And perhaps I might discover why there was such an outright rejection of Idealism by the Materialist/Scientific world.
It is vital to emphasise again that science and Materialism are entirely separate things, although many Scientists I have spoken to seem to think otherwise.
‘Science’ is a methodology of investigation based upon gathering empirical evidence. It collates and interprets local information, and in itself requires no philosophy. It discovers mechanisms and relationships, not purposes.
‘Materialism’ is a philosophy that attempts to explain the larger purpose or cause that lies behind the empirical data discovered by scientific method.
Remove the interpretative philosophy of Materialism from the world and science still works perfectly well, as is proved by the work of all the great non-materialist/Idealist scientists who used standard scientific method with great success without being Materialists:
§ Copernicus: was a Catholic canon.
Descartes: thought the pineal gland was the site of the soul.
Pascal: see Pascal’s Memorial of his personal revelation.
Galileo: ‘Maths is the language in which God wrote the universe.’
Crookes: investigated spiritualism and a levitating medium and would not recant his findings even when his membership of the Royal Society was threatened.
Darwin: refers to ‘The Creator’ in the final sentence of the final edition of Origins; he also claims in Origins that evolution is teleological (ie purposeful).
Wallace: investigated spiritualism and would not recant his discoveries when pressed.
Newton: wrote more on the Old Testament prophets than he did on physics. He predicted the end of the world to be due in 2060.
Leibnitz: repeatedly refers to ‘the soul’.
TH Huxley: was a firm believer in reincarnation.
Mendel: was an abbot.
Planck: ‘Nature is ruled by a rational will aiming at perfection.’
Maxwell: was an Elder of the Church of Scotland.
Faraday: was an Elder of a branch of the Church of Scotland.
Tesla: ‘I feel convinced that my preservation… was indeed the work of divine power.’
Einstein: ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists.’
Pasteur: ‘The more I study nature, the more I am amazed at the work of the Creator.’
Heisenberg: spoke of ‘the naïve materialistic way of thinking’, and claimed that materialism rested upon ‘an illusion’.
Schrödinger: ‘We do not belong to this material world that science constructs for us.’
If we insist that the terms ‘scientist’ and ‘Materialist’ are identical, then we must accept that if one is not a Materialist one must not be a scientist. Thus Darwin and all the other truly great non-materialist explorers listed above must be declared to be ‘not scientists’.
(Materialism is actually an anti-philosophy, as it claims (dogmatically: ie, backed by no proof) there is no ultimate explanation for anything, as by assumed dogmatic definition there can be no purpose to anything.)
I have often been asked for ‘evidence’ for Idealism by people who think of themselves as scientists. I point out that it is a question of logic and interpretation and not of evidence. I am then dismissed, because I ‘cannot produce evidence’. But logic and evidence exist in hierarchy. Logic does not depend upon evidence; evidence does depend upon logic.
Evidence is provided by scientific methodology, and Logic (frequently under the name of philosophy) attempts to interpret the Evidence by placing it into a broader framework. Currently, the framework favoured by Science is ‘Materialism’. The problem is that Materialism is itself an illogical entity.
In fact the ‘evidence for Idealism’ is the very same material that is suggested as evidence for Materialism. The evidence is constant; the perspective and interpretations differ.
Evidence for anything paranormal is rejected a priori by (most) scientists because most scientists are dogmatically certain that Materialism is an inseparable part of being a scientist, and to accept anything that runs counter to Materialism is perceived as an attack on science itself. This is unreasonable to the point of being laughable. It is also very damaging to the progress of scientific thinking, and, more importantly, to the public perception of reality and hence to the way we think of the value (or otherwise) of our own lives… and the way we treat the planet.**
§ ‘To be ignorant of causes is to be frustrated in action.’ Francis Bacon
So Where’s the Evidence…?
The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas
Carl Sagan
I read Isaac Asimov’s A Short History of Biology, and his Guide to Science and found no evidence that Life had ever been manufactured by man, which would have supported the Hypothesis of Materialism.
I read several other books, but still found no evidence. An Encyclopaedia of Evolution by Richard Milner says under the entry Life, Origin of: ‘Scientists cannot agree on a single formal definition of life’, which made me think. If you don’t know what it is you are looking for, how could you know when you’ve found it, and how could you know how to go about synthesising it?
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