Category Archives: materialism

Thoughts of a Solitary Walker IV: Is the World a Machine?

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In the previous essay, I addressed the question “Do we live in a material world?” I argued that the existence of matter is a philosophical postulate rather than a scientific observation or theory. Moreover, I explained further that matter, understood as something completely impervious to mind, contradicts the Christian doctrine of creation. In that essay I warned that if we accept materialism, even in its pseudoscientific form…

Matter becomes the enduring substance of the world and effectively takes the place of the sustaining power of God. We can no longer see God doing anything or feel God’s presence. And the loss of a sense of divine presence and activity in the world lies at the origin and growth of modern agnosticism and atheism.

The Machine Metaphor

In this essay, we will explore the companion idea almost always associated with matter, that is, the machine. How shall we explain the movement, change and transformation that occurs within the physical world? For about 2,000 years before the modern scientific revolution Aristotle’s explanations of natural phenomena had been the norm. Aristotle understood all movement through the analogy of a living organism, which is moved by an internal principle, soul. Every living thing possesses a soul that moves it toward its natural end. The cosmos as a whole is moved by a world soul.

A defining mark of early modern science is rejection of Aristotle and the organic metaphor. But if the world does not move, change and transform in the way an organism moves, changes and transforms, how then does it move? The machine provides an alternative metaphor that seventeenth-century scientists appropriated to their ends. A machine possesses no soul or mind, no internal principle of unity; it does not strive toward an end. Its constituent parts relate to each other externally and transfer movement by physical contact. Having no internal consciousness or hidden purposes, machines are not mysterious and can readily be understood mathematically. And perhaps—I am speculating here—the desire for simplicity and clarity is the reason Galileo, Descartes, and Gassendi were attracted to the machine metaphor. As I argued in “Thoughts of a Solitary Walker II,” excluding from science everything that cannot be measured in mathematical terms—psychological, aesthetic, moral and causal qualities—makes it clear, simple, and comprehensible.

Machines All the Way Down?

A machine is made of components. Understanding a machine scientifically—a mechanical watch, for example—requires differentiating the components from each other and discovering how they relate to one another and in what order and measuring their movements in mathematical terms. But machines in the microworld are composed of components that are themselves composed of components. But how do we know that the mechanical/mathematical model of explanation explains the movement of all physical things? Perhaps in the hidden world, beyond the reach of empirical experience, there is a psychic/spiritual reality at work that manifests itself in our macro world as machine-like behavior? (Think of how our own minds manifest themselves in the movements of our bodies. Indeed, common sense finds it implausible to think of any animal as a machine.) If we cannot rule this out, we cannot know that our mathematical formulae impart real knowledge of nature.

The Buck Stops with Atoms and Corpuscles

Early modern scientists were aware that we cannot prove that the mechanical model applies to every dimension of the physical world. Hence along with the postulate of the existence of matter as the substance of the physical world, they postulated the existence of tiny parts they called atoms or corpuscles. The Greek word “atom” means uncuttable or indivisible. The existence of atoms was first postulated by presocratic philosophers in approximately 500 B.C. Pierre Gassendi and Robert Boyle used the word corpuscle, a word derived from Latin that means “little body.” Though functioning like atoms, they are not necessarily indivisible.*

The postulate of the existence of atoms or highly stable corpuscles allowed the new mechanical/mathematical science to assume as a working hypothesis that all movement and change of any kind in the physical world conforms to the model of mechanical interaction of material components.

To Summarize

The postulate of the existence of matter exorcised all inner psychic factors from the physical world, and the postulate of the existence of atoms or corpuscles justified applying the mechanical model to all movement in the physical world.*

A Working Hypothesis Becomes Metaphysical Truth

As I have emphasized throughout this essay and the previous one, these two postulates were unprovable working hypotheses made to guide research and scientific explanation. Even as working hypotheses I doubt that they are completely innocent of metaphysical hubris. However, it is very tempting to conclude that their success in giving satisfactory explanations of physical movement and change warrants treating them as true representations of metaphysical reality. Many people followed this path into practical or theoretical deism, agnosticism, or atheism, each of which is devoid of the sense of divine presence in the world.

Misplaced Realism Again

The methods used by empirical/mathematical science of the 17th or the 21st century cannot prove—or even provide evidence for—a metaphysical hypothesis, whether material/mechanical or psychic/organic. It cannot distinguish between appearances caused by material atoms interacting externally and mechanically or those caused by internal psychic powers striving to achieve ends. A decision between these two opposing views must be made on other bases. For my part, I believe modern culture has been unwarrantedly and thoughtlessly confident in the material/mechanical hypothesis. So many impressive phenomena of nature and human experience are discounted by this hypothesis. It’s time to rediscover and reconsider the undeniable mental and psychic dimensions of the world. And in doing so we may very well recover a sense of God’s presence and activity all around and within us.

*I have simplified a very complex topic conceptually and historically. Hopefully, I have not falsified it. See the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for greater nuance. Search for “atomism” and other relevant terms.

Thoughts of a Solitary Walker III: Do We Live in a Material World?

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In this series, I am sharing with you some thoughts I had on my daily walks. And yes, I really do think about such things on my solitary walks. Walk with me as we explore connections among ideas that have stimulated the minds and stirred the hearts of people from ancient times to today. Thinking won’t solve every problem, but no problem will be solved without it.

Misplaced Realism

In my account of Solitary Walk II, I mentioned a thought I did not pursue. Early modern natural science rejected Aristotle’s hypotheses about why things behave the way they do, calling them “occult” (that is hidden or non-observable) only to replace them with their own occult entities. Instead of things being moved by inner strivings toward ends and given structure by intelligible forms, the new scientists postulated tiny material particles that relate to each other the way the parts of a machine relate in the macro world. And they treated this imaginary model as if it described what is truly real. I don’t know for sure whether Galileo, Gassendi, and Newton took these models realistically or merely as guides for further discovery. But many of their followers took them literally, and that is the way westerners have been taught physics and chemistry ever since.

This misplaced realism has had a profound cultural and religious impact on the modern world. Treating the material/mechanical model as truly describing the constitution and activity of the real world dramatically changes our relationship to the natural world. The external world gets evacuated of every spiritual, mental, psychological, and aesthetic quality. These qualities are transferred to a God outside and beyond nature or inside the human mind.  The world becomes a material machine that exists and runs on its own. Matter becomes the enduring substance of the world and effectively takes the place of the sustaining power of God. We can no longer see God doing anything or feel God’s presence. And the loss of a sense of divine presence and activity in the world lies at the origin and growth of modern agnosticism and atheism.

But the material/mechanical model should never have been taken realistically. The model has not and cannot be shown to be true by the mathematical methods of modern science. And there are good reasons to think it false.

Whence the Concept of Matter?

Consider the idea of matter, beginning with common experience. We encounter the world in two fundamental ways. On the one hand, we think the intelligible world of ideas, patterns, concepts, feelings, imaginings, and our own minds. These things exist inside our minds and do not conform to the physical laws that describe the external world. They do not occupy physical space. It takes no more space to imagine a galaxy than to imagine an electron. On the other hand, we experience the world as brute resistance, impenetrable by mind, unordered stuff out of which every physical thing is formed. We cannot think matter. We experience it as a dumb medium that impacts the five senses only to unload (or download!) the information encoded in it.

Let’s consolidate. The only world we can think, understand, or feel exists within our minds. Where else could we get in touch with it? And yet, there are two reasons we naturally believe that there exists an external world. First, we do not have a sense that we generate the countless ideas and endless variation of things that constitute the world we experience. Second, we experience the world as offering resistance to penetration by our minds. It confronts us with an apparently unthinking and unthinkable substance, a mere medium, which we call matter.

Let me make one more important distinction. We often confuse the concept of “the physical” with the concept of “the material.” We can experience and at least partially understand physical things. A physical thing, whether a rabbit or an atom, is a combination of a thinkable, intelligible order and what common sense calls matter. No physical thing is purely material. Matter is the physical stripped of all intelligible order. So, kicking a stone or pounding your hand on a table does not prove that there is a material world. At best, it points to the physical world.

Matter is Not a Scientific Idea but a Philosophical One

Ancient Philosophy

Plato reasoned to the necessity of matter by deducing the necessity of a place or space where the intelligible forms—the ideas of things—can exist as physical. What we would call “matter” is for Plato emptiness not substance. For Aristotle, the concept of matter is necessary to account for continuity of existence through the process of substantial change. For example, a burning log loses its substantial “log” existence and becomes smoke and ash. Matter is the unchanging stuff that accounts for the continuity within the change. Otherwise, substantial change would result in annihilation and re-creation from nothing. Matter never exists on its own. It exists only as a contributing cause to the existence of physical things.

Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas adopts Aristotle’s rather than Plato’s concept of matter. Aquinas agrees with Aristotle that matter is necessary to account for continuity through substantial change—log to smoke and ash. However, whereas for Aristotle both matter and form exist eternally, for Aquinas God created matter from nothing. God alone exists eternally and possesses the power of self-existence. Created matter functions within the created world much like eternal matter functioned in Aristotle’s eternal world. However, two great differences stand out. First, created matter, because it is not self-existent, cannot function as the ultimate ground of the persistence of the physical world through all changes. Second, matter cannot be purely opposed to mind, absolutely unintelligible. For whatever God creates, God thinks and understands. For us, matter may be an unintelligible medium for information or mere resistance, but God sees right through it. Everything that exists, exists within God’s mind. So, the distinction we make between form and matter is secondary, relative to our experience of the world and not absolute. For God—and therefore in truth—there is no non-mental world.

Escaping the Material/Mechanical Model

Once we understand that the material/mechanical model is a philosophical postulate—not an empirical observation or a scientific theory—and that taken realistically it contradicts the Christian doctrine of God and creation, we can get free from its mesmerizing power and begin to recover our sense of God’s presence and activity in the world. Realizing that the power that holds the world together is not matter but God’s continual command of “let it be” opens whole new vistas of perception. We now can perceive the presence and activity of God in the presence and activity of physical things. The beauty, rationality, purpose and goodness we see in the world can be received as the beauty, rationality, purpose and goodness of God. The durability of the world can be felt as the faithfulness of God.

Next Time: We will take another walk. Can the order and activity of the world best be explained as that of a big mindless machine or of a living organism. Do plants have souls or are they machines within machines?

Why Does God Feel So Absent (Part Two)

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Why can’t we feel what Paul and the Athenians felt: that “in him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28)? In Part One of this series I argued that modern natural science beginning with Galileo and Bacon teaches us to view the entire world of nature as bits of matter related in space. Nature has no soul, no nonmaterial aspect, and no internal goal. No wonder we cannot feel that we live and move and have our being surrounded and indwelt by God’s presence and activity! Instead we live and move and have our being inside a giant material machine! And if God is anywhere at all, God is outside the machine in another dimension. We’ve been taught a model of reality that makes us blind to God’s activity and presence; we’re all deists now! Or atheists or materialists.

In my view a wholly materialist understanding of nature will lead eventually to metaphysical materialism and atheism. That is to say, if we exclude formal and final causality, we will not be able to imagine divine causality and activity. If we cannot imagine created, nonmaterial causes acting within the world, we will not be able to imagine how God is present and active in the world.

Sense Experience and Materialism

A common argument for atheistic materialism begins with sense experience, which supposedly reveals the nature of reality for our immediate inspection. Through our senses we perceive the world as consisting of external, opaque and impenetrable physical objects.  Our senses are activated by our body’s physical contact with external bodies. Using this common experience of the world as an analogy, the materialist constructs a model of reality in which purely material bits (atoms) are accidentally related to each other to form the order we experience in the world. Matter itself possesses no order. The materialist perspective assumes that since we can destroy the ordered physical things we meet in everyday experience but cannot destroy the material substance of which they are composed, the material substance must be the only reality that endures throughout all change. The order itself is nothing and can be wholly reduced to spatial relationships of material bits. Everything other than unordered matter, including our minds and all intelligible properties, is simply a pattern in collected bits of matter. And the existence of the particular sets of spatial arrangements of matter that constitute the present order of nature can be explained as the result of pure chance. The world merely falls into place. It is not put or held in place.

A Different Beginning Point

But what if we begin our thinking about reality at a different point, not with perception of the external world through the senses, but with the mind’s perception of itself and its experience of its contents and powers? After all, we know our minds better than we know any other thing. Indeed, our minds are the only things we know from the inside. We are our minds! We experience our minds as intelligent, creative, unified, transparent and internal. In contrast, matter is defined by its impenetrability, externality, lack of order and unintelligibility. It is spatial, mindless and massive. The materialist model of reality as bits matter in spatial relationship is derived from an external view of things. But why rely on an external view of reality when we have an internal view! We have an internal perspective on ourselves completely inaccessable to an external point of view. Why not assume that other things do as well? Hence we are not being irrational or arbitrary when we make inner experience of our minds and their contents the beginning point for constructing a model of reality that includes minds, ideas and purposes.

From Inside Out

Let’s see what the world looks like when we begin with an internal view of the mind. Here is the path we will follow: (1) We will move from the mind and its inner world to our bodies; then (2) we reflect on our experience of the physical world not merely as external surfaces but as intelligible and information rich; then (3) we will ask about the significance of our encounter other minds like our own; and (4) finally we raise the question of an all-inclusive and universally operative mind in whom the whole world lives and moves and has its being.

Inside the Mind

Internal experience teaches us that our minds are real, free, creative, nonmaterial powers. Hence we know that reality is not synonymous with materiality, and knowing is not synonymous with empirical experience of external surfaces.

Mind In and Over Body

We find also that our minds have causal power over our bodies. We can move them as we will and through them move and reshape the external physical world to resemble the images we have created in our minds. Our own experience of our bodies demonstrates the power of mind to impose its internal order, its ideas, on the physical world. But what about the natural physical objects we encounter? Is the order they display the product of a mind?

Part 3 coming tomorrow

 

Why Does God Feel So Absent (Part One)?

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Something has been bothering me for years, and I am obsessed with getting clear on it: why does living in modern culture rob us of a sense of God’s presence? When Paul spoke to the Athenians he could assume that they shared his vivid sense of a divine presence in human life and in nature. He was sure that they would agree with the sixth-century B.C. philosopher Epimenides whom he quoted: “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). For the Athenians and nearly all the ancients it seemed obvious that nature was moved and ordered and directed by the divine spirit and mind. Why isn’t it obvious for us? Perhaps there are many reasons, but I want to focus on one: the impact of the model of reality generated by early modern science.

Modern science began in the early seventeenth century with Francis Bacon’s and Galileo’s rejection of Aristotle’s philosophy of science, especially their exclusion of formal and final causality from the study of nature. A formal cause is the design plan or blue print that makes a thing what it is as opposed to something else. It is the unifying center of a thing that integrates all its components into one whole. It is the foundation of its properties. Clearly a design plan is not a physical thing and does not exercise causality in a physical way. It can be comprehended only obscurely, as imperfect image. For these reasons, Bacon and Galileo excluded it from their new empirical/mathematical science.

A final cause is the reason for which a thing is made. It is the aim at which its entire development and activity is aimed. Like a formal cause, a final cause is not a physical thing and cannot exercise physical causality. It exists only in the mind of the maker of the thing. Bacon and Galileo saw no way of studying final causes empirically. How can you study the mind that made a natural object or the inner striving of the thing toward a goal? Those things, if they are factors at all, are hidden from the practitioner of empirical science who always views things from an external point of view.

Bacon and Galileo redesigned natural science so that it deals only with empirically observable phenomena, which it comprehends exclusively in mathematical terms. In other words, the task of natural science is to figure out the mathematical relationships of things that are capable of activating one of our five senses. What sorts of things activate our senses? The impacts of material objects! Hence, for Bacon and Galileo, natural science envisions reality as bits of matter related in space in ways that can be understood truly only in mathematical terms!

Natural science and the technology it has made possible have been decisive in forming modern culture. Modern science’s way of explaining empirical phenomena and the model of reality that has guided its investigations have so shaped our understanding of nature that we unthinkingly assume that it describes the way things truly are: everything in nature really is just bits of matter related in space. There is no formal causality operative in nature and no final causality that directs it toward a goal. Hence we cannot immediately experience nature as the result of design and in movement toward an end. And this is why we cannot feel what Paul assumed the Athenians felt, that “in him we live and move and have our being.”

In my view one of the most urgent needs of modern culture is to rediscover formal and final causality in nature and ourselves. I am not a professional philosopher or a scientist, but I want to do something to help people see the world through a different lens. What follows is not highly systematic. But I hope it can nevertheless cause us to question the materialistic model that robs us of the feeling of living in the flow of the divine life and thought as it manifests itself in the forms and flow of nature.

To Be Continued: Part 2 will be posted tomorrow.