Atheism, as the word is usually used today should really be considered just another word for "materialism" or "naturalism" or "physicalism" or whatever neologism a materialist comes up with as the others fall into disrepute. The most basic aspect of our knowledge, the certain and most vitally experienced fact of our consciousness, is an enormous problem for atheism. Everything we experience, everything we sense, everything we can be persuaded to consider as reliable knowledge, rests on that primary experience of our consciousness and there is every reason for people to believe that their consciousness isn't like matter.
As the covert propagandist of materialism, Carl Sagan, so dogmatically put it, "The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be." When he said that he was expressing the most basic article of faith of atheism, as it is almost always articulated, replacing God, in effect, with physical matter and the physical forces that act on that matter. It is veiled expression of Sagan's materialist faith. If that view of life, of the universe is to stand then the problem is to convince people that their consciousness is just like any other material entity. The big problem for that effort is that most people don't conclude that from their own experience, even atheists don't really believe it.
I have mentioned the observation of William James, that a materialist who insists that religious experience is a manifestation of the physical state of their body has to immediately contradict their faith holding in regard to their own ideology. If religious ideas are merely the working of physiology, on a more basic level, the product of body chemistry and the physics of those, then atheism, materialism, science, mathematics, even logic must also be nothing but the working out of the peculiar chemistry that is found in the bodies of those people who have those ideas. Developing that idea, you can safely conclude that the materialist dogma on this would, effectively, equalizes all of those various and conflicting ideas, making them as equal as any other chemical reactions are mere products of unconscious matter. A. S. Eddington, perhaps among others, said exactly that:
Suppose we concede the most extravagant claims that might be made for natural law, so that we allow that the processes of the mind are governed by it; the effect of this concession is merely to emphasise the fact that the mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions. If, for example, we admit that every thought in the mind is represented in the brain by a characteristic configuration of atoms, then, if natural law determines the way in which the configurations of atoms succeed one another it will simultaneously determine the way in which thoughts succeed one another in the mind. Now the thought of “7 times 9" in a boy’s mind is not seldom succeeded by the thought of “65.” What has gone wrong? In the intervening moments of cogitation everything has proceeded by natural laws which are unbreakable. Nevertheless we insist that something has gone wrong. However closely we may associate thought with the physical machinery of the brain, the connection is dropped as irrelevant as soon as we consider the fundamental property of thought – that it may be correct or incorrect. The machinery cannot be anything but correct. We say that the brain which produces “7 times 9 are 63" is better than a brain that produces “7 times 9 are 65"; but it is not as a servant of natural law that it is better. Our approval of the first brain has no connection with natural law; it is determined by the type of thought which it produces, and that involves recognising a domain of the other type of law – laws which ought to be kept, but may be broken. Dismiss the idea that natural laws may swallow up religion; it cannot even tackle the multiplication table single-handed.
You can see what a problem that is for atheism. If even basic mathematics is to be held to be an articulation of brain chemistry, that the asserted material structure of thought "is all that is or was or ever will be," there is no legitimate means of preferring one over the other. You have to exit the closed maze of materialism in order to assert that one is preferable to the other, a scientist and mathematical thinker as accomplished and subtle as Eddington was, pointed it out. For the materialist wanting to assert a scientific basis of ideas, of thoughts, of consciousness, it is even a greater problem than it is for the atheistic mathematician.
When atheists assert that consciousness and the product of consciousness are merely the expression of matter, they create an impossible situation for science.
Science is not contained anywhere except in the minds of scientists and students of science, it is entirely comprised of ideas that they have. If those ideas are the expression of chemistry, presumably having physical form in complex molecules, any variation of those molecules would have to constitute different ideas. Any variation in the idea must have a corresponding difference in molecular form and any difference in form would have to constitute a different idea. If that is the case any idea that someone has, which changes, which is modified, which varied, at all, in expression would have to be the product of a different molecule. And those modifications would come about through personal consideration, the personal experience of tossing those ideas around in those "brain only" brains in the way that we do any idea to make sense of it. It would almost have to be true that no two scientists could have the same concept of an observation of nature or anything that scientists derive from those observations, up to and including laws of nature, probably no scientist could maintain a stable idea about science that wasn't constantly changing as they thought about it and compared it to other observations and ideas. If that's the case then even the most basic laws of physics, chemistry, biology, even the most basic axioms of mathematics and logic, would have an indefinite and nebulous existence, being different for just about, if not for every single scientist, student of science, for every single person who held those ideas. That would be a most basic negation of the universal truth of science, mathematics, logic, of every single idea that people can have. That would produce the ultimate in solipsism. It would have to or it would have to entirely deny the possibility that there was anything knowable as being true, something that is entirely at odds with human experience and the claims of atheists.
As I have said before, materialism can only matter, it can only be true, if it is wrong.
As I have said before, materialism can only matter, it can only be true, if it is wrong.
One of the most common items atheists pull out of their grab bag of bromides, buzz words, misused terms of formal logic (for which Sagan must also be credited) to insert irrelevantly in their assertions is the accusation that someone is looking for "God in the gaps." What is so funny about that is that atheists, treating matter as God, are the foremost practitioners of doing that, today. In no other aspect of atheist polemics is that more true than when it treats consciousness. The "hard problem" of turning consciousness into a material substance was the special project of Francis Crick in the last decades of his life. At his funeral his son announced that he had, in fact, failed to dispose of consciousness as anything but the mere product of chemistry and physics. He failed to put the final "nail in the coffin of vitalism". Why he should have been trying to do that, pretending his ideological quest was science when it was merely ideological, is an interesting question. Over and over again, atheists within science have used science to promote their atheism. The history of the social "sciences," the behavioral "sciences," abiogenesis, multi-universe cosmology, neuro-science, ... are either explicitly motivated by an attempt to promote materialistic ideology as science or they hijack actual science to do the same thing, all with the tacit, if not explicit, approval of other scientists. They are always asserting the soundness of the "promissory notes of materialism" that Karl Popper admitted such scientists were always issuing, when those notes have, one after another, come up as unpaid. Those empty promises are promoted on the faith in the materialist exposition of reality, they are sold to a public that is generally as unaware of the scam as they are the ideological motives behind it. None of this is sound science, as seen above, it is philosophically bankrupt.
An interesting sideline to this is found in this article on Truthout, of all places, in which the failure of a molecular explanation of mental illness is discussed.
Question: In Anatomy of an Epidemic, you also discussed the pseudoscience behind the "chemical imbalance" theories of mental illness - theories that made it easy to sell psychiatric drugs. In the last few years, I've noticed establishment psychiatry figures doing some major backpedaling on these chemical imbalance theories. For example, Ronald Pies, editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times stated in 2011, "In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance' notion was always a kind of urban legend - never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists." What's your take on this?
This is quite interesting and revealing, I would say. In a sense, Ronald Pies is right.Those psychiatrists who were "well informed" about investigations into the chemical imbalance theory of mental disorders knew it hadn't really panned out, with such findings dating back to the late 1970s and early 1980s. But why, then, did we as a society come to believe that mental disorders were due to chemical imbalances, which were then fixed by the drugs?
Dr. Pies puts the blame on the drug companies. But if you track the rise of this belief, it is easy to see that the American Psychiatric Association promoted it in some of their promotional materials to the public and that "well informed" psychiatrists often spoke of this metaphor in their interviews with the media. So what you find in this statement by Dr. Pies is a remarkable confession: Psychiatry, all along, knew that the evidence wasn't really there to support the chemical imbalance notion, that it was a hypothesis that hadn't panned out, and yet psychiatry failed to inform the public of that crucial fact.
By doing so, psychiatry allowed a "little white lie" to take hold in the public mind, which helped sell drugs and, of course, made it seem that psychiatry had magic bullets for psychiatric disorders. That is an astonishing betrayal of the trust that the public puts in a medical discipline; we don't expect to be misled in such a basic way.
But why now? Why are we hearing these admissions from Dr. Pies and others now? I am not sure, but I think there are two reasons.
One, the low-serotonin theory of depression has been so completely discredited by leading researchers that maintaining the story with the public has just become untenable. It is too easy for critics and the public to point to the scientific findings that contradict it.
I will note, to end, that psychiatry has polled as the most atheistic of medical specialties. Which may have a bit to do with their particular denomination of bad promissory notes in that materialist market place.
