IT'S NOT UNUSUAL for some would be wit among the college-credentialed class of the English speaking People to make some snarky reference to "angels dancing on the head of a pin" whenever something approaching the topic of theology comes up. The imagined bit of erudition holding that such things were all Christian theologians talked about in the middle-ages when the fact is that line was likely invented by a minor English writer in the early modern period in order to dishonestly characterize Catholic scholastic theology. Most college-credentialed wits who echo that probably never read any medieval theology or philosophy or they'd know that Catholic theologians of that period, in fact, produced some of the more important philosophical and proto-scientific texts in history.
The same wags of a little learning will often make perhaps entirely ignorant reference to one of them, William of Occam, he of the famous razor that they know they're supposed to approve out of learned sloganeering but probably don't understand at all. It was one of the stupidest things said in the popular American media of my lifetime that some magazine scribbler said that the habitual liar and fake champion of science, James Randi wielded Occam's razor like a switchblade when all the idiot did was spout the kind of ridicule that this paragraph is about. I have read and heard loads of Randi's bilge and I never found an instance where he applied it. When Randi had the chance to show his science ability in the sTARBABY scandal, when he couldn't fake it anymore, he had to admit he didn't have a clue about the statistical basis of the science of the matter in question and, as I pointed out, he did nothing after that to remedy the gaping hole of ignorance that rendered him a scientific and philosophical fool of a "skeptic.'
He wasn't alone in that, Paul Kurtz and several others alleged to be promoting science and reason proved they were as ignorant as he was, though the scientists who clearly did understand their scientific, mathematical and logical mistake didn't act as if it was at all important so they may as well not have known what they did. The internal criticism of "skepticism" and materialism and, so, most atheism is far, far lower than the internal criticism of parapsychology or theology, for that matter. The most exigent and knowledgeable critics of theological writings and teachings are other theologians. In the lapses of science I've been going over, what's clear is that science has been following the "skeptics" in so far as their own internal criticism goes in far too many cases for science to retain its reputation. Which is a real problem for us all.
Given the widespread adoption of the real ideology of "skepticism", atheism and materialism and scientism by scientists, maybe that's got a lot to do with those lapses in internal criticism. Among those atheist-materialists who had and have an ability in the methods of science, those who are working scientists, it is incredible how much of the time and funding and teaching positions have been spent on those whose primary career focus has been on the support of, not scientific knowlege or even scientific practice but on supporting their religious faith in atheism and materialism. Entire fields of scientific study have largely, sometimes it seems entire careers are entirely focused on supporting atheism against religion. The late cosmologist Stephen Hawking certainly did some of that, especially in the later stages of his career, explicitly in The Grand Design. He has been quoted as calling cosmology a religion for atheists. Though there are certainly many successful cosmologists who would reject that, George Ellis, Georges Lamaitre, . . all the way back to Copernicus.
These days cognitive science and neurobiology seem to have a large faction within those fields who are focused on the central problem of materialism, the sciency seeming ideological basis of modern atheism. The fields of Sociobiology and so-called Evolutionary Psychology through Hamiltonian so-called "altruism" seem to me to have been motivated by little else with a more explicitly Darwinist orientation. Reading through Science Set Free again - a danger of quoting from a well written book is the temptation to reread the whole thing - Rupert Sheldrake said it very well.
The central doctrine of materialism is that matter is the only reality. Therefore consciousness ought not to exist. Materialism's biggest problem is that consciousness does exist. You are conscious now. The main opposing theory, dualism, accepts the reality of consciousness, but has no convincing explanation for its interaction with the body and brain. Dualist-materliast arguments have gone on for centuries. In this chapter I suggest how we can move forward from this strile opposition.
The section of the book I typed out, posted and commented on the other day is what comes right after this section in the book. But his laying out of the problem of materialist-atheists' own consciousness, what they use to choose what to focus on and convince others of, says it well in a short time so I'm going to type the rest of that out. I do that even if I'm rather skeptical of panpsychism, the solution he proposes on the basis of the opacity of proposed consciousness of non-living entities. Such a "consciousness" is certainly unlikely to be defined or found scientifically (science can't even account for the experienced human consciousness that produces science, how can it be done in the consciousness of atoms or subatomic particles or molecules or larger "self-organized" objects. Philosophy hasn't had any more success. I think that's because philosophy will try to use the modes of thought surrounding material objects and causal interactions of those is required for that thinking. In the same way science cannot deal with consciousness, modern philosophy hasn't exceeded the limits of that kind of causality even before the classical Greeks fixed that as the focus of philosophy. Materialism and the model of scientific thinking has done nothing to further penetrate such things in the past four hundred fifty years. I strongly suspect human experience, focused as it largely is on observing material objects, governs our language and modes of communication so maybe such things can't be successfully talked about in much detail. Much of the literature of mystical experience will eventually talk about the inadequacies of language when dealing with the experience of consciousness directly. If they're right then science and philosophy, which are conducted through words and logical rationality, won't ever really be able to crack consciousness so as to explain it. Maybe it's due to me being raised a Catholic but I have no problem with admitting that much of experience, as Luke Timothy Johnson has said, is a mystery to be engaged and not a problem to be solved.
Scientific materialism arose as a rejection of mechanistic dualism, which defined matter as unconscious and souls as immaterial, as I discuss below. One important motive for this rejection was the elimination of souls and God. In short, materialists treated subjective experience as irrelevant; dualists accepted the reality of experience but were unable to explain how minds affect brains.
That failure of the dualists was because all they could imagine was that an immaterial mind was limited to the type of causation that physical objects seem to exhibit. The irony of that is their imagination and their desire to present things in the language of science or geometry required them to limit immaterial objects to the knowable properties of material objects when they could have said that immaterial entities could be expected to have properties that material objects don't exhibit. If they didn't they'd be indistinguishable from physical objects. That inability is, I think, not due to their personal inadequacy but is a product of the character of our own experience and the language we have which deals primarily with our observations of material objects and embodied living beings. And, after all, consciousness of the kind they were trying to explain is known to exist only in living beings, not unliving objects and consciousness is capable of actions, choices that aren't exhibited in non-living objects. But it was the power and repute of infant science that it had already made coming up with a seemingly scientific answer to the problem obligatory. We haven't faced that problem when considering what's wrong with that approach to such obviously existing and significant entities as our own consciousness without which science would not exist, or at least an be known to exist as it exists in no known place except within some human minds. I will add that the mateialist panpsychists have a very similar problem which I don't think they can overcome.
The materialist philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote a book called Consciousness Explained (1991) in which he tried to explain away consciousness by arguing that subjective experience is illusory. He was forced to this conclusion because he rejected dualism as a matter of principle:
"I adopt the apparently dogmatic rule that dualism is to be avoided at all costs. It is not that I think I can give a knockdown proof that dualism, in all its forms is false or incoherent, but that, given the way that dualism wallows in mystery, accepting dualism is giving up [his italics, here underlined]"
The dogmatism of Dennett's rule is not merely apparent; the rule is dogmatic. By "giving up" and "wallowing in mystery," I supposed he means giving up science and reason and relapsing into religion and superstition. Materialism "at all costs" demands the denial of the reality of our own minds and personal experiences - including those of Daniel Dennett himself, although by putting forward arguments he hopes will be persuasive, he seems to make an exception for himself and those who read his book.
The first thing to notice is that Dennett, himself, admits he can't come up with a disproof of dualism. The second thing to consider is how much academic mileage Dennett gets out of what is essentially the emotional pique he feels in regard to "mystery." That despite him admitting that the solution to the problem is sufficiently unknowable to keep him from doing what he claims to do, rejecting dualism in the process. Just by getting into the issue he cannot avoid "wallowing in mystery." What he really wants instead is for everyone to say religion and religious People of have intellectual cooties, it really is more in line with the coercion to conform on a 4th grade playground than intellectual honesty and rigor. That is typical of the career in academic philosophy that Daniel Dennett has made for himself. This is hardly his only instance of insisting on his point of view on the playground basis of name-calling and stigmatization. He's hardly alone in that and it's hardly confined to academic philosophy. His irrational and extreme extension of what Stephen Jay Gould called "Darwinian fundamentalism," extreme even for that was largely based on Dennett's accusation of his adversaries looking for "sky-hooks" (and most of those he applied that to by name were his fellow atheists) and wasn't based in any intellectual content much more adult than that.
As you can see, Rupert Sheldrake's critique does for Dennett's claims what Dennett should have thought of himself, considering he was writing a book to persuade others, the persuasive power of which should be short circuited by the argument made by Dennett, himself, if is readers exercised any kind of critical analysis to it. But he's not alone in that among materialists of a sciency disposition because whenever they try to persuade someone of the non-existence or the insignificance or the asserted illusion of consciousness or minds or thinking they subject it, to use a phrase that Dennett rather stupidly asserted in his universal extension of Darwinism, to a "universal acid" that dissolves every such assertion of every kind. As Sheldrake points out, they must demand, if not explicitly then tacitly, an exemption for their own claims and assertions. That is something which comes up over and over again in the literature of materialism. It is more destructive of the persuasive power of atheist-materialist ideology than the noted contradictions between the Commandment not to kill and the claims that God told the Children of Israel to wipe out entire nations of People, down to the children and animals. Though, as can be seen in those who insist on the literal truth of all of the Bible and claim it, as an anthology, is internally consistent at all points, transforming it into a dogmatic monism instead of a product of many different viewpoints, materialists are alwso always ready to cut themselves exceptions from the rigid uniformity of their rigid monistic ideology.
If anything, that gets worse when it's brought from philosophy into science by the generally less philosophically apt sci-guys.
Francis Crick devoted decades of his life to trying to explain consciousness mechanistically. He frankly admitted that the materialist theory was an "astounding hypothesis" that flew in the face of common sense. "'You,' your joys and sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Presumably Crick included himself in this description, although he must have felt that there was more to his argument than the automatic activity of nerve cells.
One of the motives of materialists is to support an anti-religious worldview. Francis Crick was a militant atheist, as is Daniel Dennett. On the other hand, one of the traditional motives of dualists is to support the possibility of the soul's survival. If the human soul is immaterial, it may exist after bodily death.
Scientific orthodoxy has not always been materialist. The founders of mechanistic science in the seventeenth century were dualistic Christians. They downgraded matter, making it totally inanimate and mechanical, and at the same time upgraded human minds, making them completely different from unconscious matter. By creating an unbridgeable gulf between the two, they thought they were strengthening the argument for the human soul and immortality, as well as increasing the separation between humans and other animals.
This mechanistic dualism is often called Cartesian dualism, after Descartes (Des Cartes). It saw the human mind as essentially immaterial and disembodied, and bodes as machines made of unconscious matter. In practice, most people take a dualist view for granted, as long as they are not called upon to defend it. Almost everyone assumes that we have some degree of free will, and are responsible for our actions. Our education al and legal systems are based on this belief. And we experience ourselves as conscious beings, with some degree of free choice. Even to discuss consciousness presupposes that we are conscious ourselves. Nevertheless, since the 1920s, most leading scientist and philosophers in the English-speaking world have been materialists, in spite of the problems this doctrine creates.
The strongest argument in favor of materialism is the failure of dualism to explain how immaterial minds work and ow they interact with brains. The strongest argument in favor of dualism is the implausibility and self-contradictory nature of materialism.
The dualist-materilist dialect has lasted for centuries. The soul-body or mind-brain problem has refused to go away. But before we can move forward, we need to understand in more detail what materialists claim, since their belief system dominates institutional science and medicine, and everyone is influenced by it.
Rupert Sheldrake had personal experience with Francis Crick (and Richard Dawkins and a number of the other big names in atheist-materialism), unlike, I'd guess, most of us who read what he said about him. In a part of the book he titles "The credibility crunch for the "scientific worldview" he said.
In 1963, when I was studying biochemistry at Cambridge University, I was invited to a series of private meetings with Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner in Brenner's rooms in King's College, along with a few of my classmates. Crick and Brenner had recently helped to "crack" the genetic code. Both were ardent materialists and Crick was also a militant atheist. They explained there were two major unsolved problems in biology; development and consciousness. They had not been solved because the people who worked on them were not molecular biologists- or very bright. Crick and Brenner were going to find the answers within ten years, or maybe twenty. Brenner would take developmental biology, and Crick consciousness. They invited us to join them.
Both tried their best. Brenner was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his work on the development of a tiny worm, Caenorhabdytis elegans. Crick corrected the manuscript of his final paper on the brain the day before he died in 2004. At his funeral, his son Michael said that what made him tick was not the desire to be famous, wealthy or popular, but to "knock the final nail into the coffin of vitalism." (Vitalism is the theory that lifing organisms are truly alive, and not explicable in terms of physics and chemistry alone.)
Crick and Brenner failed. The problems of development and consciousness remain unsolved. Many details have been discovered, dozens of genomes have been sequenced, and brain scans are ever more precise. But there is still no proof that life and minds can be explained by physics and chemistry alone.
I'll note that Sheldrake has said that while he was at Cambridge as a student he, as well, was an atheist because he figured that was a part of being a scientist with a scientific world view.
I would bet that, if pressed, many if not most of the college credentialed population would say that science had either figured that out or was on the verge of figuring it out when the two decades since Crick died has gotten no farther than he did.
It is one of the remarkable things about science how much of what gets claimed as science, especially those areas of science which are the most dodgy and removed from the strict practice of scientific methods, is explicitly or, if not admitted then obviously motivated by a desire to prop-up and promote atheism through supporting materialism. It really has been a major focuses of the one field of human culture which is supposed to, by the rules, NOT be led by ideological interest anymore than it's supposed to be led by religious belief. It is especially remarkable in the context of late 20th century cosmology because a lot of it has been motivated by an unjustified suspicion that Georges Lemaitre snuck in support for a literal reading of Genesis into it by noticing the implications of Einstein's science that pointed to an absolute and finite beginning for the entire universe in what one of his atheist-fundamentalist detractors called The Big Bang.* Atheist-materialist ideologues like Lawrence Krauss and Sean Carroll seem to be largely motivated by explaining that away, coming up with claims that can not be tested and almost certainly never will be testable with science and putting that directly into the formal literature of science and also into the informal and often credulity based "public understanding of science."
As I've stated many times, I'm a political blogger, one who believes in and struggles for egalitarian democracy. I first got into the atheist-religious brawl which I'd tried to avoid when I was on a lefty political blog and one of the village barroom style atheists on it made the declaration to the assembled lefties, all asserted to be true believers in freedom and rights and reason and science, that "science has proven free-will doesn't exist." In my surprise and realization that he'd just thrown some of that "universal acid" on the entire political program of those assembled I think I pointed out if that was true we were all wasting our time promoting what such a discovery would destroy, the very foundations of democracy. At the time I hadn't come to a nuanced enough political conception that made a distinction between "liberal democracy" and the only kind of democracy worth struggling for, egalitarian democracy or I would have pointed that out. I recall realizing or at least sensing the difference between that kind of largely white, largely middle-class or affluent, college-credentialed style of "liberalism" and the liberalism of Martin Luther King jr and the struggle of largely Black, largely religion based People for equal rights and I probably realized which of the two had a track record of making a difference, a difference which, as can be seen in the declarations of materialists such as Crick, Dennett, Dawkins, etc. is meaningless because we're all just assemblages of molecules under the influence of material causation, going back to the start of modern materialist theory, nothing more than a product of how atoms coalesced and started whacking into each other by chance at the start of material existence (or in the preferred atheist steady-state, which for now doesn't seem to have been right) and nothing more. I don't think I thought especially about Francis Crick on that occasion though, when I got around to going over it in the subsequent years of brawling, his covert campaign, which I did know about, to support Arthur Jensen's scientific racism and neo-eugenics among his scientific colleagues didn't surprise me. Materialism and a credulous belief in natural selection makes that inevitable, especially when there is no countering religious morality to defeat it.
But as soon as I read "WGG's" blog-barroom atheist declaration of scientific faith, I immediately started losing my faith that the differences between atheist lefties and the religious left could be bridged. It was still a couple of years before practical political matters made me really understand how significant that chasm is through the experience of interacting with the then fashionable atheist materialists in the 00 years. The entire and insane self-defeating infatuation of so much of the secular left with the brutal anti-democratic ideology of Marxism suddenly started to make complete sense to me starting about twenty years ago. Science isn't the only thing that has been distorted by atheist materialism, it has transformed the secular left into a self-defeating and democracy destroying machine.
And it is on behalf of their foundational ideology in atheist materialism, in the end. And you don't have to be a Marxist to have it eat away everything on you.
* It is doubtful that Lemaitre, as a well-educated Jesuit would have held with a literal reading of scripture, that is far more a Protestant practice than a Catholic one. Though I doubt most atheists know that. When a 1950 encyclical from Pius XII came close to insisting on the literal truth of the Adam and Eve part of Genesis, it was a major embarrassment to many Catholics, including theologians.
Note: Unless I want to make fun of what is said, I don't post comments that make gratuitous digs about other people. Leave that out and you might get posted. There might be other reasons I don't post comments but that's sure to leave what you want to say in my blog's trash bin.
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