Materialism

“Given gravity and enough helium, I can explain the universe.”  You may have heard this quote before.  I’ve been unable to find the source, but it’s fairly common on the internet today.  This view is called Materialism. 

We’re not talking about the type of materialism we see at the mall or at the tool section of the hardware store.  Materialism is also the name for the belief that all that exists came from the forces of nature and mass.  Webster defines it this way:  “the doctrine that nothing exists except matter and its movements and modifications.  The doctrine that consciousness and will are wholly due to material agency.”

Put another way, given enough time, the laws of physics, and enough hydrogen and the hydrogen will eventually contemplate itself.  There is nothing outside the physical universe.

We should take exception to that.  As we’ve seen in this blog before, non-physical things exist: the laws of physics, the laws of logic, statements, ideas and consciousness, for instance.

Let’s look at ideas and consciousness.  What is an idea.  Well, some materialists would say an idea is something that exists in the brain.  The cells through electrical charges can hold onto ideas and even contemplate them.  The materialist might say, “In that way, ideas are physical, material.”  But how about when we exchange ideas.  The idea I just stated is now your idea.  I didn’t transfer any gray matter your way.  I didn’t even have to meet you.  You’ve looked at a series of scribbles on a screen and understood something that was not present in those scribbles themselves.  How does that happen?

For ideas to be conveyed, we need not only conscious beings but beings that can understand those ideas and act on them if necessary.  Really low functioning animals can do this.  My dogs come when I convey to them there are dog treats available.  So, the idea has been transferred from my mind to theirs.  Pretty nifty, eh?

Consciousness is a fairly important problem right now in scientific circles.  Just how does cold inert matter later become self-reflective?  How can gravity, matter, and time eventually become something which contemplates gravity, matter, and time?

 Then there is the “Binding Problem” neuroscience is facing.  The Binding Problem works this way:  When you look at a computer screen, a part of your brain recognizes the shape of the screen, another part of your brain sees the colors, a third portion of your brain sees the scribbling on the screen, a fourth part of your brain understands the scribbling to convey information, and a fifth part processes that information.  When we look at the screen, though, we don’t worry about all those factors.  In our mind, they all bind together as one event.  Neuroscience doesn’t understand how that can happen in the brain.  And, the brain is where it has to happen because that’s the physical place that these events reside.  There can’t be a non-physical ingredient, a soul.  That wouldn’t be scientific.  So, scientists continue to look for their answer where it likely doesn’t exist.  The problem here, then, is no longer the facts but scientism standing in the way.

Scientism is the belief that science has solved so many problems that it can solve all problems, answer all questions.  Science presupposes a physical universe where nothing non-physical exists.  So, science is materialistic and must exclude the possibility of the supernatural as “unscientific”.  So, any supernatural answer to a question is rejected and only a physical reason can be sought.  This is why Intelligent Design (ID) is rejected by so many in mainstream science.  It appears to give a supernatural answer to the question of how matter became self-aware. 

Now ID isn’t claiming a god exists, only that a higher intellect designed and created what we see in the universe.  There is just too much order, too much complexity to suggest it all came from natural causes.  ID says there appears to be a greater consciousness than ours that did all this. 

Because materialism has limited itself to only looking at physical causes for events, they are missing out on much more logical answers.  It reminds me of the man who was crawling around under a street light on a city sidewalk at night.  A cop stopped to ask what he was doing, and the man said he had dropped the engagement ring he was going to give his girlfriend that evening.  The cop helped him look for a while then asked the man if he was sure this is where he dropped it.  The man’s reply was, “No.  I dropped it over there, but the light is much better here.”

Materialism will not bring us to all truth.  There is more to this universe and outside this universe than just matter in motion.