Contemplative Science, page 5
The ideals of the contemplative life have almost vanished in the modern West, but we need not look outside our culture to rediscover them. Indeed, we need look no further than Thomas Aquinas, whose influence on Western Christianity can hardly be overestimated: “It is requisite for the good of the human community that there should be persons who devote themselves to the life of contemplation.”56 The very purpose of civilization is the pursuit of genuine happiness, truth, and virtue, and the contemplative life is entirely focused on these themes. This, I believe, is what Aquinas had in mind when he wrote:57 The whole of political life seems to be ordered with a view to attaining the happiness of contemplation. For peace, which is established and preserved by virtue of political activity, places man in a position to devote himself to contemplation of the truth.
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WHERE SCIENCE AND RELIGION COLLIDE
IN THE AMERICAN educational system and the general media, science is commonly presented as a body of empirical knowledge about the natural world, discovered by researchers who are relentlessly skeptical of all untested assumptions and beliefs, including their own. Religions, in contrast, are often presented as promoting beliefs about the universe and the meaning of human existence that are accepted by their adherents on the basis of divine authority. Thus, science and religion appear to stand for two incompatible mind-sets, and conflict between these two ways of viewing reality seems inevitable.
While there is some truth in this depiction, in many ways it is profoundly misleading and has resulted in widespread confusion about the nature of both science and religion. Science as a method of inquiry has been an extremely powerful tool for investigating the nature of the universe, and it has provided deep insights that have changed human perspectives and lives throughout the world. But the success of the scientific approach has led to speculative extensions of its findings into areas of metaphysics where in fact there is no experimental evidence one way or another. This is the genesis of scientific materialism, which is a dogma, not a scientific theory. Uncritical adherence to this system of belief does a great disservice to science itself, because it creates confusion about the real nature, power, and limitations of scientific inquiry. And it is dangerous for society, because if the state accepts without question a metaphysical system that focuses exclusively on material issues, human existence is impoverished and the way is open for the kinds of environmental and personal degradation that plague modern life.
The scientific materialist worldview may be summed up as follows: the physical world is the only reality. It originates wholly from impersonal natural forces; it is devoid of any intrinsic moral order or values; and it functions without the intervention of immaterial spiritual forces of any kind, benevolent or otherwise. Life and consciousness originally arose in this universe purely by accident, from complex configurations of matter and energy. Life in general, and human life in particular, has no meaning, value, or significance other than what it attributes to itself. During the course of an individual’s life, all desires, hopes, intentions, feelings, and so forth—in short, all experiences and actions—are determined solely by the body and the impersonal forces acting upon it from the physical environment. The termination of an individual’s life results in the disappearance of consciousness and the utter annihilation of the individual, and eventually this is the destiny of all life in the universe: it will simply disappear without a trace. In short, man is fundamentally isolated; he lives on the boundary of an alien world, which is as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his suffering or his crimes. Only by accepting this view of human existence and the universe at large can humans live authentically.
Science has always evolved in close interaction with the prevailing religions and philosophies of its host cultures. The above perspective is closely linked to the materialist ideology of Marx, which filtered into science through such figures as the Russian Marxist Aleksandr Oparin, who in 1938 published an influential book proposing that life originates from nonlife, implying a smooth continuum from inorganic to organic matter.1 One can also see in the above depiction of the universe close parallels to the twentieth-century existentialism of Sartre and Camus, and reflections of the ethical relativism of postmodernists such as Derrida and Foucault. But philosophy is philosophy. Let us not confuse it with empirical science.
Scientific materialism is incompatible with all the major world religions, and it has been presented as scientific knowledge by many prominent scientists, including Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Jacques Monod, Richard Dawkins, Francis Crick, Edward O. Wilson, Steven Weinberg, Stephen Jay Gould, and Antonio Damasio, to name several. Methodologically, it is quite reasonable for science to adopt the working hypotheses of naturalism, that is, to seek to understand the world in terms of natural, not supernatural agencies. Scientific theories, in contrast to philosophical ideas and religious beliefs, must be submitted to empirical observation and experimentation. But scientific materialists commonly take the further step of promoting a worldview that makes claims that go beyond the scope of scientific knowledge.
Contrary to the position of many ardent scientific materialists, belief in this worldview is not necessary for practicing excellent science. It is merely a secondary opinion that some scientists have about existence. Belief is central to both science and religion, but it usually plays a different role in each context. In science, the beliefs that are brought into research and teaching act as a set of working hypotheses. These are not meant to be dogmatic, but rather to be assumptions that allow scientists to ask particular questions. Ideally, all of these assumptions are subject to empirical refutation. Working hypotheses can be accepted for the purpose of attempting to make progress in science, but they must be tentative as well, even if some of them are taken as “facts.” By their own standards of skepticism, scientists must be open-minded enough to recognize that any of these hypotheses could ultimately be discarded.
Over time, however, working hypotheses can easily transform into closely held beliefs, and it is here that dogma creeps in. The term “dogma” refers to a coherent, universally applied worldview consisting of a collection of beliefs and attitudes that call for intellectual and emotional allegiance. As such, a dogma has a power over individuals and communities that is far greater than the power of mere facts and fact-related theories. Indeed, it may prevail despite the most obvious contrary evidence, and commitment to it may grow all the more zealous when obstacles are met. There are many kinds of dogmas, including religious, philosophical, political, and scientific.
It is commonplace to ignore evidence that conflicts with scientists’ most fundamental working hypotheses. For all its emphasis on the ideal of skepticism, science is conservative, and a paradigm shift doesn’t happen easily. In that sense, dogma can be conceived of as relative rather than absolute. On the one hand, doing science entails taking many assumptions as beliefs, to varying extents. On the other hand, scientific inquiry is conducted by people, and people are governed by various forces—political, sociological, and others—so the ideals of science may be quite different from its actual practice.
THE DOGMA OF SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM
Scientists are no freer of dogma than are politicians, philosophers, or theologians. It can be argued, however, that there is a subtle but important difference between the closely held beliefs of scientists and nonscientists. The beauty and wonder of science is that it has been growing over twelve generations in a way that is far more open and accepting of change than almost all individual scientists are. Scientists are limited human beings, but science as a method seems to transcend many of the limitations of its practitioners. Hence the common saying that an older generation of scientists has to die off to make room for new ideas, since many individuals cannot fully accept radical new insights. Given all this, it may well be that, with enough time, current scientific dogmas will eventually be challenged and perhaps overturned. This depends, though, on future societies and cultures living long enough and with sufficient freedom of inquiry to let science continue. Research that challenges the dogmas of science must be not only tolerated but also encouraged.
I turn now to a closer examination of the essential principles of the ideology of scientific materialism.
Objectivism
The principle of objectivism requires that science deal with empirical facts testable by empirical methods and verifiable by third-person means. The phenomena that best lend themselves to such inquiry are universal, public, controlled, repeatable, and predictable. In the minds of some scientific materialists, the affirmation of scientific objectivism also implies a commitment to the view that, in the words of sociobiologist Edward O. Wilson, “Outside our heads there is freestanding reality.... Inside our heads is a reconstitution of reality based on sensory input and the self-assembly of concepts.”2 The proper task of scientists, he claims, is to correctly align the subjective representation of reality inside our heads with the objective, external world. This view, which is rooted in the seventeenth-century metaphysics of René Descartes, implies that the objective world lies beyond the subjective world of appearances, including all the evidence from our senses, which are deemed to exist only within our heads.
Reductionism
While there are various kinds of reductionism, “categorical reductionism” is the tendency to reduce something relatively unfamiliar or poorly understood to a more familiar and understood class of phenomena. While this has always been a general psychological method for acquiring understanding of the world, due to the specific sequence of the development of the major branches of natural science, reductionism in science has taken on a special orientation. Historically, the physical sciences made the first great advances and established what has come to be known as the scientific method, so it was natural for later generations of biologists to try to understand living organisms in terms of physics. Physicist Richard Feynman expressed this view when he declared in an undergraduate course, “There is nothing that living beings do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics.”3 Cognitive scientists, in turn, try to understand mental processes in terms of the biological mechanisms of the brain and of artificial intelligence systems. Likewise, academic scholars of religion commonly seek to explain spiritual experiences in terms of psychology, medicine, economics, and other nonreligious factors.
Nowhere is such categorical reductionism more commonly applied than to the study of human behavior and the mind, two of the most mysterious and complex fields of scientific inquiry. Biologist Richard Dawkins, for instance, claims that genes are the central evolutionary driver and that human beings, like all animals, are basically machines created by our genes. Writing about genes as if they had conscious aims, he posits that they control human behavior, “not directly with their fingers on puppet strings, but indirectly like the computer programmer.”4 In the same spirit of categorical reductionism, neurologist Antonio Damasio declares,Many of us in neuroscience are guided by one goal and one hope: to provide, eventually, a comprehensive explanation for how the sort of neural pattern that we can currently describe with the tools of neurobiology, from molecules to systems, ever becomes the multidimensional, space-and-time-integrated image we are experiencing this very moment.5
As a research strategy, reductionism has proved its pragmatic value countless times in the history of science. Some scientists cautiously embrace reductionism as a method that has proven highly useful in many areas of research, without adopting it as a belief about the actual nature of reality as a whole. But even as a method, it has its limits. Biologists, for example, know that they cannot explain such things as animal behavior in terms of the individual movements of molecules; and cognitive scientists are aware that complex mental processes cannot be understood in terms of the behavior of individual neurons.
The Closure Principle
The closure principle declares that even if nonmaterial phenomena do exist, they never exert any influences within the physical universe. That is, the universe is closed off from any hypothetical nonphysical causal agents. Adopting this principle as a working hypothesis makes perfectly good sense when the tools of research are confined to the measurement of physical phenomena. But the implications of this principle, inflated to a metaphysical statement of fact, are enormous, in terms of both the boundaries of scientific knowledge and the nature of human existence. In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins transcends the legitimate domain of science when he claims:Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.6
Physicist Steven Weinberg makes the same error in the oft-quoted statement in his book The First Three Minutes: “The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it also seems pointless.”7 It is not that scientific materialists don’t like to address metaphysical issues. They do, but they often misrepresent them as scientific conclusions. In this way they do a great disservice to understanding both science and religion.
Physicalism
The principle of physicalism declares that the universe consists solely of configurations of matter and energy within space and time. To understand this principle, it is crucial to recognize that the matter in question is not the familiar stuff that we bump into in everyday experience. A rock held in the hand, for instance, is experienced as having a certain color, texture, and weight. But all those qualities are secondary attributes that exist, according to a line of thinking tracing back to Descartes, not in the objective world but as representations inside our heads. The matter that constitutes the fundamental building blocks of the objective universe, according to scientific materialism, exists prior to and separate from all such secondary attributes that arise only in relation to a conscious subject. The real properties of matter are its inherent, primary attributes that exist independently of all modes of detection.
HOW WELL DOES SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM WORK?
One of the most common arguments in support of regarding the principles of scientific materialism as scientific knowledge is that they work. That is, pragmatically speaking, they have proven to be extremely useful. A second argument in support of their validity is that no evidence has ever been found to refute them. If those two assertions are true, then we must take seriously the hypothesis that the adoption of those principles is necessary for conducting any kind of scientific research. Let us therefore turn to an evaluation of scientific materialism in terms of its pragmatic value and its validity.
Objectivism and the Cognitive Sciences
In its emphasis on the scientific study of universal, public, controlled, repeatable, and predictable phenomena, the principle of objectivism marginalizes all that is individual, private, uncontrolled, unique, and anomalous. This accounts in large part for the fact that the scientific study of the mind did not even begin until three hundred years after the beginning of the scientific revolution. But such phenomena, including all kinds of subjective mental processes, are no less real or significant than those that measure up to the principle of objectivism. Prioritizing the reality and significance of purely objective phenomena devalues subjective experience to such an extent that it is commonly regarded as a mere epiphenomenon of the objective physical processes that “underlie” it.
This bias, which dominated the school of behaviorism begun in the early twentieth century by John B. Watson, has marginalized first-person, introspective ways of examining mental phenomena. Indeed, Watson went so far as to declare that behaviorists must exclude from their scientific vocabulary “all subjective terms such as sensation, perception, image, desire, purpose, and even thinking and emotion as they are subjectively defined.”8 Regarding subjective mental events as nonexistent, purely on dogmatic grounds, can hardly be a pragmatically useful principle for understanding such events. Only recently have cognitive scientists begun to reconsider that introspection may play a valuable role in studying conscious mental phenomena and that subjective experience does influence brain functions. Adherence to the dogma of scientific materialism has blinded scientists from seeing these truths, which have long been evident to nonscientists.
The legitimate domain of scientific inquiry, according to the principle of objectivism, is the objective world, which exists independently of anyone’s mind. Pragmatically speaking, phenomena are deemed “objective” when they are broadly intersubjective; that is, they are apprehended by a wide range of subjects using different modes of observation. Everything of which we are conscious appears in relation to our faculties of sensory and mental perception. We have no direct knowledge of anything that exists independently of consciousness. Physicist Werner Heisenberg commented, “What we observe is not nature in itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” 9 And Albert Einstein commented in a similar vein, “On principle, it is quite wrong to try founding a theory on observable magnitudes alone. In reality the very opposite happens. It is the theory which decides what we can observe.”10
