Science and Non-Physical Reality

The technological marvels and medical advances that the empirical sciences and engineering have made possible are truly impressive, and they have, without question, improved the physical lives of countless numbers of people all over the world in recent years. And even if there are dangers and pitfalls to these advances, it seems undeniable that the physical conditions of human life have been improved. Indeed, my ability to bring these musings to you, and your ability to consider them, are themselves only made possible by such advances in science and technology.

But with an appreciation for the goods delivered by science, there has also arisen an anti-religious tendency among many a scientific devotee. In the last few decades especially, it has become commonplace in American culture to account for the rise of science by confidently asserting that what the gods used to explain (thunder, crop abundance or failure, disease) gradually came to be explained by science, and so the gradually increasing success of science signals the diminishing reliance on, or acknowledgement of, any gods (much less the One God favored by Theists (especially Christians)).

Of course (I hope it is obvious) such a story is an historical over-simplification, to the point of being misleading. But more importantly it misunderstands the nature of true religious (especially Christian) belief: while Catholic belief does make truth claims about the origin and purpose of life, the universe and everything, religious believers do not assert the reality of God primarily as an explanation for the phenomena of the observable world (even if we do contend that some observable facts about the world cannot be adequately explained without recognizing He is real.

Science, thus, is commonly thought to entail disbelief in the existence of God or any god or other supernatural being. Instead, what is proposed as an alternative worldview is scientific materialism (also known as naturalism or physicalism): a metaphysics in the sense of a description and explanation of everything that is (with unintended irony, since it pointedly does not go beyond (meta-) the physical).

This worldview even has its eschatological hope: that science can or will explain everything, and all (or almost all) human problems can and eventually will be solved by the wise application of scientific knowledge (unless human stupidity, or dumb luck, destroys us first).

What Is Scientific Materialism or Reductionist Physicalism?

Scientific materialism or physicalism has the core conviction that science, in specifying the material constituents of which everything, including living things, especially ourselves, is composed has (or in principle can) discover and describe a complete explanation of everything there is in purely material terms, as being more or less complex physical processes.

Based on the standard account of the origin of living organisms from non-living material elements, physicalism asserts that everything is exclusively composed of physical constituents and the result of physical laws and forces. For instance, noted philosopher of mind, Paul Churchland provides what for him apparently is the most conclusive argument in favor of physicalism: “the argument from evolutionary history.

What is the origin of a complex and sophisticated species such as ours? What, for that matter, is the origin of the dolphin, the mouse, or the housefly? Thanks to the fossil record, comparative anatomy, and the biochemistry of proteins and nucleic acids, there is no longer any significant doubt on this matter. Each existing species is a surviving type from a number of variations on an earlier type of organism; each earlier type is in turn a surviving type from a number of variations on a still earlier type of organism; and so on down the branches of the evolutionary tree until some three billion years ago, we find a trunk of just one or a handful of very simple organisms. These organisms like their more complex offspring, are just self-repairing, self-replicating, energy-driven molecular structures. (That evolutionary trunk has its own roots in an earlier era of purely chemical evolution, in which the molecular elements of life were themselves pieced together.) …

For purposes of our discussion, the important point about the standard evolutionary story is that the human species is the wholly physical outcome of a purely physical process. … Our inner nature differs from that of simpler creatures in degree, but not in kind.

If this is the correct account of our origins, then there seems neither need, nor room, to fit any nonphysical substances or properties into our theoretical account of ourselves. We are creatures of matter. And we should learn to live with that fact. (Matter and Consciousness (MIT Press 1988) 20-21.)

According to this physicalist view, human beings like everything else, are exclusively composed of and reducible to their material constituents and the necessary physical laws which govern their interactions and behavior. Under this view, however, science itself becomes incoherent.

Materialist Reductionism and Human Free Will

In addition to offering a complete, and completely material, account of the origin of living things, scientific materialism encompasses the more expansive yet fundamental claim that all that exists at all are physical things, their properties, and the necessary physical laws which govern and describe their past behavior and invariably predict their future behavior. Physical things themselves are nothing more than the ultimate physical constituents combining and interacting according these necessary physical laws.  These physical constituents, together with the forces that determine their interaction and composition into complex bodies, ultimately developed into complex systems of interaction we call living things, defined chiefly by their ability to replicate themselves.  But ultimately the living things are what they are, do what they do, exclusively because of the constituents that make them up, and the properties and forces they generate or are necessarily subject to.  Nothing beyond the material world and its elements is believed to be required, nor even allowed, since scientific materialism presupposes completeness and adequacy of its physical explanations.

John Searle, for example, ends his book Minds, Brains and Science (Harvard University Press, 1984) by explaining how this physicalist understanding of human action plays out.

Our basic explanatory mechanisms in physics work from the bottom up.  That is to say, we explain the behaviour of surface feature of a phenomenon such as the transparency of glass or the liquidity of water in terms of the behaviour of microparticle such as molecules.  And the relation of the mind to the brain is an example of such a relation.  Mental features are caused by, and ultimately realized in neurophysiological phenomena. …  But we get causation from the mind to the body, that is we get top-down causation over time because the top level and the bottom level go together.  So, for example, suppose I wish to cause the release of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine at the axon end-plates of my motor neurons, I can do it by simply deciding to raise my arm and then raising it.  Here, the mental event, the intention to raise my arm causes the physical event, the release of acetylcholine – a case of top-down causation if ever there was one.  But the top-down causation works only because the mental events are grounded in the neurophysiology to start with.  So, corresponding to the description of the causal relation that go from the top to the bottom, there is another description of the same series of events where the causal relation bounce entirely along the bottom, that is they are entirely a matter of neurons and neuron firings at synapses, etc. (93)

Searle, however, clearly understands that this physicalist understanding of ourselves and our behavior is at odds with another very basic belief we have about ourselves, namely our personal freedom. Indeed, he is at pains to lay out clearly the nature of the conflict between these two conceptions of ourselves.

On the one hand we are inclined to say that since nature consists of particles and their relations with each other, and since everything can be accounted for in terms of those particles and their relations, there is simply no room for freedom of the will.  …  So it really does look as if everything we know about physics forces us to some form of denial of human freedom (86-7).

As many philosophers have pointed out, if there is any fact of experience that we are all familiar with, it’s the simple fact that our own choices, decisions, reasonings, and cogitations seem to make a difference to our actual behaviour.  There are all sorts of experiences that we have in life where it seems just a fact of our experiences that though we did one thing, we feel we know perfectly well that we could have done something else.  We know we could have done something else, because we chose one thing for certain reasons.

This is a characteristic philosophical conundrum, On the one hand, a set of very powerful arguments force us to the conclusion that free will has no place in the universe. On the other hand. a series of powerful arguments based on facts of our own experience inclines us to the conclusion that there must be some freedom of the will because we all experience it all the time. (87-8)

Nevertheless, Searle believes that our (or at least his) commitment to the truth of the contemporary scientific view precludes the possibility of human beings really being free, our subjective experience notwithstanding.

Why exactly is there no room for the freedom of the will on the contemporary scientific view?  Our basic explanatory mechanisms in physics work from the bottom up. …  As long as we accept this conception of how nature works, then it doesn’t seem that there is any scope for the freedom of the will because on this conception the mind can only affect nature in so far as it is part of nature.  But if so, then like the rest of nature, its features are determined at the basic micro-levels of physics (93).

In the end, Searle believes that we can’t help but think that we are free, even though we (or at least he) believes that all our actions are determined physically.  He believes that our sense of freedom is rooted in the logical structure of viewing ourselves as originators of intentional behavior.  But, in spite of this subjective feeling, he believes that modern science is committed to denying the truth of this feeling.

As long as we accept the bottom-up conception of physical explanation, and it is a conception on which the past three hundred years of science are based, then psychological facts about ourselves, like any other higher-level facts, are entirely causally explicable in terms of and entirely realised in systems of elements at the fundamental micro-physical level.  Our conception physical reality simply does not allow for radical freedom.

(F)or reasons I don’t really understand, evolution has given us a form of experience of voluntary action where the experience of freedom, that is to say, the experience of the sense of alternative possibilities, is built into the very structure of conscious, voluntary, intentional human behaviour (98).

If you decide you are determined, you still have made a choice.

It seems, then, that intellectually one has a choice.  Searle recognized the incompatibility of his contemporary scientific view (physicalism) with the feeling that he was free, and so he decided the scientific view was more well-grounded and chose to view his feeling of freedom as illusory.  Likewise, depending on the horn of the dilemma the truth of which we are more committed to (theoretically or practically), we may choose that we have personal freedom, on the one hand, or that humans are only a collection of atoms, since it seems that both cannot be true.

To my mind, it has always seemed as though the denial of personal freedom that is entailed in the physicalist position should weigh decisively against its truth. As Searle points out, it is just a fact of our subjective experience that we make decisions freely. The denial of personal freedom makes complete nonsense of almost every aspect of social life: personal responsibility, promises, resolutions, pride, shame, regret, praise, blame, merit, guilt, heroism, cowardice, prudence and other concepts besides. For if we are determined by our physical make-up, personal history and environment to do what we do, none of these concepts would ever be fittingly applied. For it would be just as inappropriate (I dare say, incoherent) to praise or blame a clock for displaying the time accurately or erroneously, since a clock would be just as determined to exhibit the time it does according the same necessary physical laws.

Materialist Reductionism and the Process of Science

But this determinism also makes a farce even of the supposedly privileged human behavior that informs us of its truth, namely empirical science and arguments in favor of scientific materialism. For, as we have seen, physicalism claims that every event in the world must be the necessary result of the physical properties of things (their ultimate atomic constituent parts) obeying necessary laws of physics and chemistry, and the necessity of this physical causality would apply to beliefs and conclusions which are themselves physical states of the brains of the people who hold them.

In this theory, brain states – like every other physical state – are ultimately the necessary result of physical properties of things (brains, neurons, neural transmitters, synapse firings) obeying necessary physical laws (brain chemistry).  Thus, the brain states which instantiate the conclusion of any theory are the necessary physical result of prior brain states. Concluding brain states (like everything else) are completely described and governed by physical laws of physics and chemistry. Therefore, brain states which instantiate the conclusion of any theory are not the logical result of the meaning and truth of the premises.  That is, the neural instantiations in a person’s brain of any conclusion are not the result of the meaning and truth of the neural instantiations of the premises which preceded them in the person’s brain.

But there is a tension here that mirrors, and as we’ll see below, includes the tension between physicalism and personal freedom. For, physicalism also claims to be itself is a theory, or system of beliefs, and as the result of a true and valid arguments, it is a set of conclusions logically based on premises, well-grounded beliefs about the physical world as a whole. As Edward Feser notes, when we entertain the meaning of propositions, as when making an argument or giving reasons for why we do what we do or believe what we believe

… there are logical relations between mental states that partially determine precisely which mental states one will have, if one has any at all. But there seem just obviously to be no such relations between neurons firing in the brain. It would be absurd to say – indeed, it isn’t clear what it could even mean to say – that “neuronal firing pattern of type A logically entails neuronal firing pattern of type B,” or that “the secretion of luteinizing hormone is logically inconsistent with the firing of neurons 6,092 through 8,887.” Neurons and hormone secretions have causal relations between them; but logical relations – the sort of relations between propositions like “It is raining outside” and “It is wet outside” – are not causal. There seems to be no way to match up sets of logically interrelated mental states with sets of merely causally interrelated brain states, and thus no way to reduce the mental to the physical. (Philosophy of Mind: A Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld Publications 2006) p. 68.)

At most, the chemically causative properties of premising-brain-states which bring about argument-concluding-brain-states may incidentally parallel the logical implications of their semantic content (i.e., what the premises and conclusions mean), but such logical implications are not the true, i.e., physical, cause of the concluding-brain state. (Given, however, that propositions can be expressed linguistically in many ways, in many different speakers, the hope that semantic content would map to brain states according to the necessary type-type identity seems so unlikely as to be impossible; the empirical data from brain scans, at any rate, does not seem to support the incidental parallelism, either.)

And, if the meaning of the premises of an argument (their semantic content) do not provide the reason for holding the alleged conclusion, the argument is either invalid or false, or both.

Thus, it seems a logical conclusion, if not a physical necessity, that if physicalism is true, the premises of any argument never provide the reason a person holds to their alleged conclusion; brain chemistry is the true, i.e., physical, reason a person believes a conclusion. Thus, if physicalism is true, physicalism (and every theory) is false, or at least, irrelevant.

But, as with the undeniable truth of personal freedom, it just seems obvious that theories and arguments do explain (either well or poorly) and cause (by bringing about) what and why people believe what they believe. Indeed, part of being convinced by an argument is choosing to accept that the premises are true and the conclusion validly follows from them, and that one has an obligation to (which implies a freedom not to) accept the conclusion as true.

Given certain evidences, I “ought” to believe certain things. I am intellectually responsible for drawing certain conclusions, given certain pieces of evidence. If I do not choose that conclusion, I am irrational. But “ought” implies “can.” If I ought to believe something, then I must have the ability to choose to believe it or not believe it. If one is to be rational, one must be free to choose her beliefs in order to be reasonable. Often, I deliberate about what I am going to believe, or I deliberate about the evidence for something. But such deliberations make sense only if I assume that what I am going to do or believe is “up to me” – that I am free to choose and, thus, I am responsible for irrationality if I choose inappropriately. It is self-refuting to argue that one ought to choose physicalism. . . on the basis of the fact that one should see that the evidence is good for physicalism. . . (Gary R. Habermas & J.P. Moreland, Beyond Death, (Crossway Books, 1998) p. 65.)

These are just some of the arguments that scientific materialism cannot be true. But scientific materialism is based on the success of science to explain things without the need for God. But since it fails to explain itself, it does not show that God is irrelevant. None of this proves that God is real. This argument, and others like it, just show that science has not proven that there is no God.

For a more complete treatment of the problems inherent in scientific materialism, you can read about them here.