The Role of Science in Western Culture (cont.)
Material Realism
So science has taken over Western culture by infiltrating itself through the technology that saturates our experience. But how, exactly, has science shaped our belief systems in a way that undermines our belief in God?
At the heart of the scientific view of the world is a philosophy known as material realism. I call it a philosophy because even though its ideas are the basis of science, material realism is basically a religious claim that cannot be proven by any method, scientific or otherwise. Instead, the scientific method starts with material realism and creates its rules assuming that material realism is true. More to the point, as we shall see later, when scientists happen to stumble upon results that challenge material realism, those results (and often the scientists who discover them) are almost automatically dismissed as being unscientific.
Material realism is the belief that reality is just the physical (material) world and that all you need to know to understand everything is the physical laws that govern the material world. According to material realism, talk about a “higher” reality is not only unnecessary, it’s a useless distraction that gets in the way of scientific progress.
As Amit Goswami explains in his book, The Self-Aware Universe, there are five dominant principles that form the basis of the philosophy of material realism, principles that just about everyone with any sort of modern education accepts to some degree or other. These five principles are strong objectivity, causal determinism, locality, physical (or material) monism, and epiphenomenalism. I’ll try to translate.
Strong objectivity is the belief that reality is, well, real. That is, it’s the belief that reality does not need someone to observe events for them to happen. It is a belief system that answers the question, “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” with an emphatic Yes! Strong objectivity says that the structures and processes of reality don’t have to be observed to exist and affect each other. They are not subjective (dependent on the viewpoint of an observer), but rather objective (independent of any observer). When you get down to it, this is the whole reason scientists follow the scientific method in the first place, to find out what is really real, not just what they expect to see. Scientists believe that, to quote The X Files, “the truth is out there,” waiting to be uncovered. According to strong objectivity, that’s all that science does: uncover the truth that is there but hidden. This belief has been such a basic part of the worldview of scientists that most have not even considered the possibility that it might be wrong, even when—as we will see in Part II—some of the discoveries of quantum physicists have challenged it. In a way, it’s easy to understand why that might be the case. Strong objectivity is such a basic part of the way scientists look at the world that to question it is to challenge their entire worldview. Pretty scary stuff.
Causal determinism is another basic belief that is essential to the scientific worldview. At heart, it is the assumption that things don’t just happen spontaneously, that every event has a finite set of causes that would produce the same result every time so long as you could exactly reproduce those causes. Of course, every event in the real world is the result of a very complex combination of preconditions that is practically impossible to recreate, but this fact is thought to be just due to our human limitations, not a flaw in the belief itself. A logical consequence of this view, of course, is that there’s no such thing as true randomness, so that even events that look random—like a coin toss or a throw of the dice—can be explained by the conditions and forces that produce what seems to be a random event. In other words, it’s not really a matter of chance that a coin lands heads up, for example. Instead, in theory you could explain it by the amount and direction of the force you used to flip the coin, any imbalances in the weight of the coin, the influence of air currents, and the surface that the coin lands on. According to causal determinism, then, if you could exactly reproduce those conditions, the coin would land heads up every time. Of course, this is how the scientific method is supposed to work: The scientist controls all of the conditions of an experiment except one. By changing that one condition (called thevariable) and seeing the differences in outcome that result, the scientist can figure out how changes in the variable produce different outcomes. This makes sense only if the scientist believes that each outcome is exclusively the result of the events and conditions that lead up to that outcome, that the result is no more and no less than the sum of the parts that produced it. Again, however, the discoveries of quantum physics challenge the idea that this principle applies at all levels of reality.
Locality means that everything is, well, where it is. While that might seem ridiculously obvious, it really isn’t. Not only does this mean that things are bound to their particular location, more importantly, it means that the influence that one thing—be it a material object or an energy field—has over another thing is limited to its place and time.
In some ways, this might actually be harder for us to believe than it would have been a hundred years ago. In this age of telecommunications, we constantly encounter experiences that make it seem that events can affect other events far away. For example, we watch TV, seeing things that are happening hundreds of miles away. What isn’t apparent, though, is that even though a television set can display an image captured far away from us, this happens because that image is turned into radio waves that travel between the TV station and the TV set. The distance in space (and time) is spanned by events that are set in motion at the TV station and, in effect, spread as a series of events (radio waves) that eventually reach the TV set and cause the picture to be displayed there. So the appearance that an event causes a result at a distance is really an illusion, the product of a chain of events extending unbroken from the original cause to the eventual result.
The principle of locality is essential to the scientific worldview because we need it to understand the chain of cause and effect of causal determinism. If an event at location A causes something to happen at location B, the principle of causal determinism means that you have to be able to explain the chain of events that take place between A and B. The principle of locality is so essential to the scientific method, in fact, that when theories of quantum mechanics showed that—at the subatomic level, at least—events in one location can affect events at a distance without things happening in between, Albert Einstein spent much of his later years trying unsuccessfully to prove that those theories were wrong.
Physical monism is the idea that the physical (material) world is all that there is, that there’s no reality apart from the physical processes that we are a part of. By definition, this rules out anything metaphysical, from the human soul to God himself, at least to the extent that either the soul or God can affect or even be seen from the physical world. Everything that does happen can (and must) be explained by the laws of physics. Anything that doesn’t play by those rules is, well, unthinkable. If we admit that the metaphysical might be possible, we also must admit that science cannot give us a satisfactory explanation for everything. Most of us can live with this incongruity, but the scientific fundamentalist is horrified by this possibility. And yet, on this point, we might be able to find a way of affirming physical monism in a way that embraces (and explains) notions of reality that would usually be described in metaphysical terms. In fact, this is what this book is all about.
Epiphenomenalism tries to apply the other scientific principles to the fact that we human beings are conscious, a fact that is extremely hard to explain using those scientific principles. Even though we experience our own consciousness as the essence of who we are, scientists usually conclude that consciousness is only a byproduct (epiphenomenon) of the biological processes of our nervous systems. To a certain extent, we accept this conclusion. We see that when someone’s brain is injured, that person’s consciousness can be reduced or even wiped out. We count on having our consciousness suppressed when we are given anesthesia for surgery, and we are glad when we awake afterwards with no memory of what happened. And yet we have the unshakable feeling that there is something more primary, more durable at the center of our consciousness than anything that can be explained by anatomy and physiology. This actually may provide the best explanation for our persistent belief in a supernatural level of reality that can’t be explained away by science. Even scientists who insist that there’s no other explanation can’t help but act as though they are motivated by something beyond the principles of material realism, as though they have freedom of choice and that their choices are meaningful, that Why? really is as important as How?.
Despite this very personal experience of a metaphysical reality that goes against the principles of material realism and the rest, we in Western cultures have become so completely programmed with the ideas and values of science that they have come to control how we think, even if we’re not scientists ourselves. Indeed, to a certain extent, material realism has become one of the fundamentals of Western religion because Western religion describes God first and foremost as the one who created the material world. Of course, Western religious traditions insist that a metaphysical dimension does exist, but they also consider the physical realm to be highly significant, very much real. This is in contrast to Eastern religions like Hinduism and Buddhism that insist that the material world is just an illusion. In the West, though, we believe that the material world that God created is, to a certain extent, self-sufficient. And so we live out our lives firmly convinced that the physical world is what is truly real.
Of course, most of us still believe in miracles, but even there, our belief in miracles is based on the idea that the material world is pretty much self-contained and governed by laws that make it predictable. Miracles occur when the unpredictable happens, when God intervenes from outside to suspend the laws of nature that make the world stable, that make it an acceptable reality. It’s exactly because God so rarely interferes with the material world that we can count on it to be trustworthy and constant.
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