Thoughts and Matter

Draft of Friday, October 2, 2009 11:12 AM for comments only. Do not copy, quote, or distribute.

Thoughts and Matter

Vic Stenger

For Reality Check column in Skeptical Briefs December 2009.

In his book God and the New Atheism, theologian John Haught calls naturalism “deeply self-contradictory.” He does not, however, provide any specific contradiction. The best Haught can do is assert his personal judgment that evolution, in particular, will never be able to explain certain mental phenomena such as cognition. He claims, “Scientific naturalism ignores the subjective side of nature, especially our inner experience.”

I do not think it is fair to say that scientific naturalism ignores the subjective. While it is true that neuroscientists do not yet have an established material model of mind, they have considerable data on changes that occur in the brain during subjective mental activity. They establish beyond doubt that material processes are involved.

Nevertheless, Haught’s view seems to be the common refrain of theists arguing against a purely natural universe. In his book God Is No Delusion, Thomas Crean, a Dominican friar of the priory of St. Michael the Archangel in Cambridge, follows Haught in using the argument from ignorance, saying he cannot understand how thoughts could emerge from matter and therefore they must have come from God. He asks, “How could a ‘material kind of thing’ cause an ‘immaterial kind of thing’ to exist?” Well, a computer is a material kind of thing that can solve mathematical and logical problems. It can write poetry that English professors are unable to distinguish from that written by humans. It can produce beautiful art and music. The aesthetic experiences of these are immaterial kinds of things, but they result from physical brain activity.

Unaware of these facts, Crean continues in that vein, "Materialism, then, is absurd. A thought cannot be a material thing, nor can it be caused by a material thing. The only possible conclusion is that thought as such is something independent of matter, that is, something spiritual."

In a short book titled Naturalism, philosophers Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro attempt to show that naturalism is intellectually incoherent. The authors are theists who teach at Notre Dame University and St. Olaf College, respectively. They make the claim that a duality of the physical and the mental is necessary to explain mental causation, that is, how mental events cause physical events.

This strikes me as rather backward. If, as naturalism asserts, mental events arise from physical events in the brain, then there surely can be no problem since we then have physical events causing physical events, just as a cue ball can hit an eight ball and cause it to go into a pocket. On the other hand, if mental events have their own nonphysical nature, then we have the problem of explaining how they cause physical events. Goetz and Taliaferro do not provide us with even a speculative model for how that can happen.

When theists such as Goetz and Taliaferro refer to gaps in the scientific record, the best they can do is say, “See, God must have done it.” This provides no more information and is less economical than a simple statement: “Nature did it.” But materialists can usually do much more than this simple assertion and give some idea of how nature did it. In a physical explanation we often have a theory such as relativity or evolution that provides detailed mechanisms for the events being observed. Even where we do not have an existing established theory, such as for the origin of life or mental processes, we have plausible proposals under consideration that agree with all existing knowledge and that require no supernatural elements. Theists can make only the simple assertion, “God did it.” Scientists can say: “We don’t know. But we’ll try to find out.”

Of course, mind-body dualism is a widespread “commonsense” belief among laypeople. Goetz and Taliaferro seem to think common sense is sufficient to adopt the dualist view.

Goetz and Taliaferro also claim to show the philosophical coherence of divine agency. So what if it is philosophically coherent? That says nothing about its reality. A fantasy computer game in which heroes come back to life after being killed is philosophically coherent. It wouldn’t run on a computer if it wasn’t logical. But the world is still not that way.

Philosopher Paul Churchland points out that all throughout history people have expressed doubt that science would ever be able to explain some phenomena. The first-century astronomer Ptolemy (c. 85–165), the greatest astronomer of the age, said science would never be able to capture the true nature of heavenly causes because they were inaccessible. He didn’t have Newton’s inspiration that the laws of physics are universal, applying both on Earth and in the heavens. The nineteenth-century philosopher Comte (d. 1857) similarly argued we could never know the physical constitution of stars. He didn’t know about atomic spectra. As late as the 1950s most people were still expressing doubt that life could be explained purely materialistically but that some life force was needed. With the discovery in 1953 of the structure of DNA and the great success of the theory of evolution by natural selection, science saw no need for, and indeed no evidence for, a special force of life.

When the mental dualist asks, “How can thoughtless matter give rise to thought?” he is expressing the same argument from ignorance used by those who say, “How can dead matter give rise to life?”

Many questions remain unanswered by those who claim that some immaterial spirit or soul is ultimately controlling the actions of the brain. How does this immaterial thing that carries no energy or momentum provide energy and momentum to particles in the brain? This implies violations of conservation of energy and momentum, which the theist believes are God’s laws. Why is it okay to break these laws of God and not his other laws, such as no homosexual marriage or no using condoms?

This is excerpted from Vic’s latest book: The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason (Prometheus Books, 2009). For more information see his website http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/.

Thoughts and Matter

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