Finding Truth: 5 Principles for Unmasking Atheism, Secularism, and Other God Substitutes (10 page)

Another experiment involved managing money. Once again, the
determinism
group was more likely to steal money.
Scientific American
summarizes: “One of the most striking findings to emerge recently in the science of free will is that when people believe—or are led to believe—that free will is just an illusion, they tend to become more antisocial.”
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When a person accepts materialism as a life philosophy, its effects do not stay neatly contained within the mental realm. It leads to destructive personal behavior and harmful public consequences.

In these experiments, science is catching up with what Paul said two millennia ago: Your worldview affects how you treat others. A reductionistic worldview leads to destructive behavior. Those who dishonor God will end up dishonoring themselves and others.

The Psychology of Suppression

Given the negative consequences of a reductionist worldview, you might wonder why anyone would adopt one. What’s the appeal? Paul gives a clue: Recall that human nature is part of general revelation, giving evidence for God. The existence of beings with the capacity to reason, love, plan, and choose is evidence that the first cause that created them must have at least the same capacities.

The cause must be sufficient to produce the effect. The origin of personal beings is best explained by a personal Being.

How do sinful, fallen humans seek to avoid that conclusion? Paul says they “suppress the truth” (Rom. 1:18). That’s what reductionism accomplishes. It denies one or more dimensions of human nature—so that the evidence from human nature no longer points as clearly to the biblical God.

If reductionism is like trying to stuff all of reality into a box, we could say the problem is that the box is always too small. Idols deify some part of the created order. But no matter which part they choose, a
part
is always too limited to explain the
whole
. The universe is too complex and multi-dimensional to fit into a box composed of just one part. Invariably something will stick out. Something will not fit into its restricted conceptual categories.

What then? Whatever does not fit into the box will be dismissed, devalued, or outright denied. Reductionist thinking can be summarized as saying, if my worldview does not account for X, so much the worse for X. Idols are popular precisely because they cut reality down to a size that can be stuffed into a box and controlled. They eliminate those dimensions of reality that would falsify the worldview. You can make any worldview appear successful simply by denying anything that does not fit into its box.

To use the Bible’s term, people suppress anything that threatens their favored worldview. If general revelation is evidence for God, then every substitute religion will have to deny that evidence.

Yet suppression creates a deep chasm—a dualism or dichotomy—sometimes in theory but always in practice.
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On one side of the chasm are the things that fit inside the box, which are accepted as real and objective. On the other side are the things that stick out of the box, which are reduced to the status of subjective illusions or mental constructs.

To switch metaphors, philosophers sometimes picture the dichotomy using the image of two stories in a building. Reductionists try to live in only one story. For example, materialists try to live strictly in the lower story, the material universe. They treat matter and energy as the only things that are real, knowable, and objectively true. The upper story becomes a sort of attic where they toss everything that does not fit into the materialist box—soul, spirit, mind, morality, freedom, love, God.

You might say these things are stashed away in the attic in dusty old trunks labeled “Superstition” and “Wishful Thinking” and “Educated People Know Better.” We can picture the two-story divide with a simple diagram. If you have read the works of Francis Schaeffer, or my own earlier books, you will recognize this diagram:

Materialists try to live in the lower story

NON-MATERIAL WORLD

Subjective, Superstitious, Mental Constructs

MATERIAL WORLD

Objective, Scientific, Knowable Facts

Because people are made in God’s image, however, in practice they cannot live strictly in one story. They cannot completely get rid of those troublesome old trunks in the attic. But that’s jumping ahead to Principle #3, which argues that no one can live inside the limited box of an idol-based worldview.

Before we make that argument, we need to see how widespread reductionism is. As there are many different idols, so there are many forms of reductionism, and it is vital to hone our idol detectors to recognize them. Because it is easier to identify the dehumanizing impact when worldviews are developed to their most logical conclusions, we will consider two of them in their most recent versions—materialism and postmodernism. Then we will identify the reductionism inherent in two religions—pantheism and Islam. Finally, because negative consequences are especially visible when worldviews are expressed in public policy, we will end with two political theories.

Crick: “Nothing but a Pack of Neurons”

In recent years a radically reductionistic version of materialism has been advanced called
eliminative
materialism. It goes beyond the traditional materialist claim that material conditions determine the mental world to the more surprising claim that the mental world does not exist—that all of our thoughts, convictions, desires, intentions, perceptions, and decisions are fictions. They are illusions produced by the underlying brain chemistry, with no causal impact of their own, like foam whipped up by the sea or sparks created by a machine.

“Our starting assumption as scientists ought to be that on some level consciousness has to be an illusion,” says Cambridge psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. “The reason is obvious: If nothing in the physical world can have the features that consciousness seems to have, then consciousness cannot exist as a thing in the physical world.”
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In his view, apparently, if something is not “a thing in the physical world,” then it cannot exist.

But if consciousness is an illusion, then how is Humphrey conscious of that fact? And why should we trust the thinking of scientists who tell us there is no such thing as thinking? As one philosopher notes, eliminative materialism “refutes itself since even an illusion is the presence of an experience” within someone’s consiousness.
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Despite these logical contradictions (which we will discuss in Principle #4), the same radical reductionism is held by several leading thinkers. Francis Crick, best known for cracking the DNA code, later undertook to disprove the existence of the soul or self. He writes: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.” Playing off a line in
Alice in Wonderland
, he concludes, “You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.”

In a similar vein, psychologist Daniel Wegner of Harvard argues that free will is an illusion and that all our actions are really the effects of unconscious physical causes. His book is aptly titled
The Illusion of Conscious Will
. In an interview he admits that free will is “a very persistent illusion; it keeps coming back.” Yet he treats it as nothing more than a magician’s trick: “Even though you know it’s a trick, you get fooled every time. The feelings just don’t go away.”
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(You might think that when a theory is contradicted by persistent experiences that “just don’t go away,” that persistence should count as evidence against the theory. We will develop this argument in Principle #3.)

It strikes most people as extreme to claim humans have no free will or consciousness or personal identity. Why would anyone come up with a theory so contrary to normal experience? The reasoning rests on a metaphor popular among cognitive scientists: that the brain is a computer. For example, Harvard neuroscientist Steven Pinker calls the human brain a complex machine for “information processing or computation.” Now, we know that computers work perfectly well without being conscious. So why are
we
conscious? The reductionist answer is: We’re not. The idea that there is an inner self that unifies our thoughts and experiences is an illusion. In Pinker’s words, “There’s considerable evidence that the unified self is a fiction.”
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Where would such a fiction come from? The theory claims that natural selection has programmed it into our genes because it enables us to predict and control our environment more easily. For example, we can more easily predict that Sally will go to the refrigerator if we know she
wants
a drink and
thinks
a carton of milk is in the fridge. In reality, however, the theory says, internal states such as
wanting
and
thinking
do not exist. Ordinary language is just a convenient shorthand that we use because an accurate account, invoking the laws of physics that govern the neurons firing in Sally’s brain, would be impossibly complex.
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“Deepest Irrationality”

We have to give eliminative materialism credit for being utterly logical: Having made an idol of matter, it rejects anything beyond the material realm. Yet not all materialists are happy with that outcome. They point to the obvious fact that we are conscious beings. Somehow, they say, consciousness must emerge from matter. This view is called emergentism.
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Yet the claim that mental properties emerge from brain states is highly implausible. After all, mental states are not at all like physical states. A physical object like a rose may be red and prickly, but your thought about the rose is neither red nor prickly. Physical objects are public: They can be observed by other people. But mental states (such as feelings of pain or joy) are private: They cannot be directly observed by anyone else. We explain physical states by invoking a general causal law (as in science). But we explain mental states by invoking personal intentions, desires, and choices. Finally, mental states are always
about
something, directed toward an object (you think about a person, you worry about a problem). But physical objects are not
about
anything. They just “are.”
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It appears that consciousness and matter differ in kind (qualitatively), not merely in degree (quantitatively). Therefore, to claim that consciousness somehow emerges from matter seems like trying to get something from nothing—like pulling a rabbit from a hat. Philosopher Evan Fales calls it a mystery: “Darwinian evolution implies that humans emerged through the blind operation of natural forces. It is mysterious how such forces could generate something nonphysical.”
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Philosopher Colin McGinn treats it as akin to a miracle. “We do not know how consciousness might have arisen by natural processes from antecedently existing material things,” he writes. “One is tempted, however reluctantly, to turn to divine assistance: … It would take a supernatural magician to extract consciousness from matter.” Resorting to a biblical analogy, McGinn asks, “How did evolution convert the water of biological tissue into the wine of consciousness?”
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Philosopher Mark Bedau says the idea of emergence “is uncomfortably like magic.” Thus it “will discomfort reasonable forms of materialism.”
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More “reasonable” forms of materialism hold that if humans
came
from matter, then they
consist
solely of matter—and mind is an illusion.

Why do most people find it difficult to accept that “reasonable” conclusion? Because it runs counter to our most pressing everyday experience. In the words of philosopher Galen Strawson, the denial of consciousness “is surely
the strangest thing that has ever happened in the whole history of human thought
.” It shows “that the power of human credulity is unlimited, that the capacity of human minds to be gripped by theory, by faith, is truly unbounded.” It reveals “the deepest irrationality of the human mind.”
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This is a striking critique. Strawson is saying that eliminative materialism is a “faith”—one that is deeply “irrational” when measured against what we know by common-sense experience.

The eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Reid argued that such extreme logical consistency in the face of contrary facts is a form of insanity. When you allow yourself to be reasoned out of what you know by common sense, just because some philosophical system requires it, he wrote, “we may call this metaphysical lunacy.”
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After all, the goal of philosophy is to
explain
the facts of experience, not to deny them. Anything less is ducking the issue. The problem with reductionism is that instead of explaining things, it tries to explain them away.

Outside the ivory tower, ordinary people are not interested in a worldview that spins out a logically coherent system, and yet contradicts human experience. They are looking for a worldview that makes sense of the world we actually inhabit. They want one that explains the undeniable facts of human experience, not one that suppresses those facts for the sake of its own internal logical consistency.

Besides, the facts suppressed by materialism are exactly the things people care most about—the whole realm of conscious experience. Most of what makes life worth living consists of experiences: love, happiness, fulfillment, moral ideals, a sense of purpose, and so on.
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Finally, ordinary people are sensitive to the practical and moral consequences of worldviews. Radically reductionist views of the human person are not just harmless speculations—idle amusements for philosophers. What the dominant classes hold as true tends to shape social and political practice. If the elites hold a materialism that reduces humans to computers, then they will treat people like computers. Thinking will be reduced to computing: the neuroelectrophysiology of the brain. People will be judged solely by how well they perform their assigned functions. And when they stop functioning, they will be tossed in the garbage heap with the other electronic trash.