What is the ultimate explanation of the world?
Philosophy in the perennial tradition recognizes two basic alternative answers: matter or mind.
Matter with its properties and forces or mind with its ordering activity at work in everything.
Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas deny that matter, with its properties and forces, is an adequate
explanation of the world.
For all the material things of nature are shot through with form, and where there is
form there is a manifestation of mind – a mind irreducible to one thing or all of them,
yet permeating them all and suffusing them with form and working power.
The forms of the things of nature are a manifestation of the mind of God, and matter is formed according
to his wisdom, and his wisdom is formulated in the principles and laws of nature.
But what about the opposing position that the ultimate explanation of everything is
not the divine mind, but simply material things, space, time, various forces, and brute factual
laws?
Is that true?
Is that a reasonable explanation of everything?
The view that matter, or physical things, explains
everything is traditionally called materialism,
or naturalism, and today goes by the name of physicalist reductionism.
Physicalist reductionism is the view that physics explains everything.
It is not that science explains everything, but specifically physics.
All other sciences, such as biology, and chemistry, and psychology, are reducible to physics and
all things whatsoever can be explained in terms of physics alone.
With enough progress, someday, the true, final complete physics will gives us the last word
on reality.
So, what shall we say in reply to physicalist reductionism?
Does physics explain everything?
Physicalist reductionism clashes with the evidence on a number of levels, and many considerations
combine to form a cumulative case for rejecting it.
To begin with, if physicalist reductionism is true, then one science is completely reducible
to another.
However, prominent historians and philosophers of science have shown that over the course
of the actual history of science no one science has ever been completely reduced to another.
And if that is true for the reduction of one whole science to another, how much more so
for the reduction of all sciences to physics alone.
Now in response, someone might say that although no science has ever been completely reduced
to another, nevertheless, such a reduction could be done in principle, or if we were
smart
enough.
But such a response simply reasserts the position that is here being questioned, and there are
further, more specific reasons to doubt it could be done even in principle.
It seems that physicalist reductionism is something of a philosopher’s fantasy.
More than a few actual working scientists recognize serious limits of their methods,
limits to what science can tell us, and they doubt the possibility of a complete reduction
of all sciences to physics.
Furthermore, as scientific inquiry has continued over the course of the centuries, many scientists
and philosophers have found increasingly more evidence against reductionist sorts of explanations.
More and more thinkers are recognizing the reality of emergent properties across nature.
Emergent properties are features of whole entities that cannot be explained in terms
of the parts alone, or the properties of the parts.
Tornadoes are one common example, and in a later video a physicist will provide more
examples.
But physicalist reductionism clashes with the evidence in a more radical way.
In philosophy, intuitions are evidence.
Intuitions are not just feelings or hunches.
They are acts of reason born from reflecting upon total experience, and intuitions are
truth-indicating.
Now, we have powerful and reasonable intuitions that human beings are free agents, that human
beings are capable of knowing objective moral truth, that human life has an objective purpose
and meaning, that our search for God and happiness is not pointless or in vain, that human beings
have intrinsic dignity and worth, that life is worth living, love is real, and so too
our minds, our consciousness, and our relationships with one another.
IF physicalist reductionism is true, however, then it seems that – in the last analysis
– all of these powerful and reasonable intuitions are false.
According to more than a few physicalist reductionists, all such things are the illusions of a prescientific
account of reality and folk psychology.
That is why we sometimes hear it said that educated and enlightened people should just
accept the fact that there is no God, there is no such thing as free will, life has no
objective purpose, humans have no intrinsic dignity and worth, we are no different in
kind from robots and machines, love is just chemicals in the brain, and our minds, consciousness,
and relationships are all just physical.
But claims such as these clash with our fundamental intuitions, and so clash with properly philosophical
evidence.
And that is a good reason to reject them, as well as the physicalist reductionism from
which they come.
In response to such a litany of denials of God, freedom, love, dignity, meaning, and
purpose, two replies are in order.
First, it is not science that makes these claims, and science does not justify them.
They are rather the implications of a specific philosophy that says physics alone explains
everything.
And that philosophy clashes with both empirical and intuitive evidence.
Second, when we hear the litany of denials of God, freedom, love, dignity, meaning, and
purpose, we can see that not only is physicalist reductionism false, but it is a force for
the psychological destruction of human beings.
After all, when you hear it said that there is no such thing as freedom, love, or meaning
in life, what is your reaction?
Are you feeling a bit depressed?
That experience is worth noting.
One of the most prominent psychologists of the twentieth century, Viktor Frankl, once
said that many psychological disorders come from living in an existential void -- a situation
in which the sense of life’s meaning and purpose has been evacuated – and he also
said that an existential void has now become widespread in our society due to “indoctrination
along reductionist lines.”
In other words, Viktor Frankl attributed the increasing amount of psychological disorders
in our society to the propagation of physicalist reductionism, and he predicted that so long
as the indoctrination continued psychological disorders would increase.
Experience has fulfilled his prediction.
But philosophy in the perennial tradition offers us something better.
Human beings have spiritual souls and free will, we were made for the true and the good,
for love and for beauty, for happiness and for the God of eternal wisdom and love.
Given our basic experience and the evidence available to us, the reasonable thing to do
is to reject physicalist reductionism and even oppose it.
It is a false philosophy, and a formula for spiritual death.
There is another way to understand ourselves and the world, a philosophy that coheres with
what human beings actually are and experience and know to be true.
The true wisdom is more than science, and way more than physics, and tells us to be
open to God and his light.
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