The superstitions of materialism

"Beauty can be a startling reminder for those us who have sunk occasionally into the superstitions of materialism, that to see reality in purely mechanistic terms is not to see the real world at all, but only its shadow."

- David Bentley Hart

Den övernaturliga naturen

Jag skrev en liten text i det senaste numret av Tidskriften Evangelium på temat avförtrollning. Den handlar om materialism och om hur det transcendenta har gjort comeback förstådd som universums inneboende kreativitet.

Trevlig sommar!

Läsvärt angående Thomas Nagels kritik av materialismen

Mycket läsvärd artikel i The Weekly Standard om kritikstormen kring Thomas Nagels bok Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False:

Materialism, then, is fine as far as it goes. It just doesn’t go as far as materialists want it to. It is a premise of science, not a finding. Scientists do their work by assuming that every phenomenon can be reduced to a material, mechanistic cause and by excluding any possibility of nonmaterial explanations. And the materialist assumption works really, really well—in detecting and quantifying things that have a material or mechanistic explanation. Materialism has allowed us to predict and control what happens in nature with astonishing success. The jaw-dropping edifice of modern science, from space probes to nanosurgery, is the result. 

But the success has gone to the materialists’ heads. From a fruitful method, materialism becomes an axiom: If science can’t quantify something, it doesn’t exist, and so the subjective, unquantifiable, immaterial “manifest image” of our mental life is proved to be an illusion. 

Here materialism bumps up against itself. Nagel insists that we know some things to exist even if materialism omits or ignores or is oblivious to them. Reductive materialism doesn’t account for the “brute facts” of existence—it doesn’t explain, for example, why the world exists at all, or how life arose from nonlife. Closer to home, it doesn’t plausibly explain the fundamental beliefs we rely on as we go about our everyday business: the truth of our subjective experience, our ability to reason, our capacity to recognize that some acts are virtuous and others aren’t. These failures, Nagel says, aren’t just temporary gaps in our knowledge, waiting to be filled in by new discoveries in science. On its own terms, materialism cannot account for brute facts. Brute facts are irreducible, and materialism, which operates by breaking things down to their physical components, stands useless before them. “There is little or no possibility,” he writes, “that these facts depend on nothing but the laws of physics.” 

Taylor om likheten mellan fundamentalisters och materialisters världsbild

The mechanical outlook which splits nature from supernature voids all this mystery. This split generates the modern concept of the “miracle”; a kind of punctual hole blown in the regular order of things from outside, that is, from the transcendent. Whatever is higher must thus come about through the holes pierced in the regular, natural order, within whose normal operation there is no mystery. This is curiously enough, a view of things shared between materialists and Christian Fundamentalists. Only for these, it provides proof of “miracles”, because certain things are unexplained by the normal course of natural causation. For the materialist, it is a proof that anything transcendent is excluded by “science”.

Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, s. 547

Michel Polanyi om materialism och moral

"Men may go on talking the language of positivism, pragmatism, and naturalism for many
years, yet continue to respect the principles of truth and morality which their vocabulary anxiously ignores." 

Michael Polanyi. Personal Knowledge. Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. Routledge, 1998. s. 247

En filosofi för de mäktiga

"In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald depicts the indolent, troubled world of upper-crust young Americans during the Roaring Twenties. A Yale graduate from an old-money family, Tom Buchanan is the most conventional character, and in the opening scene he expresses a conventional upper-crust view. The white, northern races - that is to say, virile, strong, commanding men like Tom Buchanan - rightly rule. The mansion overlooking the Long Island Sound, the horses, the trust fund - he holds them in accord with the higher justice of racial evolution. It was a convenient social philosophy for American elites, one expressed most consistently in the doctrines of Social Darwinism, which provided a seemingly scientific justification for the impulse of the powerful to think of themselves as exempt from the old and limiting constraints of duty and conscience. Today's convenient philosophy for elites is a new materialism." 

[...]

 "As materialism disenchants, the principles and norms and standards by which we can hold the powerful accountable melt away."

[...]

"Like the Social Darwinism and racial theories that eased the conscience of Tom Buchanan and gave him peace of mind in his supereminence, a materialist philosophy reassures those who hold power today. Because nothing we do in this vast cosmos governed by the laws of nature matters, because nothing lasts, the elites can do what they want and nobody can criticize them."

 

- R.R Reno, A Philosophy for the powerful