An excerpt from Pandemic of Lunacy: How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy, by J. Budziszewski. The book is now available for preorder.
The delusion that things are whatever we say they are gives such an inflated importance to the mind that one would think nothing existed but thoughts, or maybe words. Materialism swings to the opposite extreme: that nothing exists but matter and material bodies. If nothing but matter exists, it seems to follow that there is nothing but matter to care about: As one pop diva famously chanted, “[T]he boy with the cold, hard cash / Is always Mister Right / ’Cause we are living in a material world / And I am a material girl.”
“Matter is all there is” is so much taken for granted that the Encyclopedia Brittanica simply announces it as fact. Matter, it declares, is “material substance which constitutes the observable universe and, together with energy, forms the basis of all objective phenomena.” The phrase “together with energy” adds nothing because energy can be converted into matter.
To say that “matter is material” is circular, of course. More commonly, matter is taken to be whatever has mass and takes up space. In this sense, dirt is matter, but the meaning of the definition isn’t. Assuming that this is what the Brittanica’s editors have in mind, it seems that the meaning of their sentence could be neither observable nor objective—yet somehow they expect us both to observe it and accept its objectivity.
Perhaps they would say that the ink marks spelling out the words of the definition have mass and take up space. They do, but these marks are not the definition, but only a symbol of the definition. For suppose we switched to using pixels of light on a monitor instead of blotches of ink on paper. If the definition and its material representation are the same thing, then we have to say that since the representation has changed, the definition has changed. But it hasn’t. The definition is immaterial, independent of the matter symbolizing it.
Sometimes materialists try to get away with saying that nothing exists but matter along with its properties and activities. If they say this, then they may as well stop calling themselves materialists at all, since neither the properties nor the activities of matter are matter. For example, the motion of matter takes place in space and time, but neither space nor time has mass or takes up space—things have position in space, but space just is space. Materialists also blithely call forces such as gravity and magnetism “material” phenomena, but a force doesn’t have mass or take up space, either. So it seems that even to explain what matter is, we have to suppose the objective and observable reality of things which aren’t matter.
And what about our thoughts about matter? They don’t have mass or take up space either. “Yes, they do,” the materialist may say. “Thoughts are merely something your brain is doing.” This materialist opinion has gone through many versions. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes proposed that thoughts were the motions of tiny, interconnected springs in the brain. Corpuscles of light from a horse strike the eye, the eye recoils, the motion is transmitted to the brain, and there you have it: the thought of a horse. In the nineteenth century, Pierre Jean-Georges Cabanis viewed the process as chemical: “Impressions, upon reaching the brain, make it enter into activity, just as food, by falling into the stomach, excites it to a more abundant secretion of gastric juice, and to the motions which favor their dissolution.” Today, materialists view the process as electrical.
But this is hand-waving. Yes, the brain is indispensable to thought, just as vibrations in air are indispensable to speech. But to say that the mechanical, chemical, or electrical events in the brain just are thoughts is like saying that the vibrations which convey words just are what the words convey. Any electrician can make an instrument which plays a recorded voice saying, “Red!” whenever red light strikes a photoelectric cell, but it would be ridiculous to think that the device has the idea of red.
There are so many things materialism cannot explain, among them meaning, thought, belief, pain, pleasure, the look of a color, the sound of a note, the soul or self, and mental experience in general. Faced with this failure, some materialists desperately resort to what is called “eliminativism.” Their idea is that we don’t need to explain any of these things—because they don’t exist! We are not actually having mental experiences, but only think we are. We are like that photoelectric cell, except that we are suffering introspective illusions.
This position raises unavoidable questions: If there is an illusion, then what is having it? If I am having it, then how can my self be an illusion? If it results from introspection, then what am I looking at in there? Eliminative materialism is so extreme that a consistent eliminativist can’t even believe in eliminativism—for beliefs are one of the things he can’t believe in.
Chesterton must have anticipated eliminativism when he wrote: “As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist . . . and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding.”
Just so. In every age there have been scoffers who say that although I may be moved to awe by my beloved’s face, the glory I see in it isn’t really there. Eliminative materialists outdo ordinary scoffers by a mile. Not only is the glory in my beloved’s face an illusion—my awe is an illusion too!
Even if we don’t go so far as eliminativism, it seems odd for a materialist to consider his materialism true: For given his premises, how could he know? Even if beliefs really do exist, the materialist must believe that they result solely from material causes. He can’t say, “I believe in materialism because it is true,” because on his premises, that’s not why he does believe in it—he does so only because of things like genes, upbringing, and milieu, material causes with no necessary relation to truth.
For instance, the materialist Richard Dawkins has written that “we are survival machines, robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.” Yet, inconsistently, he follows up with a call to arms: “Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.” It is all very stimulating, but of course if we really are “blindly programmed” by our genes, then his call to revolt is worse than futile. One might as well expect a typewriter to revolt against the keys. Perhaps Dawkins is setting his hopes on cultural evolution, for later he suggests that higher-level genetic programs are “open” and do not settle every detail of the way we live. Yet this is hardly a promising gambit either, for his discussion of culture merely exchanges one form of determinism for another. As he sees things, just as our bodies are blindly programmed to preserve the self-replicating molecules called genes, so our cultures are blindly programmed to preserve the self-replicating ideas he calls “memes.” Taking him at his word, the “meme” of revolt must be just one more of these replicators. He rails against blind destiny, only because he is blindly programmed to rail against it. This is a strange liberation.
The mistaken view that nothing exists but material bodies probably borrows most of its plausibility from the silliness of the opposite extreme, which is sometimes called “angelism”: the view that human beings are entirely non-bodily, that we are pure spirits which happen to use bodies but have no essential relation with them. The classical view, which I defend, is that neither of these opposites is true. We are neither pure bodies, nor pure souls, but unions of body and soul.
Our education makes us suspicious when “souls” are mentioned. To us, the word has the smell of ghost stories. A better way to think of the soul is that it is the pattern of the activity in which a living body participates, the formal principle which makes the difference between a lump of dead flesh and an embodied life. When Mr. Smith dies, we don’t point to his corpse and say, “Here is Smith, but he has stopped working.” Rather we say, “Smith is no longer present. This used to be his body, but now it is only his remains.”
In this way of using the word “soul,” all living creatures have souls, just in the sense that there are patterns to their embodied lives. But they do not all have souls of the human sort. Our souls are rational; animal souls (for example, cockroach souls) are not. Taking the term in this sense, when people ask “do we have souls?” they are probably not asking whether we have souls, but whether we have immortal souls—whether the patterns that characterize our embodied lives can survive our bodies’ destruction.
Traditionally, the rationality of human souls has been viewed as suggesting that yes, they may be immortal. I can’t settle that matter here, but before closing I want to say something about it—even if for no other reason than the fact that although materialists mock the idea of an eternal soul, few know anything about how the traditional argument works.
Consider the soul—the pattern of the embodied life—of a creature which lives by its senses, say, a beetle. Now a beetle receives sense impressions through its bodily organs without having any rational idea of what they mean. So far as we know, then, everything that happens in beetle life depends entirely on its body. But as we have seen, in the human soul—the pattern of the embodied rational life of a human being—certain non-material actions are going on, which cannot be reduced to what its bodily organs are doing. Even the thought, “Over there is another person” goes far beyond what the senses can produce: I don’t smell personhood. Since some of the actions of the rational soul do not depend on union with its body, perhaps they don’t stop when the body stops.
Needless to say, this argument raises further questions, but notice: Even if it is mistaken, it isn’t based on sheer faith or biblical revelation. Reason alone gives grounds to think there are more things in heaven and earth than materialists dream.
