Light On Dark Water

The Chilly Cocoon of Materialism

I’m still thinking about that Paul Bloom piece in The
Atlantic that I wrote about last week. What’s most
striking about it is Bloom’s determination to hang on to
the doctrine that materialistic natural selection is responsible
for everything in human nature even as he admits that his own
research undermines it. Unable to credit simplistic explanations
for the evolutionary utility of religious belief, he falls back
on the assertion that the mental processes that lead to religious
belief must be accidental by-products of other more easily
explained features.

The first of many responses that came to me is to ask how an
accidental and non-adaptive byproduct of an evolutionary
development could ever come to dominate the organism as religion
does the human. But, setting aside specific objections for the
moment, I wondered why Bloom is so committed to the natural
selection hypothesis. Serendipitously, I found an answer
in this Godspy article by Michael Behe.
The crucial insight here comes, not surprisingly, from
Chesterton:

The Christian is quite free to believe that there is a
considerable amount of settled order and inevitable development
in the universe. But the materialist is not allowed to admit into
his spotless machine the slightest speck of spiritualism or
miracle.

Of course. Behe (who as you probably know is one of the
leaders of the Intelligent Design movement) adduces this passage
in his exploration of the reasons for the intense hostility with
which the design hypothesis is often met. The objection to ID is
usually that it isn’t science, in the sense of being a
hypothesis that is empirically verifiable in the laboratory, and
I think that’s a valid objection. But the people who are
outraged by ID are unperturbed by the entanglement of materialist
philosophy with science. It’s pretty clear that the two
philosophies are not accorded equal treatment. Materialists are
passionately defensive of the ground which they erroneously
believe has been conquered by their philosophy. No one likes his
deepest convictions challenged, and materialists certainly show
the same signs of distress as any Christian when it happens to
them.

The curious turning of the psychological tables continues. I
noted last week the way the roles of challenger and defender of
conventional thinking, habitually assigned to science and
religion respectively, are being reversed. The same is true for
conventional emotional categories, in which religion is seen as a
security blanket for those who can’t face the world as it
really is, and science as the domain of those bold enough to
follow the trail of facts, however distressing. Dogmatic
materialism presents us with a pretty chilly world, but also with
a safe one—it is at least in theory knowable and
controllable by the human mind. But a world which is the product
of an active and purposeful intelligence greater than our own is
not

The irony of the situation is that it is now the Christian who
is urging the materialist to shake off the chains of his dogma,
summon his courage, and step into a larger world. My conception
of the world can include all the physical processes found in the
materialist’s, but it also includes much more, conceptions
of spiritual life and purpose that trouble the soul of the
materialist even as he denies that he has one.