From Victor Reppert:
I am convinced that a broadly materialist view of the world must possess three essential features.
First, for a worldview to be materialistic, there must be a mechanistic base level.
Second, the level of basic physics must be causally closed.
Third, whatever is not physical, at least if it is in space and time, must supervene on the physical.This understanding of a broadly materialistic worldview is not a tendentiously defined form of reductionism; it is what most people who would regard themselves as being in the broadly materialist camp would agree with, a sort of “minimal materialism.”
To the atheists:
Some of you know you’re materialists, some of you suspect it, others try to deny it or don’t like to be identified as such. But if you’re an atheist what else do you have?
Observed phenomena.
Purportedly, Einstein said: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.” It needn’t make much difference to the science either way, since physics is basically what works.
What’s important is not just making stuff up, the problem with most traditional religions and their products, like ID.
Glen Davidson
Digital watches.
Douglas Adams joke.
A spirit of inquiry.
Seriously, aside from medicine, dentistry, sanitation, air conditioning, abundant food, clothing, shelter, and quartz watches, what have materialists given to us?
Freedom to be curious, I would say. Freedom not to fear damnation for being curious. And skeptical.
That’s great. But you’re all still materialists. I think you all misunderstood the question. I wasn’t asking what you like to do on Sundays.
How can you be an atheist and not be a materialist? What other options are there? As atheists, from which of Reppert’s “three essential features” of materialism do you exempt yourself?
Of course, this OP is a direct response to Elizabeth, who seems to think that she can excuse herself from being a materialist simply because the term is too vague to be applied to her.
I hope to accomplish two things:
1. Stake out a position to which I (and others) can refer to just in case that I call someone here a materialist and an objection is raised that I have not defined what I mean by the term.
2. Show that Elizabeth is in fact a materialist.
“there must be a mechanistic base level.” I’m not persuaded of that.
“the level of basic physics must be causally closed.” I’m neutral on that. I see it as an open question.
“whatever is not physical, at least if it is in space and time, must supervene on the physical.” And I’m neutral on that.
Note, also that I am neutral on whether there is a god. That you consider me atheist doesn’t mean that I have to rule out the possibility of a god. The question for me is not “is there a god?” Rather, the question should be “Is there a god that is relevant to how I lead my life?”
Neil, is there a reason you find agnosticism appealing?
I suppose we should bring up “definition” of God, Deism, Pantheism and stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3-Tuvw_SvM
I know Mung will love that video.
Mung,
Simple:
1) By not believing in a god or gods — that’s the atheism part; and
2) by believing that reality consists of more than just the physical — that’s the “not materialist” part.
Try turning it around, Mung. If you were correct that atheism automatically implies materialism, then not being a materialist would automatically imply theism. Does that really make sense to you?
Like John Searle or David Chalmers?
Why not ask a Buddhist?
Erik,
Yes, exactly.
Whatever not-believing-in-god means about physics, that’s the view I subscribe to.
If materialism requires a ‘mechanistic’ base layer, and mechanistic means deterministic or causally coupled all the way down, then I’m not really a materialist. But materialism does not exclude quantum phenomena. From the perspective of the quantum world, it’s our level that behaves funny.
What does theism do to physics?
Mung,
Are you a theist?
If so, what do you have that a materialist does not have? Can that be demonstrated? No you say (or some excuse or just ignore the question which is as good as an answer)? Oh, then seems you have exactly the same as everyone else and is no identifiable difference between theists and anyone else at all, however hard you might delude yourself.
Then define it already.
Is information material or immaterial Mung to you?
Name some immaterial things. Are forces like gravity material to you mind?
No to all of the conditions you list.
No. Mechanistic models are helpful in the special sciences, but not for fundamental physics. (I’m assuming mechanisms as defined eg by Bechtel).
Physics, eg in the tests of Bell’s inequalities, tells us the world is fundamentally non-local, and mechanisms don’t seem to be compatible with that fact.
If so, it would be so only in a restricted sense: the sense that anything that is physical and has a cause, must have a physical cause. But QM can be understood to say there are uncaused events. Further, non-locality tells us that there are correlations between remote entities which are not causal. Finally, there are open questions about whether causality even applies to fundamental physics.
No. Although supervening on the physical is very common in the definition of physicalism in philosophy, it is not necessary. Ladyman and Ross say it is a concept which is incompatible with physics, and propose instead a “rainforest realism” which avoids this concept.
Further, as others have pointed out, Chalmers and others think that physics needs to be extended by a scientific analysis of pan-psychic entities. I think Chalmers would call him self a materialist based on that extended science.
For 1, I say that none of the criteria listed in the OP are necessary to what some would call materialism, as detailed above.
I cannot speak for Elizabeth, but I think that atheists can take, eg, Einstein’s position and believe in the God that Spinoza believed in. That would be the general direction I might take, if I think seriously about the issue. But for now my thinking has not gone beyond that in Genesis’s Watcher of the Skies
I’m happy to accept the label as long as the labeller is clear about what they mean, and I endorse that.
For instance I think there is far more to reality than matter.
Also than energy.
There is also pattern, which some define as information.
But those are what there are, in my view, and what is built from them, which of course includes curiosity, imagination, awe, and love.
It’s probably just natural curiosity and skepticism. I don’t see any point in making up stories about why I am the way that I am, just as I don’t see any point in making up the stories that are largely constitutive of religion
I have known since age ten that grownups lie about god. I had a rather personal encounter with this in a matter of faith healing.
Once I realized that preachers can lie, I began investigating and reading about world religions. It soon became clear that nobody knows anything that could be considered true. It’s all made up.
Then I had surgery under twilight sleep, and had a rather vivid out of body experience. That was 60 years ago — long before anybody talked about such things. But I am still under the influence. I realize no one knows what existence is. All the talk is bullshit. Material schmaterial. Bullshit. Theology bullshit. Philosophy bullshit. Physics, interesting bullshit. The more I learn about physics the more compatible it is with my experience. Still bullshit.
Mung:
Exactly what we all have, and what you have: the human predicament. What varies is the degree of one’s psychological denial in response to that predicament.
Death is real, Mung. Get over it.
I got over the fear of dying during that surgery. I have no knowledge to impart. I don’t know why there is something rather than nothing. I expect death to be nothing. I haven’t seen heaven.
But the fear went away. I have no need for the bullshit comforts of preachers an theologians. I am quite comfortable not knowing.
What makes most sense to me in the context of these discussions with people like Mung is simply to say “ghosts don’t exist”. That seems to cover what they mostly mean I think. They are talking about spirits, the dead rising and so on.
Talk about “information and matter” is in a different magesteria I think. We think that’s what they mean when they say materialism, but I don’t think it is. They mean that they are going to heaven and that “this is not all there is”. It is, they are not.
The British philosopher McTaggart (his full name was the Suessian: John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart) was famously idealist (in the sense of anti-physicalist), and wrote a book defending immortality (which I uploaded on my scribd site). He was considered a pretty important philosopher at one time too. Important enough anyhow that C.D. Broad took the time and effort to write a big book criticizing McTaggart’s views with respect to time.
But McTaggart was an atheist.
The only unambiguous way to define ‘materialist’ is to define it by its converse:
A materialist is the opposite of a supernaturalist.
A supernaturalist is a person willing to assert certain ‘facts’ about the nature of reality. These facts have 2 properties:
1. They are not subject to the normal rules of evidence, logic or reason.
2. Any contradiction between these facts and observed reality can be explained away by as many layers of ad hoc explanation as necessary.
It seems to me that Mung is trying to shove his opponents into a box. He wants to give the impression that theists have an expansive view of reality and are open to new possibilities whereas ‘materialists’ are narrow and limited in their scope.
I think its the opposite.
‘Materialists’ are interested in exploring every aspect of reality that we can using the cognitive tools at our disposal and are willing to accept that some things may remain a mystery forever. I think theists willingness to tack on spurious ad hoc entities to reality can’t help but to limit their perspective.
I am not a materialist, for the reasons that BruceS gave. (Also, I’m not really an atheist. More precisely, I don’t care about the label “atheism”; it’s not really central to how I describe my own views.)
According to Reppert, materialism requires a “mechanistic” base level and that everything else spatio-temporal supervenes on fundamental physics. (As an amusing aside, I find myself wondering if “basic physics” is supposed to mean “fundamental physics” or “Physics 101”. I worry that it’s intended to be the former but is actually the latter.)
I assume that he doesn’t take the stronger view — that there are no spatio-temporal entities — because then he’d need to tell a story about mathematics.
I’m not a materialist for the following reasons (echoing here what BruceS said above):
(1) it’s not entirely clear to me that we are dealing with “mechanistic” relations when we get down to quantum phenomena and relativistic phenomena, and I would not be surprised if whatever theories succeeds either (or both) would not be “mechanistic” at all;
(2) Materialism as stipulated requires that we distinguish between a “base” and then everything else that “supervenes” on that “base”. Firstly, I don’t think that makes good philosophical sense; secondly, there’s nothing obligatory about that picture from taking the sciences seriously; thirdly, even if one is committed to a scientific metaphysics that embraces a very strong version of the unity of science, even then one should find the base/supervenience distinction unacceptable — as Ladyman and Ross convincingly argue in Every Thing Must Go. The gist of their reasoning is that the distinction between basic properties and supervening properties is a distinction that is “at home” in ordinary experience, and is not itself a scientific distinction.
(3) Unlike BruceS, perhaps, I am quite happy to allow Reppert this conception of what counts as “materialism”. Certainly there are philosophers and scientists who do accept this view. In particular, this is precisely the view that Alex Rosenberg adopts in The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: physical facts are facts about fermions and bosons, and the physical facts determine all the other facts that there are.
But the contrast between what “scientific metaphysics” in Rosenberg and in Ladyman and Ross is a profound difference. In Ladyman and Ross, fundamental physics is the most general constraint on all the other sciences, and there is no reduction of any science to physics or to any other science — hence the “rainforest realism” BruceS already mentioned. By contrast, Rosenberg thinks that fundamental physics is the most basic layer or level of reality, and everything is piled on top, like a layer cake. Ladyman and Ross do not have a layer-cake picture of how the sciences are related to each other.
(4) I would perhaps go a bit further than Ladyman and Ross in several respects.
Firstly, I would emphasize that, on their picture, there is no basic level to reality. No aspect of reality has ultimate or absolute primacy — no “matter”, not “mind”, etc.
Secondly, I would emphasize that how we describe and characterize real patterns depends on the different kinds of embodied stances that we take up with regard to them. (Basically, begin with Dennett’s stance/pattern distinction, then try and unify Kukla’s re-interpretation of “stances” with Ladyman and Ross’s re-interpretation of “patterns.” That’s one of the papers I’m working on now, or will be working on if I ever get off the Internet.)
Thirdly, I would stress that (contra Ladyman and Ross) there is likely to be much more disunity than unity in science. Ladyman and Ross make the case for the unity of science too easy on themselves by helping themselves to a mechanistic version of neo-Darwinism. If we locate the concept of teleology as autopoeisis at the center of our philosophy of biology — as I’ve been repeatedly urging here and elsewhere — the prospects for unifying the sciences, even according to Ladyman and Ross’s own criteria, look rather dim.
Yes, this. I think WilliamJM and many other people at UD are also like this.
Yet for all their pious “following the evidence where it leads” all that ever seems to happen is they write another book (at best).
First, let me address all the personal attacks and then we can move on from there.
ok. moving on …
There have been some questions raised about Reppert’s first essential feature of a broadly materialist view of the world.
Reppert on mechanistic base level:
At the level of “basic physics” what are the other available alternatives for an atheist?
Or to put it another way, if a person is a self-described atheist but does not accept that their worldview is materialist, how might their view of “basic physics” differ from that described here by Reppert?
For one thing we have events that lack “local” causation.
I think there are a variety of ‘new-agey’ ideas that invoke spirits and/or aliens along with teleology in nature that couldn’t be called theist but certainly wouldn’t be materialistic as defined by Reppert
I think Mung is correct that anyone who falls into the definition of materialist put forward by Reppert would be an atheist. Possible exceptions would be people who adhere to a wishy-washy Einsteinian/Joseph Campbelly definition of God: ‘God is the sum total of natural laws’ or ‘God is humanity’s perception of something outside of itself’ etc etc. Those people might not define themselves as atheists, though theists would define them as atheists.
Mung,
Is there any realm of action where you too would be a materialist as defined by Reppert? Is Whatever-it-is-that-you-believe-in-and-I-don’t continuously active to hold together the very fabric of its created world, or does ‘materialism’ reasonably describe anyone‘s view of the bulk of the physical world, other than its origin and human souls?
I look at that explanation of “mechanistic”. And I still don’t see how it applies.
The basic measuring system of physics is the mks system. Here m is the meter, k is the kilogram and s is the second. I’ll grant that the kilogram is a measure of matter. But the others are measures of space and time, which are immaterial abstractions. It’s hard to see where space and time come from, if they do not arise out of human meaning and purpose.
Neil Rickert,
Isn’t a kilogram a measure of *mass*? If so, then it isn’t measuring an intrinsic property of “matter” but rather measuring the relational property of how matter distorts space-time. (This might allow us to see how kilograms, meters, and seconds are all abstractions from underlying physical reality.)
Yes. But I didn’t want to get into that. Historically, mass was measured with a balance and was seen as a measure of matter. That’s no longer the view, but emphasizing time and space was enough to point out the important role of abstractions for the purposes of this thread.
Off the top of my head: panspychism and pantheism. Many people would describe those positions as atheistic in the sense of lacking a personal God.
Now a question for you: for a Christian, what in the above description of physics is unacceptable? Or more broadly, why couldn’t someone who was a theist in the personal God sense accept the above?
A possible attempt at an answer is that God created the universe for a purpose, To me, however, God’s purpose in creating the universe not seem to have much to do with purpose, normativity or subjectivity in the science of fundamental physics. So I would not see that as a counter to holding the position on physics you quote and still being a Christian.
To add one more point, any lack of purpose, subjectivity, normativity in physics says nothing about the reality of purpose in emergent phenomena, unless one is an extreme reductionist. But many atheists are not extreme reductionists.
Mung, you may want to take a look at this page:
Rational Buddhism: Confronting Materialism and the Fallacy of the Mechanistic Mind
I suspect you will find much there that you can agree with. At the same time, Buddhists (all 350 million of them) are atheists in the sense that they do not believe in the existence of an eternal, personal creator God.
fG
That link didn’t work for me, but I think this one does:
http://rational-buddhism.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/rational-buddhism.html
I fixed that link. I mistakenly first fixed it in your quote. Then I fixed it in the original. It was due to a bad quote char accidentally included in the url.
Sorry about that, thanks for fixing it!
Clarifying some additional matters.
Mentalistic v. Materialistic
I am not arguing that an atheist must necessarily be a materialist. I am asking what the distinctions might be in worldview between an atheist that is a materialist and an atheist who is not a materialist.
I’d say the distinction revolves on the nature of mind.
Interesting
So in your view atheism is really just a rejection of the idea that God is a personal being not of the existence of God as a whole.
I have always thought that sort of discussion always come down to the problem of other minds.
If a person holds to panspychism or pantheism and also believes that the universe is conscious or that intelligent agents like us are in a sense the consciousness of the universe do you think “many people” would describe that person to be an Atheist?
Peace
Well, for one thing, non-reductivist types may believe in the non-reducibility of thoughts and so-called secondary qualities to the physical arrangement of sub-atomic stuff. Some believe in the objectivity of such values as truth, beauty and goodness. So they often argue, just like theists who are Christian and theists who are not often argue.
There are more things to fight about in the world than are found in your philosophy, Horatio (if I may call you Horatio).
Stripped of its religious connotations, it reminds me of Fodor’s nativism. I disagree with Fodor.
I’m pretty sure that Fodor is an atheist, so I don’t think this separates atheism from theism.
Bruce, why do you think a panpsychist couldn’t believe in a personal God? (I’m currently thinking of Fechner.)
Afiak there are or have been theists who could be classed as materialists! It certainly would not surprise me. A deist perhaps? I’m certainly no source for the varieties of theism.
I think the most obvious things would be lack of purpose and absence of normativity. A Christian holds that God sustains the physical world in it’s existence at every moment and at all levels and in such a way that they are intelligible. To then insist that the most fundamental entities revealed by physics are exist without purpose and lack any norms whatsoever would seem to me to be deeply contradictory.
They could or could not. I was using the could not case as a counter-example to the assertion that if one was an atheist, one had to be a materialist (with the assumption that materialism implies nothing happens which is inconsistent with current physics, hence pansychism is not materialist).
Although I guess I misunderstood what Mung was looking for.
Sure I understand that theists are not materialists.
But why couldn’t a theist agree with everything in your quote of Reppert “on mechanistic base level” with the proviso that the physics itself exists to fulfill God’s purpose. Is that inconsistent with the Reppert quote? Even the “base level” of the first sentence could be understood as not including the fact God sustains the structure of physics itself (which in turn dictates the structure of the world).
I also don’t think theists need require every entity to be conscious or to act subject to norms of rationality or morality. Reppert allows for emergent versions of these.