Are We Really Living in a Materialist Age?
By Kit Wilson, originally published at the Hedgehog Review.
When we look back on history, we find in almost every culture some belief or other that commanded near-universal respect—that even acquired a kind of intellectual invulnerability—despite now seeming to us absurd. When future historians look back at our age, I think they will count reductive materialism among such beliefs.
Reductive materialism is the view that all of reality can be explained by, and ultimately reduced to, the purely physical. Whatever cannot be accounted for in this way—consciousness, morality, free will, feelings—must be illusory. As the biologist Francis Crick likes to point out, this includes even you: “‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”1
The basic rationale is well rehearsed: that physics, having been remarkably successful at toppling superstitions up to now, must naturally go on to conquer every last corner of reality. The problem with this argument—that it means eliminating not just angels and ghosts but also the very things on which scientific knowledge itself depends, such as reason, free will, and abstract thought—appears not to have occurred to the reductive materialists until too late.
For this reason, to call reductive materialism a “belief” is perhaps a bit misleading. Plenty of people—the biologist Richard Dawkins, the neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, and the physicist Lawrence Krauss among them—piously recite its creed: I do not exist, life is meaningless, morality is an illusion.2 But do any of them really believe it?
Certainly, they don’t act as though they do. Dawkins, for instance, claims that “there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference” in the universe, and then complains, in the next breath, that “faith is one of the world’s great evils” (although he has, admittedly, in recent years backed away from such hysterical rhetoric). Sapolsky tells us that we have no free will, but then implores us still to act morally. Crick seems unusually passionate about explaining a form of reductionism that views nerve cells as the fundamental origin of human experience and behavior.
There’s something of the high-school bully in the way they swagger around, seemingly getting away with whatever they like. So frequent and egregious are the contradictions they spout that the rest of us assume we must have just missed something. But we shouldn’t be cowed. The only way to reconcile “there is no evil” with “that thing is evil”—or “there is no free will” with “this is how you should act”—is to engage, as David Bentley Hart put it, in “pure magical thinking.”3
If that sounds harsh, take it from Alexander Rosenberg, a materialist philosopher with a penchant for bad news. In an article titled “Disenchanted Naturalism,” he writes:
Most scientists are reluctant to admit science’s answers to the persistent questions are obvious…. Science has to be nihilistic about ethics and morality. There is no room in a world where all the facts are fixed by physical facts for a set of free floating independently existing norms or values.4
No fluff here. In his book The Atheist’s Guide to Reality, he delivers more bad news:
What is the purpose of the universe?
There is none.
What is the meaning of life?
Ditto.
Why am I here?
Just dumb luck.
Does prayer work?
Of course not.
Is there a soul? Is it immortal?
Are you kidding?
Is there free will?
Not a chance!
What happens when we die?
Everything pretty much goes on as before, except us.
What is the difference between right and wrong, good and bad?
There is no moral difference between them.
Why should I be moral?
Because it makes you feel better than being immoral.
Is abortion, euthanasia, suicide, paying taxes, foreign aid, or anything else you don’t like forbidden, permissible, or sometimes obligatory?
Anything goes.5
Now, most materialists would not, I assume, take quite this line. They would maintain, without having thought about it too much, that there is a weaker version of materialism on offer, one that eliminates frippery like spirits and souls but still allows us a bit of wiggle room for things such as meaning and morality, even if, in some sense, we have to create them for ourselves. The great hope is that there exists, buried somewhere in the philosophical fine print, some technical loophole by which the nihilistic implications of materialism can be avoided. Rosenberg argues—and I agree—that this is wishful thinking. As we both see it, all weaker forms of materialism, if they were really followed through consistently, ought to end up more or less where his does.
And yet even Rosenberg cannot go all the way. He (by his own terms, a nonexistent nonperson) still evidently feels (whatever that means) that convincing us (nonexistent nonpeople) of what he (un-freely) considers to be the truth matters. He might be the most honest reductionist on Earth, but even he cannot quite take his own claims literally.
This is why the oft-repeated claim that we’re living in a materialist age strikes me as suspect. If we were to study some historic civilization that considered itself good, yet which delighted in torture, rape, and murder, we would hardly conclude that they were good just because they thought they were.
They will not see ours as a materialist culture. What they will see is something much messier: a culture torn in two directions at once, roughly between what the philosopher Wilfrid Sellars called the “manifest image” and the “scientific image.”6 These are undeniably ugly terms, but they are crucial for what comes later.
The manifest image describes the full-blown, rich world as we actually experience it: bursting with values, colors, morals, ordinary objects such tables and trees and coffee mugs, as well as hope, suffering, and joy. The scientific image describes the minimalist, Galilean world of quantities that we imagine supplies the underlying scaffold: microphysical particles, forces, mathematical laws, and not much else.
Sellars thought our inability to reconcile the two was one of the defining predicaments—if not the defining predicament—of our age. Our hypothetical future historians will surely agree. Indeed, I think they will observe that much of what we called the “culture wars” arose from our trying to do battle with a billion different, constantly morphing hybrids of scientific and manifest—each one incompatible with the next. To attempt to hold, consciously, that none of this is really real while still, of course, harboring the ineliminable sense that life is flush with meaning suggests all manner of incoherent, mangled belief systems—amalgams of doubt and zeal. The result is a bit like a game of Whac-a-Mole: No matter how many times you use the skeptical scientific mallet to hammer down our manifest beliefs, they just keep popping up elsewhere. None of this is really real, except my beliefs about gender. None of this is really real, except my racial identity. None of this is really real, except mankind’s unstoppable march toward justice.
Perhaps this sounds hyperbolic. But I genuinely think, my rudeness about materialism aside, someone like Rosenberg would agree with a lot of what I’ve said. He would certainly accept the Sellarsian distinction between scientific and manifest, and indeed consider our ability to separate the two to be one of mankind’s greatest achievements. He would accept, with some regret, that the manifest image is, for us humans, inescapable: “All of us” he says, “are victims of a vast range of illusions foisted upon us” (we’ll set aside for now the question of what a “victim” or “illusion” is).7 And I suspect he would agree that our inability to switch off our common-sense intuitions will lead us to adopt some odd, half-formed ideologies.
Where he would differ is in still maintaining that, even from within the illusion, we can distinguish rationally between science and common sense, and simply set the latter aside. Other materialists display a similar level of confidence. The biologist Lewis Wolpert writes, for instance: “[If] something fits in with common sense it almost certainly isn’t science…. [The] way in which the universe works is not the way in which common sense works: the two are not congruent.”8
But can science and common sense really be teased apart so easily?
This article was originally published at the Hedgehog Review and is partially reproduced here without the permission of the author, who is not affiliated with this website or its views.
- Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul (New York, NY: Touchstone, 1994), 3. [↩]
- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (London, England: Penguin, 2006); Robert Sapolsky, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (London, England: Penguin, 2024); Lawrence Krauss, A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing (New York, NY: Free Press, 2012). [↩]
- David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 17. [↩]
- Alex Rosenberg, “Disenchanted Naturalism,” Contemporary Philosophical Naturalism and Its Implications, eds. Bana Bashour and Hans Muller (New York, NY: Routledge, 2014), 18, 22. [↩]
- Alex Rosenberg, The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions (New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 2–3. [↩]
- Wilfrid Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” in Frontiers of Science and Philosophy, ed. Robert Colodny (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1962). [↩]
- Alex Rosenberg, interviewed by Ard Louis and David Malone in Why Are We Here?, Tern Television Productions; https://www.whyarewehere.tv/people/alex-rosenberg/. [↩]
- Lewis Wolpert, The Unnatural Nature of Science (London, England: Faber and Faber, 1992), 11. [↩]
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