The Only Sacred Ground. Gregory N. Derry
subjects for discourse. We need to explore this relationship between science and materialism more deeply, but first we must clear up several points of nomenclature.
There is no consistency among different writers in their usage of the terms materialism, naturalism, and physicalism. Though sometimes distinguished by fine definitional differences, these terms are often used interchangeably in the literature. Since it appears to me that the use of any of these terms would satisfy the three basic assumptions just listed, my custom will be to use materialism as a broad concept that includes the basic meanings of the other two terms.
Some writers, however, restrict materialism to include only reductionist explanations of phenomena. There is no legitimate reason that I can see for this restriction. Whatever the merits or failures of reductionism as a philosophical doctrine, it is independent of our choice concerning a materialistic metaphysics; holism and emergence are equally consistent with the assumptions of materialism as defined above (not to mention being important in certain areas of modern science). Likewise, materialism is often assumed to imply determinism, but this usage is merely a relic of nineteenth century scientific thought. A strictly deterministic interpretation of phenomena is belied by both non-linear dynamics and quantum theory. Obviously, I will make none of these restrictions in the meaning of materialism used here.
There is also sometimes confusion between positivism and materialism, because positivism demands the elimination of unobservable entities, which would include the immaterial entities disallowed also by materialism. The two positions are not identical, however. Perfectly materialistic concepts might well be rejected by positivism if they cannot be tied directly to some empirical consequence (e.g. Mach’s rejection of atoms). On the other hand, later versions of positivism (in order to avoid being criticized for making unjustified ontological claims) were carefully restricted to the logical analysis of language. Hence, later positivists would avoid making any explicit claims about a materialistic (or any other) basis for reality, the question being undecidable (and uninteresting) based on their philosophy. Positivism and materialism are indeed sympathetic to one another, but neither one actually implies the other.
This brings us face to face with our crucial question: how are science and materialism related to each other? That they are related is quite clear, similar in a sense to the assertion that positivism and materialism are related. “All scientists are formal materialists in so far as their philosophies can be deduced from their behavior.”36 In a broad sense, the mission of science is to study the properties of matter; if anything else has any claim to be real, then that lies outside the domain of science. But for this very reason, we can’t legitimately claim that science implies some warrant for a claim of materialism. “If we take materialism in its nontrivial meaning, as the philosophical doctrine that denies the existence of nonmaterial realities, neither empirical science nor epistemology has anything to say about this. The reason is precisely because empirical science concentrates on the study of the material world and it makes no sense to derive from it assertions about spiritual realities. To interpret this as the ‘ontology of science’ is also meaningless.”37 The logic here seems very persuasive: surely we can’t draw any conclusions from science about questions that are not within the purview of what science studies. This logic is correct, but oversimplified. Although the validity of materialism cannot be asserted based on any scientific findings, it is nevertheless true that science proceeds (methodologically) by implicitly presupposing that a materialistic worldview is correct. The illogic of making any materialist ontological claims based on this is beside the point; the relationship between materialism and science is deeply embedded in a thinking process, not a logical claim.
This relationship can be exploited by proponents of materialism who fully understand the logical issues. “Conceding that materialist philosophy as a whole is no more scientifically provable than its competitors, [Buechner] argues for its relatively greater plausibility on grounds of the greater conformity of its approach to reality with that of science.”38 Once this reasoning is accepted, the enormous success of science as an explanatory methodology and as a cultural influence may well incline many towards materialism, even those who nominally belong to some religious faith. Equally important, those of us who value science highly find ourselves, while doing science, in an ontologically comfortable materialist world even if we dispute the validity of materialism on other grounds. To repeat, we are not necessarily saved from this problem by the strictly logical compatibility of science as such with the philosophical rejection of materialism. I will argue that the solution to the problem lies elsewhere.
Materialism and Spirit
The type of materialism that we have been discussing so far does not attribute any properties to matter that are not discoverable by science. For this reason, I will call (in conformance with standard usage) this type of materialism “scientific materialism” and generally use the terms (with and without modifier) synonymously. However, it is possible to adopt a broader conception of the properties of matter that includes spiritual aspects, and this has been done by many thinkers from the ancient Greeks down to the present day. “In this conception spirit is chief among the internal properties of matter, and may accordingly be defined as the dominant inner quality of a material thing.”39 Such thinking avoids the problems of dualism while acknowledging the reality of a spiritual order by having the spiritual reality inherent in matter itself, as opposed to a lifeless and inert matter animated by a separate and immaterial spirit. Scientific materialism, of course, also avoids dualism by eliminating spirit altogether. The issues surrounding this view of matter as fundamentally imbued with mind and spirit, along with its relationship to science and to immaterial being, will be more carefully analyzed in due course. For now, I merely wish to maintain that in order to avoid terminological confusion such thinking ought not to be called materialism. In the present work, at any rate, “materialism” will always mean scientific materialism as we’ve defined it here. This scientific materialism is what I am calling the mundane view of nature.
This brings us to one last question: is an outlook of scientific materialism compatible with religion? If we restrict the scope of religion to ethical guidance or to personal meaning that we project onto the world, then the answer is clearly yes. This was essentially the position taken by the American naturalists. However, if we ascribe serious ontological reality to a transcendent ground of Being, for example, then our beliefs can no longer remain compatible with scientific materialism. These beliefs can certainly be compatible with science as such, but given the proposed linkage between materialism and science there is still a significant problem to resolve. A materialist worldview does not conflict with our feeling that nature is sacred, but rather with sacredness being a genuine attribute of nature itself.
4. The Sacred World
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