The following essay will appear as and Op-Ed in Science & Theology and is

reprinted here with permission from the author, B. Alan Wallace.

 

 

“Materialism of the Gaps”

 

B. Alan Wallace

 

Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies

 

 

 

Charles Darwin originally conceived evolution by natural selection as a theory, but since the twentieth century it has taken on the role of an ideology, which has an answer for every question about life, even before the question is presented. How did organic molecules become living organisms? Evolution did it! How did consciousness first arise in living organisms? Evolution! Why do humans have such greater intelligence than other primates, far more than is needed to survive and procreate? Evolution is the cause! Here is a modern version of Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover.

 

Just as theists may attribute the orderliness and majesty of the natural world to God, and Buddhists may explain such things in terms of karma, scientific materialists attribute everything to interactions of matter. With the advances of science in explaining natural phenomena, religious believers on the defense have tried to provide divine explanations for scientific mysteries, hence the phrase “God of the gaps.” But materialists have devised their substitute–“materialism of the gaps”–to patch up the holes in the edifice of scientific understanding, such as the origins of life and consciousness in the universe. Everything, they assure us, can eventually be explained in terms of functions and emergent properties of physical processes.

 

Why should we take the leap of faith that the objective world, independent of human percepts and concepts, conforms to our human notion of “physical”? Even if it does, to which theory of matter does reality conform? In terms of Newtonian physics, a material body may be defined as a fraction of space endowed with constitutive properties such as impenetrability and mass. But these criteria are challenged by quantum mechanics, which undermines the primitive concept of matter as a collection of inherently massive and spatially defined particulate bodies. The more closely we inspect the fundamental constituents of the physical world, the clearer it becomes that matter is not made out of matter, but oscillations of immaterial, abstract quantities in empty space. In other words, materialists fill the gaps in their knowledge with vacuous thoughts.

 

      Moreover, one implication of contemporary physics (specifically, the Wheeler-DeWitt equation) is that without reference to an observer, the universe as a whole does not change in time. If this is true, the notion of evolution is not applicable to the universe as a whole without an external observer with respect to the universe, and without an external clock that does not belong to the universe. While psychobiologists insist that the mind be explained in terms of biology, and biophysicists insist that living organisms be explained in terms of physics, mathematical physicists insist that the physical world be explained in terms of mathematics. But the domain of mathematics, like the domain of ideas in general, appears to be inseparable from the mind. So this succession brings us to a full circle!

 

Despite the great success of reductionism as a methodology, ontologically it has its limitations:

    •     Mathematical theories alone do not define, predict or explain the emergence of a physical universe.

    •     Physical theories alone do not define, predict or explain the emergence of life in the universe.

    •     Biological theories alone do not define, predict or explain the emergence of consciousness in living organisms.

 

The ideology of scientific materialism is firmly rooted in the closure principle, based on the principle of the conservation of energy, which implies that there are no nonphysical influences in the physical universe. But the actual nature of energy as it exists in the objective world remains a mystery, and there is no consensus as to what makes something “physical.” So belief in scientific materialism requires faith in postulates that are every bit as abstract as those commonly found in theology.

 

            Science has always evolved in close interaction with the religions and philosophies of its host cultures. The current ideology of evolution is entwined with the metaphysical beliefs of nineteenth-century reductionism, set within a universe that is causally closed to all nonphysical influences. But evolution may also be viewed within the twenty-first century context of a participatory universe revealed through intersubjective experience. The choice of perspectives is ours.