Philosophical Materialism

Materialism is the notion that the material universe is all that exists. This is denied by nearly every philosophical and religious framework in history. Now, it is certainly possible to be a “practical materialist” while working in the sciences – that is, to design experiments as though only the material universe is there (after all, that’s all you can reliably test and measure), but philosophical materialism goes beyond this and asserts the actual nonexistence of anything beyond the stuff of normal scientific inquiry.

TL;DR

The essay begins by asserting (with many examples) that materialism is not necessary for scientific progress, specifically discussing a couple of incidents that are often used to assert (incorrectly) that the Christian Church has always been inimical to Science. We then go on to consider the contrary position (namely, that materialism is necessary for scientific progress) as held by two “celebrity materialism advocates” – Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye. We conclude with a look at one of the unfortunate aspects of this position – namely, that problems with the “Darwinian consensus” in biology go largely unexamined. Note that none of my examples here are “intelligent design” or creationism advocates – this is a situation in which mainstream researchers can’t (or believe they can’t) do certain kinds of research because they will be thought to be in one of those camps, which would be career suicide.

Is Materialism necessary for Scientific Progress?

Of course not: the rise of Science was concomitant with the dominance of Christianity in the West. Furthermore, most of the great early scientific innovators were (and many current ones are) actually orthodox Christians. Here is a partial list (chronological order by death date):

Note that this list does not include many others (like Laplace and Planck, for example) who were deists (not materialists), and still others (like, say, Newton and Freeman Dyson) who were unorthodox Christians (but certainly not materialists either).

These examples notwithstanding, narratives have been advanced that the Christian Church has long (and even always) been inimical to Science. These usually involve discussions of Catholic opposition to heliocentrism in conjunction with Giordano Bruno and Galileo in the early 17th century. These narratives are generally incorrect in various ways: Giordano Bruno was not himself a scientist, but rather a truly heretical theologian (who also happened to hold heliocentric beliefs) – notably, heliocentrism is not among the charges laid against him by the Inquisition (to be clear, he was executed horrifically for his beliefs, which I deplore, but just not for heliocentrism). Galileo, on the other hand, seems to have principally gotten himself into some political trouble unwittingly, and his heliocentrism was used as a “heresy” by his enemies to attack him. Occasionally, the Galileo narrative seems to imply that he was executed for heresy (possibly conflating his story with Bruno’s) – this is incorrect, as he was simply found to be “vehemently suspect of heresy” and placed under house arrest, where he continued to work for approximately another decade until he died at 77 (arguably his greatest work, Two New Sciences, was written during this period, though it was published in Holland to avoid Catholic censorship).

It’s also worth noting that, at most, the religious opposition to heliocentrism was limited to the Roman Catholic Church and this particular point in time. Earlier, Kepler (in a largely Protestant area) was much more staunchly heliocentric, and had no problems at all (he did have some difficulty in publishing his main Copernican astronomical work while the first part of the Galileo controversy was going on in 1616; he then reworked the book, changing the intended audience from amateurs to experts, and had no further difficulties). Indeed, at the time of Galileo’s trial in 1633, Kepler’s 1621 Epitome of Copernican Astronomy seems to have been the most widely used astronomy text in Europe.

At any rate, the belief that the material world is not all that exists is truly no obstruction to scientific progress.

And yet: the 21st century has seen the rise of several of what I call “celebrity materialist activists.” These are people who, for some reason, not only believe in materialism themselves, but insist that anyone who is not a materialist is obstructing scientific progress. I will discuss two of the most (currently) prominent of these.

Celebrity Materialist Activism – Tyson

Neil deGrasse Tyson is an astrophysicist turned scientific popularizer turned materialism advocate. He received his Ph.D. in 1991 from Columbia and did a postdoc at Princeton, holding an overlapping appointment as staff scientist at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, of which he became director in 1995 (at first acting director, then permanent director the next year) when his Princeton postdoc finished. As near as I can tell, he published one research paper (a 2007 paper published in 2012) after his postdoc. My assessment is that he was a pretty solid astrophysicist who traded in that career for an equally useful career as a scientific popularizer at Hayden. In recent years, though, he seems to be intent on spending the (considerable) goodwill he accumulated in those endeavors in the service of materialism and the denigration of non-atheistic scientists (though, oddly, he describes himself as agnostic, not atheist).

One of his most recognizable efforts is as the host of the rebooted 2014 Cosmos series on Fox and National Geographic. The original in 1980 was hosted by Carl Sagan (also a materialist). However, it didn’t go out of its way to denigrate non-materialists or to insist that religion had been a uniformly malign force in the history of science. The reboot, with Tyson at the controls (and with atheist activists Seth McFarlane and Brannon Braga as executive producers), did both.

Episode 1 contains a dramatization of “scientist” Giordano Bruno being killed for his belief in heliocentrism, and it doesn’t get much better after that (episode 2 describes evolution as “unguided” and “mindless;” I’m pretty sure that’s an assumption without evidence). There’s a fair amount of the same sort of “awe and wonder” that were present in the Sagan series, and better graphics, but the materialism is a lot more heavy-handed.

In an interview with Bill Moyers promoting Cosmos, Tyson described God as “an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance”** and said that “faith and reason are not reconcilable.” It’s hard to imagine good-faith engagement with theistic scientists coming from those biases.

I recommend William Lane Craig’s discussion of the new Cosmos here. Craig is a Christian philosopher, but I think he’s pretty balanced in his response to Tyson. For a more acerbic response, see Charles C. W. Cooke here.

But Tyson has done more campaigning against “non-materialism” than just Cosmos. On the Hayden Planetarium website (the article seems to have succumbed to link-rot: here is a Wayback Machine link) he argued that devout scientists of the past had their work harmed by a “god of the gaps” invocation of God whenever they came up against something they couldn’t understand. I’ll give one specific example: discussing Newton (not a particularly orthodox Christian, but definitely not a materialist either) he says:

Newton feared that all this pulling would render the orbits in the solar system unstable. His equations indicated that the planets should long ago have either fallen into the Sun or flown the coop—leaving the Sun, in either case, devoid of planets. Yet the solar system, as well as the larger cosmos, appeared to be the very model of order and durability. So Newton, in his greatest work, the Principia, concludes that God must occasionally step in and make things right:

“The six primary Planets are revolv’d about the Sun, in circles concentric with the Sun, and with motions directed towards the same parts, and almost in the same plane. . . . But it is not to be conceived that mere mechanical causes could give birth to so many regular motions. . . . This most beautiful System of the Sun,
Planets, and Comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.”

In the Principia, Newton distinguishes between hypotheses and experimental philosophy, and declares, Hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, whether of occult qualities or mechanical, have no place in experimental philosophy. What he wants is data, inferr’d from the phænomena. But in the absence of data, at the border between what he could explain and what he could only honor—the causes he could identify and those he could not—Newton rapturously invokes God:

“Eternal and Infinite, Omnipotent and Omniscient; . . . he governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done. . . . We know him only by his most wise and excellent contrivances of things, and final causes; we admire him for his perfections; but we reverence and adore him on account of his dominion.“

But here, Tyson has completely misunderstood Newton in at least four ways:

Newton is deliberately being poetic here (he certainly knew that the orbits are much closer to being ellipses – he proved that himself in De motu corporum in gyrum four years before Principia was published); this is not part of his actual argument in Principia.
He is NOT saying that everything would fly apart if God didn’t “step in and make things right” every now and then – rather, he is remarking on the beautiful order that one sees in the solar system, that it is designed from the outset so that it does not need intervention (and, yes, I am aware that others as well have attributed this belief to Newton, but I just don’t see that anywhere in his writings).
His equations don’t indicate that the planets “should long ago have either fallen into the Sun or flown the coop,” but rather that he personally couldn’t use them to demonstrate long-term orbital stability.
He is in no way saying that God is “needed” because he personally can’t show long-term orbital stability – he had shown stability of the 2-body problem, but couldn’t do so for 3 or more bodies (for good reason – it’s not stable in general). He believed (for observational reasons) that the solar system was “stable enough” – that God’s “dominion” would provide sufficient stability for mankind, even though he couldn’t prove it. He certainly wasn’t counseling “giving up” on demonstrating stability, though!

Now, Tyson goes on to celebrate Laplace for “demonstrating” the stability of the solar system “for longer than Newton could predict” and specifically, for doing so without invoking God. But this has nothing to do with any notion of the “god of the gaps.” It would not have been philosophically out of place for Laplace to have invoked God in some fashion – he was a deist – but he was simply not prone to writing in the same poetic fashion that Newton was a century earlier. Neither Newton nor Laplace needed God in their actual argumentation. The fact that Newton invoked God in his poetic descriptions of the universe is not particularly relevant, except to show that Newton and Laplace wrote very differently from one other.

I would also point out that Newton was right to worry about overall stability, since he couldn’t prove it, and that Laplace was (in fact) wrong to believe that he had proven it (though his work in “getting close” was extremely important). It turns out that the solar system is, in fact, chaotic, though it is stable over any time scale that we should be personally concerned about.***

Tyson just seems to be unable to grasp that Christian (or theist or deist) scientists have never given up with “oh, well, I guess it’s God’s will” when dealing with a difficult scientific problem. Maybe he believes that, for him, it’s only his materialism that kept him going when his research was difficult, but that’s simply not true for everyone.

Also of interest is that Tyson says rather the opposite thing about Newton in Cosmos, episode 3:

Everyone looked at the perfection of the clockwork motions of the planets in the sky and could only understand it as the work of a master clock maker. How else to explain it? There was only one way such a thing could come about in their imagination; only one answer for them: God… Along came Newton… Newton’s laws of gravity and motion revealed how the Sun held distant worlds captive. His laws swept away the need for a master clock maker to explain the precision and beauty of the solar system.

I’m not quite sure how Newton, in the same work, “swept away the need for a master clock maker” and “invoked God” when his explanation failed, but there you have Tyson’s eccentric view of Newton.

Elsewhere, Tyson has said, “Every account of a higher power that I’ve seen described, of all religions that I’ve seen, include many statements with regard to the benevolence of that power. When I look at the universe and all the ways the universe wants to kill us, I find it hard to reconcile that with statements of beneficence.” But this is his materialist perspective speaking, not science – a Christian (or theist or even deist) scientist looks at those same facts and says: yes, the universe is a vast, forbidding, inhospitable place; but it’s also made of matter (which is only possible because of the exquisite balance of nuclear forces and electromagnetism) which makes us possible, it also possesses an easily perceptible “arrow of time” (apparently because of the entropic winding-down of the structure of the Big Bang) that makes the universe intelligible, it is incredibly beautiful in a huge variety of ways and transparent enough to a broad swath of electromagnetic radiation that we can view much of it from the safety of home. And speaking of home, there is our “Goldilocks planet,” with its narrow temperature range (mostly encompassing the liquid phase of water) resulting from the combination of axial rotation speed, distance from the sun, and atmospheric/oceanic temperature regulation system, as well as its axial tilt and orbital revolution speed that allow for seasonal shifts well-suited for plant growth (both natural and agricultural), etc. We see the universe and, instead of being frightened or angry that it “wants to kill us,” are amazed at the astonishing fact that we are here at all, with a place to live and flourish and enjoy the beauty of those inhospitable reaches of space. Tyson is very good at communicating the awe and wonder of the universe, but he is truly hindered by having no one to thank for it.

An interested reader who wishes to actually learn about the fruitful interaction between faith and science would be much better advised to read the works of John Polkinghorne, who was professor of mathematical physics at Cambridge, until he resigned to study for the Anglican priesthood, eventually serving for five years as the Vicar of Blean, and then moving back into academia as a theologian (and, sadly, passed away a year or so ago). As with all recommended writers, there are certainly areas of disagreement between me and Dr. Polkinghorne, but he was well-informed, took both science and faith seriously, and treated intellectual opponents with respect. Dr. Tyson (outside of his solid grasp of astrophysics proper), does none of those things, I’m afraid.

Celebrity Materialist Activism – Nye

My second example is much more inexplicable – I can at least imagine how Tyson could have been led by his personal experience to believe that his materialism was a sine qua non for his own research, and then generalized to everyone else. Example two, on the other hand, has never been a scientific researcher – he just played one on TV.

Bill Nye received a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell in 1977, then worked for Boeing as an engineer for a decade or so, while also working as a stand-up comedian. He left Boeing in 1986 to concentrate on comedy, much of which had some aspect of science education or explanation involved. In 1993, he developed a pilot for Bill Nye, the Science Guy, a comedic science education show for children. It was a huge success, being underwritten by the NSF and US Department of Energy, distributed by Disney, and winning 19 Emmy Awards over its 6 seasons of production. My kids loved it, and I was delighted to have them watch it – I have recommended it often to parents of both science-interested and science-uninterested children.

After the end of the production of Science Guy, Nye became involved in a few miscellaneous media appearances – The Eyes of Nye (an attempted 2005 “Science Guy for adults”), a short 2013 run on Dancing with the Stars, guest appearances on lots of television shows, etc. He served as a “celebrity professor” at his alma mater, Cornell, for a few years and helped with design of a sundial for the Mars Rover. During this time, he also ramped up his advocacy for a litany of “ruling class narrative” positions on scientific issues (mostly climate change), including a profanity-laced diatribe on John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight in which he described the world as “on <expletive> fire” (apparently unaware that the overwhelming majority of the recent increase in temperature has been warming of low temperatures, not an increase of high temperatures).

And then came Bill Nye Saves The World – a 2017 Netflix show in which Nye apparently decided to burn away all his residual fans from Science Guy who hadn’t already succumbed to materialism, “scientism,” and leftism. Saves the World was largely panned by anyone who wasn’t already a materialism true-believer beforehand, and featured gratuitous insults toward Christians (or indeed anyone who held to a vaguely traditional view of sexuality), videos (I’m not going to link to it) about the “voice” of our genitals (featuring a young woman named Rachel Bloom, who apparently is well-known to those who know her well, which group does not include me, however), an episode all about the “sexual spectrum” (but see here for a rebuttal of that notion from a couple of actual biologists), etc.

Even mostly–positive reviews of Saves the World (which, amusingly, uniformly describe Nye as a “scientist,” apparently unaware of his actual curriculum vitae) concede that a lot of it was poorly executed, mean-spirited, condescending, assuming that the audience is already on the bandwagon, etc. These reviewers only reached their positive conclusions because of their belief that he was right on all the issues, and therefore was (at least somewhat) justified in his rather vicious (though ineffective, they admitted) approach. Other reviews were, um, less positive, even from reviewers who appear to agree with him on the issues.

So, what happened to Mr. Nye between the end of his fun, avuncular Science Guy program and his angry, vicious, condescending program, Saves the World? After all, as near as I can tell, he has always been a materialist personally (the videos described in the third section of this article and his writings described here were made before Saves the World) – why was he able to keep his materialism more or less to himself during Science Guy, but felt the need to make it the essential centerpiece of Saves the World? It wasn’t that anything changed about science, and it wasn’t that he had new personal experience with science (he wasn’t doing scientific research at this point either). I can’t know for sure, but I suspect that the answer is politics, since that was largely his milieu in those intervening years. As “scientism” became more and more entwined with the “ruling class” narrative (especially on climate change), he became more and more convinced that materialism is necessary for scientific progress (much like the beliefs of his friend Neil Tyson).

Results: Darwinism problems suppressed

This insistence on materialism is important (and harmful) in a couple of different ways:

The people pushing this assertion are important communicators of science to children and teenagers, who may well believe them.
The broader culture of science is impacted through ostracism and denial of funding for non-materialists.

One might think that the second point couldn’t happen for science researchers; after all, as I said at the outset, many non-materialist scientists are nevertheless “practical materialists” in their experimental design. A personal belief system that is non-materialist might not be detectable in the research of many scientists (certainly I doubt that you could tell from my mathematics research that I’m a Christian†).

One place where this is not true, though, is in biology, where a pervasive materialist culture requires wholehearted approval of all aspects of Darwinian evolution. Evolution is required to be the origin of life and the origin of species, and even acknowledging that there are scientific difficulties with our current understanding of it is met with suspicion of alliance with the hated “intelligent design” movement (or, worse, the thoroughly-despised “creationists”).

Now, it is fairly obvious even to this amateur observer that there are serious scientific difficulties with the “evolution über alles” approach currently taken:

consider the number of changes in chromosome-number that occur with nearly all putative lines of descent, and consider further how rare it is that a meiotic failure like haploidy or polyploidy produces viable, fertile offspring, and how unprecedented it is that it also simultaneously confers some advantage, and then (stunningly) suitable mates are found nearby in order to pass the new chromosome-number on to the next generation;
consider also the difficulties associated with the evolution of sexual reproduction – for the first organism to develop this feature, all the disadvantages are there, but none of the advantages, since there are no genetically-dissimilar mates available nearby.

And this is just with regard to the “origin of species” – evolution as “origin of life” has weak points nearly everywhere you look (to be fair, that’s not unexpected – “origin of species” evolution occurs at a time-scale that is amenable to current observation, whereas “origin of life” evolution does not).

In fact, regarding evolution as the only available explanation for all of biology seems to me (as a mathematician) to instantiate a remarkable lack of understanding of the “local vs. global optimization” problem. It requires a huge amount of faith in the efficacy of small, mostly deleterious random changes over an enormous amount of time to believe that it’s the only source for the beauty and variability of life on Earth.

Note carefully that I’m not suggesting that we stop looking into these things – on the contrary, I am advocating looking into them more carefully! Consider this article, describing estimates that one-third of professional academic biologists (who are not intelligent design advocates) agree that Darwin’s theory is inadequate to describe the known complexity in biology. Suggestions have been made (again, from non-creationist, non-intelligent design sources) here, here and here, that the field must abandon its commitment to “all Darwin, all the time” if progress is to be made. The problem, however, is that young scientists in the field can’t pursue any of this for fear of being tarred as some sort of creationist nut-case. Young scientists who are non-materialist in some way (say, Christian or even just deist) are especially suspect, so much so that the “Third Way” group linked above is invitation-only and specifically excludes religious believers.

In this case, not only is materialism not necessary for scientific progress, the commitment to materialism is hindering scientific progress! This is “scientism” not science.

* I’m not giving detailed bios of these folks (Wikipedia is good enough on most of them), but I would be remiss if I did not mention that Johannes Kepler was THE MAN. I cannot recount his intellectual achievements without being amazed by them – just one will have to suffice here. He formulated what are now called “Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion”:

the planets orbit the sun in elliptical orbits with the sun at one focus
the velocity of the planets is so as to sweep out equal area (from the sun) in equal time
the square of the period of revolution of a planet is roughly proportional to the cube of the length of the major axis of its orbit

Obviously, all these need adjustment in a relativistic regime, but they’re all remarkably close to correct. I used to give a lecture to third-semester calculus students in which I derived all of these from basic Newtonian mechanics and vector calculus in 50 minutes. It’s a pretty fun lecture to give (and, one hopes, to receive) but here’s the spectacular fact: Kepler didn’t have Newtonian mechanics (Newton was born 12 years after Kepler’s death) and he didn’t have ANY sort of calculus, much less vector calculus (due principally to Gibbs and Heaviside near the end of the 19th century). All Kepler had to work with were his teacher Tycho Brahe’s extensive (and remarkably accurate) tables of astronomical observations, which were (obviously) taken from the perspective of one of those non-constant-speed elliptically-moving planets! Admittedly, he was refining an earlier theoretical framework of Copernicus, but I still find it mind-boggling to think of deducing these laws from numerical tables of astronomical observations, by hand, with none of the mathematical tools we have available today (recall that they had only been using a positional number system for a few centuries at this point).

Certainly Kepler’s view that his job was to “think the thoughts of God after Him” (which phrase may be due to Kepler) doesn’t seem to have harmed his ability to think deeply and originally about difficult problems!

** To be fair, he does admit that this “God of the gaps” viewpoint is not the only possible view of God.

*** Lest you think that I am being unduly hard on Laplace and too easy on Newton for theological reasons, I will mention that I am a proud mathematical descendant of Laplace (he was my great-great-great-great-great-great-grandteacher; this fact doesn’t really impair my anonymity, since there are around 128,000 of us worldwide).

As an irrelevant aside: Newton (a century before Laplace) only has 22,000 mathematical descendants, nearly all of whom arise from one single 19th-century great-great-great-great-great-great-grandstudent, William Hopkins of Cambridge. Hopkins, the son of a farmer, was famous not so much for his own work, but for the fact that his students tended to be spectacular: his math genealogy lists 7 students, 4 of whom were Arthur Cayley, James Clerk Maxwell, Stokes and Lord Kelvin (not a bad magisterial yield!). Yet another was Edward Routh, who was also more well known for his students’ work than his own: his mathematical descendants include Bohr, Bose, Chandrasekhar, Eddington, Hardy, Hawking, Hodge, Quine, Ramanujan, Rayleigh, Russell, Rutherford, Whitehead, and Wittgenstein among around 17,000 others.

I realize that likely no one but other mathematicians are interested in observations like this (and they may already know them), but it is offered in the spirit of giving a bit of insight into the mathematical mind. I’m aware of no other discipline that has the intellectual family tree and collaboration graph organized and available the way math does. To be fair, I’m also aware of no other discipline that is borderline-obsessed (see here for explanation) with this information the way math is.

† Apparently, though, you could tell from my math teaching. I had a number of students over the course of my career ask me about my Christian beliefs during office hours. When I inquired of them why they suspected that I was a Christian, they uniformly said, “Because you don’t swear in class.” I thought that was just professional behavior, but apparently not!