"Unweaving the Rainbow" specifically attacks the idea that a materialist, mechanist, naturalistic worldview makes life seem meaningless. Quite the contrary, the scientific worldview is a poetic worldview, it is almost a transcendental worldview. We are amazingly privileged to be born at all and to be granted a few decades -- before we die forever -- in which we can understand, appreciate and enjoy the universe.
Richard Dawkins, Salon
I'm an atheist, which is not that big a deal these days. There are somewhere between 7 and 35 million of us in the U.S. alone (depending on how you define the term), and many hundreds of millions more across the globe. We can even count some of the 400 million Buddhists as atheists, at least those that do not hold the Buddha to be divine. But I'm also a materialist. I believe in those things which can be shown to exist and I do not believe in things that cannot be shown to exist. It is this worldview, more than atheism, which many find troubling. Atheists can easily be dualists, embracing or at least accepting the possibility of any number of supernatural beliefs, but materialists are necessarily atheists in the strong sense.
I have found that religious people defend against materialism with basically two arguments. The first is that materialism is accepted on faith in exactly the same way as any religious belief. Therefore, they argue, although you may prefer materialism it is not a superior philosophy, just a different, equally arbitrary one. This is quite untrue. I hope to refute this argument in depth in a later posting, but for now it should suffice to observe that there is a difference between holding as true that for which there is evidence, and holding as true that for which there is no evidence. While the materialist endeavors only to do the first, the theist has to do both. This puts them on the sharp side of Occam's Razor.
The second argument is rarely an argument as such; it's more often a statement like "if you really believe that you're nothing more than matter, why don't you just kill yourself right now?" I have heard this strange but heartfelt sentiment many times. It appears that the religious feel that it is the non-material, or spiritual, component of their worldview that makes existence worthwhile. While it is a logical fallacy to argue that something must be true because it would be bad if it wasn't (in fact this is one of the canonical examples of argumentum ad consequentiam), it would be only fair to try to understand why. Why is it that contemplating a materialistic view of reality is tantamount to suicide for so many people?
Few are so unmoored that metaphysical introspection would make them turn into oncoming traffic in despair. Most of us have a rather visceral commitment to our own existence that we would not end lightly. Even in times of crises our family and friends, home and career, plans and ambitions, all compel us to keep moving forward. At times these may pale into trivial insignificance, and one may seek change and new adventures, but only for the very unbalanced do these life crises turn into questions about whether one should exist at all. So where does this existential tension arise?
In a classic case of projection, the theists accuse materialists of "reductionism," while in fact it is they who suffer from the strongest form of this fallacy. Theists and other adherents to the supernatural do not accept that a complex system can be more than the sum of its parts. They hold that unless the constituent elements of an aggregate innately posses a given property then the whole cannot either. Since atoms aren't alive, for example, and we're made of atoms, we must be merely non-living automatons. Since chemical reactions don't have feelings, and our brains run on chemical reactions, our brains can't have any more feelings than a pot of soup. Because rocks aren't conscious, human beings have to be made of exotic parts to posses consciousness.
Theists posit souls, which hold the consciousness and all other human qualities in pure non-material form as the solution to this non-existent dilemma. The New Agers are no better, turning instead to quantum physics to find mind and magic in the subatomic which they incorrectly and incoherently project to the human scale. Materialists, on the other hand, are content with the notion that interesting and worthwhile phenomena emerge out of simpler systems, and we seek the right level of explanation for each. We would no more look to our constituent elements to explain our humanity than we would try to explain mortgage interest rates by electron orbitals. We do try to reduce the complexity of theories as much as possible, and sometimes that can be done by looking for similar processes in simpler systems, but we only go as far as the observational details will allow. The reverse process, employed perhaps without thinking by the supernaturally-inclined, is entirely unjustified.
But let's face it, the real issue is death. Here materialism offers cold comfort indeed. It predicts not merely that the death of the body means the death of the mind, a permanent oblivion beyond the ability of anyone to really imagine, but the death of the civilization, the species, the planet, and the universe itself. Whether crushed to a white-hot singularity or spread as a cold gruel of particles robbed even of the energy to form the weakest of bonds, not just us but our family lines, our species, and all life everywhere is doomed to extinction. To be a materialist is to grasp that you and everything you cherish is finite.
But so what? Does existence have to be infinite to have meaning?
Religion says yes. Every religion in the world and all the popular non-religious supernatural beliefs promise eternal life in one form or another. Souls, spirits, heaven, reincarnation -- all are imaginative ways to die without actually dying. Even the dream of personal immortality through nanotechnology, popular with cyber-libertarians, fills this niche for those who are materialist in the money-grubbing sense, but who still don't want to face the reality of a finite life. People cling to these beliefs without a shred of evidence to support them, and even actively fight scientific truths that might contradict them. Religion does promise comfort, but is this small solace really worth the cost of polluting your beliefs with irrationality?
There is some evidence that religion makes people happier. Those with strong fundamentalist beliefs rate themselves as more grounded in their lives than those with weaker faith, and those who actively question their faith report the greatest unease. This suggests a trend, one which if projected linearly leads people to think that if they let go of all their supernatural beliefs they would fall into an abyss of hopelessness. But the trend is not linear. In fact atheists are just as happy as religious people, and strong materialists are as well grounded in their lives as the fundamentalists at the other end of the scale, if not more so. The unhappy people going through a crises of faith are at the bottom of a U-shaped curve from the very religious on one end to the very unreligious on the other. If they would just let go of their hope for an eternal afterlife and start working on a personal understanding of the world that takes everything we have learned from science into account, they would start on the road to genuine well-being.
Life is finite, but that makes it all the more precious. It is to be lived and enjoyed now. Right now. Go out and live it.
- jack*
You scored as Materialist.
Materialism stresses the essence of fundamental particles. Everything
that exists is purely physical matter and there is no special force
that holds life together. You believe that anything can be explained by
breaking it up into its pieces. i.e. the big picture can be understood
by its smaller elements.
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