Neil McKenzie on the restoration of the spiritual dimension
These days anything spiritual is dismissed as purely subjective, mythical and just the product of our imagination.
It is supposed that the universe – including human beings – is purely material. Materialism now reigns in the Western mindset.
However, the great majority of philosophers from Plato to Nietzsche have expounded a basically spiritual view of the universe – idealism (the view that mind or the spirit is the only ultimate reality). Keith Ward (former Professor of the History and Philosophy of Religion in the University of London, and Regius Professor of Divinity in the University of Oxford) in his book The God Conclusion (2009), argues that Plato, Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel and many others shared this view. Even Hume, who opposed religious belief and denied the existence of ultimate mind, did not suppose that matter could be ultimately real. Up until the 1960s materialism was a philosophical joke.
Western worldview
Materialism is the view which now controls the Western worldview. Ward writes: ‘It pricks the bubble of our spiritual illusions, and reveals that we are in fact computational, inefficiently designed and largely malfunctioning physical entities without any larger purpose or meaning within the blind, pointless, freak accidents of a wholly physical universe’. This is the view impressed upon the public at large by popularisers of science such as Professor Richard Dawkins. However, the most recent physical science undermines materialism, though this has not yet filtered down to the public awareness.
This assertion is based on modern physics. What we commonly regard as solid matter is in fact just force fields and wave-functions in curved multi-dimensional space-time. The dogmatism of materialism is crumbling. It faces some very grave problems, largely raised by quantum physics. The profound difficulty for materialism is that it is increasingly hard to say what ‘matter’ is. After Einstein formulated his famous E = mc2 and then quantum physics came along in the mid-1920s, matter was treated as just a form of energy. The sub-atomic particles of which our bodies are made became probability waves which collapsed into particles under specific conditions of observation. Even then, Heisenberg showed that it is impossible to know exactly where they are, and all we can say is that they are probably in a certain location.
Turning from the unimaginably tiny microcosm to the unimaginably huge scale of the universe, modern quantum cosmology similarly undermines belief in materialism. Virtual (unreal) particles of indefinitely many different sorts flash in and out of existence from a vacuum state in accordance with quantum laws. What we thought was a universe of four dimensions of time and space has in fact ten or eleven dimensions which fluctuate in and out of existence from a more primal ‘quantum foam’.
Imaginary time
Notable physicists like Chris Isham and Stephen Hawking tend to say that ‘imaginary time’ is more real than ‘real time’. Modern science has left materialism far behind. The ultimate reality is beyond space-time as we know it, having a deep and complex mathematical structure and is nothing like the world that we sense around us. Professor John Polkinghorne, the mathematical physicist, as a critical realist is convinced that there is an actual physical reality modelled accurately, if not exhaustively, by our mathematics. So impressed is Polkinghorne with the beautiful equations which describe the universe that he became a clergyman in the Church of England. The vague, the unimaginable, the incredible, the seemingly incomprehensible are now intellectually respectable amongst those at the cutting edge.
Matter and mind?
The fact is that quantum physics has moved so far beyond classical materialism that it is no longer clear that ‘matter’ is different from ‘mind’. It could be that matter is just one form the objects of consciousness take. This restores the position of the mainstream philosophers up to the middle of the 1960s, that a transcendent Mind was the source of reality. This hypothesis raises the hackles of those who oppose it, for they rage at the apparent injustice and seeming indifference of this Mind to suffering. Better to have a materialistic, blind, meaningless, purposeless universe than one shaped and controlled by a mind supposedly belonging to a benevolent God.
However, such protests do not admit the possibility of ultimate judgment and meaningful suffering. Why should there not be a final judgment where all humanity is held to account? Is all suffering pointless or harmful? Is it not true that suffering can test the genuineness of faith and strengthen it, produce perseverance, maturity, strong character? What are we to make of the claims by many who have endured suffering that it has given them empathy so they can understand and comfort others? Is it not possible that the self-sacrificial suffering of one individual can save many? On what basis can we dismiss the biblical writers who claim that the suffering Christ brings forgiveness of sins through faith in him?
Deprived of purpose
It is certainly true that many modern philosophers cling to materialism, but confidence that this is the best explanation to fit the facts of experience is waning. The sort of simple-minded materialism which one finds in the public arena that insists that everything that exists must be definitely somewhere, or that it must exist at some time (just because we see it somewhere at some time), is just woefully ignorant of modern physics. Our perceived world is more sensory-induced illusion than reality. Professor Ward writes: ‘There are supra-spatial and supra-temporal realities, realities beyond any and all spaces and times, and mathematical physics talks about them with an immense degree of sophistication and precision.’
Materialism robs us of objective purpose in life, and reduces it to seeking pleasure and egocentric goals of our own choosing. Therefore we have to be very sure of the materialistic disproof of purpose if we are to dismiss the sense of greater purpose that many people feel. Is all sense of ‘calling’ purely illusory? In the same vein, are we justified in setting aside as delusions the thoughts of some of the greatest philosophers and the experiences of thousands of the greatest morally heroic mystics and religious teachers? There is no objective way of deciding whether their beliefs are mistaken or not. Therefore some of the most enriching, intense, reflective and creative teachings and inspiring lifestyles in human history will have to be discounted because of some rather abstract and disputed theory that material things, and nothing but material things, exist.
Anthropic principle
The intelligibility of the universe to human minds indicates its commitment to rationality, to mind. The Anthropic Principle – the fine-tuning of many fundamental constants controlling the equations which produce the conditions essential to human life – poses important questions about its design by a benevolent Mind. Whatever matter is, there is absolutely no reason why it should have a rational structure, or why human minds should be capable of understanding that structure. If the universe, and subsequent life on Earth, are simply the outcomes of random accidents, how do we explain this rational structure? Where did the laws of physics come from? Even more fundamentally, for a materialist there is no possibility of a final explanation of the existence of the universe. With no Mind to conceive its existence, there is no possible explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Einstein went further: ‘Those individuals to whom we owe the great creative achievements of science were, all of them, imbued with the truly religious conviction that the universe is something perfect and susceptible to the rational striving for knowledge’ (Christian Register, June 1948).
Drive towards consciousness
So where does this take us? The universe seems to have an in-built drive towards consciousness – thoughts, feelings, sensations, images, intentions. Where does this drive come from? It is almost wholly inexplicable in purely physical terms. How do we account for the seeming ability of energy to produce an appreciation of beauty, of music and the whole aesthetic phenomenon? More than this, the universe has allegedly produced morality. Is this fully explained by evolutionary psychology? To argue that morality is simply achievable compromises between conflicting human desires - pure pragmatism – fails to account for the admiration of self-sacrificial action for the sake of doing what we consider right, just and good.
Professor Ward concludes: ‘I think the God conclusion stands firm, and that it is the best intellectual defence of the intelligibility of the Cosmos, of the objective importance of our moral ideals, of an affirmation of the goodness, the joy and the beauty of life, and of the authenticity of those intimations of transcendence that provide some of the most sublime and transforma-tive human experiences.’ I agree.
