Scientific materialism – the windowless room

Scientific Materialism – the windowless room by Peter Corney
Since the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution we live in a culture that has made enormous progress in our understanding of the physical world which has been of enormous benefit to us – just think of the field of microbiology and the treatment of common diseases.
But accompanying this success has grown the popular doctrine of ‘Scientific materialism’ which believes that reality is limited to the physical and material world alone, that there is no ‘metaphysic’ – nothing bigger than or beyond the physical. This belief, which incidentally is not held by most serious scientists, has cut us off from the transcendent and the larger, more subtle and spiritual aspects of reality. This reductionist belief provides no answers to our deepest and most persistent questions of meaning, purpose, and values. It has no answers to our questions about how we determine what is good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust, and how we determine accountability for our actions. This doctrine is like a brilliantly lit room in which we can research and discover wonderful things about our physical world except that it has no windows on to the larger realities and its door is tightly locked and bolted and permits no access to our most pressing existential questions.
One of the latest exciting scientific frontiers is in neurobiology as we uncover more of the mystery of how our brain works. But once again the reductionist temptation is with us. We think that once we have tracked the physical cause and effect pattern we can explain everything about human behaviour, emotions, beliefs, and consciousness. But humans are not just biological machines, they are more than material objects, they are persons who persist in asking questions about meaning and values, who express opinions and appreciations about beauty and art, who create music and poetry to express joy and sorrow and hope and love, who understand values and make moral judgements.
Music illustrates the above points well. It can be described quite accurately at one level as fluctuating air pressure made by an instrument and processed by the human ear, but if that’s all we say it’s a reductionist explanation, which from a human perspective of appreciation and emotion, is completely inadequate. You could say the same thing about gunfire! Why is it that when that fluctuating air pressure is produced in a particular pattern that we call ‘a melody’ it produces in us delight or pathos, deep feelings of sorrow or joy and so on?
As English philosopher Roger Scruton points out the ‘Why question’ can be asked and applied in many different ways: There is the ‘why’ of science that looks for causes; there is the ‘why’ of reason that looks for arguments; and there is the ‘why’ of understanding that looks for meanings.
Peter Corney 2017