Cosmic Materialism and Philosophy

In a debate a while back with an atheist, I attempted time and time again to explain the rationality of the cosmological argument and what, exactly, it argues to. The atheist, unfortunately, remained unconvinced. He rejected philosophy as a means at getting at truth, saying, “For me, natural explanations are all we can reliably say are true; everything else is philosophy, ethics or myth, none of which is without merit, but none of which is what I would consider truth.”

This man’s grouping of philosophy with myth is typical of modern thinking. We live in a time in which the intellectual life is severely limited by a mechanistic view of reality rather than the holistic view held by Aristotle and his Christian follower Thomas Aquinas. The mechanistic worldview rejects formal and final cause, and sees the entire universe and all of reality as nothing more than an aggregate of chunks of matter and their interactions with each other. For the mechanist, including my atheist friend, nothing is real that is not physical, and nothing is true which does not deal specifically and concretely with physical reality. In modern times, this view is called universal or cosmic materialism.

The advent of cosmic materialism is seen most clearly in the scientific “revolution” of the 17th century, but the seeds were planted in the late 13th and in the 14th centuries, with the nominalism and positivism which arose in the aftermath of the Condemnations of 1277. The skepticism about human knowledge applied to faith led to the question of what humans can know with certitude, and from there to a turning inward, a focus on the self as knower, and the great cartesian difficulty of linking the self to the external, sensible world. Descartes believed in a spirit-matter dualism, which Cardinal Schonborn, archbishop of Vienna, describes as “the habit of thought in which physical reality is conceived of according to the reductive claims of modern science (which is to say, positivism), combined in a mysterious way with a belief in the immaterial realities of the human and divine spirits as known only by faith (which is to say, fideism).”

The irrationality of this approach is easy to grasp, and it is rightly rejected by modern scientists who realize how silly it is to think of humans using Descartes’ “ghost in the machine” approach, in which the realms of the spiritual and physical are totally separate, yet somehow brought together, in an unnatural imposition, in each human being. However, these scientists, still firmly entrenched in mechanism, see the irrationality of the spirit-matter approach as just one more reason to reject the existence of anything other than the physical, natural realities. Their cosmic materialism rejects anything except the physical universe and the efficient causes by which it operates.

Cardinal Schonborn describes how philosophy is seen by these cosmic materialists: it is thought to be an “old-fashioned way of understanding reality which quickly faded into the intellectual shadows after the arrival of the new knowledge of Galileo and Newton. Philosophy continues, it is said, only as a meta-narrative for modern science and contains no positive knowledge of its own."

But philosophy, Schonborn says, is actually “the ‘science of common experience’ which provides our most fundamental and most certain grasp on reality.” In fact, science (or rather, natural science, which is what is meant today by the word “science”) depends absolutely on the truths of philsophy for its very possibility. Schonborn says, “. . . human reason is much more than just positivistic ‘scientific’ knowledge. Indeed, true science is impossible unless we first grasp the reality of natures and essences, the intelligible principles of the natural world. We can with much profit study nature using the tools and techniques of modern science. But let us never forget, as some modern scientists have forgotten, that the study of reality via reductive methods leads to incomplete knowledge. To grasp reality as it is, we must return to our pre-scientific and post-scientific knowledge, the tacit knowledge that pervades science, the knowledge that, when critically examined and refined, we call philosophy.”

Schonborn is pointing out the limitations of the purely reductive and mechanistic cosmic materialism. This limitation is seen most critically in the rejection of final cause. Final cause — which can be understood as the goal or end of a process or thing — is fundamental to the very intelligibility of the universe on which science depends. Unfortunately, the cosmic materialists would have us believe that all processes are ultimately the result of chance — not ordered toward an end, but utterly pointless. In saying this, they are effectively cutting off their own feet. A lack of final cause means a lack of intelligibility. How can processes be understood except as moving to a completion or end?

Reason is not limited to merely efficient and material causes, or to the realm of natural science. Reason applies validly to the subject of metaphysics, an understanding of the nature of reality. Without this understanding, how can one who studies the natural world truly understand it? It is like trying to glean meaning from a single sentence in the middle of a paragraph while ignoring the rest of the paragraph, including the all-important thesis sentence.

Modern thinkers need to return to a holistic, synthetic worldview, specifically the worldview of Thomas Aquinas, which integrates the efficient and material causes which so fascinate cosmic materialists into, as Cardinal Schonborn says, an “understanding of reality based on all the faculties of reason and all the causes evident in nature — including the 'vertical' causation of formality and finality.”

Cardinal Schonborn quotes taken from his article in First Things: "The Designs of Science."