A materialist creed?

It is common to think that materialism is antithetical to religious faith. But this needs to be thought about a little more deeply.

I think that we must affirm that the materialist view of humanity and the world is essentially correct ie there is no such realm as the paranormal or the immaterial, we and the world are composed of matter, period.

However, as soon as the material world has an observer, an aware, sentient being, then the description of the world as pure matter has to be modified. I am not suggesting that consciousness requires us to postulate a "ghost in the machine". This would contradict my previous statement that there is no such thing as the immaterial.

What I am saying is that there is no way we can bridge the gap between the material and our experience of being conscious. This does not mean that consciousness does not have a material basis; it is that there exists an unbridgeable gap between matter and consciousness.

For example a functional MRI image of activated areas in the brain is not an image of the consciousness that is present in that brain. Certainly neural networks produce consciousness but we have no way of knowing how this happens. Thus our only window into consciousness is our experience of it.

Furthermore, we may, with certainty, say that there will never be a time in which a thought process may be described in terms of nervous activity. Even if it were possible to describe each neural firing and excitatory or inhibitory activation of synapses this would still not amount to a description of an event in consciousness. What would be missing would be the self that experiences this event.

Thus although we may say that events in consciousness have their basis in neural firing and connectivity there is no way that a bridge between them may be found. It is because of this gap that we are forced to invent a different language when we attempt to describe an experience or a thought process. The words that are traditionally used are "spirit" or "psyche" or "soul". None of these words point to the existence of the immaterial, they denote human consciousness.

These words encompass the whole of human experience, of memory and life story that contributes to identity. They encompass hopefulness, dread, anxiety, joy and love. There will never be neural analogues to these conscious events even though an area may light up in the brain when we are anxious, for example. Indeed we can say that all of culture is reliant on neural processes but cannot be described by them.

The evolutionary psychologists have demonstrated that the brain is specialized to respond to certain stimuli. This has been referred to as the Swiss Army Knife model of the brain. Thus we have modules that identify human faces, those that acquire language, those that deal with exchanges, care of children, fear of snakes and spiders but not knives and guns.

The evolutionary process has produced modules that operate below consciousness and reduce the computational load of the higher centres. It may be that the operation of these modules will someday be open to analysis on the basis of neural connectivity and function. This would be a huge step forward but we would still be a long way to understanding conscious events in terms of neural processes.

I can hear the reader protesting that religion requires the acceptance of the existence of the immaterial. Some do. But, I would argue, one can agree with the above and still be a faithful member of the Christian Church i.e. that despite the biblical texts that relate the breaking of well accepted laws of physics, despite the texts that refer to angelic beings, despite postulation of a divine being who created the universe one can still go to church and feel that you belong.

Mind you, being so influenced by natural science which most of us are, you will need to do some intellectual work. But that work is no more than most students of the humanities are familiar with. Texts work on several levels and the surface level is not necessarily the most important. The great novelists know this. Telling a story that consists of a description of events is not enough, the story must point to a deeper human reality. It is the same with the visual arts; the visible refers to the invisible.

Just so, biblical texts are deep texts. When we read that Jesus waked on water we are surprised and that summons our attention. But the subject of the story is not the breaking of the physical law of specific gravity, it refers to the conquest of the chaotic, water being the symbol of chaos notably in the first creation story and that of the Flood. Just so, the stories of the resurrection of Jesus is not the relation of a nature miracle but indicates that Christ will be present to the believer in the future, he is not in fact dead, even thought he died. Faith is often expressed in terms of paradox. For example: "If you would have your life you must lose it."

There is a whole backstory to this that involves the prescientific nature of the societies that produced biblical texts, and how Platonism was selectively adopted by the Church in what became known as Neo-Platonism. In Platonism the soul could be reborn to another life i.e. reincarnated. The Church was selective in its adoption of Platonic philosophy. For example it rejected the idea of reincarnation but it was influenced by the idea of the immortality of the soul and its return to God after death. It is interesting that this idea has been replaced by a more earthly focus, the coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth.

There is no reason that materialists could not be Christian. It is sad that materialists feel that their belief excludes them from the church because it cuts them off from the centre of the culture of the West and they become estranged from their past. I have noticed that scientific colleagues who would robustly describe themselves as materialists and hence unbelievers, turn up to a concert from the Choir of Kings College Cambridge composed of mostly church music. They quite happily disregard the fact that the music was composes and performed in order to glorify God. How much more enjoyment they would have had if they could affirm the words being sung!

I find myself agreeing with John Updike when he says:

It appeared to me that when we try in good faith to believe in materialism, in the exclusive reality of the physical, we are asking our selves to step aside; we are disavowing the very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept – the realm of emotion and conscience, of memory and intention and sensation.
John Updike Self-Consciousness: p 250

A thorough going materialism is used to poor scorn on religion in general and Christianity in particular. But what, given the above, is the point? Such materialism uses a literal understanding of biblical texts in the same way that fundamentalist Christians do. Because some texts obviously imply a breaking of the laws of physics they are ridiculed as nonsense and superstition. But this is to ignore the deeper meaning. It is here that confessed materialists make a fatal mistake, a mistake that isolates them from several centuries of experience and meditation on the human condition.

But what, you ask, about transcendence? Surely Christianity boasts that it opens a way to the "other" to that which is not of the earth but of heaven. If we are alone in the universe are we not trapped within the cage of the self? It is relevant that much of the New Testament points to the importance of the neighbour, the person next to us. They provide the "other" that promises transcendence of the self.

Christian faith is communal. It is in the community of faith that we find we are not alone. The "other" is the gateway for our escape from the self and is, as such, along with the whole of culture and nature "not us" and hence transcendent. Scientists know the thrill of seeing what was hidden, artists the thrill of making the human drama apparent and so on. Transcendence is a this-worldly phenomenon.

What happens when we mistakenly reduce our field of view so that all religious insight into humanity is discarded? Firstly, we have to live as though the universe is a meaningless absurdity. We are Vladimir and Estragon lost in a blasted landscape waiting for Godot (God?) We are the madman in Nietzsche's tale of the death of God. The world becomes the theatre of the absurd and we must find something to keep hope alive. So we spend our lives in busyness, trying to make the world a better place only to find that we construct a very safe and healthy prison for the human spirit. We become excellent sheep.

The people of faith know of this, these are the living dying ones, closer to death than to life. They put their hope in technology and progress but each breakthrough leaves them unsated.