The Materialist Position)

I have previously criticized the materialist position, which is that only the material exists and is real. In the physical-materialist view there is no metaphysical reality, such as soul or spirit or transcendence. Debates between the material and the immaterial viewpoints are often based on interpretations of the human experience. The materialist must maintain that even the things that are typically not associated with matter have their origins within it. For the materialist view to be correct all thoughts, feelings, convictions, hopes, and anguish must have an explanation in atoms and protons and minerals.

Many critics of materialism have pointed out the horrifying conclusions that follow when we strip morality and emotion of their spiritual origins. I would like to emphasize a few of these points, observations that have only been briefly mentioned elsewhere, but which deserve the special attention that I will bring to them with this series. I will start today by defining one of the core beliefs of materialism, and tomorrow I will make my critique of it.

Deterministic Machines)

The theory that describes how a person can make choices under a physical-materialist worldview is called determinism, which asserts that there actually is no choice at all. In a physical-materialist view, humans possess no free will. They are nothing more than deterministic machines, and all that they “choose” to do is actually predetermined by their chemical construction and environment.

Each one of us is born with certain synapses and pathways already formed in our brains. That is the programming that determines what behavior we will exhibit in response to certain inputs. The inputs come from the environment that we live in. If the temperature is cold, our brain interprets that fact and executes whatever reaction is programmed as a response.

Since the environment is out of our control, and since the initial state of our brains is formed before we are born, we have no control over what inputs and reactions will come into and out of us. It has all been predetermined, and we are simply reactive beings, constrained to behave in a way that is outside of our own control.

Even if we change our programming, we only do so in predetermined ways. So if a child is pre-programmed to touch a hot stove, and is burned, and then remaps his brain to not do that anymore, he does that remapping as a pre-programmed reaction to feeling pain. Thus, even the changing of one’s mind is predictable.

And we predetermined machines are perfectly capable to interacting with one another by hooking up our cognitive inputs and outputs to form a larger machine. What you say to me you are predetermined to say, and how I respond I am predetermined to respond, and the same for you, and then the same for for me, back-and-forth, until one of us terminates the conversation because we are predetermined at that point to do so. And what each of us takes away from that conversation will be exactly what we are predetermined to take away.

Commentary)

This model may sound very strange, very different from how we perceive our day-to-day experiences, but it is the only logical conclusion once one decides that only the material is real. So long as there is nothing but matter, choice and free will can only be an illusion, a perception that is ironically pre-programmed into us, just like everything else.

Tomorrow I will discuss the absolute license this theory gives to all immoral and unethical behavior. In short, if everything we do is predetermined, if we have no choice over our own actions, then we are not responsible for any evil that we might do. There is no blame for even the most horrific of crimes, because the people that did those things only did so because they were predetermined to do so. Come back next time where I will discuss this even further.