Motus Mentis

We live in an age dominated by scientistic materialism. Ever since the Enlightenment, the explosive growth in our scientific understanding of nature has rocked religion back on its heels by providing mechanistic and mathematical explanations for phenomena that had previously been wholly mysterious. The great paradigm by which we understood the world was slowly inverted; science’s glittering successes gradually shifted the default position regarding the explanation of all phenomena toward the laws and mechanisms of the physical world, and away from transcendent agency.

The world is no less astonishing than it ever was; the difference now is that when we see something we can’t account for, we insist — reflexively, as a matter of faith — that “I’m sure there must be some scientific explanation”. This makes sense, but only up to a point: for example, while there do indeed seem to be laws of nature, observations of the breaking of which usually lead only to the discovery of deeper and more subtle laws, nobody, at least as far as I’m aware, has yet come up with a compelling “scientific explanation” of the origin and specific content of the laws themselves. (See my linked series of posts beginning here.)

This confidence in scientistic materialism is not irrational in itself, if one accepts that it rests on axioms that, like all axioms, are themselves unprovable, and so must be taken on faith: that they simply “feel true”. (That’s just what axioms are; if they could be proven, they’d be theorems, not axioms, and would in turn have to rest on even deeper axioms.) But being “not irrational” is consistent with a variety of other rationally defensible models of the world, for example the various theistic models that religions have offered. The scientistic-materialist model, however, now enjoys a dominant position in Western civilization (there’s some irony in that, but I’ll leave that for another post), and so its adherents would like very much to shoehorn everything one might normally want from a plenary and satisfying world-view into its austere constraints. Being human, after all, we still yearn for meaning, purpose, and some way to comfort ourselves in the face of annihilation — things that transcendent, theistic models handle easily, but which present an almost insuperable challenge to secular materialism.

And so we find some poaching going on: attempts by materialists to pocket attractive features from the religious model. One form of this is called “transhumanism”, which is the idea that advances in life extension, cognitive and sensory enhancement, and control of nature will put genuine transcendence — everything we might ask and long for — within reach right here in the material world.

Our friend, the philosopher Bill Vallicella, was recently asked by a correspondent whether, in this way, transhumanism might eventually “put religion out of business”. The answer is no: and in an excellent piece over at Substack, Bill explains why. You can read it here.