Machan's Musings - Materialism Through Equivocation
by Tibor R. Machan
Within the secular philosophical community there is more division than meets the eye. Critics of Secular Humanism, mainly from theological and religious circles, tend to overlook this—they think that all those who reject the supernatural realm are therefore materialists. This way they can intimate that without embracing the supernatural, we consign ourselves to the status of bits of matter floating about aimlessly—without consciousness and, more importantly, without moral conscience—in the universe (unless we drastically redefine these notions).
But some justification exists for how Secular Humanists are treated by these critics. Quite a few secular thinkers do embrace the materialist alternative. Their false choice is that between materialism and spiritualism, where the former amounts to affirming only nature-as-pure matter as real, the latter embracing something spooky and ineffable ... namely, the ghostly supernatural.
But there are other alternatives that many philosophers who have rejected supernaturalism or spiritualism affirm without hesitation. These thinkers are also naturalists, holding that nothing besides what is part of nature exists. They do not believe that any scientific laws can be escaped in this natural realm, nor the laws of a metaphysics, limited to the basic ones, such as the Law of Identity, the Law of Non-Contradiction, the Law of the Excluded Middle, and the Law of Causality.
Yet what separates these secular thinkers from the materialists is that they agree that many types of beings can exist in the world, not just bits of matter (whatever that is supposed to be anyway). As a result, of course, they also hold that there can be different kinds of causes in reality, depending on the nature of what is involved in a causal relationship. Sure, billiard balls on a pool table and a whole lot else that’s part of reality will exhibit the Law of Causality in a mechanistic fashion. On the subatomic level, however, this same law will be exhibited in the fashion spelled out by quantum mechanics; while at the level of human consciousness the Law of Causality will be manifest as self- or agent-causation or free will. And other versions may well exist, too, with scientists looking into the matter all the time.
My point here isn’t to show that these different forms of causation exist—it is, at any rate, pretty evident to most of us that they do. That’s because human beings also have the unique capacity to know of their own causal power "from inside." They are able to experience it as it exists within them when they act (and how this differs from when they are, say, pushed about by forces over which they have no control, such as the wind or a virus). Ed Pols, in his 'The Acts of Our Being' (1982), shows this brilliantly. The point is to make it clear that not all naturalisms are alike. Aristotle’s is different from Hobbes’s, Spinoza’s from Marx’s, and Newton’s (when he wasn’t dabbling in supernaturalism and the occult) isn’t that of Einstein.
In short, not all naturalists are reductive materialists. Whether they are correct is, of course, another matter. But to know that the alternatives are more varied than both some of the critics and some of the defenders of the secular stance make it appear is important. At least for PR purposes! Why?
Because common sense tells many people that they have free will and there are moral responsibilities they need to fulfill. They have a well enough grasp that they could well neglect these (which is when they may be said to be acting irresponsibly and can be blamed for this), or fulfill them in exemplary fashion (which is when they deserve praise). When secular thinkers deny this, along with denying some alleged supernatural dimension, they easily alienate ordinary folks from secularism. Few will go along at the price they think they have to pay, namely, to abandon their common sense, that essentially gets them through their lives with a good deal of success. So they remain linked to supernaturalism where they think free will and morality have to be located.
But if they are aware that embracing secular ideas does not need to mean giving up on their common sense beliefs in free will and moral responsibility, they could well give the secular option more attention. And they indeed should.
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[Machan teaches ethics at Chapman University, Orange, CA. He elaborates on these matters in two of his books, 'The Pseudo-Science of B. F. Skinner' (1974) and 'Initiative--Human Agency & Society' (2000).]
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