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Darwin Day in America

How Our Politics And Culture Have Been Dehumanized In The Name Of Science

ISI Books

Nothing Buttery from Atomism to the Enlightenment

"In the last ten years we have come to realize humans are more like worms than we ever imagined," declares biologist Bruce Alberts, former president of the National Academy of Sciences. Geneticist Glen Evans at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center agrees. Genetically speaking, he reports, "the worm represents a very simple human."

Other biologists prefer to think that humans are actually oversize Drosphila melangaster — fruit flies. "In essence, we are nothing but a big fly," insists Charles Zuker, genetic researcher and professor of biology at the University of California at San Diego.

Or perhaps humans beings are merely overgrown mice. After all, "we share 99 percent of our genes with mice, and we even have the genes that could make a tail," claims British scientist Jane Rogers, who worked with other researchers to publish the mouse genome in 2002. According to one journalist, "the genetic blueprint of the mouse" produced by Rogers and other scientists demonstrates that "there isn't much difference between mice and men."

Apparently there is even less difference between men and chimps. "We humans appear as only slightly remodeled chimpanzee-like apes," insists Morris Goodman of Wayne State University, coauthor of a 2003 study which concluded that "chimpanzees are more closely related to people than to gorillas ... and probably should be included in the human branch of the family tree." Goodman complains about the traditional view of human beings that "emphasizes how very different humans are from all other forms of life," deriding it as contaminated by "anthropocentric bias." In reality, according to Goodman, "the molecular genetic view ... places all the living apes (gibbons, orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees) with humans in the same family and within that family barely separates chimpanzees from humans."

Few people today would deny that human beings can learn important things about themselves by studying other animals, but many scientists want to go considerably further. They seem to think that studying worms or flies or chimps will reveal in time all the mysteries of the human soul. They are inspired in this belief by a powerful assumption enshrined at the heart of modern science: the assumption that the material universe is the sum of reality. Scientists "have a prior commitment ... to materialism," asserts Harvard biologist Richard Lewontin, adding that scientists are compelled by their "a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute." This commitment to what some have called "scientific materialism" has led ineluctably to reductionism in the natural and social sciences during the past century, as those speaking in the name of science have attempted to show how everything that exists — including human action and thought — can be fully explained as the products of unintelligent matter and motion.

To borrow the words of political philosopher Leo Strauss, scientific materialism has tried "to understand the higher in terms of the lower: the human in terms of the subhuman, the rational in terms of the subrational." According to scientific materialism, the parts are more important than the whole — to the degree that sometimes the whole seems to be a lot less than the sum of its parts. The end result is what the late British neurophysicist Donald MacKay liked to call the "nothing buttery" syndrome, the attempt to explain every fact of human existence as "nothing but" some nonrational material process — as in, "Our enjoyment of symphonies is nothing but the conversion of mechanical energy into electrical signals by the cells in our inner ear," or "Morality ... is merely [i.e., 'nothing but'] an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends," or "your joys and your sorrows ... your sense of personality and free will, are in fact no more than [i.e., 'nothing but'] the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules." Even the realms of mind and spirit cannot escape from the reductionists' onslaught, because in their view "matter is the ground of all existence; mind, spirit, and God as well, are just [i.e., 'nothing but'] words that express the wondrous results of neuronal complexity."

While the triumph of materialistic reductionism over nearly every field of human endeavor is of recent vintage, both materialism and reductionism have deep roots in Western culture. The story of their rise to ascendancy is a tangled and multifaceted one, and this book cannot tell it exhaustively. But it can present some of the highlights. It is usually perilous to try to pinpoint the originator of an idea. The very attempt presumes a universal knowledge of human history that finite human beings probably can never attain. But stories must have a beginning, and so if we are to tell the story of materialism's development, we must start sometime and somewhere. The sometime is more than two millenia ago. The somewhere is Greece.

Atoms and Void: Materialism in Greece and Rome

It was a hot midsummer's day, and three elderly pilgrims walked the dusty road from the city of Cnossus on the island of Crete to the grotto of Zeus. Situated on top of Mount Ida, the grotto was the legendary birthplace of the deity who was chief in the pantheon of the Greek gods. One of the pilgrims, Cleinias, was a native Cretan. The second pilgrim, Megillus, was a Spartan. The third man came from Sparta's historic enemy, Athens.

The walk was a long one, and so the men passed the time in conversation. Eventually their discussion turned toward the gods, and the Athenian spoke of philosophers who claimed that planets and stars, animals, and even human beings arose by "nature and chance" from the material elements of fire, water, earth, and air.

"In this manner the whole heaven has been created, and all that is in the heaven, as well as animals and all plants ... not by the action of mind, as they say, or of any God, or from art, but as I was saying, by nature and chance only." For such philosophers, the Athenian continued, the fundamental reality is material, and everything that is real is a byproduct of that material reality, even the human soul. As for religion and morality, the naturalistic philosophers claimed that they have no basis in nature and are transient and changeable according to the dictates of the time.

"These, my friends, are the sayings of wise men, poets and prose writers, which find a way into the minds of youth. They are told by them that the highest right is might, and in this way, the young fall into impieties, under the idea that the Gods are not such as the law bids them imagine."

"What a dreadful picture ...," replied the Cretan Cleinias in shock, "and how great is the injury which is thus inflicted on young men to the ruin both of states and families."

The Athenian went on to indict the naturalistic philosophers for reversing that which is first and last. They wrongly think that justice, beauty, and the human soul are byproducts of the physical body, when in fact "the soul is prior to the body." Because the soul is prior to the body, "characters and manners, and wishes and reasonings, and true opinions, and reflections, and recollections" — in short, all the qualities that typify mind — are also prior to matter, and it is an error to try to reduce mind to matter rather than treat it as something with independent dignity.

This imaginary conversation between Cleinias, Megillus, and the unnamed Athenian appears in Book X of Plato's Laws, probably one of the last dialogues written by the great Athenian philosopher. Plato (427?–347 B.C.) and his pupil Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) were the most compelling critics of materialism and reductionism in the ancient world. Some of the "pre-Socratic" philosophers whom Plato and Aristotle critiqued were possibly not materialists in the strict sense of the term. But they supplied fertile soil out of which a full-blooded materialism grew, and by the fifth century b.c. Leucippus and his student Democritus (460?–357 B.C.) were spreading a wholly materialisticatomism was revived by Epicurus philosophy that became known as atomism.

While trustworthy knowledge about Leucippus and Democritus is scant, they apparently believed that everything — plants, animals, the operations of the senses, and mind itself — could be reduced to atoms in motion. In their view, sense perception and thought were purely mechanical processes. According to Aëtius, Leucippus and Democritus believed that "sensations and thoughts are alterations of the body" that "take place by the impact of images from outside. Neither occurs to anyone without the impact of an image." Thus, in the atomists' view, a person can see a tree because the tree gives off atoms that ultimately enter his eyes. The problems with this mechanistic view of mind were apparent even to the ancients. Ridiculing the atomists' conception, Cicero a few centuries later asked "whether ... whenever he thought about Britain, an 'image' had detached itself from that island to come and hit him in the chest."

Determinism was another key feature of the philosophy of the early atomists. In the words of Leucippus, "nothing occurs at random, but everything for a reason and by necessity." Democritus likewise believed that "everything happens according to necessity." It is easy to see how their determinism followed from their atomism. According to Leucippus and Democritus, the atoms in the void were a sort of perpetual motion machine, the motion of each atom being produced by a prior collision with another atom. Almost by definition there was no room for freedom in their system.

In his magisterial history of Greek philosophy, W. K. C. Guthrie suggests that Leucippus and Democritus "encouraged the faith of all who in later ages have been attracted by the notion of man as a machine." The two atomists further sparked debate over whether the universe displayed the hallmarks of design. "Has matter formed itself unaided into organisms of an almost incredible complexity, delicacy and adaptability to purpose, or has this order and efficacy been imposed from outside by a rational agent working to a plan?" According to Guthrie, "it was Democritus who first compelled philosophers to take sides by his detailed exposition of a system in which intelligence, direction and purpose were epiphenomena emerging at a late stage from nothing but the undesigned clash and recoil of individually inanimate particles."

After the deaths of Leucippus and Democritus, atomism was revived by Epicurus (342–270 B.C.), who likewise maintained that "the universe is bodies and space," with the primary bodies being "indivisible and solid" atoms. For Epicurus, everything that exists was ultimately reducible to atoms in motion, including the human soul. Those who insisted that "the soul is incorporeal" were "talking idly." The soul is just as corruptible as the rest of the human body, and so "when death comes ... we do not exist."

Epicurus did make one major break with Leucippus and Democritus: He defended free will. The better man, according to Epicurus, is one who "laughs at destiny" and "thinks that with us lies the chief power in determining events," because though some events "happen by necessity and some by chance," there are still some remaining events that "are within our control." Epicurus seemed to provide a theoretical foundation for free will within his atomic system by suggesting that atoms occasionally swerved unpredictably, so that there were at least some atomic movements that were not dictated by prior collisions with other atoms. Whether Epicurus's concession to indeterminacy actually allows for human freedom and responsibility (or even makes sense, given his overall system of physical causes) is another matter. As Frederick Lange pointed out in his History of Materialism, "the unconscious arbitrariness" of the atomic behavior in question seems to refute "any intimate connection between the actions of a person and his character."

Epicurus attempted to connect his ethical teachings to his atomic theory, grounding his ethics on the sensations of pleasure and pain. To pursue pleasure and avoid pain was the primary maxim of his ethical philosophy. But he denied that he was a defender of unbridled hedonism.

The materialistic philosophy of Epicurus was later propagated in Rome by the Roman poet Lucretius (96?–55 BC), who made the materialistic conception of the universe the heart of his poem De Rerum Natura ("On the Nature of Things"). Running more than seven thousand hexameter lines, De Rerum Natura was a remarkable achievement under any circumstances, but especially so considering that Lucretius (if one can trust the account of Jerome) underwent fits of insanity while writing it and committed suicide before bringing the poem to completion.

Like the Greek atomists before him, Lucretius saw human beings and the rest of nature as products of the mindless collisions of atoms. The first and essential things were atoms in motion, and everything else came out of them:

Neither by design did the primal germs
'Stablish themselves, as by keen act of mind,
Each in its proper place; nor did they make,
Forsooth, a compact how each germ should move;
But since, being many and changed in many modes
Along the All, they're driven abroad and vexed
By blow on blow, even from all time of old,
They thus at last, after attempting all
The kinds of motion and conjoining, come
Into those great arrangements out of which
This sum of things established is create ...

De Rerum Natura has been called "the greatest monument in Latin poetry," and its language is echoed repeatedly by the celebrated Virgil. Despite Lucretius's literary influence on Virgil, however, the philosophy he championed failed to thrive. It is not difficult to understand why. The tremendous gulf between living and nonliving matter, the equally cavernous gap between rational and irrational living beings, all seemed to make incredible the notion that intelligence and the rational ordering of the natural world could be produced by blind forces operating on irrational matter. The idea that mind was preeminent over matter seemed confirmed by common sense, and Plato and Aristotle and their followers pressed this point against the early materialists with vigor. Indeed, their alternative theories of mind and matter were so persuasive that they supplied the foundations for intellectual life during the next two millennia.

Plato and Aristotle differed in some of their metaphysical principles, but they were united in opposing the materialist attempt to reduce mind to matter. In Aristotle, the defense of mental independence comes out clearly in his famous theory of causation. Aristotle taught that there are four primary kinds of causes: material, efficient, formal, and final. The material cause of something is the matter from which it is made. The material cause of a bronze statue is the metal from which it was constructed, just as the material cause of a human being is the chemical and cellular materials that make him up. The efficient cause of something is "that which brings about a change" in it. The efficient cause of a baby, for example, is his or her parents. Modern science generally proceeds as if material and efficient causes together provide an exhaustive explanation of the world around us. But Aristotle would argue that two of the most important kinds of causes — the formal and the final — cannot be understood simply as matter or matter acting on matter.

The formal cause of something is the pattern or idea (i.e., the "form") that makes the thing what it is. This pattern or idea is not itself material, and it is what allows us to differentiate between a stack of cedar logs and a handmade cedar chest. Both the logs and the chest are fashioned from the same material. What differentiates them, then, is not a difference in matter but a difference in form. As Harry Jaffa observes, "the fact that the form of a thing can be separated from its matter is the very heart of human understanding, and of human intelligence. Without this possibility, modern science itself would not be possible, because all science presupposes the detachment of the mind from its object as a condition of human speech about the object."

Aristotle's final cause (or telos) also transcends the merely material. The final cause of something is the reason for which it exists — in other words, its purpose. The final cause of someone exercising at a health club might be health. In many instances, the formal cause of something is also its final cause. The final cause of a human fetus, for example, is to grow into the mature form of a human being.

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Excerpted from Darwin Day in America by John G. West. Copyright © 2007 ISI Books. Excerpted by permission of ISI Books.
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