A Material World?

This is a draft of the first section of a chapter of the philosophy textbook. I'm putting the chapter in a unit called "Philosophy and Science." The title of the chapter is "What is Reality?"
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7.1 Introduction
Although most students do not care much for math and science, the Western world as a whole tends to value science more than most other fields of knowledge. High school teenagers may call good math and science students "nerds" and "geeks." But as adults we are all thankful for the cell phones and lap tops such students go on to invent. And the ex-jock working sales at a used car lot may envy their pay check.

Certainly you can make more money in business or entertainment, but as a culture most in the Western world consider scientists and mathematicians the smartest type of people. Of course, it is not necessarily true. That ex-jock in theory could have a much higher IQ than the valedictorian who now teaches physics at MIT. But as a culture we think of science as king in the game of truth.

A paradigm is a particular way of thinking about a particular topic. Where a worldview involves a person's whole view of the world, a paradigm has to do with a person's view of just one particular piece of the puzzle. In that sense, a worldview is the collection of all your paradigms put together.<1>

[text box, paradigm, worldview]

Although most in the Western world may not be good at science, we tend to have elements of a scientific paradigm in our varying views of the world. For example, if we are in a thunderstorm, we do not usually ask ourselves what demon might be angry with us or if God is trying to teach us a lesson. We tend to think of rain and snow as natural events rather than "supernatural" ones involving spiritual forces like angels.

By the same token, we do not ask what angel will be flying our plane to Denver this afternoon. We worry more about engines and pilot error than whether demons might try to down our plane. If something unusual were to happen, like a crash or an accident, then some would begin to inquire what purpose God (or Satan) had in mind. But we less often refer to God or other spiritual forces to explain the "ordinary" workings of our lives.<2>

This train of thought leads us to an important issue. On the one hand, we would not have all the scientific discoveries of these last years if people at some point had not begun to look for natural explanations for the things that happen rather than spiritual ones. Isaac Newton (1643-1727)strongly believed in the existence of God. But he did not refer to God to explain the precise mechanics of gravity. Instead, he looked for a physical law of nature to explain it:

F=G(m1*m2)/r*r

Yet as Christians, we believe that God is involved in the world. Where do we draw the line between "natural" explanations for events and "supernatural" ones? A little more than a hundred years earlier, a young man named Martin Luther (1483-1546) had committed to become a monk in a thunderstorm. He wondered whether a lightning strike near him was God threatening him if he did not. So Luther abandoned his studies to be a lawyer and became a Roman Catholic priest. The rest is history--he went on to lead the "Protestant" mass exodus from the Roman Catholic Church, resulting in the great variety of non-catholic churches we have today.

[textbox, Protestant Reformation]

Unlike Newton, Luther saw this storm as a spiritual rather than natural event. He did not divide the world into the categories of "natural" and "supernatural." Rather, everything about the world was spiritual. If scientists viewed the world the way Luther did, they would not invent anything, for they would not look for "laws" to explain the workings of the world. They would attribute events to the wills of spiritual beings. In short, they would not be scientists.

Here we arrive at the main topic of this chapter. Does the world around us consist of matter that operates according to laws that God created and then set to run largely on their own? Is the universe a natural realm that, we believe, is in distinction from the supernatural realm of God, angels, and other spiritual forces "outside" it?

[textbox, natural versus supernatural]

Or perhaps, on the other end of the spectrum, our sense of matter is an illusion. Perhaps the world in some sense is an extension of God. Perhaps when physics digs a little deeper, beyond quarks and neutrinos, it will find that "dark matter" is, after all, the "material" of God. Or perhaps we are all thoughts in the mind of God rather than some separate, natural material. We will talk about these options in the second part of this chapter.

Most Christians today function as "dualists" who believe in two fundamental kinds of reality in God's creation. They picture distinct natural and supernatural elements to the world right "next" to each other--for example, a human soul associated with our physical bodies. We will discuss this option in the final section of this chapter.

This chapter deals with these questions of ontology, the part of philosophy that asks what reality is made of--what is the nature of existence. Ontology is one of the two sub-branches of metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that asks questions about reality.<3>

In the first part of this chapter, we will explore whether a Christian could have a mostly materialist view of God's creation. A materialist believes that the universe consists only of matter. This person does not believe that we have a detachable soul or that reality involves some other distinct type of reality like spirit.<4>

[textbox--materialist, naturalist, ontology]

7.2 A Material World?
Certainly a person cannot be a historic Christian if they do not believe in a God who in some sense is distinguishable or "detachable" from the creation. In that sense, a Christian could not be a naturalist: someone who believes that nature is all that exists.

However, we might still call a person like Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) a materialist, even though he believed in the existence of God. While he believed that God created the world, he saw the world itself as a kind of machine that ran according to its own laws apart from any divine intervention.<5> His view of the creation, therefore, was entirely materialist.

[textbox: Thomas Hobbes]

At this point we want to pick up the question we raised in the introduction above. To what extent can we as Christians distinguish the material, the reality of the universe, from God? Western philosophy has traditionally traced its beginnings back to a Greek named Thales, who lived approximately from 624 to 546BC.<6> He is often called the "father" of philosophy, although we know that this designation is drastically "ethnocentric"--it makes it sound as if philosophy originated in the so called "Western world."<7> It makes those who identify themselves as Westerners sound like they are smarter than those in other parts of the world who do not identify themselves in this way.

As we define philosophy, however, philosophy has existed since the first human. In the first chapter, we suggested that there was a sense in which a person is not fully human unless they reflect on the world and life. By this definition, philosophy has existed since the first "true" human. We might suggest, then, that Adam (or Eve) might have been the first philosopher.

Nevertheless, the reason why many have looked to Thales as the first Greek philosopher is because he looked for an explanation for the world apart from the gods. Thales believed that the earth around him had been generated from an underlying and surrounding water. For him, therefore, water was the basic substance from which all other materials were produced.

This was not a startling suggestion, since several of the cultures at that time had a significant place for water in their myths of creation. In the Babylonian creation story, the Enuma Elish, the god Marduk fashions the world out of chaotic water goddesses. Even in Genesis 1:2, we see "formless and empty" waters there at the very beginning of creation, before God has spoken a word.<8>

So while it puzzles many philosophers to hear that Thales also said, "There are gods in everything," we should not be surprised. The so called break between myth and science with Thales was not likely so great a break as some would like to think. Indeed, in the next chapter we will suggest that modern science is not so far removed from myth as most think.

Nevertheless, Thales is often considered the father of science as well as the father of philosophy.<9> The later philosopher Aristotle and others considered Thales the first of several philosophers over the next few years who suggested one or another "element" as the basic substance from which the world was made. For Thales is was water. For Anaximenes the most basic substance was air. Heraclitus thought it was fire. So we see that science as a field of study originated in philosophy as individuals asked what the underlying nature of the world was.

[text box: natural philosophers]

Materialism in its modern form was a by-product of the scientific revolutions of the 1500's and 1600's. People began to look for natural explanations for the world, laws that govern the way the universe works. This development led some to become Deists. A Deist is someone who believes that God created the world to run like a machine on its own. God created the universe like a watchmaker makes a watch. The watchmaker makes the watch and winds it up. Then it runs on its own. Many of the minds we associate with the 1600's and 1700's fall into this category, including Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin.

[textbox: deism, theism]

The materialists of that time tended to be determinists. Determinists of this sort believed that everything that happens must happen because of the laws of cause and effect. If we think of the materials of the world as a set of pool balls in motion, we could predict what all the balls would do because of the laws of physics.<10> So materialists tend to think that history is simply playing out the "bouncing" of one material "ball" against another.

[text box: determinism, monism]

Today we do find some Christian materialists who are not deists. In the manner of Hobbes, they would believe in God and the supernatural realm, but see the natural, created realm as entirely material. Such a person is a monist, a person who believes reality consists of one type of "stuff." Unlike Hobbes, however, they would not be deists because they would believe that God can and does act in the world today. They might believe in the possibility of miracles and be theists who believe God is involved in the world, rather than deists who believe God is not.

Yet they would not believe that we have souls that are immaterial, made up of something different from the materials of the world. They would not believe in spirit as something different from matter. We will discuss these Christian "physicalists" when we get to chapter 9.

<1> In the second chapter, we treated worldviews as if they were "monolithic," single packages that fit together neatly. Many Christian thinkers treat worldviews in this way, a "naturalistic" worldview, a "theistic" worldview. In reality, however, few of us are entirely consistent across all our paradigms, in addition to the fact that each worldview usually accommodates a good deal of variation within it.


<2> Certainly some Christians do. A good example of a thoroughgoing application of divine purpose to our lives is Rick Warren's, Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003).


<3> We will discuss the other sub-branch of metaphysics, cosmology, in the next chapter.

<4> We will wait until chapter 9 to discuss the question of the human soul.


<5> In other words, he was a Deist.


<6> It is possible that Thales was Phonecian, but he lived in Greek territory.


<7> Historians debate the extent to which it makes much sense to group together the various individual cultures we call the Western world.

<8> We will discuss creation at greater length in the next chapter.

<9> What then are we to make of the many others who did impressive things like the Egyptians who had built the pyramids over a thousand years before Thales?

<10> In chapter 10 we will see that this analogy does not actually work. Because of quantum physics, one cannot say today that materialism implies determinism at all.