The Last Superstition; A Refutation of the New Atheism - Edward Feser

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-Article by Edward Feser in The American; "The New Philistinism"

 "...as John Searle ( who, as we have seen, is no religious believer) has argued, every form of materialism implicitly denies the existence of the mind, whether or not it intends to (John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind , 1992).  Thus, every form of materialism really entails eliminative materialism, and is thus as absurd, incoherent, and false as eliminative materialism is. We have already seen in the previous chapter the deep reason why this is so. The conception of matter that modern materialism inherited from the Mechanical Philosophy, since it strips of matter anything that might smack of Aristotelian formal and final causes, necessarily strips from it also anything like qualia and intentionality, and thus anything that could possibly count as mental. Scientific materialism "explains everything" in non-Aristotelian terms only by sweeping what doesn't fit the mechanistic model under the rug of the mind. And thus the only way to deal with the lump that remains, short of Descarte's dualism, is to throw out the rug, lump and all. Hence, to say that matter, understood in mechanistic terms, is all that exists, is implicitly but necessarily to deny that the mind exists. Conversely, to acknowledge that both matter and mind exist is implicitly but necessarily to affirm either that something like Descarte's dualism is correct, or (if one wants to avoid the paradoxes inherent in Descarte's position) that something like Aristole's view really is right after all, and that the moderns were wrong to abandon it in favor of mechanism.

And this brings us to a rich irony of historical proportions, yet one which goes almost entirely unnoticed. As I have said, most materialists would like to avoid eliminative materialism if they could. They have no problem, then, acknowledging the existence of  reason, truth, beliefs, desires, or the mind and intentionality in general. At the same time, they are desperate to avoid anything that smacks of Descartes's dualism; and since, in the modern period, the mechanical conception of the natural world has unreflectively come to be taken for granted, so that Descartes's position has come to seem the only realistic alternative to materialism, these materialists tend to assume that if they can formulate and defend their position in a way that avoids dualism, they have thereby vindicated materialism.  What they do not realize, however, is that many of their arguments can make sense only if interpreted in Aristotelian terms, and in particular in terms of final causes. Their arguments are ambiguous between a mechanistic reading and an Aristotelian one, and it is this ambiguity that gives them whatever plausibility they have. Yet they fail to see this ambiguity because of their general ignorance of the history of their subject, and in particular their ignorance of what thinkers in the Aristotelian tradition have actually believed. While they dutifully parrot the general line that Aristotle and his Scholastic followers were all wrong and no longer worth taking seriously, they often inadvertently appeal to concepts that can make sense only if interpreted in a broadly Aristotelian way."   (236-37)


 "The bottom line is this. Any materialist who argues: "Everything else has yielded to reductive materialistic explanation, so why should the mind be any holdout?" thereby manifests only his own cluelessness. The mind cannot possibly fail to be a "holdout," indeed an absolute barrier to the reductive aspirations of materialism, precisely because it is the rug under which modern philosophers have historically swept everything that could not fit the mechanistic picture of the world. Descartes, Locke, and other early modern philosophers realized this, and that (rather than "ignorance of modern neuroscience" or any other such red herring) is the reason they were dualists. Dualism follows necessarily if one wants to maintain a mechanistic picture of the physical world while avoiding eliminative materialism. And the only way to avoid both dualism and eliminative materialism is to return to Aristotle.(23. More precisely, this is the only way to avoid these alternatives if one believes that there is a material world in the first place. Another option is idealism, the view that matter is an illusion and that only mind is real. But naturalists and secularists are unlikely to find this view any more attractive than Descartes's dualism or Aristotelianism. For a discussion of some problems with contemporary versions of idealism, see Chapter 5 of my book Philosophy of Mind.) That, in fact, is what some materialists have done, at least partially and without realizing it; but to follow through such a move consistently is just to cease to be a materialist.

Could it get any worse for materialism? Yes it can, and it does. For as it happens, the materialist's "everything else has yeilded to reductive explanation" shtick isn't true anyway. As I have said several times in this book, the idea that modern science has eliminated final causes from our picture of the natural world is a myth, the statement of an agenda and a wish rather than an actual accomplishment. Human thought and action are the most obvious examples of phenomena that exhibit irreducible teleology, but they are far from the only ones. Indeed, final causality pervades the natural world from the level of complex biological organs all the way down to the simplest casual interactions at the microscopic level. And the greatest irony is that, not only have contemporary science and philosophy not shown otherwise, they have if anything and despite themselves made the reality of irreducible teleology even more evident." (247-8)


"Of course, all these matters could be pursued at much greater depth, and even many readers willing to acknowledge the purported difficulties of Aristotelian metaphysics have been greatly overstated by its critics would resist any suggestion that modern science licenses nothing less than a full-scale return to it. But as this book has, I think, established, (a) when rightly understood, the traditional arguments for an Aristotelian metaphysical picture of the world are powerful, (b) the modern philosophers' criticisms of that picture are no good and their own attempted replacements of it are fraught with various paradoxes and incoherencies, and (c) modern science is not only not inconsistent with that metaphysical picture but at least to some extent tends to point in its direction. At the very least, then, there can be no doubt that a broadly Aristotelian philosophical worldview is still as rationally defensible today as it ever was, and must be admitted to be so even by those who do not think (as I do) that when one pursues these matters to the end one will see that it, or something very much like it, is rationally unavoidable.

But if Aristotle has, by virtue of developments in modern philosophy and science, had his revenge on those who sought to overthrow him at the dawn of the modern period, why is this fact not more widely recognized? One reason is the prevailing general ignorance about what the Aristotelian and Scholastic traditions really believed, what the actual intellectual and historical circumstances were that led to their replacement by modern philosophy in its various disguises, and what the true relationship is between the latter and modern science. Apart from scholars who specialize in these matters, most academics and others intellectuals, and certainly most journalists and popular writers, simply cannot think about the Middle Ages, Scholasticism, the scientific revolution, and related topics except in terms of the crudest cliches and caricatures.

As we have seen, the rabid anti-Scholasticism of the early moderns was driven less by dispassionate intellectual considerations than by a political agenda: to reorient human life away from the next world and toward this one, and to weaken the rational credentials of religion so as to make this project seem justifiable and inevitable. That brings us to the main reason why Aristotle's revenge is not more widely acknowledged. Even in Aristotle's own work, we find a very conservative ethics grounded in human nature, a doctrine of the immateriality of the human intellect, and an Unmoved Mover of the universe contemplation of whom is the highest end of human existence. By the time Aquinas and the other Scholastics were done refining and drawing out the system, it was evident that it entailed nothing less than the entire conception of God enshrined in classical monotheism, the immortality of the soul, and the natural law system of morality. To acknowledge the truth of the Aristotelian metaphysical picture of the world is thus unavoidably to open the door to everything the Scholastics built upon it. In short, Aristotle's revenge is also Aquinas's revenge; and for that reason alone, contemporary secular intellectuals cannot allow themselves to acknowledge it. For the project of the early moderns is their project too.

But that project is built on a lie. To quote a famous Confucian proverb, "When the finger points at the moon, the idiot looks at the finger." The modern secularist is, as it were, positively fixated on the finger - unsurprisingly given that, if (as he falsely assumes) there really are no fixed natures and natural ends in the world, no formal and final causes, then nothing could naturally point beyond itself to anything else. In fact, the material world points beyond itself to God; but the secularist sees only the material world. The material side of human nature points beyond itself to an immaterial and immortal soul; the secularist sees only the brain and the body. The sexual act points beyond itself to marriage and family; the secularist sees only the sexual act. And so on, and on and on. What else can one say? It's the moon, stupid.  (266-7)