Michael Larkin
Member
A snippet from: http://www.thebestschools.org/features/rupert-sheldrake-interview/
Rupert Sheldrake
You are right to raise this interesting question about the persistence of the materialist ideology despite the twentieth century revolutions in physics. I don’t think there’s a single answer for this. There are several different forces at play here.
One is that Enlightenment rationalism—with its belief in science, technology, and progress from the eighteenth century onwards—seemed to be confirmed by the transformation of society through science and its applications in technology. In the U.S. and in Europe, this ideology seemed to be reinforced by the development of steam power, the Industrial Revolution, and the continual appearance of ever more impressive technologies like airplanes, radio, television, computers, the internet, mobile phones, and all the triumphs of modern medicine and dentistry.
Most people believe in the power of science, and support its enormous prestige because these technological advances have such a large impact on their lives and are undeniably new, not being present in traditional pre-scientific societies. So, when the sciences appear to be so successful, there is little motive for questioning their ideological foundations.
Second—in Europe more so than in the United States—scientific materialism was taken to support an atheist worldview, and the motives for a mass adoption of this worldview were partly political. In nineteenth-century Europe, in Catholic countries the Roman Church was often allied with reactionary political regimes, and people who sought to overthrow the established order also wanted to overthrow the influence of the Church. Scientific materialism provided a very effective way of doing this. If scientific materialism can explain the world without the need for God, then it justified atheism, and atheism justified a complete rejection of the power of the churches as without any foundation other than dogma and illusion.
Once these habits of thought became well established in Europe—and also among the academic and intellectual elites in the U.S.—there was not much incentive for quibbling over the details of recent scientific discoveries. The general materialist picture was by then widely taken for granted.
Third, it’s an interesting paradox that while in the twentieth century physics became broader and more pluralistic, with different interpretations of cosmology and quantum theory, biology became narrower and more dogmatically materialist, particularly with the development of molecular biology in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Twentieth-century psychology was also heavily materialist, and in the United States the behaviorist school dominated the universities until the 1980s. It was then superseded by cognitive psychology, which treats the brain as a kind of computer, which is still mechanistic and materialist, but seemingly more plausible.
When combined with the enormous power and prestige that accrued to the sciences after the Second World War through massive government investment in the U.S. and elsewhere, there was little incentive for members of the scientific establishment to question or upset a convenient consensus that saw hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into the scientific enterprise, and sustaining very large numbers of scientific jobs. And that is still the situation today.
Finally, dogmatic materialists have effectively dominated the educational agenda and have had a strong influence on the media. First, they have promoted the idea that that any genuinely educated person must be a materialist, and anyone who isn’t must be superstitious, or stupid, or deluded. Secondly, skeptic and militant atheist organizations have mounted very effective, proactive, public relations campaigns, a contemporary example being the influence on the media by the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry. For a discussion of these organizations, see the Skeptical About Skeptics web site.
Once a vast system is in place, on which many careers and a lot of personal prestige depend, it’s very difficult to change it quickly, just as an ocean liner cannot suddenly change direction. I think the best way to free up this system is to have several alternative sources of funding that enable different scientific approaches to be pursued, introducing pluralism into scientific research and education.
You are right to raise this interesting question about the persistence of the materialist ideology despite the twentieth century revolutions in physics. I don’t think there’s a single answer for this. There are several different forces at play here.
Most people believe in the power of science, and support its enormous prestige because these technological advances have such a large impact on their lives and are undeniably new, not being present in traditional pre-scientific societies. So, when the sciences appear to be so successful, there is little motive for questioning their ideological foundations.
Second—in Europe more so than in the United States—scientific materialism was taken to support an atheist worldview, and the motives for a mass adoption of this worldview were partly political. In nineteenth-century Europe, in Catholic countries the Roman Church was often allied with reactionary political regimes, and people who sought to overthrow the established order also wanted to overthrow the influence of the Church. Scientific materialism provided a very effective way of doing this. If scientific materialism can explain the world without the need for God, then it justified atheism, and atheism justified a complete rejection of the power of the churches as without any foundation other than dogma and illusion.
Once these habits of thought became well established in Europe—and also among the academic and intellectual elites in the U.S.—there was not much incentive for quibbling over the details of recent scientific discoveries. The general materialist picture was by then widely taken for granted.
Third, it’s an interesting paradox that while in the twentieth century physics became broader and more pluralistic, with different interpretations of cosmology and quantum theory, biology became narrower and more dogmatically materialist, particularly with the development of molecular biology in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Twentieth-century psychology was also heavily materialist, and in the United States the behaviorist school dominated the universities until the 1980s. It was then superseded by cognitive psychology, which treats the brain as a kind of computer, which is still mechanistic and materialist, but seemingly more plausible.
When combined with the enormous power and prestige that accrued to the sciences after the Second World War through massive government investment in the U.S. and elsewhere, there was little incentive for members of the scientific establishment to question or upset a convenient consensus that saw hundreds of billions of dollars flowing into the scientific enterprise, and sustaining very large numbers of scientific jobs. And that is still the situation today.
Once a vast system is in place, on which many careers and a lot of personal prestige depend, it’s very difficult to change it quickly, just as an ocean liner cannot suddenly change direction. I think the best way to free up this system is to have several alternative sources of funding that enable different scientific approaches to be pursued, introducing pluralism into scientific research and education.