Bernard Shaw's Remarkable Religion: A Faith That Fits the Facts

206 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
stone’s “desire” to be reunited with the earth. Scientific law says nothing
about “awareness” or value; it is concerned strictly with rules that govern
how matter moves through space. There is no provision in physics for
molecules to move in such a way as to avoid pain or seek pleasure, so it
is hard to see how physics and chemistry alone could ever explain awareness
and desire. If known physical law accounts for everything in the universe,
why are not all animals, ourselves included, merely unconscious automata?
Since human beings, at least, are not automata, the materialist
position appears absurd.
There is an alternative, the one proposed by Huxley: epiphenomenalism.
One could continue to maintain that physical laws account for everything
in the universe but that, in addition to producing changes in physical
states, under certain complex conditions, they produce states of awareness:
mind. Mental states, however, do not change physical ones. Although it
would be necessary for the materialists to admit a degree of ignorance—
they would have to concede that they know nothing about how consciousness
is produced—there would be no need for a new, “higher” theory of
causation. They would thus concede that there are effects (the multiple
aspects of awareness) that are as yet not understood, but they could maintain
that there are no new causes. If one accepts the commonsense view
that physics cannot explain awareness, Darwinism is forced to accept
epiphenomenalism. But if epiphenomenalism is true, Darwinism becomes
incoherent. Our mental states are extremely complex and could be created
only by the very gradual operation of natural selection, which weeds out
unadaptive traits and reinforces adaptive ones. But if mental states cannot
cause anything, they are adaptively neutral. Natural selection must be indifferent
to them. So if epiphenomenalism is true, Darwinism is false. So
Darwinism implies epiphenomenalism, but epiphenomenalism implies
that Darwinism is not true; thus Darwinism is false. The only way out for
the Darwinists is to deny the commonsense observation that mind cannot
be reduced to matter. For Darwinism to be viable, it becomes necessary to
insist not only that science has the answers to everything but that nothing
really exists except matter. Mind is just something matter does. So orthodox,
contemporary scientism insists not only on banishing purpose but
mind as well. To a degree even Butler could not have imagined, they have
truly pitchforked mind out of the universe. Any attempt to establish a
place for purpose in the cosmos must begin with the repatriation of the
mind.