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

Can Science Be Purged of Materialism
and Still Be Scientific?
The Marriage of Science and Religion 207
Before we examine the vexed question of the relation of mind and matter
or the virtually unasked question of how to establish a science that recognizes
teleology, it is well to remember that, as Shaw always insisted, arguments
are not settled by reason and facts but by the fears and desires of the
disputants. No one will ever convince the mechanists without assuring
them that their fears are unfounded. Scientists see materialism as the necessary
foundation of science. Attacks on materialism are attacks on science
and are thus intolerable. This is true even of the liberal, religiously inclined
scientists; that is why they insist on divorcing religion from science: they
feel they can protect religion only by isolating it from the necessary materialism
of science. Are they right? What is necessary to science, and could a
science stripped to its essentials really have room for religion? In the case
of Shaw’s religion we can be more specific: can science find room for a
teleological principle operating in the universe?
As was observed earlier in the discussion of George Eliot and the nineteenth-century
rationalists, the thing valued most by the scientific mind is
order. Scientists insist on a world that is orderly and knowable. Their
most telling criticism of vitalism and any metaphysical system that includes
teleology is that these are vague and ambiguous, operating according
to fuzzy and indistinct principles. As was observed earlier, a teleological
universe need not be an indeterminate one, but scientists want more than
determinism; they want a knowable, predictable world. They want something
like Popper’s “falsifiable” scientific theories: hypotheses that make
precise predictions that can be tested, which means that the events predicted
would not otherwise be highly probable. Although Kuhn was
right—science does not actually deem a theory “falsified” because of a
single counterexample—the kind of hypothesis Popper describes is indeed
necessary to science because the ability to make accurate predictions is
what allows the paradigm to accrue authority and its accumulated failures
to produce the crises that precipitate revolutions. So any theory of mind
and teleology—of final causes—must be capable of specific predictions. It
must concern itself with things that are observable and subject to analysis.
The last point is important. There is a sense in which teleology is certain to
be intrinsically holistic; it must deal with wholes that are more than the
sum of their parts. But too often when antimaterialists take refuge in ho-