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

The Marriage of Science and Religion 209
matter and those who were convinced that mind was the sole substance of
existence. The proponents of matter were known as “realists” and the disciples
of mind as “idealists.” People who believed that both mind and matter
exist and are yet quite distinct from one another (a group that, then as
now, included most nonphilosophers) were “dualists.” Nowadays, those
formerly known as “realists” usually refer to themselves as “materialists”
and their opponents as “dualists.” Idealism, in its purest forms, is not much
heard from, but its concepts are important in establishing the terms of the
debate. Dualism is now usually associated with Descartes, who articulated
an extreme form of the doctrine. Because dualism accords so nicely with
unreflective common sense, most people probably just take it for granted
that both mind and matter exist and are distinct entities, but an unintended
consequence of Descartes’ precise formulation of the theory was that he
made clear its logical difficulties. In particular, it is difficult, given strict
dualism, to understand how mind and matter can interact, as common
sense and most philosophies say they must. But if dualism is rejected,
there appear to be two absurd (to common sense) alternatives. One leads
to the conclusion that minds do not really exist and the other to solipsism:
the doctrine that only “I” exist. Specifically, that only the present
contents of my awareness exist. The materialists had to explain the first
absurdity and the idealists the second. Idealism was once marginally favored
by philosophers and realism by scientists—on the rare occasions
when scientists thought about philosophy. Nowadays idealism is hardly
ever mentioned, and “realism” (that is, materialism) is—at least by the
materialists, who have a solid hold on orthodoxy—held up as the opposite
of dualism. Dualism is often equated with “Cartesianism”—as if any dualistic
philosophy must be identical to Descartes’s. The contempt for Descartes
so blatant in materialist writings is both ironic and unfair. The strict
separation of the material from the spiritual helped protect an infant material
science from the censorious attentions of a zealous church. That may
have been its purpose. Now that science and the materialistic viewpoint are
triumphant, Descartes is condemned for allowing a role for spirit at all. He
could hardly, given his historic circumstances, have done otherwise.
Shaw’s condemnation of the scientist for failure to live up to his own
myths may have been vindicated by the acceptance of Kuhn’s version of
scientific progress, but Shaw’s rejection of materialism is unquestionably
not in keeping with present orthodoxy. The nineteenth-century materialism
of George Eliot and John Tyndall which Shaw dismissed as passé
would be derided by contemporary materialists as vitiated by timorous