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

The Marriage of Science and Religion 211
that a dance is something that dancers do. It would be foolish to imagine
that a dance is a “thing” like a table or a vase, but that is what people do
when they imagine that minds are distinct from bodies or that mental
events need to be discussed in terms different from those used to discuss
bodies. One can speak of minds just as one can speak of dances, but to think
that mind is something that has properties and attributes apart from the
behavior of brains is equivalent to thinking of dance as something independent
of dancers. The materialists are convinced that their opponents are
misled by their inability to face the harsh truth of materialistic determinism.
They have their own fears, of course. To them, the insistence that
mental events have qualities unaccounted for by physical law is an invitation
to chaos. A notion of the mental as something distinct from the physical
is an open door into vagueness and fuzzy thinking.
If Gilbert Ryle is the exemplary champion of materialism, George Berkeley
(1685–1753) is the most famous, and perhaps the most thorough, of
the idealists. Berkeley’s arguments, although they seem bizarre to most
people now, as they did then, were meticulous and well thought out. That
was probably because he was responding to the challenges of a nascent
scientism which he regarded as dangerous and oppressive: the very
scientism that culminated in the ideas of people like Ryle. The “new philosophy”
of his time, inspired by the fascinating and revolutionary discoveries
of Galileo, Newton, and others, was increasingly mechanistic and
analytical. The investigations of the scientists had an unexpected consequence:
it became increasingly apparent that if the new scientific theories
were true, then the world as it actually exists is markedly different from
the world as it appears to our minds. This observation leads naturally to
questions about how it is possible truly to know anything about the external
world. Thus the new philosophy raised the specter of skepticism as well
as those of materialism and atheism. Science seemed to be suggesting that
the universe was just a giant machine operating under fully deterministic
laws, and there appeared to be little room in such a scheme for God. If He
existed, at any rate, there was little for Him to do. The philosophy of Deism
attempted to make room for a deity in a mechanistic cosmos: God is seen as
the Divine Watchmaker who created the universe, wound it up, and has left
it alone ever since. But the very insistence on the essentially mechanistic
nature of the universe had the effect of highlighting those qualities of
mind that common sense declared to be incapable of mechanistic explanation.
That would imply some form of dualism: the idea that mind and mat-