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

The Marriage of Science and Religion 213
physical world is elaborate and more insightful than is often acknowledged,
and many of his observations seem more discerning now, in light of
twentieth-century quantum mechanics, than they appeared to his contemporaries.
They certainly are not conclusive, and few (but not no) philosophers
today find them persuasive. His notions appeal to like-minded souls,
those horrified by the notion of being only a cog in a vast, pointless cosmic
machine. God is not an unnecessary hypothesis but an absolutely essential
premise. But those who love the image of the machine for its accessibility
to our understanding, its ability to yield to analysis, find Berkeley’s world
of spirit repellent. It is unscientific, unaccessible to rigorous and systematic
study, and immune, in Popper’s terminology, to falsification. It cannot be
tested; it must be accepted on faith.
There are logical objections to all these theories: Ryle’s materialism,
Berkeley’s idealism, and the dualism implied by representative realism.
The most telling criticism of idealism is that it conspicuously fails the test
of Ockham’s razor, at least as a scientist would interpret it. Berkeley’s form
of idealism is simple in that it poses a single cause for everything—God—
but such an explanation leaves much unexplained: specifically, why God
arranged things in the fashion we observe, which seems both unnecessarily
complex and distinctly unsatisfactory. In other words, using God as a
single explanation demands many more explanations for what we actually
observe, much as Ptolemy’s circular orbits demanded the addition of innumerable
epicycles to make them harmonize with observation. Most people
reject Berkeley merely because the existence of matter seems to them obvious
and its rejection absurd. If, however, one accepts the rejection of naive
realism and its conclusion that the physical world can be known only
indirectly, in a manner analogous to inference, idealism becomes plausible.
The case for the existence of matter comes down to its providing the best
available explanation we have for much of our mental lives: our sensations
being caused by interactions with matter.
One objection to Ryle’s theory that mind is an illusory concept is simply
that we have distinct experiences that belong to us alone. If we accidentally
touch a red-hot stove, we will probably exhibit behaviors that will say
to those around us that we are in extreme pain, but none of them, however
sympathetic, will experience what we experience. The pain of a severe burn
may be evident to all present, but only the victim knows what it “feels
like.” None of this matters to Ryle and his followers. For them, conscious
experience is “invisible.” We are aware of our pains and pleasures just as