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

The Marriage of Science and Religion 215
cal system, as a physical system, could have direct contact with another
physical system outside itself. The brain, they insist, is nothing but a
chemical-electrical machine, yet magically it directly apprehends the
world outside itself. Such absurdities are unnecessary. The abandonment
of naive realism, as Bertrand Russell showed, does not entail the abandonment
of science. Russell, who was wholeheartedly committed to science
and the scientific way of thinking, provided the basis for an alternative to
the conventional materialism of Ryle. The stupendous success of modern
science conceals a startling paradox. As Russell put it:
Physics assures us that the occurrences which we call “perceiving
objects” are at the end of a long causal chain which starts from the
objects, and are not likely to resemble the objects except, at best, in
certain very abstract ways. We all start from “naive realism,” i.e., the
doctrine that things are what they seem. But physics assures us that
the greenness of grass, the hardness of stones, and the coldness of
snow, are not the greenness, hardness, and coldness that we know in
our own experience, but something very different. . . . Naive realism
leads to physics, and physics, if true, shows that naive realism is false.
Therefore naive realism, if true, is false; therefore it is false. (Inquiry
15)
Physics has achieved its triumphant conquest of the material world by
denying the truth of our awareness of that world. As Russell said: “Modern
physics . . . reduces matter to a set of events which proceed outward
from a centre. If there is something further in the centre itself, we cannot
know about it, and it is irrelevant to physics” (Outline 163). The hardness,
temperature, color, and taste which we imagined to be attributes of material
objects are only the effects those objects have on our consciousness.
The immediate objects of our perception are not physical objects in the
usual sense but what Russell calls “percepts,” and they exist in our heads,
not the world outside:
We do not know much about the contents of any part of the world
except our own heads; our knowledge of other regions . . . is wholly
abstract. But we know our percepts, thoughts and feelings in a more
intimate fashion. Whoever accepts the causal theory of perception is
compelled to conclude that percepts are in our heads, for they come at
the end of a causal chain of physical events leading, spatially, from the
object to the brain of the percipient. We cannot suppose that, at the
end of this process, the last effect suddenly jumps back to the starting