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

The Marriage of Science and Religion 223
least we do not imagine them to have—a similar relationship. They simply
move, or do not move, in accordance with the forces acting on them. We
have no reason to think that the molecules are “aware” of each other; they
are simply “behaving” in ways that can be predicted by the laws of physics.
A genuinely “perfect” neurological science would have to include a theory
that allowed scientists to accurately predict the unique connections of
mind from the outside.
The “connectedness” of mind makes intentionality possible. You cannot
have a belief that God exists—or even that chocolate ice cream tastes
good—without some concept of what God (or ice cream) means. A belief in
God is not like a covalent bond between two atoms; it cannot be reduced to
a simple formula of time and distance. It is intrinsically holistic. Consciousness
is intrinsically holistic. It is more than the sum of its parts, for it
is defined by the structure of those parts. That is why consciousness is
important. The “qualia” could be ignored by the mechanistic materialists
because outside of a structure of consciousness they would be meaningless.
If every elementary particle in the universe were, in a presently unknown
aspect of itself, a single pixel or bit of consciousness, the laws of physics
would be utterly unaffected. If that were true it could be said that the entire
universe was conscious (in an utterly trivial sense) but that it made
absolutely no difference.
When Minds Change Bodies
When Ellie accuses Captain Shotover of not realizing that “we know now
that the soul is the body, and the body the soul,” she could be interpreted as
a materialist, someone who imagines that what we call soul can be reduced
to purely physical events (Heartbreak 5:145). Many today take that for
granted; when mind and body are discussed now, it is often assumed that
when you reject dualism, as Ellie does, you must espouse materialism. The
idea that the elemental nature of the world could be closer to what we
think of as mind is not even considered. People who seek to describe everything
that exists in physical terms are called reductionists, but there is no
reason why the basic set of rules to which everything is reduced could not
be mental and spiritual, or at least like Bertrand Russell’s “neutral monism.”
Neutral monism maintains that the ultimate reality is neither
physical nor mental in the sense that we understand those terms but gives
rise to both. Shaw never explicitly rejects dualism, but much of what he
says about mind and body harmonizes with Russell’s concept that mind
and body, while distinct, are inseparable, like the two faces of a coin. If the