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

230 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.
Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the realm of
matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as
the creator and governor of the realm of matter—not of course our
individual minds, but the mind in which the atoms out of which our
individual minds have grown exist as thoughts. (186)
Nothing has happened since in the realm of physics to give reason to
change that assessment. However much biologists and psychologists may
cling to old-fashioned materialism, physicists are acutely aware how untenable
it is. Paul Davies and John Gribbin close their book The Matter
Myth by referring to the phrase coined and made famous in 1949 by Gilbert
Ryle, who has become something of a patron saint of contemporary
NothingButters. Ryle derided the notion that there was anything in the
universe except matter in motion as a fallacious belief in the “ghost in the
machine.” Davies and Gribbin wryly note that today “we can see that Ryle
was right to dismiss the notion of the ghost in the machine—not because
there is no ghost, but because there is no machine” (309).
If we are to believe, as the scientists are always urging, in the unity of
nature, we cannot imagine that anything as complex as our consciousness
appeared magically with the first homo sapiens. It must have developed
out of some fundamental principles governing the universe. But you cannot
build minds out of matter any more than you can build houses out of
thoughts. The atomic elements of any structure must be appropriate to
that structure. Bricks and mortar can produce houses because their nature
is such as makes houses possible. We have made a tiny step toward identifying
the mortar of consciousness when we noticed the connections that
are the defining attribute of consciousness, but even more significant is the
recognition that desire—will—is fundamental to the nature of the universe.
The assumption that has provided the foundation for so much of twentieth-century
philosophy, that we are merely cogs in a cold, pointless universal
machine that blindly and indifferently grinds away, is false. We are
pilgrims on a long journey, the end of which is far beyond our ken. We are
the soul of the universe, not its victim, and it is our frightful responsibility
to guide it to its destination, a goal we can but dimly perceive. Science has
not yet fully accepted this fact because individual scientists, like most of
the rest of us, are conservative when it comes to relinquishing fundamental
assumptions, but science must eventually come to see its truth. It must