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

238 Bernard Shaw’s Remarkable Religion
fallacy is that one cannot derive value from a value-free context. If you
assume the universe is intrinsically value-free, you must conclude that
values do not exist. Values do exist; therefore, the universe is not valuefree.
You cannot argue that values are all derived from pain and pleasure,
which are in turn the arbitrary and accidental product of firing neurons,
because pain and pleasure are themselves elementary values and cannot be
reduced to mechanics. The neurological system, conceived in exclusively
mechanistic terms, must be strictly behavioral. It will be only about the
movement of physical objects, purely by virtue of their physical properties,
causing subsequent movement of physical objects. Once you suggest
that neurons do something in order to avoid pain or seek pleasure and
your premise dissolves like sugar in hot water. Purpose has entered the
universe.
The mechanists could still argue that values have no effect on the behavior
of the universe, that the behavior of every particle that exists is
fully determined by mechanistic laws, regardless of how we or other sentient
creatures might feel about it. It would then be incumbent upon them
to explain how, in this mechanistic universe, such things as desires ever
came to be.
The explanation they offer is Darwinism. The apparent purposefulness
of biological systems, they assure us, is an illusion created by the purely
mechanical process of natural selection. But Darwinism as the linchpin of
atheistic materialism fails because even if evolution could be fully accounted
for by natural selection, the purpose that we experience in our
daily living, as Shaw repeatedly insisted, could still not be explained. The
essence of teleological causation is value—desire—acting through awareness.
Value and awareness acting together must have agency: they must be
able to change things. Even if pain and pleasure are the building blocks of
all value, they can be forces for change only if they act through awareness.
An awareness that contains pain or pleasure must also contain an awareness
of how to avoid pain and seek pleasure. Teleological causation rests on
consciousness: a unity of differences that contains value (pain and pleasure
or higher values), some kind of representation of the facts that stimulate
those values (for example, what causes the pain), and a means to change
those facts.
Science, unfortunately, is utterly at a loss to explain any of this. If the
laws of physics and chemistry were sufficient to explain everything in the
universe, awareness would not exist. All living things would be unconscious
automata. Since that is patently absurd, the materialists are reduced