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

Catching Up with Shaw 239
to various attempts to explain consciousness away, to find elaborate
schemes purporting to show that consciousness really is not consciousness.
That is why they fall back on naive realism, even though the very
science they idolize renders naive realism absurd. But the belief that their
brains (purely physical systems) directly apprehend, through the senses,
the physical systems around them allows them to force awareness into the
background. Focusing on the physical, on matter in motion, which their
dogma teaches them is all that can exist, they can squint their eyes and
pretend that awareness does not really exist. But no matter how they
equivocate and evade, an honest look at the logical implications of materialism
always concludes that we are unconscious automata. And that is simply
false. The more honest defense of materialism is the one endorsed by
Huxley and Searle: epiphenomenalism, but epiphenomenalism destroys
Darwinism as a keystone of mechanistic determinism. That defense provides
a hole for the mechanists to crawl through, since it is at least conceivable
that some other mechanistic explanation for conscious experience
could be found. It is just extremely difficult to imagine what it could be.
Science fears teleology not only because it defies all accepted scientific
paradigms but because the scientific mind dreads uncertainty and vagueness.
Scientists shudder at the prospect of forces which they imagine must
be capricious and incapable of analysis or scientific prediction. That dread,
while understandable, is unfounded. Value exists, but there is not reason to
imagine that it is random. Mind is certainly susceptible to analysis since if
Russell’s causal theory of perception is correct (and I am convinced it must
be) all we ever can analyze is the contents of our own minds. Finding “falsifiable”
(that is, testable) hypotheses that can explain teleology in its own
terms is more problematical. It probably would involve new ways of correlating
neurological systems with what we know of conscious experience, of
mapping the united differences of awareness onto the molecular structure
of the brain. I, of course, have not the slightest idea how that might be
done, but since scientists presently refuse even to ask those questions there
is no wonder that they have no answers. It is even possible, if teleological
principles operate in some very diminished way throughout the universe,
even in nonbiological systems, that physicists will find teleology useful in
explaining the very weird things that happen at the subatomic level of the
universe. But first the scientists must recognize that logic and the evidence
insist that the universe is in some degree teleological. If they can only
admit that, it is inconceivable that they should not want to investigate it.
The universe has a will; how can we not want to know its nature?