{"id":44509,"date":"2017-10-07T12:41:02","date_gmt":"2017-10-07T18:41:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=44509"},"modified":"2017-10-07T12:41:02","modified_gmt":"2017-10-07T18:41:02","slug":"notes-crude-attempts-reduce-everything-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2017\/10\/notes-crude-attempts-reduce-everything-matter.html","title":{"rendered":"A few notes on crude attempts to reduce everything to matter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"dsp<\/a>
Another view, via my wife\u2019s iPhone, of the spot on the Provo River where my wife and I enjoyed dinner the other night.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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It is very simple to reduce things down to the level of mere matter.\u00a0 Even the finest cello concerto is, from one not very interesting perspective, nothing more than the scratching of cat gut on cat gut.\u00a0 Tolstoy\u2019s War and Peace<\/em> and Anna Karenina<\/em> are merely blotches of colored liquid on thin sheets made from rag and wood fiber.\u00a0 The reductionist is merely a transient cell colony, and what we refer to as that cell colony\u2019s reductionist point of view can easily be dismissed as simply a series of intercellular electrochemical transactions.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe are compelled to admit between the thoughts of a terrestrial astronomer and the behavior of matter several light-years away that particular relation we call truth.\u00a0 But this relation has no meaning at all if we try to make it exist between the matter of the star and the astronomer\u2019s brain, considered as a lump of matter.\u00a0 The brain may be in all sorts of relations to the star no doubt: it is in a spatial relation, and a time relation, and a quantitative relation.\u00a0 But to talk of one bit of matter being true of another seems to be nonsense.\u00a0 It might turn out to be the case that every atom in the universe thought, and thought truly, about every other.\u00a0 But that relation between any two atoms would be something quite distinct from the physical relations between them.\u201d[1]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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\u201cIf H [his wife, Joy] \u201cis not\u201d then she never was.\u00a0 I mistook a cloud of atoms for a person.\u00a0 There aren\u2019t and never were, any people.\u00a0 Death only reveals the vacuity that was always there.\u00a0 What we call the living are simply those who have not yet been unmasked. \u00a0All equally bankrupt, but some not yet declared.\u00a0 But this must be nonsense; vacuity revealed to whom? bankruptcy declare to whom?\u00a0 To other boxes of fireworks or clouds of atoms.\u00a0 I will never believe\u2014more strictly I can\u2019t believe\u2014that one set of physical events could be, or make, a mistake about other sets.\u201d[2]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

William James quotes M. Taine, from the introduction to this history of English literature:\u00a0 \u201cWhether facts be moral or physical, it makes no matter.\u00a0 They always have their causes.\u00a0 There are causes for ambition, courage, veracity, just as there are for digestion, muscular movement, animal heat.\u00a0 Vice and virtue are products like vitriol and sugar.\u201d[3]<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

To which James responds, \u201cWhen we read such proclamations of the intellect bent on showing the existential conditions of absolutely everything, we feel\u2014quite apart from our legitimate impatience at the somewhat ridiculous swagger of the program, in view of what the authors are actually able to perform\u2014menaced and negated in the springs of our innermost life.\u201d[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

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William James eloquently (but not quotably) denouncing the idea that the human religious impulse can be reduced to sexuality.[5]<\/a><\/p>\n

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Medical materialism finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex, he being an epileptic.\u00a0 It snuffs out Saint Teresa as an hysteric, Saint Francis of Assisi as an hereditary degenerate.\u00a0 George Fox\u2019s discontent with the shams of his age and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon.\u00a0 Carlyle\u2019s organ-tones of misery it accounts for by a gastro-duodenal catarrh.\u00a0 All such mental overtensions, it says, are, when you come to the bottom of the matter, mere affairs of diathesis (auto-intoxications most probably), due to the perverted actions of various glands which physiology will yet discover.<\/span><\/p>\n

And medical materialism then thinks that the spiritual authority of all such personages is successfully undermined.[6]<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> C. S. Lewis, \u201cDe Futilitate,\u201d in Christian Reflections<\/em> (Eerdmans, 1967), 63-64.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed<\/em>, 8-9.<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> $Cited at James, Varieties of Religious Experience<\/em>, 9.<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> $James, Varieties of Religious Experience<\/em>, 9-10.\u00a0 See also pages 10-13.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> $James, Varieties of Religious Experience<\/em>, note on pages 10-12.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> $James, Varieties of Religious Experience<\/em>, 13.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 It is very simple to reduce things down to the level of mere matter.\u00a0 Even the finest cello concerto is, from one not very interesting perspective, nothing more than the scratching of cat gut on cat gut.\u00a0 Tolstoy\u2019s War and Peace and Anna Karenina are merely blotches of colored liquid on thin sheets […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1019,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44509","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nA few notes on crude attempts to reduce everything to matter<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"    It is very simple to reduce things down to the level of mere matter.\u00a0 Even the finest cello concerto is, from one not very interesting\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, 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