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Materialistic Determinism. Last Rites.
Ken Glasziou
The combined philosophies of materialism and determinism have dominated thinking in the Western world for many centuries. Put simply, materialism claims that matter is all there is and determinism claims that all matter obeys cause-effect relationships. Logically there is no room for free will or purpose in such a philosophy thus promoting an automatic tendency to godlessness
Materialistic determinism has been accompanied by a dispute between philosophers and scientists on whether there are limits to what science can actually know. The dispute was crystallized by the challenge of French philosopher, Auguste Compte, who scoffed that there were things beyond the ability of science to know. Among these, he included a challenge for scientists to discover the composition of the stars, something inconceivable to him in the early 1800's, but something that was duly achieved by Kirchoff and Bunsen in 1861 who used the spectroscopic method pioneered by Joseph von Fraunhofer to identify and analyze the elements of the sun and subsequently, the stars.
The concepts that there are no limits to what science can know accompanied by the materialist-determinist outlook on the universe have persisted very strongly right up to present times. The ideas were succinctly put forward by Pierre Laplace in the early part of the 19th century. Laplacian determinism is the claim that given complete knowledge of the state of the universe and the laws of nature, every detail of the future must become predictable. This is a concept that permits no role for mankind's free will. We do what we do because we cannot do otherwise. It is the concept behind causation in behaviorism. Among its better known opponents were Rene Descartes who argued that since the separate existence of mind and body are conceivable; therefore it must be possible (ie. his famous "I think, therefore I am" statement).
The concept that science has no limits was fortified by mathematician, David Hilbert, who, having claimed that there is no such thing as an unsolvable problem, set out to show that all the theorems of mathematics could be proved from a handful of axioms. The importance of this proposal is because mathematics underpins all science, without mathematics there can be no scientific laws.
Hilbert's proposal was demolished by one of the most significant discoveries of the 20th century, the theorem of Kurt Godell who, in 1930, showed that there are statements in arithmetic that cannot be proved. All of a sudden, the foundation of mathematics, and hence of all science, was found to be incomplete!
Put another way Godell's finding says that since our mathematics may contain inconsistencies, how can we possibly know that the laws of science are either correct or complete. To make matters worse, mathematician Alan Turing proved that there were statements in arithmetic that could never be proved within a finite period of computing time. This applies whether machines or mathematicians are doing the computing.
How then can a determinism which is based upon the necessity of inviolate cause-effect relationships which, in turn, are mathematical and scientific, possibly be a valid concept if mathematics and science cannot be shown to be free from inconsistencies?
A further fatal blow to materialistic determinism was dealt by quantum physicist, Werner Heisenberg's proposal in 1927 that it is forever impossible to know the precise location and velocity of any particle in the Universe at one and the same instant of time. Heisenberg's principle can just as well be called the indeterminacy principle but despite its success at the quantum level, the adherents of determinism by-passed it by claiming it was not valid in the real world of macro-objects.
In the last ten to fifteen years experimental evidence has continued to accumulate in favor of quantum theory in many and varied rigorous tests. Recently the peculiarities in the behavior of sub-atomic particles have been shown to hold good at the level of the atom itself--even in experiments in which atoms maintain a state of superpositioning (such as when existing as both particle and wave simultaneously), and becoming determinate as one or the other only when an observer chooses to make an observation.
In very recent years, a further step has been made in the direction of connecting the atomic and sub-atomic worlds with the visible world in experiments with what have long been known as Bose-Einstein condensates (BEC's), now one of the "hottest" fields (or should I say "coldest") fields in physics. Predicted as a new form of matter by Einstein in 1925 on the basis of calculations made by Indian physicist, Satyendra Bose, gases composed of identical particles were expected to condense into a single quantum state of very low energy if cooled to a temperature within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero.
Physicists can now routinely cool a gas the atoms of which are held suspended in a cell by means of magnetic fields and weak laser beams to a temperature as low as 50 billionths of a degree above absolute zero. If things are done right, out from the gas comes Einstein's indescribable glob--as many as ten million atoms in a form of matter never known before.
Physicists are now racing to see what can be done with these BEC's. One remarkable
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